Disparation: Sentinels of the Realm

The Fellowship of Freedom

Sir Paul VIII, Son of Paul was the newest member of a long line of champions of the innocent, endowed with magical powers to fight against evil. His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph the Smith, received a prophetic vision in his dreams one day, warning him that his village would be raided by marauders. But the village survived due to Joseph’s warning. Each firstborn descendent of Joseph developed a new magical ability and inherited those of his forefathers. The abilities that Paul VIII possessed included foresight, exceptional physical might, the ability to transform into wild beasts, the strength of a giant, the ability to heal the wounds of himself and others, immunity to disease and poison, levitation of himself and other objects, magical vision, and a tough hide.

Lady Maia was a wealthy young noble. But, once while she and her fiancée were returning home to the City of the Rooks through the surrounding dark forest, they were ambushed by bandits, and the Lady’s courter was slain. Thus Maia resolved to avenge him by becoming the bane of banditry. So she learned archery from the best archers in the city, and at night she secretly slipped out to combat rogues and knaves as a hooded forestwoman known as The Wraith of the Woods.

Sir Tyler was one of the most competent members of the city watch. He lead his brothers-in-arms against many threats to the people. His valor was so exemplary that he was chosen to command the newest creation of the Artificers’ Guild: a mobile, one-man siege machine. He used the device well to continue defending his city.

Dame Meredith was a renowned master alchemist. She had cured several plagues and made countless other helpful discoveries. However, her magnum opus was creating the Sandals of Swiftness, an artefact which allowed her to travel with the speed of the wind.

Old Man Frost was a mysterious figure. No one knew from whence he came. All that was known was that he lived in a cave high up in the mountains. He only rarely left his mountain home, and when he did, he returned very quickly. Some folk tell rumours that he is a warlock possessing wintry magicks, and that he is unable to stay away from his cold lair for long, but surely such rumours are entirely unfounded.

Squire Devra was an apprentice to Dame Meredith the Alchemist, and an accomplished sorceress. Unlike her mentor, however, who used utilised alchemy, Devra used only pure magic. Her specialty was the creation of mindless Golem servants, often in the shapes of animals. She most often crafted them out of earth, stone, or timber — or rarely metal, if she could find enough of it.

With the Alliance of Kingdoms facing increasingly dire threats, they knew that they would need a mighty group of defenders. So, the most talented warriors and mages were gathered from throughout the land under one banner: The Fellowship of Freedom!

The Warriors Prime

Makius was an ambassador for the Maerfolk people, as well as an accomplished weather mage. Maerynis, home of the amphibious Maerfolk, was a great floating city. All was peaceful there . . . until Admiral Voss of the faraway land of Thorathia and his conquering fleet arrived and razed the city, killing hundreds. Makius and some others managed to flee to the Alliance of Kingdoms, but not all there trust the Maerfolk strangers.

Hugh was a magistrate who dabbled in astrology. One night when Hugh was stargazing with his brother Nigel (a watchman) a stream of starlight fell to the earth near them. And when the brothers went to investigate, they found a wounded starmage, who bestowed her magicks upon them before dying. The next day, Hugh found that Nigel had disappeared, and so set forth across the land to find him.

Blake was an explorer who specialised in the excavation of tombs, crypts, and dungeons. On one such exploration, he uncovered a magical relic: a spear that was once wielded by a long-lost fire god. Touching the item, the deity spoke to Blake, and offered divine power to him. He accepted, and thus gained the ability to channel the power of the sun! However, Blake’s power also rose and fell with the sun every day, so he was at his mightiest at noon, and powerless during the night.

Makius and Hugh, along with two others — Anthony (a bard) and Helen (a paladin) — were brought together to defeat a rampaging earth elemental, and remained allies since (with the occasional aid of Blake), as the Warriors Prime!

Forsooth! Prithee, what of the whispers of a savage man from ports unknown who fought alongside the Warriors Prime?

Acknowledgement that Haka may not exist here thanks to La Comodora “condensing” the various versions across the Multiverse.

Ah yes, ‘tis true that a mountain of a man, Aata, had joined that stalwart fellowship in their quest to thwart evildoers and miscreants! But alas, due to some foul sorcery, the brave fellow was discorporated in the midst of a heated battle! His friends and allies did grieve for him, and thusly sought for the source of his untimely demise, but their efforts were for not . . .

Baron Fyodor ruled the humble kingdom of Mordengradia. When the land was launched into the Second Great War of the Realm, the Baron came into conflict with Sir Paul VII. The two fought, but the struggle ended when Fyodor’s castle collapsed. Sir Paul survived, but the ruler of Mordengradia did not. Fyodor’s son, Ivan, was crowned the new Baron of Mordengradia upon his father’s death, but he also swore that he would visit vengeance upon Sir Paul and all his descendants. Baron Ivan was a brilliant machinist, and he created many clockwork tools far ahead of his time. He built hot air balloons, cannons, and many more fantastic inventions. Under his guidance, Mordengradia became the most advanced kingdom in the realm, powered by windmills, dams, and furnaces. But Baron Ivan had not forgotten his vow of vengeance.

Dawn developed an innate affinity for fire magic at a young age. The explosive discovery of her magicks, however, resulted in a considerable amount of destruction. Her ability at the craft was quite powerful, which attracted the attention of a local order of wizardry. They coerced her to join their ranks, but instead of treating her as an equal, they conducted numerous rituals on her to learn more about her strange and powerful magic. Dawn had had enough of that, and so escaped into the icy North. She eventually settled on the isle of Insula Draconis, far away from civilization. Yet, many magicians heard tales of her, and went to learn from her. She turned them away, but their words of admiration struck true. She was the land’s mightiest pyromancer, so why should she hide from the world? Thus, Magus Dawn and the Sorcerers of the Sun rose.

Admiral Voss was the ruler of Thorathia, a land far, far away across the sea. The Thorathians were a non-human race, each possessing an innate magical ability. Voss had the power to unleash infernal energy from his hands. Voss was a ruthless ruler, but he was also the creator of a new breed of magic which could permanently bind others to his will. The Admiral lead his Mage-Bound Armada to conquer a multitude of lands. But now, his conquering ships have set their sights on the Alliance of Kingdoms.

The Allcastle was the greatest work of the Wizards of the Order Aldred. The group of mages and spellcasters wanted to create an impregnable fortress that could move across the land under its own power, possessed a well-stocked armoury, and the latest siege weapons which were to be operated solely by the magic enchanting the mighty bastion. They wished for the Allcastle to rove the land, finding disputes and injustices, and swiftly put an end to them. But, during the final ritual to animate the fortress, a single syllable was mispronounced (much to the chagrin of Cedric — the Order’s counselor) and the castle’s imperative was twisted: instead of searching for injustices to solve, it determined that the root of all evil is humanity, so it must destroy humanity to prevent injustice. Thus the Allcastle went on a terrible rampage. It animated the weapons and suits of armour within its stores, which marched forth to destroy. Furthermore, the castle’s magic was far-reaching, and it could cause practically any object to join its crusade.

Allcastle sounds a little like some influence from the Celestial Tribunal got mixed with Omnitron. Kind of reminds me of at least the trailer of Mortal Engines, even though I never watched the movie.

Edit: Oh yeah, I also meant to say Insula Draconis sounds pretty awesome. Just picturing Dawn riding on the back of a dragon if that was your vision.

Yeah, I can see that, although it wasn’t intentional.

That wasn’t an inspiration. If anything was, Howl’s Moving Castle was a very small one.

Yes. Yes, it was.

Megalot was a thriving city in the Alliance of Kingdoms. It is home to more magicians than any other city in the land, and is known for its famous canals, which make transportation throughout the city quite expeditious, and the mystical grove of trees at its centre, which casts a magical light upon the whole city at night. And perhaps most importantly, Megalot is home to the champions of justice known as the Fellowship of Freedom, who defend it from all manner of monsters and marauders.

For up in the North, there be a mysterious, uncharted island, and on that island, there be dragons. It be called Insula Draconis, which in the tongue of the ancients means “Isle of Dragons.” Yonder isle contains all manner of scaled beasts, from small dragonets no larger than a hound, to great wyrms that tower higher than the highest, uh, towers. Some of yon dragons dwell in forests dark, others reside in caverns deep, and yet more be living in the waters cold that surround yon island. Magus Dawn — a skilled sorceress — and her acolytes have recently settled on the island, making it all the more perilous. Be forewarned, all ye who would dare to tread there, for few return to tell thy tale.

Port Wagner is the farthest outpost that has ever been built. It lies on the very edge of the Known World. It rests on an island of red rock, and beyond it stretches a vast, endless ocean. From its docks fearless explorers set sail, in attempts to discover new, uncharted lands. They are certain that more lands exist than just the ones that we know if, for a small few travellers have come to the port from such undiscovered lands, including Makius the Maerman, and Portia the Thorathian warrior.

The Tower of the Fellowship lies at the very heart of the fair city of Megalot. It serves as the quarters for the city’s mightiest defenders, the Fellowship of Freedom. The Tower was built after the Fellowship’s previous residence — a modest keep outside Megalot — was destroyed by a black powder explosion caused by the conniving Baron Ivan of Mordengradia. The Tower contains many chambers, among them are an armoury containing multitudes of weapons for Sir Tyler and the Wraith of the Woods, and a well-stocked storeroom of alchemical and magical supplies for Dame Meredith and Squire Devra. The Tower is also protected by a small but loyal force of guards, and its logistics are managed by the Fellowship’s longtime friend, Stewardess Aminia.

The Watchers of the Darkness

Amanda was the daughter of the infamous Magus Dawn. However, unlike her mother, she completely lacked any innate magical ability. But Insula Draconis — the home of Magus Dawn and her Sorcerers of the Sun — was a dangerous place, and without magic, Amanda needed a way to survive the island’s fierce wildlife. So she trained herself in the use of crossbows that she found on the island, which she surmised must be all that was left of an ill-fated expedition to Insula Draconis. Yet despite her mastery of marksmanship, she was still scorned by Dawn and her followers for her mystical ineptitude, and so eventually ran away from Insula Draconis to the mainland City of Rooks. There she used her skills as a sellsword and mage slayer. She eventually was befriended by the Fellowship of Freedom, who taught her that not all magic was evil, and who crafted enchanted, elemental bolts for Amanda’s crossbows.

Peter was a humble villager whose every endeavor seemed ill-fated. He tried to get work at a variety of places, but every time he wound up resigning for one reason or another. Eventually, he signed up to be a test subject for the alchemical Order of Revocation’s experiments in exchange for monetary compensation. The order was trying to perfect a potion of strength, but it had not worked on anyone thus far. However, when Peter drank it, he gained might comparable to that of the famous Sir Paul! Then, for a reason Peter did not quite understand, the Fellowship of Freedom arrived and fought off the Order, and told Peter that they had been a front for the maniacal Baron Ivan. After that, Peter decided to put his newfound strength to use as a defender of the weak.

These days, Old Man Robert just minds his own business running his stable in the City of Rooks. Way back, long ago, he had been taught by a wandering monk how to use his qi to sense the qi in others, and how to use that ability to become a master martial artist. He learned from the wanderer how to use his qi to channel the very essence of the physical world, enabling him to create fire, move earth, bend water, and conjure wind. He used these abilities to fight for justice. But even with all these mighty powers, Robert grew old, and so retired from questing to run a dojo. But one of his apprentices betrayed him, slew his other students, and defected to the Guild. After that, Robert opened a stable, in hopes that no more tragedy would befall him. But his assistant, Charles, has recently been getting into trouble with the Guild, and it might be time for Old Man Robert to once again take up the sword.

Lady Lillian was a young noblewoman, but she always felt overshadowed by her famous cousin, Dame Meredith, who was a part of the Fellowship of Freedom and an accomplished alchemist. One day while she was wandering through the woods outside the City of Rooks, Lillian found a staff of yew wood with an feather encased in amber atop it. Desiring it, Lillian picked it up, but when she did, the untempered wrath of nature’s fury flowed into her. She then used its druidic magicks to summon many creatures of the forest, and commanded them to attack the City of Rooks. Thankfully, Lillian’s plot was foiled by the Fellowship of Freedom, and she was jailed. Years later, the staff called to her, and she escaped imprisonment and again found it. But this time, she was found and calmed by her cousin before any harm could be done. Lillian wanted a chance to redeem herself, so she was allowed to be apprenticed to Faye, a master magician. Under her tutelage, Lillian learned to control her druidic magic and learned many new spells, including those that could temporarily transform her into a beast of the wild.

These five defenders have now banded together to strike back against evil, and have become known as the Watchers of the Darkness!

Small suggestion: I would replace Magus Dawn with Magister Dawn, as it sounds better imo, and preserves the rhythm of the original name. By the same token, I would go Wizards of the Aldred Order, the Mage-Bound armada, and the Order of Revocation. I would also switch Mordengradia and Thorathia back to just being Mordengrad and Thorath, as those don’t sound out of place in a fantasy setting.

Interesting choice to drop Atlantis from the core set. I suggest that since you’ve largely swapped space travel with horizontal travel across the ocean surface, it makes little sense to have Atlantis under the waves, and it should instead be the ruins of a flying city located far above an inaccessible land area (mountains or desert would work best, with either permanent cloud cover or a mirage hiding the sky palace from viewers on the ground).

PS, I really like making Fixer’s four Styles into elemental effects. It even makes sense of why they destroy each other, as elemental spirits hate spirits of a different element; if you were in Fire Style and you switch to Earth Style, the fire now refuses to serve you again until you reattune yourself to it.

True, it preserves the rhythm, but magister merely means master, which lacks any magical connotations. I have seen it used to refer to wizards, but only in one book trilogy. Also, it reminds me of the word magistrate, which makes me picture a stuffy bureaucrat.

Sure, but I feel like the noun-adjective order sounds more mystical.

These two I like. I think I’ll go and edit the posts to change them to these.

Fair enough, I can see your point. But I don’t really see reason enough to change them.

Well, see, I didn’t, really. If I don’t include a character or environment in a post that seems like it should logically include them, then chances are that they do exist, but their counterpart in this universe is so similar to the main timeline version that I wouldn’t have anything new to say about them. Examples include AA, Fanatic, Haka, Akash’Bhuta, The Ruins of Atlantis, and Magmaria.

Your idea for Atlantis is pretty neat, and I don’t really have anything else, so it’s canon.

Thanks. I really like that concept too.

Hmm . . . I wonder if I could map Slim’s EE Styles to the four elements. Let’s see, Grease Monkey Fist is almost certainly Fire (offense), and Driving Mantis is probably Water (counterattacking). And Alternating Tiger Claw could be Earth (unstoppable), while Riveting Crane would be left with Wind.

I disagree; it’s faux-Latin, that’s magical enough. At the very minimum, it’s suggestive of Catholic priests; whether those feel magical probably depends on how you grew up.

I’m not sure where I got the term from originally, but it definitely wasn’t that, which I’m certain I’ve never consciously observed prior to today. In terms of my current awareness, it makes me think of the term Magisterium (Catholic again), which makes me think of the Mysterium, one of the four Orders of mages descended from Atlantis in the RPG “Mage: the Awakening”. That may be how the term got codified in my head, but depending on when exactly MtAw was published, my first use of the word Magister to mean “an archmage in a scholastic and formal tradition” may have predated it, dating back possibly as far as 2003.

A bureaucrat, sure. Stuffy, perhaps. If you would apply these terms to Dumbledore in Harry Potter, then they equally might apply to Magister Lenson, the character who I originally created as an arcane superhero and later rolled into my D&D campaign, as the author of a historical treatise regarding dragons.

FWIW, “magister” is also used in Pathfinder to refer to a head wizard/court wizard type, particularly in their Kingmaker Adventure Path.

Well then, in light of the valid points raised by @The_Justifier and @Jeysie, I will concede that Magister could be an accurate title for this Dawn. However, my mind remains unchanged, as I simply personally prefer to call her Magus Dawn.

In that case I hereby copyright my own original character, Magister Swan, plz no steal kthx.

a humble suggestion about Ra when you get to him
In standard "modern’ continuity, he is a little out of place being an Avatar of an ancient god.
In a world with wizards, where Thorathia and Wagner base are across the sea, I would suggest Ra gets his power from Aliens from the stars with fantastic technology

Well, @Sea-Envy, I actually did already get to Ra. He was in the Prime Wardens/Warriors Prime post (third paragraph).

Graham was the Lord of the House of Pike, and also the chairman of the City of Rooks’ premier Alchemists’ Guild. But, unknown to all but a select few, Lord Pike was also the boss of the city’s largest Thieves’ Guild, which was known simply as “The Guild.” The Guild controlled all crime in the city. The organization’s ranks include corrupt guards, assassins, burglars, sellswords, and informants. Lord Pike himself is a skilled unarmed-combatant. And, unknown to everyone except his right-hand aid, Pike is also an immortal, undead being.

Sophia was Lord Pike’s right-hand assistant and operative. In her youth, she was a student at Sifu Robert’s martial arts dojo, where she learned to become a skilled martial artist, as well as a practitioner of her sensei’s signature elemental styles, before betraying her master to the Guild and slaying all of her fellow students.

Randy was an infamous smuggler who operated in the subterranean catacombs underneath the City of Rooks. But, due to the amount of time that he spent in those ancient tunnels, he was slowly warped by the arcane and mysterious energies that permeated that primeval realm. He was transformed into a monstrous beast: the first Were-Rat. However, his condition only afflicted him while he was in darkness. Nonetheless, he came to the surface during the dark of night, to terrorise the inhabitants of the city.

Jack the Mad was a ruthless killer, but he was eventually apprehended by the City Watch and sentenced to execution. However, the Pike Alchemists’ Guild’s corrupt city officials arranged for Jack to instead become a test subject for their less ethical experimentations. Jack was pumped full of magical elixirs that had killed all other test subjects, but he thrived. He escaped to once again plague the city. But now, he had developed an appetite for magic of all kinds. Whenever he had a chance, he devoured arcane elixirs, drained the energy from magical relics, and even absorbed the magical power of mages.

Gabrielle was part of a family of nomads. But after a disastrous end to a courtship, she decided to run away, taking her family’s ancestral artefact with her. She shortly discovered that she could use said talisman to perform luck magic, and twist the strings of Fate itself. She could cast hexes and banes upon others, while granting herself and her allies blessings of good luck. She soon found work as a mercenary-mage.

The Terror Tower was a gigantic siege machine that mysteriously appeared in the countryside one day and began destroying it. Luckily, though, the machine was defeated by some chivalrous heroes, although its operators got away without being questioned. After the tower’s defeat, the Order of Revocation offered their services to clean up its destruction. But unbeknownst to anyone, the Order themself had constructed the mecha-machine, so that while they were “restoring the land,” they could really harvest the arcane crystals that had been buried underneath the countryside.

Sir Ansel was a famous actor who was renowned for his breathtaking performances in plays and theatres. But acting did not suffice to satisfy his ego, so he began hunting magical creatures. However, that, as well, was not enough for him. Ansel went to the Order of Revocation, and had an enchantment placed upon him which allowed him to set ablaze anything he could touch. Armed with this magic, Ansel set his sights on the one challenge worthy of him: the champions who defended the Alliance of Kingdoms, especially the savage Aata.

On the plus side, “The” Guild sounds way better than “The” Organization. I get what C&A were going for with that name, but it has absolutely never worked for me. The cover of the Sentinel Tactics expansion illustrated it best; swapping “The Guild” in on that cover would instantly make it way more intimidating.

Other than that, though, Rook City has a rough transition to try and fit into a medieval setting. Points for effort, and some of these are probably decent, but my brain just kind of slides right off them the second I look, just because of how obvious the genre mismatch is.

The City of Rooks makes me think of what you’d get if you had Ankh-Morpork without Vimes or Vetinari. (Or rather, evil versions thereof.)

That’s a great comparison! : )

I see Carl the Wolf King - I mean, Apex - isn’t on this list. I take it’s because there’s not much practical difference between this version and the main timeline?

(Likewise for Nightmist & Alpha, I imagine)

And Gloomweaver! He’s kind of a given to fit right in this setting.

Also, Allcastle/Terror Tower team-up plz!

Gloomweaver is actually surprisingly out of place in a fantasy setting; all the pieces work, but the general vibe of a Louisiana-style bayou voudoun cult just feels like it should exist as a deliberate anachronism among the malcontents of the modern era. I would suggest refluffing him as more of a lich-king type, substituting “swamp” for “ice” as his milieu, with open servants rather than a cult, and renaming the Relics to Phylacteries or something.

Apex, on the other hand, yeah not much needs to change. Alpha will take some thought though, as “reporters” weren’t really a thing in the middle ages. A royal herald or town crier is about as close as you can get.

Correct on all accounts.

Well, if I ever decide to tell any stories in this setting, I’ll keep that in mind. ; )

I respectfully disagree. Just replace bayou and voodoo with swamp and dark magic, and Gloomy would work just fine. Sure, he’s less unique in a more magical setting, but there’s no way around that. And changing him into a lich king actually removes his main defining feature: that he is practically omnipotent, but is stuck in another realm.

Agreed. Hmm . . . I’d probably go with an inquisitor or a scrivener with her, depending on what I wanted to emphasize. I suppose both might work?

I would suggest making Gloomweaver a living mortal wizard.
Who would then “comes back” as a lich in the information age future of this world just like the evil wizard(s) from Marvel Connan/Red Sonja comics that showed up to fight Marvel superheroes.

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That concept has never really worked for me (at least not in EE; the new version seems a little closer. If Gloomweaver is in another dimension, then why can Legacy punch him? Even on Advanced he’s still vulnerable to nine of the eleven damage types. Maybe the idea of a non-target villain hadn’t yet occurred to C&A when he was designed (particularly given that he was a guest character from another designer), but if he’s meant to not be here until summoned, then it seems obvious he ought to work like Miss Information or Kaargra Warfang. Instead, with the mechanics he has, it fits for him to just be some wizard looking for ultimate power.

Hmm . . . interesting, I suppose. My concern is that it still leaves him rather bland in the medievalesque age. Additionally, I don’t think that this timeline will ever actually get an information age. In my mind, this world is much more attuned to magic than to science and technology, so the closest it would get is perhaps some sort of magitech Eberron-esque setting.

You do have a point. However (if I may borrow your schtick for a brief moment) I think that I could justify it. The GloomWeaver HP pool could represent lots of other things, like the enchanted idol that it does in DE, for instance. Or it could be a portal or altar that the heroes have to destroy. Or, Gloomy could be only partially manifesting on the Prime Material Plane — half here, but also half still in the Realm of Discord.

No, see, what you need to do is fight the Terror Tower in the Ruins of Allcastle environment, with your lead hero being King Aldred (who is actually an enchanted suit of armor which originally sat on the throne at the Allcastle’s heart, but came to life and believed itself to be King Aldred reborn after the Castle’s original defeat).

You know, I said it in this thread but I wouldn’t mind hearing a canon story of something like the Terrorform being corrupted by Omnitron code or controlled by Chokepoint. I don’t know if there was opportunity for either of those to happen. Really just any story with the Terrorform at this point.

I like the concept, but I’m not so sure about the name.

If my memory is serving me correctly, the Terrorform debuted in the ‘00s (or maybe the ‘10s?), which I believe is when Omnitron-IV and X/U are the only active versions, but I think that Chokepoint could work.

Well we can’t exactly call him Allcastle-X, now can we? Time travel in general is very off-theme for a fantasy setting, so rather than having the hero associated with the Allcastle be an evolved future version of it, it is instead the magical “heart” of the castle, which was initially expected to rule the kingdom (“if King Arthur did not exist, we would have had to invent him”). In fact, it would make a lot of sense to reverse the causality behind King Aldred’s guilt, and say that the Allcastle didn’t rise and go on its rampage until after the “golem” who sat on its control throne, and was crafted by the Aldred Order wizards for the purpose but was never intended to be sentient, woke up and went off by itself, leaving the Allcastle as essentially a hungry beast with no conscience to guide it. The animate armor, with its false memories of being a flesh-and-blood king named Aldred, wandered like Frankenstein’s monster in the wilderness, but eventually learned of the Allcastle’s attacks and went back to stop it. When he sat on the throne again, however, he had changed and grown so much that he could no longer fully control the castle, and could only disable it for long enough that it could be destroyed, and him along with it. Alas, the heroes didn’t fully understand how the wizards had designed it to rebuild itself; the ruins were thought haunted for a while, but eventually the castle rose again, stronger than ever, having absorbed much of the King’s mind. Only an expert golem-crafter could recover the shattered armor from the ruin site and rebuild King Aldred, so he could again go and confront his other half.

I think that’s the best I can do to tie together Omnitron, Cosmotron, O-X, O-U, and O-4 without using any science fiction tropes.

Mark Twain would like a word… He did it before H. G. Wells!

Connecticut Yankee isn’t fantasy. It’s time travel to the actual middle ages, not to a quasi medieval kingdom with magic and monsters and such.

Uh… Arthur? Merlin? Sounds like fantasy to me.

I take some of it back, though. Apparently Wells and others had stuff before Time Machine that pre-dates Yankee.

Of course, this thread is all @fjur’s brainchild. They can have time-travelling sci-fi dragon wizards as they see fit.

And I will call them science fantasy, if so.

Close, '99 based on the Kickstarter reveals.

Your reasoning for King Aldred makes sense, @The_Justifier. Although I’d probably call him King Aldred X (pronounced the Tenth rather than ecks). Or maybe just Aldred the Tenth?

How I see it is that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is both science fiction (the science-based time travel) and fantasy (the magic). And I suppose that it then could also be called science fantasy.

I do think, though, that a solely fantastical setting could have time travel. Just make it powered by time magic rather than a time machine.

I sure can! Except I won’t, because the point of this is to be solely fantasy. Superhero comic books already have cyborgs and sorcerers together in the same setting.

Also, thanks for the correction, @Samantha_The_Demoncat!

You’re quite welcome!

I don’t really see time travel as that off brand for high fantasy RPG settings. Chronomancy is a school of magic after all… or before all. or something.

Before you get to the time travel villain, I would like to remind you that in many high fantasy RPGs (both pen and paper and video games) there is already a high amount of anachronism for “pirates”. the world seems like King Arthor until you get on the high seas when it suddenly seems more like Francis Drake.

FWIW, Connecticut Yankee was written as a satire of Sir Walter Scott’s novels and of a number of popular socioeconomic ideas Twain took umbrage with in general. It’s also considered a seminal founding work of the time travel genre. Make of that what you will.

I personally would hold up Pathfinder as proof you can have something that combines a ton of genres but still overall feels like fantasy.

Yes! My point exactly. Time travel can definitely be fantastic. Rip van Winkle, for example. (Although that could be considered to not be “true” time travel.)

And for everything else, really. This page has plenty of examples:

Well since a spambot was good enough to flatter me with imitation and reup this thread, I say we start working on it again.

@fjur , what would you say to flipping the genre on Ra and having the “Egypt” he comes from actually be a hypertechnology society that was apocalypsed in the distant past of this world, so it was basically modern New York about six thousand years ago, blew up five thousand years ago after achieving Clark’s Law levels of tech, and is now just mysterious ruins in the desert. A scholar named Lord Blake, of the House of Washington, discovers this high-tech staff in a pyramid (which was basically the Louvre, or maybe a Vegas casino), and it transforms him into a Solar Fusion Engineer named Ra (actually Ray), but Lord Blake’s garbled medieval interpretation of a 30th-century average Joe’s lifestyle and worldview ends up coming all the way back around to “Foolish creature! Stand not before Ra!”

Yeah, sorry we let that one slip through.

Please continue …

Huh, it’s interesting that both @The_Justifier and @Sea-Envy have suggested making Realmverse Ra tech-based:

Not that I’m complaining or any such thing. I simply find the coincidence notable.

I did already describe Ra, but seeing as both of you have suggested doing something sciencey with him, maybe I’ll reconsider.

So, let’s quickly rolodex all the decks and whether you’ve covered them so far in this project.

Absolute Zero = Old Man Frost.
Bunker = Sir Tyler.
Chrono-Ranger = see below.
The Sentinels = see below.
Expatriette = Amanda (prefers no other name.
Fanatic = see below.
Guise = see below.
Haka = initially no change, later removed.
Sky-Scraper = easily extrapolated from changes to GWV.
Setback = Pete (I suggest that the common folk should rumor him under the name “Lucky Pete”).
KNYFE = even I’m having trouble with this one.
Legacy = Sir Paul the VIIIth, Son of Paul
Tempest = Maekius.
Nightmist = very minimally referenced under Lady Lillian’s backstory.
Omnitron-X = not yet officially named as either Allcastle “Ecks” or King Aldred the “Tenth”.
Parse = I got nothing, this is either easy or impossible.
Captain Cosmic = Sir Hugh.
Ra = being reconsidered, see above for now.
The Scholar = superficial changes only.
Tachyon = Dame Meredith.
Unity = Squire Debra.
Visionary = see below.
The Wraith = the Lady Maia of House Montgomery.
Mister Fixer = Old Man Robert (needs other names).
The Naturalist = see below.
The Argent Adept = see below.
Stuntman = see below.
Luminary = see Baron Blade, needs hero rationale.
Lifeline = see below.
La Capitan/Commodora = this is the one character I would agree should appear in the “Realmiverse” as the exact same individual who visits all other timelines. She needn’t even look out of place (unlike CR), as the Realmiverse’s oceans can easily be frozen in a perpetual (early) Age of Sail just as the inland areas remain eternally (late) medieval.
The Matriarch/Harpy = Lady Lillian.
Akash’Bhuta’Thriya = superficial changes only.
Benchmark = Probably best treated as Sir Tyler 2.0, funded by a shady merchant from the Benedetto Viscounty, after Sir Tyler’s patrons failed to fund the construction of a second mechanical masterpiece.
Baron Blade = see above under the same name.
Citizen Dawn = Magister Dawn, the Magus-Supreme(acist). Fjur can call her Magus Dawn if he wants, but this is my list, and I already cringe at “Dame Meredith”, I’m drawing the line at this one.
Grand Warlord Voss = see above.
Omnitron = the Allcastle.
Ambuscade = see below.
The Chairman, the Operative, and the Organization = see above under basically the same names, except the last is The Guild.
Plague Rat = Randy the Burke (or Burke the Randy for a marginally less PG version).
Spite = Jack the Mad.
Apostate = see below.
Gloomweaver = see extensive debates above.
The Ennead = see whatever we decide on for Ra.
Iron Legacy = this one is pretty up in the air, for now I’ll hold off on saying anything.
Kismet = Miss Gabrielle.
The Dreamer = superficial changes only.
Miss Information = see below.
Deadline = see below.
Infinitor = the former Sir Nigel.
Kaargra Warfang = either superficial changes or none, depending on whether this Bloodsworn Coliseum is an identical visitor from space, or a local analogue. (Importantly, it is not Singular, so even if it is identical to our version, it isn’t the same.)
Progeny = probably totally unchanged, though unless any of the locals saw it fall from the sky, they would probably assume it to be a naturally occurring monster rather than an alien from the sky.
Wager Master = the other character besides La C. Who travels the multiverse and visits both this reality and the canon one. Unlike her, however, he typically garbs himself in local color to blend in.
Chokepoint = this is the one character so off-theme that I’m uncertain she can be made to work in this setting at all. If she can, it’s probably as part of the whole Sir Tyler / Benedetto Man / possible Sentinels thing, which I’m still working out the details of.
The Fey Court = basically identical (that’s a step up from “effectively unchanged”).
Apex = Carl the Wolf-King (superficial changes only).
The Terrorform = the Terror Tower.
Ermine = superficial changes only.
Friction = see below.
Fright Train = see below.
Proletariat = see below.
The Slaughterhouse Six = see below.
Biomancer = not even superficially different, except his costume is probably made of different materials, and the metal to make his skeletons is probably more expensive, so he might use wood or stone instead for the more disposable ones.
Bugbear = no change necessary.
Greazer Clutch = see below.
Sergeant Steel = see whatever we do with KNYFE.
Insula Primalis = Insula Draconis.
Megalopolis = Freedom City.
The Ruins of Atlantis = see below.
Wagner Mars Base = Port Wagner.
Freedom Tower = the Tower of Freedom.
Rook City = the City of Rooks.
Pike Industrial Complex = I’ll have to think about this one.
Tomb of Anubis = we’ll need to figure out Ra first, though this needn’t exactly match him.
Realm of Discord = zero changes needed, regardless of what we do with Gloomweaver.
Time Cataclysm = a tough nut to crack, loosely the same concept but probably completely different in execution.
The Block = see whatever we do with KNYFE.
Silver Gulch 1883 = see below.
The Final Wasteland = no longer in the future, and now only a moderate sized area, but otherwise effectively unchanged. A hermit might dwell in the Library who is effectively the local replacement for Haka, though not the same person.
Mobile Defense Platform = see below.
Dok’Thorath Capital = effectively unchanged.
The Enclave of the Endlings = see below.
Omnitron-4 = the Allcastle Ruins.
The Court of Blood = effectively unchanged.
The Temple of Zhu Long = effectively unchanged.
Madame’s Festival = effectively unchanged (though I’d probably refluff Alzrabar).
Magmaria = I disagree with Fjur that this is basically unchanged, as even though the place and its residents could appear unchanged, medieval heroes would have a harder time justifying how they reach such a location and exist unharmed there. Honestly I’d probably just refluff the entire deck to represent a tropical island inhabited by trolls or something, with no mechanical changes. The locals still collect magma crystals, but these come up from a volcano instead of being on the cavern walls, and their fireproof nature has an explanation other than being made of lava (at worst, they might effectively be “carbon elementals”).
The Celestial Tribunal = see below.
Champion Studios = see below.
Nexus of the Void = effectively unchanged.
Mordengrad = see Baron Blade.
Maerynian Refuge = is probably now the original home of Makius’s people rather than a refugee colony, but otherwise basically unchanged.
Fort Adamant = for simplicity’s sake I would recommend merging this with Sir Tyler’s backstory, as it stretches credulity that the kingdom could contain multiple facilities of this type without breaking immersion. Perhaps say that it’s currently being run by the Benedetto merchant. The Sentinels equivalent can easily have their promo and whole-deck versions come from a similar story that happens in some completely different location, or maybe they’re still here too; it’s not like the Mad Baron and his Benedettois accomplice would be above collecting and studying Oblivion Crystals.

See Below pt. 1 - The Sentinels
These four characters are all pretty challenging to fit into a medieval paradigm; the Idealist is the only one who is super easy to do, as she can just be a “sorceress” in D&D terms (or a Psion as D&D conceptualizes them, to be slightly more apt), but the most essential aspect of her character is that she’s a kid, her imagination empowered by TV shows and the like, so this needs to be reflavored a bit in terms of how she developed her picture of the world (replacing the Karate Robot with a Shining Knight, for example). Writhe is also not super hard, since on a shallow level everything he does with hypertechnology can be done with magic instead, but the specific way his “shadow stuff” operates is a very limited set of applications of “science”, and it’s a bit tricky to make him feel equally fitting as a wizard with very narrowly defined powers (to go back to D&D, a Warlock probably works best). Then there’s Doctor Medico. A man made out of living healing energy isn’t hard to deal with in a fantasy world, but Nick Hernandes’s day job is much more anachronistic; healers in the medieval age were unlikely to cure anyone of more than superficial symptoms that could be treated with herbal poultices and the like, so making a character who’s an actual doctor fit into a medieval setting is a challenge. You can handwave him away as a “sage”, but the vibe is very different. And lastly, there’s Mainstay. Mainstay absolutely does not work in The Realm as-written; a “biker” is such a thoroughly modern concept that it can’t even begin to be translated. Even if you turn Sweet Rhonda into a miraculous mechanical horse, this is an extremely different wavelength from being one of a few thousand motorcycle riders patroling America’s interstate system, getting into bar fights and chomping cigars while wearing spiked leather jackets. While we can create a character for Jackson the Brave in this setting, he is by far the most superficially different from the version we know, and a great many of his cards will have to be renamed (nobody in The Realm knows what a Highway is, Lonesome or otherwise, and while they’ve pretty much all had a few Hard Knocks, very few of them could conceive of a School of that or any other variety).

Regardless of where these characters’ powers come from, Nick Hernandez (or “Hernan” as his name probably is in this setting) and Jackson are definitely not Omegas in this universe, since there is no Nolan Generator to generate antimatter particles which turn into exotic muons that interact with water 0.0001% of the time to create superpowers. We could just replace all that with “a wizard did it”, but that’s boring, so a new explanation for the two’s abilities is needed. One possible backstory comes from an obsolete theory that I had about Haka and Mainstay being the same type of being, from back before the podcast answered most of our questions (and posed a bunch of new ones). If Haka had been, for lack of a better term, a “Highlander”, then Mainstay might have just been another of those. But that isn’t the case, so let’s keep looking. Right now the best theory I have is that, in frustration with the limited abilities of medieval medicine, the deeply compassionate sage Hernan ended up casting an ancient Wishing Scroll, which freed a genie-like angelic being that allowed him to gain the power to heal others, but doing so required him to exchange places with the bound efreet. Now the ancient spirit walked the world as a mortal man, and Nick had an immortal form with extraordinary powers but unusual limitations. At the same time, however, freeing this powerful spirit of good and healing and light had also liberated another spirit, one of evil or at least of darkness and chaos, and this “devil at the crossroads” sought out Nick’s best friend and offered him a bargain. While not tainted by the powers of Hell or anything so extreme, Jackson gained an unnatural edge as a result of this exchange, and any leftover similarities from his biker form that don’t quite make sense in the medieval context might be explained away by this bit of Ghost Rider aesthetic.

As alluded to in the Fort Adamant section above, the Sentinels might or might not have gotten their promo forms from interacting with the stuff going on in that location’s equivalent here; rather than answering that question, I’m going to look at a different aspect of their careers together. Why did these four individuals all start “fighting evil” together? Instead of following the comics too closely, I think we can come up with a much more interesting answer: having independently mastered their various magics or fighting skills, the sage and the warrior and the psion and the dark magus all ended up coincidentally together in the same location one day, and they were promptly attacked by La Capitan, who acted as though she knew them all and was very accustomed to fighting the team of all four of them, even though they had never met her or any of each other before (except probably Jackson and Hernan, who could well have been friends before, and so I went back and wrote the paragraph above on the assumption they were). This was a tough fight, as the Captain knew them better than they knew each other, but in the course of managing to defeat her (or at least survive the assault and escape together), they realized that they had a good dynamic fighting together, and they decided to band together to try and do good in the future. In other words, by assuming they were already a group, Cappy actually made them one; such are the perils of time travel.

Everything I have said here applies both to the deck “The Sentinels” and to the Void Guard individual decks, so I didn’t list them separately above.

See Below #2: Deadline/Lifeline

The realm has been free of dragons for as long as anyone can remember; the beasts persist in ancient tales, but if they ever existed, they were slain long ago by heroes whom history has forgotten. When the creature calling himself Tarogath stalked out of the wild mountains, wielding ancient weapons of neither elven nor dwarven make, those who saw the imposing eight-foot reptilian humanoid thought that the old tales might have some truth to them, and who is to say they were wrong? With single-minded determination, Tarogath cut a swath of destruction across the countryside, deviating not a step to either side as he advanced; the peasant rumors spread like ripples from a stone, telling of the “line of death” that was crossing the kingdom, seemingly bound for the imperial city itself. The Fellowship of Freedom and other such heroes rallied to stop this juggernaut, and though the cost was great, they succeeded in capturing him, whereupon both victors and vanquished simply disappeared. The heroes later returned, but they refused to speak of where their opponent had gone, saying only that the matter was dealt with now.

Years later, a tall and fearsome figure began to be seen abroad in the world, destroying monsters with mysterious blood magics and other incomprehensible powers. Though loosely similar in appearance to Tarogath, and similarly prone to incredible straightforwardness in his actions, it remains unclear whether this individual is the same person or creature who once threatened the lands he now seemingly protects (without showing any particular care for them; he avoids causing collateral damage, but never stops to explain himself or attend to the wounded or anything of that nature). Tales of this warlock’s power over life and death have spread once again, and many interested persons are watching the saga unfold with great curiosity as to the being’s next step.

Yeah, I like that.

Agreed, although I would replace her laser sword and pistol with magic weapons.

I am glad that we can agree to disagree regarding Dawn’s title.

What’s wrong with “Dame Meredith?” It’s the feminine equivalent to “Sir.”

I would definitely not make it be from space. As a general rule, the Sentinels of the Realm avoids space stuff, with the possible exception of Ra.

I haven’t thought about the Wasteland yet, but your concept seems good, although I think that the Cryptids would need to be replaced with more fantastical monsters. Perhaps it could contain the remains of some long-lost civilisation. Hmm . . . Maybe I should merge it with Atlantis?

Yeah, I too am starting to reconsider my initial stance on it, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it yet.

I think it could still work as a refuge.

Magmaria could be an above ground volcanic realm with volcano trolls

Alliteration naturally between normal words subsequently impairs speech fluidity y’see.

Fair enough. I can see your point, but it doesn’t seem major enough to me to warrant a change. Besides, the only alternative title for a female knight is “Lady,” which to me is more of the equivalent to “Lord” than it is to “Sir.”

I somewhat like the idea of an above-ground Magmaria, but I’m not sold on the volcano trolls part. To me, trolls are just big dumb brutes (no offense to any trolls reading this), whereas Magmarians are more enigmatic, shamanistic, and peaceful.

Yes, that is quite true. Although I’m leaning away from the Psionicist option, as — despite them being in D&D — they are a pretty Science Fiction-y archetype.

However, I think that I have an idea for her that is based on her origin story, rather than her archetype.

The Idealist’s mother originally created her to use as a sacrifice in a necromantic ritual to resurrect her husband. That still works in the Realmverse; just make Miranda’s mother a straight-up necromancer instead of the necromancy-mad science thing she had going on in Universe 1.

The Idealist was a clone of her “mother” in the main timeline, but clones don’t really work in fantasy. So I think she’ll have to be some sort of flesh golem instead. And not a Frankenstein’s Monster-style flesh golem, but one that looks more or less human. Hmm . . . Flesh golems are kind of Biomancer’s deal, so why don’t we just go ahead and say that Mrs. Fischer commissioned one from Biomancer for this express purpose.

And then the magical ritual went wrong, blah blah blah, she was rescued and because of her unusual nature and said ritual, she developed magic, with a special aptitude for conjuring objects.

Agreed. I think that the simplest way to go about that is just making her like reading stories.

True. I think that what I’d do with him is make him an alchemist who created and then drank some sort of “shadow elixir,” which imbued him with dark magicks. Or, to go a bit further, perhaps it transformed him into a shadowy wraith- er, I mean specter- no, um, a phantom.

Eh, I’m not overly concerned with that aspect. I’d just call him a “healer” and be done with it.

True. Although I don’t think it’s impossible. He could be some sort of wild horseman — basically a highwayman but without the thievery. A hooligan, if you will.

He rides across the countryside and gets into tavern brawls, etc. Or one can make him vikingesque, although I’m not entirely sure about that.

I don’t think that he needs a mechanical horse; I believe that a traditional one would do. And he can still have spiked leather armour.

I think that just “Nickolas” or “Nicholas” would work.

Ah, but you are forgetting that C&A have explicitly said that the Nolan Generator is a Fixed Point, thus something like it must exist in all realities. But what would its fantastical counterpart be? I’m thinking some sort of mystical fountain high up in some undiscovered mountain peak that was created by the Wizard Gregory. Every so often, a trickle of enchanted water from the font finds its way into a river and flows down into the wider world, where someone may be bathed in it and find themself with a magical gift.

So, Gregory’s Fountain does exist in the Realmverse, but I don’t think that it is the source of any of the SW Sentinels’ powers.

As for your origins for Dr. Medico’s* and Mainstay’s powers, @The_Justifier, they are good, but probably not what I would do. For Jackson, I think I’d just make him a completely mundane warrior, who just happens to be stronger than most. Maybe explain it by him having some “nonhuman blood.” Reason being, Universe 1 Jackson’s superpowers aren’t all that spectacular, and I don’t think that they need an explanation in a fantasy universe. In fantasy, you can just have normal folks be at the same level as magic-users. (Just look at D&D.)

Nickolas, though, definitely does need an origin. I do like your Djinn idea. Yeah, we can say that he found a magic scroll, and uses it to transform into a Healing Genie.

As for the team’s Void Guard phase, I haven’t decided what to do with Fort Adamant, but I figure that one way or another, the four find four magical artifacts containing Oblivion Shards: Nickolas gets an amulet, Jackson gets a flail, Miranda gets a ring, and Eugene the son of Wilken gets a circlet. Nickolas, Miranda, and Eugene often use their relics to enhance their magical prowess, whereas Jackson only rarely uses his flail’s ability to transform into an earth elemental.

Now, what is the team called? I suppose the Sentinels of the Southlands could work.

*When I typed “Dr. Medico,” my autocorrect replaced it with “Dr. Mexico,” which sounds like his less politically correct alternate.

So don’t make her a knight. She’s a scholar or sage in medievalist terms; her title could be “court wizard” or something. Besides, as a lesbian who’s modeled originally after two male characters (the powers of the Flash and the personality of Barney from HIMYM), it would be fitting for her to say “just give me the same title that the guys get”. Calling her “Sir” would be a bit too eyebrow-raising for most Middle Age people, but a nominally masculine but mostly neuter title such as “wizard” would fit well enough, such that I don’t think anybody would show up and be like “nu-uh you have to call her the court sorceress”.

You’re clearly not a World of Warcraft player; there the trolls are all whip-thin and fairly intelligent. Neither version really matches the Magmarians super-well, but frankly the Magmarians don’t match themselves that well in the first place; just being immune to fire damage, as opposed to automatically dealing fire damage to everyone in the same room as them, is exactly why I think they could be translated to random fireproof trolls or elves or anything else, and it would only improve the Environment to further Justify it in this way.

Warcraft trolls have the shamanism thing down; not so much peaceful, but that’s more because other people keep attacking them than because they want to fight. And enigmatic? Well, I don’t know them well enough to be sure… wink

Never was particularly fond of that origin, but you’re right that it fits here at least as well as it did there.

There you lost me. I don’t see Miranda the Elder as being a Biomancer knockoff; the equivalent to cloning in a fantasy setting is some sort of doppelganger pulled out of a magic mirror, so Miranda I could just be an Evil Queen type wizardess who tried to gain eternal youth by stealing the soul from her magically de-aged reflection, but the ritual went awry, the mirror broke, and Miranda II emerged into the world as an innocent child with all her original’s magical potential, but none of the blackness in her soul that she acquired through the process of learning those forbidden spells. (To further tie together the team’s origin, in defiance of the canon “this other guy just happened to be nearby” thing, maybe the darkness which was absent from Miranda ended up as an animate semi-sentient force, and Eugene was another wizard somewhere nearby who captured this, having no idea where it came from, and experimented upon it until it fused with himself. It could still turn out to have been Voidsoul in the end, and maybe its influence upon him is part of why he and Miranda ended up bonding so well with each other, as the darkness whispered in his ear to get him to stay close to her, so that it could eventually find a way to reunite with its original body.)

I mean, if you wanna do that, I can’t stop you, but IMO this isn’t a great story. Biomancer isn’t really the type to work for anyone, especially not without exacting some horrible cost. And the original Miranda was probably bad enough on her own.

Or just like having stories read to her, given that literacy was extremely rare and books were super-expensive in the medieval era. I always intended to have my version of Idealist be one of several characters who were tied in with a bard-type character, who might or might not be the Argent Adept (my See Below #3 will probably cover this topic, as I have few more pressing parts of the above project to further explicate on).

Okay you avoided getting sued by either DC or Sentinel Comics, but I’m pretty sure The Phantom is a character, though I forget who owns him.

Highwaymen engaged in thievery because, back when there were no grocery stores, it was pretty much impossible to eat unless you either grew your own vegetables in a rural farming community, or lived in a city where bakers and butchers and such were within walking distance of your house and your job and whatever passed for a bank. If you couldn’t stand the company of other people, and wanted to live as a vagabond wandering the countryside, then unless you were confident in your ability to hunt and forage for food, robbing people was basically the only way you could sustain yourself. If going this route with Mainstay he’d virtually have to be some sort of Robin Hood archetype, as it would be way off-flavor for him to have the forestry skills necessary to feed himself off the land.

That certainly is closer to his existing vibe, but again suggests that he’d probably be more of a marauder than an agent of the Crown. If the superheroes in this setting work for a benevolent feudal monarchy, then the aristocrats supporting that monarchy probably aren’t corrupt enough that a Robin Hood type character makes sense within the same universe. Then again, the Southwest Sentinels are meant to be somewhat physically segregated from the rest of the setting, so maybe there’s a rival nation which is much more unsavory than the Megalopolis setting, probably not quite as bad as the City of Rooks (although that would work), but still bad enough that antiheroes would have the support of the common people as they prey upon the wealthy.

Well if Rhonda is a living horse, she should probably not be an Equipment card, as this would take Squire Devra in a very different direction…

These names feel very, very un-medieval to me. “Hernan” isn’t great, but it does feel quasi-Arabic, which is fitting since the Moors ruled Spain at around this time in the real world. (The fact that this whole setting needs to be pseudo-European rather than mostly-American but also global will make things a bit interesting for some of the more international characters, like KNYFE and the Naturalist; it’s not an insurmountable challenge, but for some characters such as Parse and Ra I’ve felt it was better to handwave their country of origin rather than to have them all hail from “some distant land” beyond the borders of this Realm.)

Hm, okay I missed that. scratches head Given that I don’t care for Clarke’s Law stuff, I’d probably rather just rule that the Fixed Point requirement happens on some other planet elsewhere in this universe, and has no effect whatever upon The Realm. There still should not be any Omegas in The Realm, as it’s completely off-theme even if you change the Nolan Generator to a wizardly artifact or something.

Okay, I guess that’s not too bad. I’m still going to ignore it entirely for my further explications of my version of this project.

That is an option, certainly. My main reason for wanting to have her and Sir Paul and Sir Tyler have such titles is to signify their working with the kingdom, akin to how the U1 FF are government-funded.

You’re correct there.

I think what I’m leaning towards regarding Magmaria is simply an above-ground region that’s full of volcanoes and lava and stuff, and the Magmarians are just called Magmarians and are pretty much the same.

Well, having a fleshchild in the Sentinels of the Southlands seems like a pretty good motivation for him.

How did he know she would end up in that team, you ask? Well, let’s just say everything went according to his plan.

Yes, she would definitely care for verbal storytelling as well.

Consarnit, you’re right! Okay then, so I’ll call him a shadow? No, a ghost? Oh come on!

Well, I am glad that I avoided legal trouble with a comic book company that totally for reals exists.

I’m not overly concerned with historical accuracy or minutiae, given that this isn’t history. Quoth Twain: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

“How does Mainstay pay for food?” is a question that has always been with the character. U1 Jackson doesn’t really have a clear job either.

I’m imagining that The City of the Phoenix is somewhat more lawless, yes.

For See Below #3, a couple of quick Environment notes, and then the shortest and most obvious hero note I can think of, as I’m overdue for bed.

Mobile Defense Platform = this was inaccurately a See Below; the Baron Blade equivalent might be slightly less technological, but he can still build a flying fortress and then abandon it to be taken over by other heroes, leading his Battalion of Minions to run the place in his absence (and prove surprisingly loyal to Admiral Voss when he sails in to conquer the Realm).

The Enclave of the Endlings = Forgot to mention in my Deadline/Lifeline post…I’m assuming that since the Enclave and Jansa are not Singular, they have different versions in different universes, even though this probably contradicts the canon with regard to the Block, which I know was a creation of Jansa’s species (the Vyotians or whatever they were called). Thusly, Deadline is still an endling in this universe, but he’s the endling of the species of dragons rather than of Procytors, and Jansa probably transformed him into a humanoid as part of her effort to protect him. The Enclave’s Kirbyesque aesthetic is incompatible with The Realm overall, but I imagine it’s large enough to contain several biomes, and doors to a compatibly fantasy-esque biome within the extra-universal Enclave might open onto isolated corners of The Realm, allowing The Last Manticore and The Last Chimera and The Last Catoblepas to all wander in and take refuge.

Moving on…

One of the most archetypal heroic figures in the medieval tradition is the Bard, aka the Minstrel or Troubador, a wandering performer who brings news of current events from town to town, and trades information and entertainment in exchange for lodging and food from commoners, kings, and everyone in between. We have a character in Sentinels who is practically a Bard straight out of D&D…but the magical D&D bard is a very different animal than the historical medieval one, and quite frankly, I feel that The Argent Adept fits into The Realm better as a straight-up Wizard instead, leaning into the magical side rather than the musical side of his abilities, in order to fight whatever eldritch horrors emerge from the shadows to threaten the world.

So instead, I have a different character picked out to exemplify the minstrel/troubador archetype: the King’s Joker, or “Joe” as his friends call him (or would if he had any), aka Guise. While the cartoon silliness of his comic origin story is off-theme here, the differences are only superficial; he is still a fanboy of the heroics of others, particularly Sir Paul, and the Fellowship of Freedom still considered “Joe” a nuisance at best, finding that he had a habit of getting underfoot, endangering himself, and thereby giving an advantage to various villains. Eventually, his luck ran out and he was shoved out a castle window to his death - but he happened to land in a puddle of purple goo that had been left behind a few minutes earlier. That was when the Wager Master had seemingly been slain by an unrelated group of heroes who were fighting in the courtyard below, at the same time that a different villain battled the group which Joe had been “recording the annals of your heroic exploits” at, just outside the throne room.

Emerging from the liquefied remains of the blue-skinned imp, Joe was now clad in a pristine new purple jester costume instead of the travel-worn roughspun he’d previously afforded; his tawdry tales of the heroes’ exploits now suddenly held the power to bring those heroic visions to life around himself, though his idols still found his presence difficult to tolerate, even now that he could actually contribute somewhat to a battle. Either before or after this transformation, one of the few groups of the Defenders of the Realm who could tolerate Joe’s presence were the Sentinels of the Southlands; though Scholar Hernan found him less than amusing, the wizard Eugenius ignored him entirely, and Jackson the Brave had to be restrained from punching his lights out a few times, Miranda absolutely adored his recitations (she gets along with everyone, after all, and with no televisions in this universe, an animated tale-teller like Joe was basically her favorite thing in the world). Thanks to her genuine fondness for the obnoxious mountebank, the other Sentinels gradually grew to at least tolerate his presence, and eventually the Wardens of the Prime and other groups followed suit, though the FoF and other more “serious” heroes still tend to groan when he turns up. (The Watchers of Darkness were also on that list: Amanda probably pointed a crossbow at him and told him to go away, and Old Man Robert was likely thinking the same even if he was patient enough not to say it. But Lucky Pete likes everybody, to perhaps an even greater extent than Miranda, so eventually he would talk the other members into letting him help. Lilian is nothing if not a believer in second chances, so she probably defended his presence as well; perhaps even Tabitha the Wolf-Maiden decided he smelled good.)

I could probably shoehorn in Champion Studios as some sort of common-folk performance theater (maybe call it “the Champion Harlequinade”, or simply “Joker’s Follies”), which “Joker the Mighty, aka the Living Disguise” eventually managed to somehow spearhead the creation of; maybe connect Madame Mittermaier to this as well, saying that she provided the funding for the stationary installation in Freedom City, but also took her show on the road, growing progressively more sinister the farther away from the kingdom’s defenders she got. Anyway, I’m gonna leave that thought half-complete, and get some sleep already. Twenty-odd decks yet to be accounted for, so expect several more of these articles yet to come…

When Blake II of House Washington discovered an ancient spear in a long-forgotten crypt that spoke to him and offered him the power of the sun, he assumed that it must be the relic of some lost god. But in reality, it was actually a very advanced technological weapon built by an ancient alien civilisation. That civilisation, whose name has been lost to time, originated on another planet far out amongst the stars. Their society there collapsed, for reasons no one alive now knows. However, a small number of refugees managed to pilot spacecraft to Earth. That was thousands of years ago. Those refugees have all died out, but their high-tech devices remained buried in hidden crypts and tombs. Blake II had found one of their warrior’s weapons. The spear was equipped with a rudimentary AI system, which would instruct its user how to operate the device. It originally also possessed a database of useful information, but the ravages of time have made that feature function only erratically. Blake mistook the AI for the voice of a god, and its occasional data output as guidance from the god. The spear’s main functionality, though, was to store solar energy, and then discharge it in blasts of plasma.

Blake’s spear was not the only piece of that civilisation’s alien technology that survived the ages, however. Deep in a trackless desert, inside another sealed tomb, an alien medic android resides (along with the incredibly long-lived alien creature Amyt). The memory banks of the android, an 4NUB15 model, were severely damaged by the passing of the centuries, so it no longer recalls the fact that it is a machine. All it retains is its directive to carry out its medical functionalities. One day, however, some hapless travellers stumbled across the tomb. They had sustained several injuries from their travels, which the android quickly mended. The travellers were astonished by the machine’s healing ability, and thought it must be a god. 4NUB15 had nothing else to call himself, so a god he was.

Some time after Blake II’s discovery, a band of nine thieves led by a man named Roderick found another cache of ancient alien weapons. They claimed the devices, and decided to use them to conquer the land.

Explaining the relics as technological won’t be hard for some Ennead members… Set gets a weather control device, Geb a localized seismological inhibitor which works in reverse, Atum has his laser beetles (a subtle point being that these no longer need to pretend that their fire is different from Ra’s fire despite both being sun gods), and Nephthys has a device very similar to Extremis from Iron Man 3, which stimulates biological healing but easily destabilizes into causing extreme metabolic heat, so it can effectively only heal the strong while burning the weak. But other Ennies will be harder to reflavor. Shu literally exists as a near-invisible gaseous substance; it takes VERY high tier technology to make that seem feasible. And Isis is the goddess of magic, so if we’re saying all the magic is actually science, what limits her from just having control of this entire technology?

Certainly it can’t be that difficult for ancient techno-aliens to vibrate molecules at a frequency such that photons and matter transmit through them, no?

And how do you stop the person’s molecules from drifting apart on the gentlest breeze? How do the person’s neural synapses function at the speed of thought when they’re literally airgapped to an extent that prevents electrical transmission? No, actually being air and still functioning as a human being is a tall order even at Clarke’s Law levels of hypertech; you have to be all the way to the “precise mathematical description of the human soul” extreme before this is plausible. And at that point, Ra would be soloing Oblivaeon while the Ennead would be a Difficulty 12 villain, whose Advance mode requires the player to transcend death Horus-style before he has a chance of surviving three game turns.

Bottom line is, technology and magic are fundamentally different approaches to power. Arbitrary restrictions on what someone can do are fine for magic; if Matriarch has power over "the birds of the sky, and that works on an Archaeopteryx but not on an ostrich, that’s perfectly fine, because magic manipulates reality on the basis of human-comprehensible (if only by way of their negative space, see Xxxhulish) concepts and conceptualizations. It doesn’t matter if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, only which one it was believed to be, by the crazy old magician that gave Inversiverse Green Grosser his magical fruit-exploding powers and told him to protect the universe from the ancient cosmic horror of Nega-Guise.

But conversely, science operates on the basis of what’s actually true, and while you can break like one scientific law per character or franchise, and still call yourself “science fiction” rather than “fantasy” or “science fantasy”, everything else needs to pretty much make sense. An unexplained chemical accident turned Ryan Frost’s body into a perfect heat sink, and everything about Absolute Zero’s powers unfolds with mechanical precision from that single fact; he can’t just make ice out of thin air (the GM of a SCRPG campaign might allow that he can, but this is just an abstraction for the sake of gameplay convenience, like not bothering to count how many bullets are in Expatriette’s guns). Instead, he has to be in an area with a normal-range temperature, and he opens a few vents on his suit, allowing air to begin dumping heat into him, which cools the air around him, and precisely manipulating which vents open how far allows him to shape the area that he drops to freezing temperatures, and if that air also contains an adequate saturation of water vapor, that will freeze into a particular crystalline shape based on the hexagonal structure inherent to the H2O molecule, and NOW he’s made ice.

We don’t always have to see him go through every step of the calculations necessary to do it properly (likely he doesn’t do it at all, Tachyon did all the math in advance when building the suit, and he’s just learned how to activate all the macros she wrote to produce desired effects), just as we don’t need to see Expat or Bunker buying every single bullet. But if we know Expat is out of bullets, and her gun fires anyway, then suspension of disbelief is broken (or she has superpowers, which ruins her character). Without some explanation, likely involving Nightmist or Harpy doing magic, Expat can’t shoot an empty gun, AZ can’t make ice in the vacuum of intergalactic space (within system or even within galaxy, the vacuum is never perfect, so his powers work a little but have drastically escalating failure chances as he drifts further from any source of water or heat), and Techno-Shu can’t think with a brain that’s been literally turned into air.

No, I’ve decided Techno-Shu simply can’t be The Air Unleashed while keeping the Ennead at their current power level; it just wouldn’t be possible for it to make sense. We’ll have to settle for giving him a combination Predator shield and Phasing Cloak, so that he’s 99% invisible and insubstantial, via shifting him into a dimensional sublayer where kinetic energy has no effect on him, though sound and electricity and extremes of temperature will still pose a threat. Given the sci-fi postulate that such a dimension exists, it is then scientifically deterministic that researchers and engineers will eventually learn how to master it. That’s only like five steps up from us on a pretty reasonable tech tree; actually turning a person into something non-solid is basically the LAST possible step on any such tree, right up there with time travel and consequence-free resurrection.

(As an aside, this is why I see characters like Colossus as proving that the X-Men aren’t really mutants. DNA is a specific combination of adenine, guanine, cytosene, and t-something-ene molecules; if you replace those molecules with “organic steel”, then they’re no longer carbohydrate atoms structured into amino acid sequences which form those four proteins, and thus Colossus no longer has any DNA, is not alive anymore, and most assuredly does not have an X-Gene in his chromosomes that can grant him the power to change back. No, most of the “mutant” powers I can at least vaguely accept, but that one completely kills it; I love the X-Men, but they absolutely have to be powered by some sort of magical or divine or transdimensional force, not just their own bloodlines.)

I think the current backstory is that the x-gene was invented by the Celestials, which would make this assumption correct.

I’m gonna have to agree with @Thunderbird on this one, @The_Justifier. Although I don’t think literally turning into air is the way to go with Shu, flight, invisibility, and intangibility seem entirely doable with comic book science. Yes, it probably wouldn’t work out too well in our world, but comics never cared about that. The Flash has been vibrating through things for upwards of 60 years. It’s Artistic License.

All of those definitely work. I’m not quite sure what to do with Isis either. Maybe just give her flight and energy blasts? Or perhaps telekinesis, as that’s pretty magical-looking. I don’t think technopathy is the way to go with her, as that would be of very limited use in a fantasy setting.

Nuit, as “She Who Protects,” should probably get force-shields. Tefnut could have either some enhanced combat claws or maybe something that pulls moisture from the air and then releases it in a high-pressure blast. I don’t really know what Universe 1 Osiris’s powers are, but he deals psychic damage so he could just have a psychic disrupter of some sort.

Regarding those nutty X-Men, Colossus is far from the only one that doesn’t make scientific sense. Iceman has a similar problem, as a person made of literal ice is not a person anymore. Angel’s wings should not be able to lift him. And so many of them violate the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Professor X, Banshee, Magneto, Havok, Gambit, Jubilee, Wolverine, et cetera.

Also, while on the topic of the Celestial-Mutant connexion, I recommend Earth X, which is an excellent What If? story that heavily features the concept.

Conservation is not an issue I worry too much about, since it is easily bypassed by the existence of other dimensions. Cyclops’s eye beams don’t create energy, they just import it from an adjacent universe. I could buy that one even if we were assuming mutants to be completely natural, as it would just mean the truth of our reality is more complex than scientists had previously assumed. Likewise, I can deal with Angel being able to fly on the assumption that he generates antigravity or something (the one that bothers me more in terms of flight is Banshee, since a sonic scream that overcomes gravity should also shatter windows and implode eardrums in about a ten mile radius). And Iceman being entirely ice is a recent development; I don’t really go much past the 90s in my familiarity with Xmen canon. Colossus is the one that really crystallizes my objection to the mutant theory, but then his sister is literally named Magik, which really feels like the creators winking at the audience and saying “we know this stuff doesn’t make sense, just go with it”. As the YouTuber Lorerunner puts it, “a tale rather than a story”.

The Allcastle was a magically-animated fortress gone wrong. It ravaged the land, and the defenders of the innocent were desperate to stop it. Even the Fellowship of Freedom could only blunt its rampage; they were unable to vanquish the sentient keep. Their salvation, however, came from a most unexpected source. The ambient magical energies that made the castle animate had seeped into the crypt of King Aldred X, former lord of the castle. Those energies animated the late monarch’s suit of armour (his corpse had turned to dust long ago), which strode forth from the crypt believing itself to be Aldred X. He saw the destruction his fortress was causing, and quickly began a ritual that would undo the Allcastle’s animation. The spell was cast, and the Allcastle’s threat was ended, for a time.

James of the Brooks was the sole watchman in the small town of Argent Valley, located in the desolate Southlands. He was a good man, and skilled with the sword and the crossbow. But one day when James was riding outside town, he accidentally rode through a circle of standing stones, which activated an ancient enchantment and teleported him far away. When James came to after the teleportation, he found himself in an unfamiliar land, and menaced by a pack of giant rats. He managed to fight them off, but not before losing his left hand to one of them. He wandered the unfamiliar land, badly wounded. He eventually found a partially-ruined keep. Inside was a mage named Constance. She healed James’ wounds, and gave him an enchanted hook as a replacement for his ill-fated hand. Then Constance explained that James had been teleported to the Primal Wasteland, the homeland of most monsters. The Primal Wasteland was immeasurably distant from any inhabited lands, and the only way anyone had ever come to or from it was via magic. Nonetheless, over the years, the monsters of the wastes had been slowly migrating to inhabited lands. Should they gain a foothold there, they could overrun all of civilisation. Constance then asked James if he would hunt down the monsters that made their way to civilised lands to prevent that from coming to pass. She would have done so herself, but she was not a warrior, and her magic was capable only of healing, augmentation, transportation, and scrying. James accepted the task. Thus Constance equipped him with an arsenal of enchanted weaponry before teleporting him away for his first mission.

For some reason I was thinking make the wings look more mechanical but just basically be gliders while the propulsion comes from some kind of ion thrusters. Again, hand-wavy comic book pseudoscience here. I’m not gunning for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Order of the Cocoon was a secretive cabal of magic-users. Their leader had prophesied that the lands would erupt in war sometime in the near future. To prevent this, the Order began a plan to create an army of mage-knights. They used divination to scour the land for children that had sorcerous potential, and acquired those children by any means necessary. They then began to train them in the ways of magic. The training was nightmarishly harsh. The most gifted of their number was the young sorceress Vanessa. She developed a suite of mentalist powers, as well as an affinity for draconic magicks.* Eventually, once Vanessa had grown into an adult, she set out from the secretive base she had lived in to prevent the prophesied war.

Clio† was another child who possessed natural sorcerous potential. She was also acquired by the Order of the Cocoon, although by a different sect than Vanessa. However, her training never got as far as Vanessa’s, as when she was but six years old, Vanessa came to that sect and freed Clio from it, so that she would not be subjected to the heckish training that she was, and not burdened by the mystic power she possessed. Clio was returned to her family, and all was quiet for a time. Yet, Clio’s untapped magic began to manifest itself as projections of the girl’s dreams and nightmares as she slept. She eventually fell comatose while her magic unleashed a horde of mental monsters.

“Heckish”

Maria Helena stowed away on a great sailing galleon to experience a life of adventure. Meanwhile, in the space outside Reality, the Singular Entity OblivAeon shattered the Timelines of the Multiverse. When the cosmic shockwave from that event reached this reality, its unusually high level of magic caused a great mana-storm to form in the centre of the sea. The ship that Maria Helena was on was caught in that storm. In the heart of the magical maelstrom, all others on the ship perished. But Maria Helena did not. She grasped the ship’s helm and thrilled to the exaltation of the magic-charged waves crashing against its prow. In that storm, the ship was infused with magic, as was its new captain. La Capitan, as she now called herself, sailed La Paradoja Mágica through the seas. The ship had acquired the ability to conjure storm-clouds, then shift itself into an ethereal plane, where it could traverse distances in but a fraction of the time it would take a ship in the normal plane to do so. She acquired many crew-mates and many names, becoming Maria Helena Teresa Fafila Servanda Jimena Mansuara Paterna Domenga Gelvira Placia Sendina Belita Eufemia Columba Gontina Aldonza Mafalda Cristina Tegrida de Falcon.

Sir Paul VIII, Son of Paul, was a paragon of nobility, heroism, and justice. His eternal nemesis, Baron Ivan, was unfaltering in his conviction to finally finish his foe. Baron Ivan was a man of science; he had used various ingenious inventions of his own devising in his struggle against Sir Paul. However, no matter what he tried, the ways of science could not vanquish the noble hero. So Baron Ivan began researching a mystical artefact that he believed could destroy his nemesis. He discovered that it rested deep underground, beneath the island outpost of Port Wagner. He travelled there, and uncovered the relic — a large, red-hued diamond. Reports of the Baron’s activity had reached the Fellowship of Freedom, however, and they swiftly came to Port Wagner to confront him. Sir Paul’s daughter, Paulina, who possessed the power to conjure flame in addition to all of her father’s talents, also accompanied the brave group of heroes. When the heroes arrived, Baron Ivan sprung a trap which gravely wounded Paulina. She would live, but her recovery would take months. Sir Paul, angered by his daughter’s injury, charged at the baron. But Baron Ivan held out the diamond artefact, and activated its power. Baron Ivan expected the diamond to slay his enemy, but he was mistaken. Instead, it created a dark duplicate of Sir Paul, a doppelgänger that possessed none of the brave hero’s morals or integrity. The doppelgänger was ruthless, merciless, and without compassion. Yet he still retained his mission of vanquishing evil, and to that end he went after Baron Ivan while the original Sir Paul was recovering from the diamond’s effect. The doppelgänger managed to wound Ivan before he escaped. Once the threat of the Baron was gone, however, the doppelgänger turned on the heroes, desiring to pursue his own ruthless brand of justice. He dubbed himself Lord Paul the Iron, and a great battle began between him and the heroes of the realm. It raged on for some time, until the mentalist Vanessa managed to imprison Lord Paul in the diamond that spawned him.

Curious divergence from the actual Iron Legacy story there. Not only do you make him a separate entity from the original Paul 8, but you also don’t kill the daughter.

This brings up an interesting question. You wrote that Pauline can “conjure flame”, something that Old Man Frost will certainly be happy about, but it is definitively a change from the original’s laser eyes. Energy damage in general is always much more akin to a sci fi vibe, with I think the single exception being Akashbhuta. So if you were to create Sentinels of the Realm in card game form, would you do away with energy damage entirely? What would it be replaced with, both as a general rule and in specific edge cases? Would Grand Admiral Voss have a fire fist and another, burnier fire fist? Would Sir Hugh be rendered immune to fire by his Cosmological Crescent? Would the Dark Lord Empyreon, in his Living Void form, now absorb fire damage to gain HP?

Yes. I did that because I wanted the Realmverse to have Lord Paul the Iron, but without losing Sir Paul. Just like how Universe 1 has its normal Legacy, but it also had Iron Legacy in it for a bit. I just had the evil duplicate come from a curse instead of another universe. If I just had Sir Paul VIII turn bad, it would make the Realmverse a fantasy equivalent of the Iron Legacy Timeline, rather than a fantasy equivalent of Universe 1. Similarly, I wanted the tragedy of Paulina being wounded, but without killing her.

I agree, on both accounts.

I don’t think it would be removed entirely. There would still be uses for it. Instead of it being “pure energy” in a SF lazer-plasma way, it would most likely represent pure magical energy in most cases (akin to Force damage in D&D 5E), somewhat similarly to how Infernal Damage is used in base SotM. When it is replaced, though, I think it would be by Fire, Infernal, or Radiant. All instances of it certainly wouldn’t be replaced by Fire, though.

As I said in his original post, Voss would deal Fire damage and Infernal damage.

Hmm, I’m not sure about this one. Sir Hugh has “star magic,” so he likely wouldn’t interact with Fire damage. (Yes, stars actually are made of fire — more or less — by they were not perceived as such in the Middle Ages.) I’d either keep him dealing Energy damage, or change it to Radiant.

I have not thought at all about Realmverse Empyrean yet, seeing as he’s a deckless character. However, if he does become a Scion in this reality, he’d likely still deal — and absorb — Energy damage in that form, at least.

The Fellowship of Freedom worked tirelessly to defend the Alliance of Kingdoms from threats of all sorts. Yet, not even they could be everywhere at once. The rulers of several kingdoms thought that it would be wise to establish another, more numerous organisation to protect them from invaders. To that end, the Fidelitous Institution for the Limitation of Treachery from Exterior Rogues was founded. It was a secretive organisation whose mission was to swiftly exterminate any threats that hailed from far off lands. The group was headed by Felix the Stone-Hearted — as he was called by his detractors — and has skirmished with foreign individuals on several occasions, including but not limited to Makius the Maerman, Portia the Giant, and Grand Admiral Voss.

Not long after the Institution’s inception, its members had established The Prison. The Prison was a, well, prison that sat high up in a mountain-range far from any other settlement.

Paige the Hunter was one of the Institution’s finest operatives. She had been an exceptional soldier and skilled swordswoman before being recruited, and her skills only grew after she joined. She often yielded flawless execution in her missions. One day, for no discernible reason, however, Paige fell ill. Her disease eventually passed, but afterwards Paige discovered that she had somehow gained the magical ability to wreathe any weapons she wielded in golden fire. She put this new power to good use in her work at the Institution. However, as time went on, Paige began to realise that the Institution had been treating their enemies and prisoners much less than justly. She also began to learn that perhaps not all outsiders were enemies. Learning these things incentivised Paige to splinter off from the organisation, and pursue the protection of the land her own way.

Sergeant Jack the Steely was another exceptional operative of the Institution. He led a company of highly-trained members, including a battle physician, a pyrotechnist, an assassin, a mechanist, a spy, a cannoneer, an archer, and a bombardier. Sergeant Jack, unlike Paige, however, remained loyal to the Institution.

Unknown to all but a select few in the Realm, the extradimensional covert-ops organization F.I.L.T.E.R. has made contact with the Institution. The two groups, sharing similar goals and ideologies, have formed an alliance. They frequently share resources, personnel, and intel with each-other to further their dual missions.

Duke Michael of House Conteh was a greedy man. He owned one of the largest mining companies in the land. His methods were less than ethical, though. His miners cared not for the natural land, and ravaged it in their pursuit of precious metals and ores. One day, though, the great earth elemental Akash’Bhuta took notice of Duke Michael’s efforts. The spirit bestowed a curse upon the man, granting him a shape that would match his greed — the form of a dragon, although little taller than a horse. When Michael awoke from his metamorphosis, he fled from his manor in horror. He lived in that form in the wilderness for some time, before encountering the minstrel and arcanist Anthony the Argent Adept. Anthony had had experience dealing with Akash’Bhuta’s chaos, and so he helped Michael to master his new bestial state. As his mastery grew, he discovered that he could transform into other beasts as well. Besides the Mighty Dragon, Michael could take the form of the Agile Gryphon, or the shape of the Mystical Unicorn. He also regained the ability to resume his original, human form. Michael’s time in the wild had changed him — in more ways than one. He learned of nature’s suffering, and so resolved to use his newfound power to defend it from those who would do it harm, as he once did.

Kimberly the Sage worked for the Order of Revocation. She was a scholar and a researcher — an expert on all things academic, as well as a dabbler in arcane runes. After the rampaging Allcastle had been defeated by the heroic Fellowship of Freedom and King Aldred X, the Order had assigned her to study its ruins. While there, Kimberly got caught in the crossfire of an altercation betwixt the heroic Watchers of the Darkness and Gabrielle the Witch of Doom, a potent practitioner of luck magic. Gabrielle cast a hex at Kimberly, but the sage ducked behind a fragment of the Allcastle. The spell struck the enchanted stones of the formerly sentient keep, before flowing through them and into Kimberly. After the battle, the sage discovered that the botched luck spell combined with the castle’s ambient magicks had somehow given her the power to see the Strings of Fate, and understand how they were woven. She could use this to divine the near future (although only up to a few minutes), as well as possible futures, seeing how different actions would produce different outcomes. Kimberly returned to her work for the Order of Revocation. But after not long, she discovered corruption within the Order’s ranks, and that they were working with the villainous Baron Ivan. So she left, took up archery, and used that and her fatesight to combat treachery.

The Vengeful Legion

Baron Ivan had battled Sir Paul XIII countless times, with each struggle always ending in defeat for the vile villain. The Baron concluded that it was Sir Paul’s allies, the Fellowship of Freedom, who had been the cause of his failures. So he devised a plan to gather a fellowship of his own. He sent summons to all of the scoundrels of the realm, imploring them to come together and unite under one banner, and to finally vanquish their shared foes. The Baron knew, however, that that would not be enough. He still wanted to deal the killing blow to his eternal nemesis, but none of his miraculous inventions had hitherto been able to best Sir Paul’s mystic gifts. Thus Baron Ivan turned to the Order of Revocation, which he was secretly the leader of. With their help, he concocted an alchemical elixir which he hoped would mimic Sir Paul’s gifts.

Sir Alexander was a loyal soldier to a kingdom that had been at war with the Alliance of Kingdoms for quite some time. The war was not a traditional conflict, as there was very little actual fighting; rather, it was an escalating race between the two sides, each trying to become more powerful than the other. Some of the scholar-mages of Alexander’s kingdom had uncovered an arcane stone possessed of unknown magical properties. Alexander, being an exemplary warrior, was chosen to attempt to attune to the stone, and hopefully gain some manner of enchantment from it. At first there was no sign of a magical boon, but eventually Alexander discovered that he had gained the ability to temporarily mesmerise the minds of others. The thralls he could create lacked much agency, however, and were not useful for anything but creating a swarming mob. Alexander’s new ability was quickly put to use. Shortly afterwards, though, he was mortally wounded. His kingdom managed to preserve him by causing him to fall into a deep slumber. They kept him that way while they searched for some way to cure his fatal wound. But before such a cure could be discovered, the kingdom started crumbling from the prolonged conflict with the Alliance. The group that knew of Alexander eventually died out, and he was forgotten.

After months of preparation, Baron Ivan was finally ready to begin his War of Vengeance. He had perfected his elixir and gathered a veritable army of knaves and rogues. He assembled them atop his Aerial Fortress, an ingenious flying machine powered by steam and hot air. He had also recruited an elite force of villains that, with him, would take on the Fellowship of Freedom directly. It consisted of Baron Ivan himself; Sir Steven the Grave, a former knight and rival of Sir Tyler, whom Baron Ivan had given a dose of his elixir; Lady Cassandra, a noblewoman who had secretly been a thief until she was exposed by the Wraith of the Woods; Krystal, a reckless alchemist who had been apprenticed to Dame Meredith before she stole a dangerous prototype of her sandals of swiftness; and Sir Alexander, who Baron Ivan had discovered in his slumber and awoken. Together, Baron Ivan’s Vengeful Legion would visit vengeance upon the sentinels of the realm!

The Enclave of the Ancients was created by Jansa Vi Dero, the last member of a forgotten race. The Enclave was an immense island, far away from any inhabited lands. Jansa used her people’s considerable magical talents and relics to scry for members of other dying civilisations and bring them to the island, where her magic could halt their ageing indefinitely.

Tarogath was the last of the Procitorians, a reptilian race thought to have draconic ancestry. He lived in the Enclave of the Ancients for an uncountable number of years. But when he saw that the same threat that had destroyed his people was looming over the Alliance of Kingdoms, he decided to flee from the Enclave’s protection. With him, Tarogath took many of Jansa’s ancient artefacts (without her permission). He sailed to the mainland and began to use those artefacts to create several magical cataclysms. He specifically targeted the ley lines of the land, wreaking much havoc upon the natural balance of the world.

Sir Nigel of House Lowsley was a brave knight and brother of the magistrate Sir Hugh. Both dabbled in astrology, and one night they saw a stream of starlight fall to earth. The brothers went to investigate, but were both incapacitated by the raw magic of the event. When Hugh awoke, he discovered that he had been imbued with astral magic, and that Nigel had seemingly disappeared. In actuality, while Hugh had received power, Sir Nigel had been cursed with star madness. His mind was flooded with the terrible secrets of the unknown heavens, that which man was not meant to know. Nigel went mad from the revelation. He fled into the wilderness before Hugh awakened. Nigel heard the whispers of nameless things, and learned that he had gained the ability to conjure hideous, tentacled blasphemies.

Kaargra the War-Fanged was the master of the Bloodsworn Colosseum, a massive arena-ship that sailed from port to port. At every stop, Kaargra and her Bloodsworn Gladiators would raid the port and abduct those who showed promise as warriors. They would then be forced to battle the Gladiators and each-other in the Colosseum. Kaargra herself was a skilled warrior, as well as a blood mage, which allowed her to magically bind Gladiators to her service.

Long ago, a spark of power was planted deep underground. It waited for years while it grew. Eventually, it burst forth from the ground, having created a form of stone for itself. The stone beast immediately began destroying the countryside. It wrecked any settlements it came across, and slew any who resisted its inevitable march. The beast’s form was mutable; it took on the elemental aspect that would best suit its current opposition. It could set itself ablaze, it could grow tendrils of tree-limbs, and it could even transform itself wholly into water or æther.

Having failed to write up my original ideas for this project in time, many of them are now obsolete, so here’s a quick recompiling of what remains uncovered by either Fjur’s or my versions of the fantasy-refluffed SOTM. For the moment, the two haven’t diverged enough that I feel the need to create my own distinct version, but it’s likely that will happen eventually, as it did for a similar project I worked on involving Star Trek where the other person’s ideas were not fully compatible with my own.

So, we’re basically left with Fanatic, The Scholar, Ambuscade/Stuntman, Akash’Bhuta/Thriya, Apostate, Miss Information, the Celestial Tribunal and Champion Studios, all of which are fairly superficial in the adjustments they need. I can work on putting some copy together for these at some future point when I get bored, but overall I’d say that the work Fjur has done so far has been largely sufficient, and this whole project is more at the part of needing fanart than requiring further writing to plan it out.

I imagine that her default size is around that of an ogre (≈7’-10’), but she can grow larger, as well as shrinking to tall human height (≈6’). And she probably possesses the ability to shrink as small as her Universe 1 counterpart, but uses it less often and more discretely, so most folks don’t know that it’s something that she can do.

CANON.

Yeah, I agree. I was never super happy with Exterior. I also considered External. Enigmatic? Evil? Envious? Egregious? I’m open to suggestions; what do y’all think?

Yeah, I’d go so far as to say that her race is wholly amphibious., being able to breathe air and water equally well.

Yep, I don’t think I’m going to do a write-up for WM, as he’d just show up and put on some vaguely medievalish-looking clothing (likely knight’s armour or jester’s garb).

True. Perhaps he’d have an equestrian obsession instead?

I agree that a better name is possible, but I’d want it to match the monotony, unoriginality, and uncreativity of The Block.

Perhaps that hermit is Aata’s long-lost sister Arataki?

Agreed, although I did already discuss Ambuscade above. The various Akashes would be nigh-identical, likely with the only change being that she’s an “elemental” rather than a “spirit.” Fanatic and Apostate would be nigh-identical, although I’m not sure whether this timeline has Christianity or not. If not, I’d likely rule that Fanatic is aware of her true nature as an extraplanar spirit. Or maybe she’s just a bona fide angel? Or perhaps she’s simply a mortal warrior who draws power from the Host? The Scholar would be practically the same, although I wonder what to do with his houseboat. I could see it being replaced with a wagon, a cabin, or just a more appropriate variety of boat.

Here’s my remaining list of characters that I’m planning to write:

• Guise
• Benchmark
• Miss Information
• Chokepoint
• The Celestial Tribunal
• Magmaria
• Madame Mittermeier’s Fantastic Festival of Conundrums and Curiosities
• The Slaughterhouse Six
• Greazer Clutch
• Champion Studios
• Fort Adamant
• The Maerynian Refuge

My workload’s gotten a touch lighter recently, so I expect to finish those (relatively) soon(ish).

Thanks!

True, although I have almost zero idea about how to go about that, beyond just asking the forum at large.

'Tis been many fortnights since I last put pen to this tome, but now I shall once again take up my task of chronicling the inhabitants of this fantastical land! We shall resume with two heroic figures, although both are less deserving of that title than many of their peers…

Joseph was a wandering minstrel—he would go from town to town, regaling the villagers with tales of brave heroes. He would never fail to mention his contributions to those heroes’ exploits, of course, despite the fact that anyone asking the heroes in question about Joseph’s “contributions” would likely find that they would characterise him as more of a nuisance. Nevertheless, Joseph continued to “aid” various courageous warriors in their battles (mainly by standing on the sidelines and composing “good” lyrics about how he saved the heroes from their dastardly foes). One day, however, Joseph was strolling through the city of Megalot when a statue dislodged itself from its perch atop a citadel, and plummeted down towards him! Joseph was sure that he would be quashed, but he reflexively held up his arms to shield himself from the falling statuary. Miraculously, Joseph felt a surge of strength and somehow managed to deflect the statue away from him. Amazed, Joseph tested the limits of this newfound power, and eventually discovered that he could morph his own form into any shape or appearance that he could imagine, provided it was roughly humanoid. Joseph could even give himself forms that possessed far greater strength, speed, agility, or vitality than any normal mortal. Joseph was at a loss to explain his newfound power—yet that did not stop him from finally actually joining other heroes in their battles and quests, although his annoying tendencies persisted. Joseph would learn much latter that his powers were the result of him being descend from the royalty of an otherworldly Court of Fey—he was, in fact, a Changeling. And so he took to calling himself King Joseph, the Hero of a Thousand Guises.

Sir Randal was the son of minor nobility—his family lacked any real power, and were really simply wealthy gentry. Nonetheless, Sir Randal excelled in all pursuits that he attempted—and he attempted all pursuits befitting of a modern gentleman like himself. Randall went on to master fencing, archery, hunting, falconry, calligraphy, poetry, dance, smithing, history, literature, and countless other fields. He also possessed exceptional charisma, and so was phenomenally popular with the laypeople. And yet Sir Randal still felt that he could be doing more with his life. His desire was granted when the Order of Revocation came to him; they had invented a fantastic suit of armour for him, and bequeathed it to him as a gift. The armour was truly marvellous—it was fitted with a myriad of clockwork devices as well as being enchanted with magic. It had pistons that enhanced Sir Randal’s strength and allowed him to jump great distances. It was armed with contraptions that could fire bolts or arrows with the strength of a ballista, or hurl alchemical solutions at foes. With this suit of armour Sir Randal resolved to put his extraordinary skills to use fighting treachery and knavery wherever it might strike. What Randal did not know, however, was that the Order of Revocation had placed a curse upon his armour. They could see all that Sir Randal saw through his helm’s visor, and more terrible still, they could subtly influence his behaviour while he wore the suit…

Evelyn of the Moor had always possessed a unique talent—she could hear the voices of the earth, of rocks, of trees, and of streams, and she could speak back to them. All of these things spoke to Evelyn, and they told her of their imprisonment and subjugation by humans. So, when she had grown into adulthood, Evelyn began her crusade. She used her ability to speak to raw, inanimate materials to manipulate them into fighting back against their human captors. The brick and mortar and lumber of houses and walls, and the metal of arms and armour—all listened to Evelyn’s commands, and all were utilised by her for her mission.

Aminia II was the loyal seneschal of the Fellowship of Freedom. She acted as stewardess of the Tower of the Fellowship, in addition to handling all of the clerical and administrative matters that allowed those brave heroes to continue their righteous fight for justice. However, one day when Aminia was taking stock of the enchanted artefacts that the Fellowship had confiscated from various dastardly villains, her gaze became entranced by an Orb of Prophecy. In the clear, crystalline form of the sphere, Aminia saw her own fate—being crushed under collapsing rubble while the Fellowship that she had so loyally served were occupied rescuing some nameless peasants. Aminia was enraged that her so-called friends would one day forsake her, so she chose to pre-emptively visit vengeance upon them before they could. Aminia knew all of the secrets and weaknesses of the Fellowship, and put that knowledge to good use as she sabotaged their quests from the shadows.

Aminia’s schemes were all unfolding perfectly—the Fellowship had been failing, and no one suspected her involvement. Her run of luck ended, however, when Kimberly the Sage, a skilled archer possessed of mystic sight, managed to see through her ruse and alerted the other heroes of Aminia’s betrayal. Thus Aminia had to go on the run from the Fellowship. The final confrontation betwixt Kimberly, the Fellowship, and Aminia occurred in one of the vast buildings of Lord Pike’s Alchemists’ Guild in the City of Rooks. The battle had caused significant destruction to the structure, and so the Fellowship had to pause their fighting momentarily to evacuate the endangered alchemists. Kimberly took that moment, however, to fire an arrow at the weak-spot of a support beam, causing that section of the ceiling to collapse, burying Aminia.

The Justifier is back from the dead, but may not have the time, energy, or frankly the heart to resume his previous project of either contributing to OR contradicting what you’ve been doing here. Just know that me and my temporarily resurrected ghost will be following along with everything you do here, as time permits us such amusements in our new existence.

Thanks; it’s nice to know that this stuff is acknowledged by at least one person. I’ll do my best to keep it entertaining.

I’m still reading them with interest. Looking forward to adaptations of Necrosis and Grimm in the Realm. “We heard you like fairy tales, so we put a fairy tale-teller in your fairy tale!”

I’ve been greatly enjoying them. Just not being that good at creativity I haven’t had anything detailed to add. Sorry if that gave a poor impression; I’m genuinely having fun reading these.

Thanks, @Thunderbird and @Jeysie. I appreciate your confirmations of readership, and my apologies if my initial reply to The_Justifier came across as ungrateful.

No worries. That’s certainly not required—the knowledge that folks are enjoying this little project of mine is satisfaction enough. : )

Hmm, I hadn’t thought about the new Disparation characters yet. My knee-jerk thoughts are that Æternus and the Demon Twins are unchanged—save for superficial details—like the Argent Adept, Fanatic, NightMist, and GloomWeaver, as demons are already very fantastical. Those other two villains, however, I’ll have to put some thought into. Fantasy-Necrosis will definitely be at least moderately different. Regarding Grimm, though—fairy tales are thematically closer to fantasy than supers comics are, but still rather different. Then again, from what little we know of him, Grimm’s schtick seems to be stories—he simply specialises in folklore.

Oh not at all, my dude. “Is anyone listening/liking this” is a very, very common thing to worry about when you’re a fan creator (or I mean, when you’re a pro creator too, heh). Don’t feel bad about it.

If anything, it’s good to sometimes have the little reminder that speaking up when you’re happy is as important as speaking up when you have a criticism. Gotta let people know what they’re doing right, too.

Grimm I think is maybe essentially a bard in the actual historical envisionment rather than the D&D approach. Back in the days when people thought a bard coming up with a story about someone could actually curse people or change reality.

Oh, you have Terror Tower and I assume the Fey Court and werewolves are pretty much the same so I figured the next step since you’ve covered most old material would be the brand new stuff. Necrosis seems like he can easily be another mad alchemist, not necromancer exactly although the name is nearly right on point.

@Jeysie may be onto something with the reality-warping bard angle for Grimm. You could go a little meta if that’s the right word and have him tell stories set in the “present” canon universe, framed as a medieval vision of the future.

Thanks. : )

A very good point, that.

Correct. I do plan on covering all the (significantly different) new-to-DE decks; the new Disparation ones simply hadn’t crossed my mind until you brought them up. And yes, Apex, Alpha, the Fey-Court, and Diamond Manor are all relatively unchanged.

He seems to be a combination of the two, really: he uses alchemical solutions to raise the dead. A Necralchemist! Or an Alchomancer! . . . I’ll work on it.

Indeed. Perhaps, because Grimm is in a world that more aligns with his schtick, he is more powerful than his Universe 1 counterpart. Or maybe he tells actual history rather than made-up tales, but then twists them somehow… There are certainly many possibilities with him, so I’ll have to mull it over some. (I should also probably listen to his podcast episode—I haven’t yet as I’m behind.)

I don’t really know Grimm’s deal, but I’m reminded of the novel “The School for Good and Evil” by Soman Chainani, which has a fantasy setting in which children read storybooks full of fairy-tale characters, but then get abducted to the titular School so that they can learn how to be the heroes and villains of future such tales, with the implication that all the classic Disney stories are past generations of this cycle. Perhaps your version of Grimm is doing something similar.

Perhaps. Frankly, I don’t really know much of his deal either. The Disparation update on him was fairly enigmatic about his origins and capabilities, and—as I’ve mentioned—I haven’t listened to his episode, which presumably elaborates somewhat on his nature.

The again, there is the possibility that he’s something like DC’s Phantom Stranger (but Evil), and doesn’t have any single definitive backstory or very defined powers—just nebulas inscrutability.

You could also power source swap Grimm like my suggestion for Ra. Instead of the ancient teller of ancient stories that neatly fits into the fantasy milieu you could make him a high-tech space alien record keeper. Who of course gets involved because “history” is supposed to follow the patterns he expects to see. He could also be some kind of alien documentarian press ganging heroes into being reenactors. Since in the fantasy world becoming The Woodsman or The Prince is more like in modern media when the protagonist becomes George Washington for a Revolutionary War episode or the Red Barron’s rival in a WWI episode.

Well, I’ve thought of a term that describes Grimm’s modus operandi and also makes him sound even more creepy - nonconsensual LARPing.

Slightly different than Wager Master’s shtick where the heroes can see right through his ruse but decide to play along to get rid of him faster. I get the sense that Grimm uses some degree of mind control (total villain power as we’ve established) since the heroes actually believe at first that they are the characters they’re portraying.

That is an intriguing idea, @Sea-Envy. However, I am hesitant about adding another high-tech alien character beyond the Egyptians.

One of the main reasons that I was convinced to go that way with Ra and the others was because two different readers (you and @The_Justifier) both independently suggested it, and so I thought the coincidence too great to ignore.

You’ll nary meet a sailor who’s not heard tell of The Tribunal. An yet, no one can tell ye from whence she comes. On those nights when the stormclouds grow ‘specially dark, she appears, seemingly out o’ the air itself! She’ll sail up to an unexpectin’ port or seaside town, and some o’ th’ folks there will just get up an’ start walkin’ towards ‘er! It’s as if they be entranced by a siren’s call… An’ they’ll swim on out to The Tribunal and climb aboard, an’ they’ll stay there fer a time. Fer how long? Well, that be anyone’s guess. Sometimes it be days or weeks, other times only an hour or two… An’ not all o’ those who go come back to tell about it! But those who do come back, they say that aboard that eerie ship, there be all sorts o’ ghosts an’ spectres an’ phantoms! An’ these spooks, they question th’ poor folks who got dragged up there. It be like same nasty, phantasmagorical trial, they say. An’ then once theses spooks be done wi’ that, an’ after they send th’ folks home, sometimes they just up an’ leave! But oftentimes, they do nuthin’ like that. No, me matey, instead they’ll take The Tribunal and send ‘er straight at th’ town, an’ her prow, it be like iron! And it’ll cleave th’ town in two, wreaking all sorts o’ terror an’ destruction! An’ some o’ the legends say that The Tribunal’s even done that to entire island civilisations!

There exist a range of mountains so high that their peaks remain bound in ice and snow all year long. And yet, amongst those mountains rest a ring of eternally active volcanoes; and within that ring lies the valley of the Magmarians. The heat from the volcanoes keeps their valley blisteringly hot, despite the frigid clime of the surrounding slopes. The Magmarians are an enigmatic people; only a rare few have ever managed to decipher their language. Some folk have called the Magmarians trolls, or elementals, or dwarves, or imps, but none of those terms are quite accurate enough. The Magmarians somehow seem to be composed of living magma,* and the only sustenance they require is the consumption of magma crystals that naturally grow from the lava-flows of their home. The Magmarians are also adept practitioners of elemental magic tied to fire and to the earth, and they have been known to craft their unique crystals into powerful charms or totems. They have shown reluctance teaching these crafts to outsiders, however. What’s more, there have been rumours that the Magmarians are somehow related to the mysterious Old Man Frost, perhaps as elemental opposites to his icy nature. Attempts to ask him about this connexion have thus far failed, with Frost becoming agitated at the mention of them.

Madame Mittermeier’s Fanciful Fair of Carousing and Cavorting was once a vibrant gathering that toured the realm and brought celebration wherever it went. That was many years ago, however, and now Madame Mittermeier nor any of her entertainers have not been seen for quite some time. And yet, sometimes when the sun has set and only the dimness of dusk remains, travellers may happen upon the fair. All the fair’s lanterns and torches are ablaze, and yet it appears entirely deserted. But if one wanders through the empty grounds long enough, one may chance to see some truly unusual sights—apples that juggle themselves, swords that fence against one another, instruments playing all on their own, bows that shoot all by themselves, costumes that dance and perform with no one wearing them, and many other, equally strange and bewildering sights. Most who see such sights, however, do not live to tell the tale. Count yourself lucky if you do…

Greazor was a bounty hunter from a land far across the sea. His people possessed moderately more strength and vitality on average than humans did, and Greazor was fairly strong himself, although not exceptionally so. Besides his own fighting skills, which were mediocre at best, Greazor used an arsenal of traps—both mechanical and magical—to ensnare his foes. And perhaps his most defining quality was his possession of a loyal, crimson-coated pegasus, which he had taken to calling the Scarlet Steed.

Sir Ansel—the world-famous actor who had turned to hunting the deadliest game to satisfy his ego—had fought against stalwart heroes many times. His efforts, however, were almost always met with failure. Thus, Sir Ansel turned to the Order of Revocation in a bid to acquire more power. The Order put him in contact with five powerful fighters: Aislin the Glamorous, an illusionist and former member of the Fellowship of Freedom; Raymond the Manta, a mechanist who was convinced of the existence of all manner of secret conspiracies hiding amidst the shadows of the realm; Sean, a man who possessed elemental storm magic; a nameless Magmarian who had been exiled from the Valley of Magmaria for criminal behaviour; and Mikal, the Eagle of the Desert, a winged man who was determined to learn the mystery of the great warrior Aata. Together, these six became the Scourges of Slaughter.

Aminia II was the faithful aide to the righteous Fellowship of Freedom, until a self-fulfilling prophecy resulted in her betraying her former friends. She turned on the heroes and struck against them from the shadows, acting unnoticed until Kimberly the Sage helped the Fellowship recognise Aminia’s treachery. In the end, Aminia was crushed when the ceiling of one of Lord Pike’s alchemy storehouses collapsed on her. However, that was not the end for Aminia. Her spirit, so enraged at the Fellowship’s perceived betrayal, refused to die. It lingered in the mortal plane, without substance and invisible. Eventually, though, the spirit of Aminia figured out how to possess the bodies of the living and take control of them for her own ends. And while possessing a mortal form, Aminia gained ghostly powers; among them the abilities to twist the senses and manipulate objects from afar. With these new capabilities, Aminia II set out to resume her quest for vengeance.

Not a fan of the spelling change to Greazer’s name. I agree that he can’t be Greazer Clutch anymore in a fantasy setting (which is the only excuse I accept for ever shortening his name to just the one word, which IMO sounds terrible by itself), but I’m sure there’s some other word that can be swapped in, some obscure equestrian terminology that would reflect the idea that this version of Greazer needs to be a horse guy instead of a car guy.

Agreed, although I am at a lack for what word to use—my equine vocabulary is quite small. Bit, bridle, saddle, stirrup, gallop, prance, trot, foal, mare, mane, hoof-pick?

If anyone reading this is acquainted with such terms, please don’t hesitate to speak up. : )

The Diamond Fortress is so-called not because it is actually made from adamant, but because its walls have not been breeched in all the years it has stood. One of the Alliance of Kingdom’s greatest strongholds, the fortress houses scores of soldiers. In addition, it is the site of many advances in the art of war, from siege engines to metallurgy and war magic. The mage Demikahv is the head of arcane research at the fortress, and rumours have begun to circulate that she has been conducting ethically-questionable eldritch experiments on captured miscreants there. The rumours tell that, among others, Demikahv has been experimenting on a man who can summon a storm’s lighting, a woman whose intellect knows no bounds, a man who can conjure heckish green flame, and a man whose very form is infused with unknown radiance. Furthermore, the Sentinels of the Southlands have been using the fortress as a base ever since they became officially recognised champions of justice.

The home of Makius Dall’ton’s people, the Maerfolk, was destroyed by the brutal Mage-Bound Armada of Grand Admiral Voss. Only a small number of Maerfolk managed to flee the assault and survive the voyage across the sea to these lands. Those survivors, led by Makius, were hunted for years by the Fidelitous Institution for the Limitation of Treachery from Exotic Rogues and their enforcers, such as Paige the Hunter and NecroKon. Eventually, Makius and the other refugees managed to establish their own settlement within the mainland. Called Isla Maerynis, it was a moderate-sized isle situated at the centre of a rather large lake, and protected by the Maerfolk’s innate magic of storm and sea. Lately, however, reports of a mysterious, aquatic menace known only as the Leviathan menacing the lake around Isla Maerynis have begun to emerge.

The Champion’s Theatre is known throughout the land. It was founded by Alonso the Champion, a legendary troubadour, actor, and knight who retired from adventure to start the theatre. Located in a settlement also named after Alonso, the theatre is the most famous such production in the known world. Sir Ansel, the famous actor, is just one of many to have participated in its efforts, before he was horribly scarred. What’s more, the town around the theatre has been home to two of the Realm’s more mysterious defenders, the Demon-Princling and sorcerer Zane the Dark, and the demonic Akari the Pained.

Benjamin was a proficient magician—one of many in the Realm. He, and most other mages, performed their eldritch feats by tapping into the natural magic of the ley lines of the land. However, such frequent magical draining was having harmful effects on the natural world: plants withered, diseases spread, streams dried . . . But Benjamin was convinced that he could find an alternative source of magical power, so that his colleagues would no longer drain the land’s vigour. Eventually, Benjamin had crafted an alchemical ritual that he was sure would accomplish his goal. But before he could attempt the rite, a wyvern unexpectedly flew into Benjamin’s study and destroyed all of his arcane components, making him unable to perform the ritual. Then, Count Vincent the Snide, a merchant who represented the Conteh Guild of Sorcery, approached the mage Benjamin and offered him the requisite alchemical materials that he would need. Benjamin accepted, and got to work. His rite was successful, and he was able to drain arcane energy from a single plant, rather than the entire landscape. Benjamin’s work continued, as he discovered ways to siphon mana from animals too. Unfortunately, the process did leave dessicated remains of its subjects, but that was a necessary evil, Count Vincent told Benjamin. One day, though, Vincent brought in a commoner, and told Benjamin to perform the rite on her. Benjamin refused, so the Count ordered his other lackey magicians to perform it. They began the process, but Benjamin leapt in their way and attempted to use his own magicks to counter theirs. But instead, his interruption caused the vitae from the commoner and all the other mages to flow into himself, leaving them zombified. The shrivelled corpses then jerked their limbs, moving to Benjamin’s will. Benjamin turned to visit his wrath upon Count Vincent, but he had already fled the scene.

The Bard* was a mysterious being. Few knew of its existence, and even fewer had ever encountered the ancient entity. Its origins remain shrouded in the mists of the forgotten past. Some of the oldest known manuscripts spoke of the being, or at least an entity similar enough that they must be one and the same. The Bard is rarely seen, but whenever it is, it brings tragedy in its wake. The Bard is a teller of the Old Tales—sagas of ancient myth and legend known by all in the Realm. And when the Bard tells a tale, someone, somewhere, is compelled to act it out. The details of the story may vary, and its actors always do, but it is still the same tale in the eyes of the Bard. No one still alive knows what ends the Bard strives towards. Just be grateful that I haven’t turned my gaze towards you . . . yet.

And with that, this chronicle of the Sentinels of the Realm comes to a close. I have expounded upon all of the characters that I will. Any that I’ve not covered are either too minor in my eyes—such as the various Mini-Nemeses or Scions—or are already adequately fantastical—such as the Argent Adept, Fanatic, NightMist, GloomWeaver, Apex, Æternus, DS&PS, et cetera.

When the next Definitive Edition expansion rolls around, I may look at the possibility of doing write-ups for the new folks in there, however. In other news, I do grant permission to anyone to write their own stories in this timeline that I’ve crafted—and you’re also free to change anything that I’ve said if you do, of course.

For me, though, I don’t think I’ll be writing any actual stories in this universe any time in the near future, as I have some other projects that I’d sooner like to engage with. However, I will still be glad to participate in any discussions or answer any questions regarding what I’ve written here.

Excelsior!