This site is a wiki – you should be able to login using just your e-mail address, and edit this page and the campaign setting page.
Who
Sean (GM), Matt, Jenny, Jess
Where
The studio at the top of the garden of Sean’s mother’s house.
When
Weekly between 15th May and 12th July, and then possibly to continue using Internet group video chat.
Characters
Please see my house rules.
Zoluco [Matt]
Backstory
Zoluco is an 18 year old initiate at Hun’Hao monastery… or at least he was. Everything changed when the monastery fell out of the sky.
Zoluco was taken from a small village on the mainland at 8 years old, when the monks came, each family were ready and hoping to have their child chosen to travel back to the monastery and learn the great teachings of Xbalatul, The Coursing River. Each family, that was, except for Zoluco’s. Zoluco’s father was a trader of ikana fruit, and possibly the richest man in the village. He had only one son, and being an astute man but not a religious one he was absolutely infuriated that the monks had chosen the boy he intended to take over his business. Picking up on this, Zoluco tried to attack the monks who came to his house, trying to kick sand at them and kick at their legs. As the monks breezed past his attacks and the dust parted in an eddy of air to avoid the monk in charge, one of them commented that he fought like a crazy quail. Which is how Zoluco was named. His father, fearing the damage to his business that would come from refusing the monks permission to take his son, grudgingly submitted him.
Training at the monastery was gruelling but fulfilling. They were taught how to balance their own bodies, to respect the moons as spiritual equals to each other, but to view all teachings through the lens of the moon of water, wind and swiftness. The blue moon. They were taught that knowledge and wisdom come to us through the perspective in the eye of the storm of learning. Wisdom flows and meanders like a river and truth is carried on the winds like seeds are carried from island to island. Only by bringing our bodies and minds closer to these elements can we hope to fully understand the truth of the world. When we understand how a single swift river can touch many lands, we can understand how a single mind can hold many truths. Although that river is in many single places, the only reason it can be in all of them is from the perspective of its flow.
The day that Hun’Hao monastery fell out of the sky was the day Zoluco was to take his final tests to become a fully fledged monk of the order. It all started when a stranger visited the island. Strangers were not unheard of, but usually they came to ask for help, for wisdom or for medicine. Capitan Duende Cantada of the airship Avansa came “only to observe”.
Although the Monks of the order are not mistrustful of outsiders, the knowledge contained within the inner libraries could be catastrophic if the uninitiated were to get hold of it; supposedly the books held the secret as to why the lands float like they do in the first place. Therefore Zoluco was asked to escort Duende around the outer gardens, and to explain some of the philosophy of Hun’Hao to him, and to ensure he didn’t pry too much. Zoluco was in the middle of explaining the layout of the irrigation channel system when he turned around and Duende was gone.
Zoluco may not be the strongest of the order—that honour belonged to Hefty Batza—but he’s fast on his feet. He ran the length of the gardens just in time to see Duende disappear around the back of the monastery. He tailed the captain as he clambered up the main monastery building, a hulking square based pyramid with incredibly clear water running down channels at each of the four corners, generated by rare blue moonstones built into the structure of the place. He disappeared through an opening on the third tier, an area not even Zoluco’s teachers had been allowed to visit, and just as Zoluco began to raise the alarm, the shaking started.
Suddenly the outer gardens were gone, people were running and shouting, but Zoluco had one job, and he would make sure he did not fail. He danced from step to step and with one great leap, cleared the balcony railing of the window the captain had disappeared into.
After saving Duende in the collapsing monastery, they realised that that whole island was sinking, and coming apart structurally, they slid from the top of the monastery down the waterway and where Duende’s ship was anchored, as they began the descent, the top of the temple began crumbling completely. And as they reached the bottom, Zoluco again had to push Duende out of the way of falling debris. One piece of this debris, however, did hit Zoluco and knocked him unconscious: something heavy and bound in cloth. Duende dragged Zoluco to his ship and set sail, not realising that Zoluco was still clutching this piece of debris.
[text elided as not yet known to other PCs—no peaking at the wiki’s history!]
Arboréa Daintree [Jenny]
Race
Very leathery skinned, short people from deep in the forest. Live very high in the trees. Thought of as just a subrace of humans (mechanically: halflings); origins unknown.
Personality
She’s tiny and she doesn’t like you.
Ixa’ȝoxa (”servant of the forest”) [Jess]
It’s pronounced roughly [iʃaʔjoːxɒ]
Race
Fey-aspect Tiefling, modified from the default infernal-aspect Tiefling—only mechanical change is substituting Sylvan for Infernal.
Still has fire resistance because thick, lush forestry is very hard to set alight.
Setting
My Skies of Arcadia setting. We start in Ixa’taka, quite close to the edge of the lands under the green moon—so the moon is relatively small in the sky, and your village(s) have a lot of trade with people who live on outlying islands, as well as with other settlements on the main continent, by land and by ship above the canopy.
Your characters need to be Ixa’takans. The world is meant to feel quite small because travel between continents is so hard—your character can’t have come from the lands under a different moon. They could have come from near or far within the Ixa’taka, though.
The adventurers meet in the town of Takaslew, a trade town handling shipping routes that supply a large number of outlying islands. Despite the fact that most people are basically unaware of the changes going on around them, the town is growing as more and more trade passes through, year on year. However, Takaslew is no city—it’s only food and other similarly basic supplies that get traded through here, with occasional exceptional travelling merchants from further afield.
There is a temple to Quetya, the Ixa’takan gods, who is worshipped in the way that gods are usually worshipped, rather than the less conventional way in which the moons are worshipped – though there are no clerics of the Quetya. The town elders live in a fairly assuming hut towards the geometric centre of town, though it’s the docks that are the economic centre. The home of the elders doubles as something like a temple to the green moon: healers are trained here.