The Cave of Worlds Campaign Blog

The Cave of Worlds Campaign Blog - Interlude

November 2nd, 2013: I exhausted my stock of fully written-up session notes last time, so let me take this opportunity to catch things up a bit. The last session writeup was from 11/05/2011; I'm writing this almost exactly two years later. We continued to meet weekly (usually) for that time, so there are nearly another hundred sessions which I should write up, in theory.

That's very unlikely to happen. Jenny has taken incredibly copious notes, so it's possible that some day they'll see the light of day, but if I were to try to write up all 100 sessions here I'd have to give up running the game to do it - not to mention my job!

But if you're interested, you can still follow the campaign. A lot of it is even online. I've been posting about it to my Google Plus account all this time, usually several times a week. I've even done quite a few video blog entries, as well as pre-game notes and discussions in which I let my imagination run free. For some reason those discussions are almost always incredibly helpful. I've come to rely on them.

The posts are restricted to people who are in my Roleplaying and RuneQuest circles. There are also some posts (but far fewer) in my Saturday Game circle, but that's really just for the players. Those posts are restricted to things that the players can know. In the Roleplaying/RuneQuest posts, I can talk more about the interesting issues behind the game, elements of the meta-plots and so forth. If you're interested in being added to my circles, drop me a line and let me know!

Now here's some more of what's been going on:

Portals

The Cave has been determined to contain 107 primary portals, plus four others which are separate and an indeterminate number of secondary portals. This may seem confusing, so let me explain: the primary portals are from the main cave. Some lead to worlds which contain other collections of portals, such as the Wood Between the Worlds from the Narnia books (that's what I love about this game; I can use anything). There's also one portal which leads to what appears to be a secondary cave that contains still more portals. New ones are still appearing there.

The party has gone through about sixty of the primary portals, although in most cases they didn't spend much time in them. The sixty include an Arthurian world of knights (although it's ruled by a queen rather than a king), the Hell of Dante's Inferno, the Mississippi of Tom Sawyer, the world of Star Trek, comic-book worlds based on several different settings...the list is really too long to continue here! And many of the worlds are changed by the actions of the PCs. But here are the main worlds that the party has been involved with of late:

The Floating Isles. This is a game-setting that was originally developed by a friend of mine in college, about thirty years ago. I adopted it, and developed it over the years; it's a very refreshing setting. It was originally inspired by the Yes album cover art of Roger Dean, mainly. Islands of stone and earth float in an endless blue sky. There is no ground other than that on the Isles, and between the isles gravity doesn't exist - although air, warmth, and light do. There are none of the standard races in the Isles. Humans, elves, dwarves...none of that. All of the species are unique to that realm, and almost all of them have some means of aerial self-propulsion. One of the newer characters is from the Isles: Shale. She's a Junior Librarian from the Great Library, which is one of the most powerful of the Isles. The Library is currently investigating the portal that the PCs came through. Unfortunately the PCs also destroyed a large chunk of the Library - their medical building - and they also cost the Library a complete small Isle in itself. So while the Library is still friendly to the party, they're a lot more cautious about them, too.

The Isles mostly have a curious blend of magic and technology with a sort of ethereal, crystalline quality. They're quite advanced, or at least the Library is.

Tanelorn. Actually this is a city, set in the multiverse called the Million Sphere. It is, of course, derived from the Eternal Champion books of Michael Moorcock. The city itself is a place of peace, of Balance. The party owns two dwellings in it. One is a manor now owned by Dominica; her little girl lives there, watched over by Bob, her nanny. The other is a very odd place called the Crooked House, owned by Ophelia. Actually it can be argued that the Crooked House isn't in Tanelorn; it seems to be a dimensional interloper which somehow entered Tanelorn by widening an alley (Crooked Alley) into a street. One effect of the intrusion was to partially insert the house into the memory of some of the citizens, too. It confuses them.

Crooked House is a bit Lovecraftian, dingy and odd, with lines subtly out of true. The front opened on Tanelorn, but the back courtyard is in 1888 London, a London based on the works of H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, and H.P. Lovecraft - with a few other things thrown in. The far end of the courtyard is always shrouded in mist, with stairs that lead downward. Those stairs actually lead to the Edge of the World. Tunnels in the edge of the world also lead to other worlds, and one of them leads back into the cellar of Crooked House itself. It's a very strange place! But fun.

The Valley of Peace, where the campaign started, has suffered a curious fate. As far as the party knows, the gods there became very angry - Ares in particular - and have placed the whole valley in stasis, freezing it and the inhabitants in amber. All of the original PCs loved ones, friends, and mentors are frozen there. Whether or not they're dead is unknown.

Glorantha. Glorantha died of old age, the first world to do so. Time rates between the worlds are not standardized, although the admixture of worlds started by the PCs seems to have affected time rates in some cases.

Characters

Sith'liss and Gormuz are no longer in the campaign, and neither are their players.

We've had some issues with players, which I won't go into here (sorry!). Suffice it to say that we currently have four players. I would like one or two more, so that we can play even if one or two aren't able to make a particular session. We've put up some flyers here and there, and players are checking out their friends and acquaintances. If you can make a weekly game in the Woonsocket, Rhode Island area and are interested, drop me a line! But if you think you might, don't ask to join my Google Plus circles first.

We're looking for emotionally mature players who have a good sense of humor and like to have fun. We have no specific age limit. We'd like you to be relatively dependable about making it to the sessions, which are normally on Saturdays from noon to 5pm - although of course we all know that there are times when real life intervenes. There are a couple of cats where we play, so a cat allergy would be a problem.