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in which the Author shares some parting Thoughts on the Dark Mysteries story arc...
It's about an hour before I'm leaving to run the climatic session of this campaign, Book IV/Chapter 14: Confrontations, and I decided to sit down and look at updating this epilogue. I like a lot of the original content, which I wrote 2 1/2 years ago, so I'll keep it here with some editing and updating. They were mostly my thoughts on the campaign as of that time, so early in the story that my gray notebook, where I kept my chapter notes, was full of ideas for the Dark Mysteries Campaign, with a few pages stuffed into the end of it for "future" ideas. Now, the Dark Mysteries story arc is almost empty -- two or three sheets of paper with my notes for the wedding (Chapter 15: Reflections), and one sheet that's almost empty with a sentence for a chapter that could have been used if the party didn't figure out what they needed to do to save the world.
Book V, City under the Stars (Eldritch Mysteries), dwarfs the remains of the Dark Mysteries Campaign now, with over a dozen chapter pages ready to be fleshed out. The Far Future section is about as large as Book V. But the Dark Mysteries story is almost over.
I don't remember exactly when the game started -- ahh, a perusal of old Yahoogroups messages shows that the campaign officially kicked off on July 16th, 2000. Now, three months shy of four years after the kickoff, the game is hitting the finale, and I'm sad to see it end.
For much of 2003, I was really having a tough time keeping the campaign going. Stress at work had really sapped a lot of my energy, and my enthusiasm for the Dark Mysteries Campaign reflected it. There were a few times when I had nearly called the game off. My writeups had started lagging farther and farther behind, to the point where, at the start of this year, I was typically over a month in arears with my writing. The enthusiasm I had for the game had waned, and I'm pretty sure it was obvious. Add to that that the player who ran the pivotal character, the Chosen One (Sturm), left the game due to other conflicting interests, and I was really in a tough spot. I am bad at running NPCs. I am pretty well tasked to my limits as it is keeping the game moving and keeping track of the players. NPCs? They're pretty much an afterthought if they're not actively doing something in my notes.
But, early this year, things fell together and I found my passion for the game again. I finally figured out how everything would fall together, and I started having fun once more. All of this, just in time for the game to end. NOOOOO!
But, all good things must come to an end. And, I can console myself and the players who feel the same -- this isn't the end of the game. The first, grandest story arc may be ending today, but I have even more material lined up for the future, even beyond next month's epilogue chapter, Reflections.
The Eyes of the Church short stories will tie off some loose ends in the campaign, as well as provide some backfill of how the Church wound up being as helpful as it did. It probably will not involve the players much -- it's a JM/author's exercise more than anything.
The currently-titled Dark Mysteries: Aftermath will deal with the mess Bilbus left in Portsdale when he and the party left. It will fill the time between Confrontations and Reflections, but it will mostly be "side-story" style -- emailed stuff. Aftermath will also start laying the seeds for some fun down in the Middle Ranges, where Lord Eric Ithell is going to establish a trade city that will bypass Arabel Cinlu and the drow who secretly run it. Hmmm... What might the drow do when a major source of revenue and slaves (via kidnappings) dries up?
City under the Stars, my Mythus-style "Call of Cthulhu" story, is ready for development. It'll be much shorter than the Dark Mysteries Campaign, but it will set the seeds for a few future twists -- Bilbus will get his chance to move farther into a leading role in the Dales Council, and he will get a crucial item needed for the last half of the Ancient Mysteries Campaign (Book IX, still untitled).
The Clockwork Mysteries will probably by shortened a bit -- right now, Book VII: Duty and Honor is looking less feasible from a story perspective (Sorry, Jon! There's probably not going to be an "Oriental Adventure"). Book VI: New World Order might expand enough to fill two books, but I haven't developed the story far enough to figure out if that will happen.
The Ancient Mysteries Campaign will be a fun one, if everything develops right. It's going to almost be "Mythus: the Next Generation", set about twenty years after the end of the Dark Mysteries Campaign. I will be introducing a couple of steampunk themes (steam engines and clockwork technologies) that will drastically affect society. Add to this the cultural shift in the Kelltic lands to once more accept magick, and I think there is great potential for an exotic high fantasy campaign world.
The extremely far-out stories -- Dwarven Mysteries and Lunar Mysteries -- are so abstract right now, I really don't know if they'll survive. And, considering how long it will take to get there, I might find plenty of other material to fill in the blanks. They may remain far future campaign ideas for a very long time.
Well, I'm leaving in a quarter hour. Guess I better get ready to leave. I'll finish my thoughts here later, while I work on the writeup for "Confrontations".
Well, it took me longer than planned to get back here. The game ran much as I had hoped, with the big confrontation early on and the trip back home filling a lot of the session, wrapping up (running late) at Armagh. I got a quick start on the writeup, then had to set it aside for a few days before I had that burst of inspiration that got me through the rest of it. And now it's done.
All that remains is "Reflections", the chapter that lets us see the party one last time in its current incarnation. We'll have a lot of people from the party's past showing up, from Quaeven, the merchant the party saved at the start of Book I, to emissarys from various rulers the party have interacted with over time. We'll have Javik Raiders and Breanna's adoptive centaur family. And, of course, a requisite last hurrah for the Company of Unusual Headgear as they deliver a message from an anonymous employer. They should have actually opened the letter before reading it aloud in front of everyone, but they aren't known for their smarts.
Ending the game session was really tough. I had no idea what to do once the party was back in Armagh, so I went with the flow. I would have kept things rolling for quite a while, and I think the players would have gone along with it. But it turned out that Eric's dad invited everyone to dinner, and I decided that it was a good spot to end things. So, as things wound down, before the players could move on to "tomorrow", it was simply a case of saying, "...And fade to black. Roll credits." Sure, there's the epilogue next month, but the gist of this story is done. The epilogue sets up the future of the story. It's really a stepping stone towards Book V.
Well over half a million words in the writeup. I just added my running totals. And that doesn't count any of the rest of the materials on this site. Wow. Once Chapter 15 is added in, it'll be over 560,000 words. Now what? I guess I'll have to get busy putting together Aftermath, writing the Eyes of the Church, and getting ready to sic the party on the Great Cthulhu itself...
I must repeat again the thanks that ended the original epilogue:
Many Thanks must go out to Dan, Andrew, Jon, Cindy, Jennie, Ryan, and Julia for breathing life into their Personae Dramatis. Having a group of players who play their roles, instead of just rolling dice, really has been a lot of fun. And additional thanks must go out to Cindy again for her role as my Ghost Editor/Beta Reader throughout these writeups.
In retrospect, this "Dark Mysteries Campaign" is the third campaign I've worked on that bears that particular name. Maybe some brief comments on the first two would be apropos before diving into my thoughts on this DMC, since elements from the first two stories ultimately appear in this final version of the story.
Perhaps even before I delve into the history of the Dark Mysteries Campaign, I can make a side trip to this assertion: No contemporary fantasy story is original. They all build on and borrow from past fantasy stories and mythology. The only aspect of it that is original is which specific elements are used, and the order in which they are mixed. As Ryan Decker (Bilbus the Great) said in response to this comment, perhaps that is the appeal of fantasy. We are ultimately familiar with what is happening. It's a lot more clear-cut than the Real World. The "bad guys" really are bad. The "good guys" really are good. I wasn't planning on defending the assertion beyond this statement, so let's get back to the story.
The first Dark Mysteries Campaign started the characters as members of a tiny agricultural village of Merthyr, about two days' ride from the coastal city of Saltcliffs. This naive group decided to be adventurous and travel to the Big Town of Armagh to attend the Beltane Fire Festival (I told you there were elements common to the stories!). Merthyr was also the nearest settlement to the ancient ruins of Camelough, where King Uther Pendraeg (renamed Paendroeg) died fighting hordes of orcs...
The story never made it past about twelve pages of notes I'd written on my computer. I was never able to focus on it well enough to really create a story. I had a beginning, I had a couple of things that would happen later in the story, and I had a really dramatic battle holding off the hordes of orcs, who had been contained on a peninsula. It really wasn't very good, and I was lucky enough to realize it before I tried to run with it.
Dark Mysteries the Second actually saw the light of day. It was for this campaign that most of the personae first appeared. Bilbus, Kasey, Farran, Adria, and Rishala all were created to run in this campaign. It was set on Aerth, the "official" world from Mythus. The characters were swept into a plot that involved some sinister people planning on subjugating the world. They ended up traveling to the mysterious city of Ys, represented conveniently in my universe by TSR's Lankhmar AD&D game supplements. The party rushed through the mysteries I had planned far too quickly -- they went straight to the secret meeting and found out how to get to the Drow homelands in one night. They set out to head through the AD&D Drow story arc (D1-D3) by the time I put the story on permanent hiatus.
I'd blown something pretty badly with the campaign. I made it far too easy to find the crux of the problem, and the players were smart enough to figure it out in no time flat. So, I dropped the Mythus campaign out of rotation again, jumping back to my Grey Skyes Campaign sci-fi story for a while before starting the Merc:2000 adventures.
Some time in the summer of 1999, when my first project at work was cancelled, I started getting an itch to put together a fantasy campaign again. All of the games in the Northern Colorado Gamers rotation were contemporary/near future dark stories. I still wanted to run fantasy -- that was the reason I had originally created the Grey Skyes Campaign: it was a fantasy story in a sci-fi wrapper. So, with nothing to do at work but find a new project, I started doodling and scribbling notes.
By September of 1999, I had completed a map of the central region of Avillonia. I had a few notes for the initial adventures -- a way to introduce the personae dramatis to the overall plot in a few snippets. While traveling to the Beltane festival, they would rescue a merchant from raiders who belong to a mysterious organization calling itself the Anlor Balsil Agralem. Some prominently-placed clues would point the personae to the coastal town of Saltcliffs.
I've used Saltcliffs (or Saltmarsh, in its original form from "The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh", an AD&D adventure module published in the 1980's) as a running theme in all my AD&D and Mythus campaigns in the last fifteen years (which, all told, amounts to about six times). The details of what the smugglers are doing has changed with each running, as well as just what sort of non-human creatures were involved. The first time the players ran through it as Mythus personae, the smugglers were working for overlords in Ys with the help of a local merchant. The orcs (gnolls in the original AD&D adventure module) were slaves whom the overlords had supplied as a present to faithful servants. This time around, the orcs were customers of the ABA network who were buying arms while getting ready to enslave some humans to run a mine and forges...
The story was pretty tightly linearized through Chapter 21 (Book II/Chapter 10: Summoners), just to establish a lot of possibilities for the players to explore through their personae. Chapters 14 and 15 (Book II/Chapters 3 and 4, Steppes and Heavens, respectively) had to get shuffled in quickly. They were originally a one-sentence idea in my gray notebook (more on that soon) that suddenly took great significance: I had decided that the darkblade the Shadow Kindred wielded would cause a festering, fatal wound. Sturm, unfortunately, got hit during his fight with the beastie in Chapter 7, and I had to quickly flesh out those two chapters into a usable adventure. Luckily for me, this problem occured in November of 2000, giving me a few extra weeks of prep time thanks to the holidays.
Then, when I got the Steppes and Heavens scenarios polished up for use, I found a way to throw a twist into the story line again. The party would (conveniently) find the Sea Ghost in port in Londoun. Unfortunately (for them), the Anlor Balsil Agralem had recaptured it from the hapless Brule. A new diversion! Three more chapters in the story (11, 12, and 13: Detours, Smokes, and Flights). And more scrambling to flesh out the latter parts of it before late January 2001.
My notebook... The Gray Notebook of Doom. One thing I did not do well during the original attempt at running an epic fantasy campaign was to organize. I'd think of things that would be interesting for the story while at work, or at a store, or while driving, then have to get home and write the ideas into a file on my PC. By that time, I would either lose the idea or it would change. It never seemed as interesting by the time I fleshed it out on the PC. The ideas I kept never played out as well, principally because I tried to get them completely written when I sat down to do them. So, I'd have a page of notes about a cool sequence of events involving the players, where they had to do a bunch of things to discover a morsel of information. Then, come play time, they'd bypass all the little clues and side adventures and walk right into the Big Event.
With the poor performance I had putting together the plot directly on the computer, I decided to try a different tactic. I got a gray notebook and a pad of Engineer's Computation Paper (something I "discovered" when I started working at Hewlett-Packard). When I would think of an idea for an adventure, I'd scribble a note onto a fresh page of the pad. Sometimes I would come up with a chapter name to go with it. Often, as in the case for Steppes and Heavens, it was a one-sentence note that I planned to flesh out later.
With notes recorded on separate loose pages of paper (accompanied by sketches where applicable, thanks to the horizontal and vertical ruling of the engineer's pad), I could shuffle them as needed. I could go back to the paltry adventure treatments and flesh them out. I could split them into multiple chapters (like I did with Steppes and Heavens). I could write out big Hollywoodesque sequences that cropped up late in the story without having to fill in all of the blanks leading up to them. And, being a simple notebook of paper, I could take it with me readily, where ever I was going. It'd go to work with me sometimes, sitting on my desktop PC in case a sudden flash of inspiration hit me. It went with me on a business trip to Japan, tucked into my laptop's backpack with a snake's den of cables. It went on our vacations around Yellowstone and Glacier and Grand Teton National Parks. Any time I started thinking about the story for more than a brief time, I'd start carrying the notebook -- I had lost several ideas because I couldn't write them down when I first had them (something else I learned: when the Muses talk, listen! Then, write it down!). Even before the campaign began, I would keep a notepad by my bed to hold notes as I found interesting ideas in whatever I happened to be reading before going to sleep.
During the week or so before an upcoming Dark Mysteries session, I'd transcribe my notes from the notebook to the PC. Each page became a chapter. I'd flesh out the notes, sketch maps, and otherwise smooth the edges and add the polish to the original treatment. Any changes would get copied back into the notebook. The digitized adventure would get printed out, along with the rosters of Other Personae, and enter their new home, the Purple Notebook of Ongoing Campaign Information (I also have a Red Reference Notebook that has handouts and charts that are used regularly, such as the weapons and armor tables, and combat charts, and so on).
The point I'm making, for anyone who might want to try their own epic campaign: Organize. I got the idea of the notebook full of loose-leaf papers from an ancient Dragon magazine article (I'd have to go digging to find out which one, but it was from the early or mid 1980's). I had to pull pages out and reorder them several times during the writing of the story, as events came along and messed up my plans. For instance, the players decided to follow a river past the cave and elemental temple (back in Chapter Seven) to discover the witch Axransa's tower. I had intended for them to find the tower after dealing with the orcs at the mines. Shuffle, shuffle.
I've already mentioned my Saltcliffs/Saltmarsh theme. Several other adventures (and major story components) were drawn directly or indirectly from other sources. The merchant caravan with the Gnome from Chapter 1 was from a previous DMC treatment, as was the Fire Festival in Armagh (which, in itself, was liberated from pre-Christian Celtic culture). The idea of an imprisoned Dark One? Inspired by Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series -- I had started again to read the series before I got tired of it dragging out somewhere in the sixth book. The imprisoned Evil Thing isn't original to that series either. H. P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu comes to mind as one "for instance" -- again, modern fantasy isn't truly original in theme.
Those aren't the only sources from which I borrowed to create elements of the story. I went through the trouble of writing a lengthy "prophecy", the Shroeganus Balsil, then translated it into a synthetic language (that is, not coincidentally, the language that the Grey aliens in the Grey Skyes Campaign speak! -- possibly the most useful thing I ever got from a computer game: Ultima 6, in this case, plus some online resources at Origin's website that I can no longer find). I didn't want the personae to just walk up, wave their hand over the prophecy, spend some Heka, and read it right away, so the prophecy resists translation by requiring a second skill used in parallel. None of the personae have both the right Casting and the right skill. They're going to have to figure it out as players, or send the personae to the experts.
I also borrowed from H. P. Lovecraft. I had the Cthulhu-headed coins from Chapter One in an earlier treatment of the story, and I forgot to remove them from the printout I used as an adventure guide when I ran the players through it. I ended up retroactively rationalizing why the Great Cthulhu itself would be imprinted on coins. It also inspired one of the side-gags of the gamers playing in the campaign, the Klal of Cthulhu. Cthulhu also explained some other really strange things on this world -- go look at the side-story The Salty Anchor.
Another set of Lovecraft stories figures into a chapter or two of the story in the next book (Sacrifice the Sun), but that information can't be discussed here -- the players won't visit that chapter until 2002. I am guessing that there will be close to fifty chapters in the campaign by the time the final chapter of this two-book story is played, and we've averaged under two chapters per month.
Well, I think I've talked enough about the story for now -- I can't go much further without spilling future events to suspicious and attentive players...
As for the players, they are quite a wonderful group. Without them, I could not have put together anything as elaborate as I have for this website and the story. They have good enough definitions of their personae that they can keep in character through just about anything I throw at them, and they still do some of those weird and silly things that seem to always happen in role-playing game sessions (turn Bilbus and Eric into women?!? Sure!).
Even though I bounce ideas off of some of them from time-to-time, I think I have succeeded in keeping enough of the overall story hidden that they are still enjoying the occasional surprise. Thanks to their enthusiasm for the story and their work fleshing out the characters, the Dark Mysteries Campaign has reached a self-sustaining level. I haven't had any project go this long without faltering. The players and their personae are substantially responsible.
The interactions of the personae are central to the story. I'd argue that the epic save-the-world-from-ultimate-evil aspect of the campaign is almost secondary. After all, like I've stated, fantasy isn't original. Same themes, different cast of characters. It's the cast that provides the element of fascination in the story. It's the cast that makes a story memorable. We see the tensions between Bilbus and Adria. What we don't know is how (or if) the two will settle down and stop arguing. Why is Farran such an odd horse? Why was Sturm left on the footsteps of a military order's training hall? Why does Rishala stay with Bilbus? Will Bilbus accept the offer he received from the Dark One? These are some of the questions that really drive the story.
I know some of the answers. The players know some of the answers. Some of those answers were revealed in this first book. For the rest of the questions, we shall see who has the answers.
Many Thanks must go out to Dan, Andrew, Jon, Cindy, Jennie, Ryan, and Julia for breathing life into their Personae Dramatis. Additional thanks must go out to Cindy again for her role as my Ghost Editor/Beta Reader during the draft-revision phase.
Back to the Book IV Index.
Back to the Story so Far.
The newer epilogue was last updated 21 April 2004
The original epilogue was last updated 5 December 2001
Contact for this page: JourneyMaster@BabylonByCandlelight.com