Reese Bauman mopped his brow with his old pocket handkerchief. Traffic into the Citadel district was particularly bad for this time of day. At 62, Reese was no longer prone to impatience, but his student Harvey had sounded so anxious on the phone.
“The cover-stone, Dr. Bauman!” he had said with more urgency than he had ever shown in the years they had worked together, “There’s a key! The stone takes a key!”
The cover-stone had baffled archaeologists since it was first uncovered two years ago by workers digging an underground Metro extension. Reese and his colleagues had opposed any public works beneath the Citadel for years, but their efforts had mostly been frustrated by the need for progress. Ancient sword blades, rusted beyond recognition and broken potsherds couldn’t convince the powers that be that archaeology in the nation’s most historically important place was worth more than the need for new public works.
This thought ran through his mind as he turned off the main avenue and onto one of the steep, narrow streets that cut into the clutter of ancient stone city blocks built up along the slopes of the Hill of the Citadel. Who lives in these old apartment buildings anyway, he wondered? Or perhaps that was the point; the old neighborhood was ripe for revitalization. Bored with the sameness of track-housing in Brettwood, or perhaps wishing to out-do their townhouse neighbors in Kingshill, Siligby’s yuppies might dish out a fair amount for luxury condos carved out of ancient town castles and abbeys on the Hill. The thought depressed him, but then came the discovery of the cover-stone, and archaeology became popular culture over night.
A massive carved stone, circular in shape, set into an even more ancient post and lintel underground structure leading into the heart of the Hill. On its outer surface were bas relief carvings of a style that suggested a late Caerdolan period, and inscribed all over with glyphs and runes meant to shut out the world. For a thousand years or more the ancient spells had worked. The stone had been left undisturbed, and its secrets safe. And yet, the stone had not been ready to reveal its secrets just yet. Engineers had determined that the post and lintel structure it supported was unstable, and it would collapse if any attempt were made to move the massive stone. Only by means of extensive support structures could the chamber be opened safely, and such an undertaking was expensive work; too expensive for anyone to want to fund until now.
Reese marveled at the way that one distant and seemingly unrelated event could have such a profound affect on his own work. The discovery of dragon bones – real dragons dated to the recent past – in a suburban swimming pool excavation across the ocean in New Vineland had in an instant given credence to the texts to which Reese had devoted his life’s work. Texts that had always been considered the fanciful fiction of a medieval lunatic had now been given new life as possible eye-witness, historical accounts. Ah, B’auk, how you have been vindicated, Reese thought to himself.
The medieval scholar had been royal archivist of Siligby under Murad I, and both tutor and chronicler of Tarus the Red before retiring to write and publish his Warlands Chronicles. His accounts of fire-breathing dragons and shape-shifting savages had always been treated by scholars as fanciful embellishments in what was otherwise a fair account of the federation of petty kingdoms under Murad I during the 10th Century. In the Chronicles, B’auk had hinted at a great power hidden beneath Castle Siligby, in the bowels of what had once been ancient Caerdolas. B’auk had dedicated his life to the study of Caerdolan, often expressing admiration for the achievements of that hostile race, while shuddering at the price they had paid for greatness. Reese felt an intellectual and emotional kinship with old B’auk. How difficult it must have been for a man of letters to live in such a hostile world. For even Caerdolan had valued science and learning more than the brutal kings and savage chieftains that ruled during B’auk’s time.
Now the discovery of real dragons showed that perhaps B’auk had been accurate in his descriptions, and that perhaps magic and even the gods might have a place in the modern world. In an instant, B’auk became a best-selling author, and New Age cults of Tiamat and modern Druids had cropped up on college campuses and village squares. Pilgrimages to long-ignored megalithic sites and any old building where some half-hidden glyph could be discovered became popular holiday excursions. Anything that even hinted at having belonged to ancient Caerdolan became instant commodities: barely recognizable segments of silver hoop money, blackened and pitted by age, fragments of masonry indistinguishable from modern quarry stones, or peat-saturated bits of planking dug up from the Black Fens could be sold for obscene amounts on online auctions as “authentic” Caerdolan artifacts. It was disgusting, and yet Reese was grateful in a way. The renewed interest in Caerdolan had made it possible for projects like his to be funded.
And now a breakthrough: Harvey Kerr, Reese’s most promising student, had discovered a possible mechanism for opening the cover-stone, hidden amongst the intricate carvings and glyphs. The ancients were known for their mysterious ingenuity, and an ingenious mystery was just what the public wanted to hear about now.
He squeezed his car into the makeshift parking lot of the old Chapel of St. Elohar, and climbed out with a spryness that he hadn’t felt in decades. Despite his bulk, he nearly ran the length of the narrow alley behind the church, and didn’t fret when he stumbled on the broken pavement of the ancient square beyond. What had been meant to be a ventilation shaft for the new subway line was converted into a point of ingress directly onto the site. He paused to catch his breath.
Mopping his brow with his handkerchief again, he noted that some of the lights strung down the length of the shaft had gone out.
“Harvey,” he called down the shaft. “Sarita?” Neither of the student archaeologists responded. He looked for the project engineer, who was supposed to be supervising the construction of the supporting structure, but he was nowhere to be found.
A flashlight, he thought. I need a flashlight. He contemplated making the run back to the car, but decided against it. Instead, he went to the side door of the chapel rectory, where the priests had allowed his team to store some equipment in one of the pantries. The place was eerily quiet. It wasn’t unusual for the priests to disappear for days at a time, lost no-doubt in some deep devotion. Even Roskianity had an ancient and arcane look about it on the Citadel Hill, as if the Reformation had failed to penetrate the defensive walls that had once kept marauding pagans out.
He grabbed a flashlight off a metal chest, and rushed back out. The depth and angle of the shaft daunted him, and for a moment his resolve nearly faltered.
“Harvey!” he called out again, surprised at the shrillness of his voice. What was wrong? Were his students out somewhere? But Harvey had sounded very anxious on the phone. Why would he abandon the site now when he had expressed how urgent it was for Reese to come and see for himself.
Carefully, Reese descended the makeshift wooden steps. The line of strung lights blacked out about fifty feet down. The rest of the way was darker than possible in the world under the sun. He turned on the flashlight, and it faltered somewhat. He cursed his idealistic students for insisting that they boycott GnomeTech devices. Reese didn’t give much weight to the notion of technological imperialism, especially when descending into the black earth with a fading light. Who cared that the little beasts were sitting atop mountains of money, when what they sold above all was reliability! Reese hit the failing flashlight three times with the palm of his hand, and coaxed it into brightening up again. He continued his descent.
“Harvey,” he called out again, almost in a whisper. He didn’t know why he was scared. He hadn’t been scared of the dark since he was a boy, so long ago that it might have been written in B’auk’s now famous Chronicles. He breathed a sigh of relief when his feet crunched down on the gravely floor of the tunnel.
The beam of his light glistened off the damp walls of the tunnel, chewed up and polished by the teeth of the boring machine that had stopped when a sharp-eyed operator had spotted the ancient carvings. He walked a few paces and caught a glimpse of someone standing in front of the stone just before the flashlight went out completely.
He swore, and began hitting the flashlight with the palm of his hand, attempting to bring it back to life again.
“Is that you, Sarita?” he called out. The figure had seemed slim and dark in the fading torchlight. He was less familiar with his newest student. She was friendly and eager, to be sure, but she had never seemed to want to share in the thrill of discovery with him as Harvey Kerr had. For her, Reese, indeed the whole department had been merely a means for her to have her own, private victories. Fair enough, he had thought.
“Sarita,” he repeated.
“Yes, Professor Bauman,” came the girl’s sultry voice out of the dark.
“Where’s Harvey?” Silence.
“Why are you here alone in the dark?” he asked again.
“I was born into darkness, Professor,” she said. Her tone seemed strange, at once distant and present. “I find solace in the dark.”
“Where is Harvey?” he asked again. “He made a discovery… you made a discovery, I mean together. Didn’t you?”
The light grew weakly from the flashlight of its own accord. He had let his arm drop, and a faint yellow circle of electric light illuminated the earth, imprinted with the marks of work boots. He could barely make out the form of the young woman standing lean and dark before the huge, carved circular stone. Something kept him from raising the light to shine upon her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to blind her, but rather, that he feared some terrible and unknown consequence to this action.
He moved the beam slowly toward her, careful not to shine it upon her face, and then an electric fear ran up his arm and down his spine, threatening to make him collapse where he stood. On the ground, near her feet lay the crumpled form of Harvey Kerr. He couldn’t see any blood, but the stillness of the form made him fear the worst.
“What’s happened here?” he asked, his voice rasping. “Was there an accident?” The last question had been said without conviction. He knew it was no accident even before he had asked it.
“Some sacrifices must be made sometimes,” Sarita said, or the thing that seemed to be Sarita said. The tone of her voice seemed alien in the darkness.
“You killed him? For what?” Reese asked, surprising even himself for voicing the accusation.
“He was in my way,” she said. “And the Dark Power requires blood.”
“What?”
“Come to me!” she commanded, and for a moment he felt the urge to dash himself against the carved stone and spill his blood and brains upon it. He stood his ground.
She gasped in the dark; a sound barely audible.
“Truly, you carry the Legacy of the Archivist!” she said with something like excitement, if not joy.
“I don’t understand?” he said.
“Oh but you do!” she said. “That’s just it. Only you understand the significance of the stone. Only the Archivist carried the true Key, and only he was entrusted with the knowledge of the power within!”
“I don’t know what you mean!” Reese said, backing away. He felt an inexplicable terror, a primordial fear of this slightly-built girl. Then, despite himself, “B’auk didn’t know anything about this stone. He doesn’t mention it in his works.”
“He knew!” Sarita hissed. “He knew because the blood of Caerdolan ran through his veins, just as it does through mine… and yours.” She moved forward, slowly and deliberately, stepping over the lifeless body of what had once been Reese’s friend and protégé.
“No!” Reese said. “I don’t know anything about this business! You’re mad, and you’re a murderer! That’s all I know!”
Sarita’s hand went up, palm facing out toward him. A faint glow seemed to shine out from the depths of her eyes, like the eye-shine of a cat.
“No!” Reese cried out again, and this time found the strength to shine the light in her face. She hissed out an animal sound, and brought the outstretched hand to shield her mad eyes.
“Back!” he cried with as much courage as he could muster in his voice. In an instant memories of a childhood in the north country came flooding back to him, of morning worship services in the country church with his mother and father, the rising sun blazing in a dazzling spectacle of color through the stained glass rose window above the altar. The memory was superimposed upon another, impossible memory that was his and yet not his. A foreign mother as real as his own, crushing herbs in a stone mortar by a peat hearth, the morning light streaming through autumn leaves no less spectacular than the stained church glass.
“The power of Caerdolan failed!” he heard himself cry out in a voice that was at once his and yet someone else’s. “The Light prevails, and the Darkness is swept away! Go back into the Void where you belong!”
He thrust the torch forward, and the feeble beam seemed emboldened by his words. It surged brightly like a ray of sunlight, and the Sarita thing cringed and growled like a savage beast held at bay. Then the light went out, as suddenly as it had flared up, and he was plunged into darkness.
For what seemed like long hours he stood alone in the dark. Although he could not see anything at all for some time, he was somehow instinctively sure that the dark thing was gone. His fear paralyzed him where he stood, but slowly his limbs began to move. A faint light made its way down from the opening far above. It took all his will to make it to the shaft, and begin the ascent. He felt shame at abandoning Harvey’s body in the dark. My dear boy, he thought, I am so sorry. He didn’t know what he had to be sorry for. Perhaps it was the Archivist again. He wondered this as he wondered whose tears burned down his cheeks.
He wiped his face with his sleeve, and the roughness of the tweed startled him. He looked up and blinked as he began his ascent into the light.
The preceding short story was written to introduce players to Legacies, a role-playing campaign set in the World of Caerdolan familiar to some from D&D Warlands, D&D Mainlands, Caerdolan, and Castle Ferickje but set in a modern era. The story revolves around a cast of player characters some of who possess supernatural abilities inherited from ancient ancestors who defeated a Great Evil and were then charged with keeping it from ever returning. The powers or abilities but mostly the "calling" are the Legacies passed down to their descendants.
The player characters will be from all walks of life. They can be rich or poor, educated or not, even have criminal tendencies, but they must not be evil by nature. I don’t mind if someone makes a petty thief or even someone who has fallen into hard times and steals or turns tricks to make a living, but no murderers, kidnappers or rapists please… I’ve been asked if I would allow vampire characters. The answer is no. Vampires in this universe are inherently evil beings who have sold their souls to the Darkness in return for an eternal half-life. There is no goodness left in them to be redeemed, and so they cannot be the protagonists of this story. Player characters can be flawed – in fact I encourage this – but they must be inherently good, and have the possibility of redemption.
The supernatural abilities will be relatively low-powered, but cinematic. They can be heightened awareness, psionics, sorcery (in D&D terms), heightened physical abilities, unnatural fighting prowess, mechanical/gadget wizardry, etc. We are using the new Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition because of its versatility with crafting powers and skills and its elegance in combat. Power level in Mutants & Masterminds will be 4 (giving 60 points). I had considered D20 Modern or Urban Arcana because they are appropriate for the genre setting, but having played them, I still feel that the new M&M 2nd is probably better suited. Please do not think of your characters in terms of classic superheroes, however. The character types I’m looking for are more akin to the character types in Urban Arcana than what one immediately sees in the pages of Mutants & Masterminds. That said, I also don’t want to use the archetypes, races, and so forth in Urban Arcana, which is another reason not to use that game system. I don’t want people distracted into making modern-day Drow, etc.
All the races available in the World of Caerdolan D&D campaigns will be allowed here, although please tell me early on if you plan on making a demi-human as their roles in the culture and society of modern-day WoC is somewhat complicated and requires more explanation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the WoC campaigns, I will allow Gnomes, Dwarves, Half-elves and Halflings as well as the more common humans. Gnomes are the most common and visible demi-humans in the WoC followed by Dwarves and then Halflings. Elves exist, but are rarely seen in the D&D setting and virtually never encountered in Legacies. I will not allow Elves as player-characters, but will allow Half-elves if you can convince me with a really great background story.
I've been waiting here
Waiting for faith
And the word to fall.
Now the darkness comes
And I'll pray for
The end of us all.
Don't let the dark into me
We killed the angels that warned us of you
Don't let the dark into me
We raised the tower of Babel for you
Don't let the dark into me
We let the children build temples for you
Don't let the dark into me
Don't let the vengeance of Heaven be you…
Dark, Gary Numan
“The cover-stone, Dr. Bauman!” he had said with more urgency than he had ever shown in the years they had worked together, “There’s a key! The stone takes a key!”
The cover-stone had baffled archaeologists since it was first uncovered two years ago by workers digging an underground Metro extension. Reese and his colleagues had opposed any public works beneath the Citadel for years, but their efforts had mostly been frustrated by the need for progress. Ancient sword blades, rusted beyond recognition and broken potsherds couldn’t convince the powers that be that archaeology in the nation’s most historically important place was worth more than the need for new public works.
This thought ran through his mind as he turned off the main avenue and onto one of the steep, narrow streets that cut into the clutter of ancient stone city blocks built up along the slopes of the Hill of the Citadel. Who lives in these old apartment buildings anyway, he wondered? Or perhaps that was the point; the old neighborhood was ripe for revitalization. Bored with the sameness of track-housing in Brettwood, or perhaps wishing to out-do their townhouse neighbors in Kingshill, Siligby’s yuppies might dish out a fair amount for luxury condos carved out of ancient town castles and abbeys on the Hill. The thought depressed him, but then came the discovery of the cover-stone, and archaeology became popular culture over night.
A massive carved stone, circular in shape, set into an even more ancient post and lintel underground structure leading into the heart of the Hill. On its outer surface were bas relief carvings of a style that suggested a late Caerdolan period, and inscribed all over with glyphs and runes meant to shut out the world. For a thousand years or more the ancient spells had worked. The stone had been left undisturbed, and its secrets safe. And yet, the stone had not been ready to reveal its secrets just yet. Engineers had determined that the post and lintel structure it supported was unstable, and it would collapse if any attempt were made to move the massive stone. Only by means of extensive support structures could the chamber be opened safely, and such an undertaking was expensive work; too expensive for anyone to want to fund until now.
Reese marveled at the way that one distant and seemingly unrelated event could have such a profound affect on his own work. The discovery of dragon bones – real dragons dated to the recent past – in a suburban swimming pool excavation across the ocean in New Vineland had in an instant given credence to the texts to which Reese had devoted his life’s work. Texts that had always been considered the fanciful fiction of a medieval lunatic had now been given new life as possible eye-witness, historical accounts. Ah, B’auk, how you have been vindicated, Reese thought to himself.
The medieval scholar had been royal archivist of Siligby under Murad I, and both tutor and chronicler of Tarus the Red before retiring to write and publish his Warlands Chronicles. His accounts of fire-breathing dragons and shape-shifting savages had always been treated by scholars as fanciful embellishments in what was otherwise a fair account of the federation of petty kingdoms under Murad I during the 10th Century. In the Chronicles, B’auk had hinted at a great power hidden beneath Castle Siligby, in the bowels of what had once been ancient Caerdolas. B’auk had dedicated his life to the study of Caerdolan, often expressing admiration for the achievements of that hostile race, while shuddering at the price they had paid for greatness. Reese felt an intellectual and emotional kinship with old B’auk. How difficult it must have been for a man of letters to live in such a hostile world. For even Caerdolan had valued science and learning more than the brutal kings and savage chieftains that ruled during B’auk’s time.
Now the discovery of real dragons showed that perhaps B’auk had been accurate in his descriptions, and that perhaps magic and even the gods might have a place in the modern world. In an instant, B’auk became a best-selling author, and New Age cults of Tiamat and modern Druids had cropped up on college campuses and village squares. Pilgrimages to long-ignored megalithic sites and any old building where some half-hidden glyph could be discovered became popular holiday excursions. Anything that even hinted at having belonged to ancient Caerdolan became instant commodities: barely recognizable segments of silver hoop money, blackened and pitted by age, fragments of masonry indistinguishable from modern quarry stones, or peat-saturated bits of planking dug up from the Black Fens could be sold for obscene amounts on online auctions as “authentic” Caerdolan artifacts. It was disgusting, and yet Reese was grateful in a way. The renewed interest in Caerdolan had made it possible for projects like his to be funded.
And now a breakthrough: Harvey Kerr, Reese’s most promising student, had discovered a possible mechanism for opening the cover-stone, hidden amongst the intricate carvings and glyphs. The ancients were known for their mysterious ingenuity, and an ingenious mystery was just what the public wanted to hear about now.
He squeezed his car into the makeshift parking lot of the old Chapel of St. Elohar, and climbed out with a spryness that he hadn’t felt in decades. Despite his bulk, he nearly ran the length of the narrow alley behind the church, and didn’t fret when he stumbled on the broken pavement of the ancient square beyond. What had been meant to be a ventilation shaft for the new subway line was converted into a point of ingress directly onto the site. He paused to catch his breath.
Mopping his brow with his handkerchief again, he noted that some of the lights strung down the length of the shaft had gone out.
“Harvey,” he called down the shaft. “Sarita?” Neither of the student archaeologists responded. He looked for the project engineer, who was supposed to be supervising the construction of the supporting structure, but he was nowhere to be found.
A flashlight, he thought. I need a flashlight. He contemplated making the run back to the car, but decided against it. Instead, he went to the side door of the chapel rectory, where the priests had allowed his team to store some equipment in one of the pantries. The place was eerily quiet. It wasn’t unusual for the priests to disappear for days at a time, lost no-doubt in some deep devotion. Even Roskianity had an ancient and arcane look about it on the Citadel Hill, as if the Reformation had failed to penetrate the defensive walls that had once kept marauding pagans out.
He grabbed a flashlight off a metal chest, and rushed back out. The depth and angle of the shaft daunted him, and for a moment his resolve nearly faltered.
“Harvey!” he called out again, surprised at the shrillness of his voice. What was wrong? Were his students out somewhere? But Harvey had sounded very anxious on the phone. Why would he abandon the site now when he had expressed how urgent it was for Reese to come and see for himself.
Carefully, Reese descended the makeshift wooden steps. The line of strung lights blacked out about fifty feet down. The rest of the way was darker than possible in the world under the sun. He turned on the flashlight, and it faltered somewhat. He cursed his idealistic students for insisting that they boycott GnomeTech devices. Reese didn’t give much weight to the notion of technological imperialism, especially when descending into the black earth with a fading light. Who cared that the little beasts were sitting atop mountains of money, when what they sold above all was reliability! Reese hit the failing flashlight three times with the palm of his hand, and coaxed it into brightening up again. He continued his descent.
“Harvey,” he called out again, almost in a whisper. He didn’t know why he was scared. He hadn’t been scared of the dark since he was a boy, so long ago that it might have been written in B’auk’s now famous Chronicles. He breathed a sigh of relief when his feet crunched down on the gravely floor of the tunnel.
The beam of his light glistened off the damp walls of the tunnel, chewed up and polished by the teeth of the boring machine that had stopped when a sharp-eyed operator had spotted the ancient carvings. He walked a few paces and caught a glimpse of someone standing in front of the stone just before the flashlight went out completely.
He swore, and began hitting the flashlight with the palm of his hand, attempting to bring it back to life again.
“Is that you, Sarita?” he called out. The figure had seemed slim and dark in the fading torchlight. He was less familiar with his newest student. She was friendly and eager, to be sure, but she had never seemed to want to share in the thrill of discovery with him as Harvey Kerr had. For her, Reese, indeed the whole department had been merely a means for her to have her own, private victories. Fair enough, he had thought.
“Sarita,” he repeated.
“Yes, Professor Bauman,” came the girl’s sultry voice out of the dark.
“Where’s Harvey?” Silence.
“Why are you here alone in the dark?” he asked again.
“I was born into darkness, Professor,” she said. Her tone seemed strange, at once distant and present. “I find solace in the dark.”
“Where is Harvey?” he asked again. “He made a discovery… you made a discovery, I mean together. Didn’t you?”
The light grew weakly from the flashlight of its own accord. He had let his arm drop, and a faint yellow circle of electric light illuminated the earth, imprinted with the marks of work boots. He could barely make out the form of the young woman standing lean and dark before the huge, carved circular stone. Something kept him from raising the light to shine upon her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to blind her, but rather, that he feared some terrible and unknown consequence to this action.
He moved the beam slowly toward her, careful not to shine it upon her face, and then an electric fear ran up his arm and down his spine, threatening to make him collapse where he stood. On the ground, near her feet lay the crumpled form of Harvey Kerr. He couldn’t see any blood, but the stillness of the form made him fear the worst.
“What’s happened here?” he asked, his voice rasping. “Was there an accident?” The last question had been said without conviction. He knew it was no accident even before he had asked it.
“Some sacrifices must be made sometimes,” Sarita said, or the thing that seemed to be Sarita said. The tone of her voice seemed alien in the darkness.
“You killed him? For what?” Reese asked, surprising even himself for voicing the accusation.
“He was in my way,” she said. “And the Dark Power requires blood.”
“What?”
“Come to me!” she commanded, and for a moment he felt the urge to dash himself against the carved stone and spill his blood and brains upon it. He stood his ground.
She gasped in the dark; a sound barely audible.
“Truly, you carry the Legacy of the Archivist!” she said with something like excitement, if not joy.
“I don’t understand?” he said.
“Oh but you do!” she said. “That’s just it. Only you understand the significance of the stone. Only the Archivist carried the true Key, and only he was entrusted with the knowledge of the power within!”
“I don’t know what you mean!” Reese said, backing away. He felt an inexplicable terror, a primordial fear of this slightly-built girl. Then, despite himself, “B’auk didn’t know anything about this stone. He doesn’t mention it in his works.”
“He knew!” Sarita hissed. “He knew because the blood of Caerdolan ran through his veins, just as it does through mine… and yours.” She moved forward, slowly and deliberately, stepping over the lifeless body of what had once been Reese’s friend and protégé.
“No!” Reese said. “I don’t know anything about this business! You’re mad, and you’re a murderer! That’s all I know!”
Sarita’s hand went up, palm facing out toward him. A faint glow seemed to shine out from the depths of her eyes, like the eye-shine of a cat.
“No!” Reese cried out again, and this time found the strength to shine the light in her face. She hissed out an animal sound, and brought the outstretched hand to shield her mad eyes.
“Back!” he cried with as much courage as he could muster in his voice. In an instant memories of a childhood in the north country came flooding back to him, of morning worship services in the country church with his mother and father, the rising sun blazing in a dazzling spectacle of color through the stained glass rose window above the altar. The memory was superimposed upon another, impossible memory that was his and yet not his. A foreign mother as real as his own, crushing herbs in a stone mortar by a peat hearth, the morning light streaming through autumn leaves no less spectacular than the stained church glass.
“The power of Caerdolan failed!” he heard himself cry out in a voice that was at once his and yet someone else’s. “The Light prevails, and the Darkness is swept away! Go back into the Void where you belong!”
He thrust the torch forward, and the feeble beam seemed emboldened by his words. It surged brightly like a ray of sunlight, and the Sarita thing cringed and growled like a savage beast held at bay. Then the light went out, as suddenly as it had flared up, and he was plunged into darkness.
For what seemed like long hours he stood alone in the dark. Although he could not see anything at all for some time, he was somehow instinctively sure that the dark thing was gone. His fear paralyzed him where he stood, but slowly his limbs began to move. A faint light made its way down from the opening far above. It took all his will to make it to the shaft, and begin the ascent. He felt shame at abandoning Harvey’s body in the dark. My dear boy, he thought, I am so sorry. He didn’t know what he had to be sorry for. Perhaps it was the Archivist again. He wondered this as he wondered whose tears burned down his cheeks.
He wiped his face with his sleeve, and the roughness of the tweed startled him. He looked up and blinked as he began his ascent into the light.
The preceding short story was written to introduce players to Legacies, a role-playing campaign set in the World of Caerdolan familiar to some from D&D Warlands, D&D Mainlands, Caerdolan, and Castle Ferickje but set in a modern era. The story revolves around a cast of player characters some of who possess supernatural abilities inherited from ancient ancestors who defeated a Great Evil and were then charged with keeping it from ever returning. The powers or abilities but mostly the "calling" are the Legacies passed down to their descendants.
The player characters will be from all walks of life. They can be rich or poor, educated or not, even have criminal tendencies, but they must not be evil by nature. I don’t mind if someone makes a petty thief or even someone who has fallen into hard times and steals or turns tricks to make a living, but no murderers, kidnappers or rapists please… I’ve been asked if I would allow vampire characters. The answer is no. Vampires in this universe are inherently evil beings who have sold their souls to the Darkness in return for an eternal half-life. There is no goodness left in them to be redeemed, and so they cannot be the protagonists of this story. Player characters can be flawed – in fact I encourage this – but they must be inherently good, and have the possibility of redemption.
The supernatural abilities will be relatively low-powered, but cinematic. They can be heightened awareness, psionics, sorcery (in D&D terms), heightened physical abilities, unnatural fighting prowess, mechanical/gadget wizardry, etc. We are using the new Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition because of its versatility with crafting powers and skills and its elegance in combat. Power level in Mutants & Masterminds will be 4 (giving 60 points). I had considered D20 Modern or Urban Arcana because they are appropriate for the genre setting, but having played them, I still feel that the new M&M 2nd is probably better suited. Please do not think of your characters in terms of classic superheroes, however. The character types I’m looking for are more akin to the character types in Urban Arcana than what one immediately sees in the pages of Mutants & Masterminds. That said, I also don’t want to use the archetypes, races, and so forth in Urban Arcana, which is another reason not to use that game system. I don’t want people distracted into making modern-day Drow, etc.
All the races available in the World of Caerdolan D&D campaigns will be allowed here, although please tell me early on if you plan on making a demi-human as their roles in the culture and society of modern-day WoC is somewhat complicated and requires more explanation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the WoC campaigns, I will allow Gnomes, Dwarves, Half-elves and Halflings as well as the more common humans. Gnomes are the most common and visible demi-humans in the WoC followed by Dwarves and then Halflings. Elves exist, but are rarely seen in the D&D setting and virtually never encountered in Legacies. I will not allow Elves as player-characters, but will allow Half-elves if you can convince me with a really great background story.
I've been waiting here
Waiting for faith
And the word to fall.
Now the darkness comes
And I'll pray for
The end of us all.
Don't let the dark into me
We killed the angels that warned us of you
Don't let the dark into me
We raised the tower of Babel for you
Don't let the dark into me
We let the children build temples for you
Don't let the dark into me
Don't let the vengeance of Heaven be you…
Dark, Gary Numan
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