Dowreth’s Return
If you’ve read my fantasy series based on D&D games I ran many years ago, you’re probably already familiar with Sharrow and Dowreth, brother gods stuck in an eternal war between light and undeath. This game is set in the same universe, starting around the time of A Hero’s Birth, but it’s not set on Illuma. This world is called Gesmee and the repercussions of the events in that book resonate on this far distant world.
Prologue
The prologue wasn’t audio recorded due to technical difficulties, so I’ll give a quick recap. Heroes of the Kingdom of the Sun were summoned to the Lordship of Invenny on the frontier. There they discovered several odd things: the stone under the settlement was shattered, the grasses were thin and grew too slowly to feed the livestock, and the trees bled when cut. Investigating further, the heroes discovered an ancient white tower in the woods dedicated to an unknown god named Sharrow. In the basement they found a covered portal which they uncovered and went through… on the other side was a land of darkness, ruled by the undead. A lich named Lucius and demilich named Venia killed the heroes, ushering their undead minions through the portal into the lands of the living…
If you would like to listen to the adventures of Group 1 and Group 2 (see below), I have created a YouTube podcast list that has every single session in chronological order.
Group 1
Far to the north in the city of Nordgard, a disparate group of people met. Tempus the half-orc barbarian trudged through the snow into the city and met a city guard named Ysmyr. The half-orc sought his father, a human, but the adventuring guild he was said to frequent was closed for the night. What seemed a chance meeting turned out to be anything but, and their adventures have spanned great distances across the northlands as the undead threat encroached on their home.
Group 2
To the south of the white tower was another group – mostly strangers – who were about to experience true horror. It started off with Skippy the halfling rogue getting a job to steal a book from the restricted section of a library. But that book turned out to be what the lich Lucius was seeking, and shortly after Skippy liberated the book a skeletal dragon flew into town and toppled the library. What came next was a sprint for safety, trying to uncover the secrets of the magical tome that they could neither read nor destroy – and the undead were never far behind.
Ryan Toxopeus Writing 