The Adventure Zone - Summary: The Adventure Zone: Ethersea — Prologue

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Didn’t have time for all five episodes of our world-building miniseries for the next TAZ campaign? Fear not: This extremely abridged version has everything you need to know about the city of Founders’ Wake, and the magically irradiated ocean that surrounds it. Get caught up now — the adventure begins in earnest next week!For our Prologue, we played The Quiet Year, a brilliant mapmaking game designed and written by Avery Alder. Learn more about The Quiet Year and purchase it for yourself here: https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-yearSee the maps (including a world map and two maps of Founder's Wake) and their alt-text here: http://bit.ly/EtherseaMaps Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointaz

What follows is a summary of the events of the Adventure Zone Ethersea's prologue, a five-episode series in which we built the world of our new campaign while playing Avery Alder's world-building role-playing game The Quiet Year. I'll cover the major events, concepts, and characters generated in those episodes, everything you need to know before we get the season started in earnest. If this synopsis peaks your curiosity, I encourage you to listen to the prologue episodes to hear how this particular narrate. sausage got made. For now, let's get started. The people of this world once walked side by side with the gods that they worshipped. Those gods were called vestiges, and they ruled over mortal kind with arcane powers that they protected covetously from their subjects. One vestige, named benevolence, shared the secrets of his magic with his mortal followers, effectively usurping his kin. The recipients of this arcane gift founded the prosperous,

Theocratic Kingdom of Homanine, which conquered the realm, wiping out nearly all the vestiges that stood in its way. After decades of conflict, three other kingdoms remained alongside Hominine when the dust had settled. To the north, the inhabitants of the Delmer Wilds, utilized the region's plentiful resources to become a highly industrialized powerhouse. To the east, the Inar Plateau offered safe haven to the followers of the few other surviving vestiges, who shared their wisdom with their followers, not as gods, but as collaborators. And across the sea, the free-spirited mariners of the southern archipelago built a life free from the mainland's ceaseless strife. Though these four kingdoms would eventually settle into an uneasy piece, it would be short-lived.

The magic granted to mortal kind by the vestige benevolence carried with, it a material cost, an exchange of reagents that the world's warring magic users often neglected to pay. When that happens, a volatile exhaust is produced. This ether would irradiate the land, sea, and sky. An arcane storm of unimaginable size and power took form over the ocean, threatening the realm's people with absolute extinction. And so the four domains began to seek ways to take shelter from the storm. And while they toiled, a voice seemingly emanating from the sea itself called out to people from all corners of the realm. It offered an invitation. When kingdoms fall, the sea provides. A home for all beneath the tides.

Hundreds of travelers from each of the four kingdoms followed this voice to an unassuming cove in the foothills of the Aynar Plateau. Over the following year, this community would grow, explore, endure, and, of course, work to create this undersea haven promised to them by divine invitation. Resources were scarce in those early days, but over time, the community would find ways to fulfill the countless needs of their undersea migration.

Rapidly reproducing filler fish and ether-cleansed seaweed flakes would become staples of their diet. Mutated phytoplankton provided a means for filtering air and water. A universal magical reagent called Prestige was discovered in salt, refined from ethersea water. Building materials were limited to driftwood, clay, and salt glass, though gatherers found limited pockets of arcane ore, which they'd later discovered to be fragments of an ancient vestige named Coda, whose body was hurled from the Aynar Plateau and shattered on the rocks below. From this oar they would build a fearsome battleship that they named,

for some reason, the biggest baby, whose pilots, called chaperones, shared a psychic link with the codite built into their vessel. In the months that followed, a handful of intrepid individuals took on leadership roles in the community. The Bhojar Hermine, a royal from the Delmer Wilds, led efforts to break ground beneath the waters. The cartographer Phineas Kahl lended her his expertise,

finding a promising build site offshore near a strange coral-encrusted spiral staircase. A hominine scholar named Brother Seldom founded a schoolhouse for the community's young and began broadcasting lessons via tone wheel, a radio-like arcane instrument. Old Joshy, also known as Uncle Joshy, or sometimes Old Uncle Joshy,

was a charlatan who opened a school for advanced psychic warfare against blink sharks. The threat of those vicious, teleporting sharks was very real, though Joshi's psychic abilities were almost certainly not, which is perhaps why he eventually turned to bathosphere residential design once the school's revenues dried up. Relics of the surface world's past were collected and cataloged by the curator, though what merited preservation was a constant subject of debate among the community. Similarly, contentious was the presence of the benevolent parish, a separatist chapter of the church that used its arcane power to aid the community,

empowering the phytoplankton that would make life undersea possible, and building hard light constructs, such as vapor suits, which made extravehicular exploration and construction a reality. As the shoreside community worked to evade the apocalypse, so too did the kingdoms they left behind. The inhabitants of the Delmer Wild sought shelter from the storm by moving their sprawling citadels into the very mountains upon which they were built. The mariners of the southern archipelago constructed a fleet of submersible arcs to travel the deep, staying one step ahead of the ethersea's innumerable dangers. The Ainar took shelter too, but not in a manner anyone could have predicted. A zealous contingent of Ainar magic users would somehow reopen the doorway to the Vistachyne.

realm from which the vestiges first entered our world. The entire plateau would be pulled into that doorway, spiriting its inhabitants away from our world. Though they'd forfeit their corporeal forms during this abduction, some Einar spirits began manifesting among the shoreside community. The greatest minds assembled there would devise a way to give them a second chance at life, building bodies from the local coral formations that could be inhabited, Though the energy required for this process often required multiple spirits to amalgamate into a singular identity.

The first of these beings, now called Brynar, was named Tessalation. They would serve as a shepherd to the Aynar spirits that would follow in their footsteps, returning to our world from the vestigial realm. The disappearance of the Aynar Plateau was the first of many hardships endured by the community during their final year on the surface. A group of headstrong gatherers took on the title of The Vanguard. They stole precious resources from the community and departed into the ethersea to become the first of this society's founders. Months later, they were found massacred at the bottom of the ocean,

though the story behind their grisly end was never uncovered. During a mission to find the Vanguard, the cartographer Phineas Call was betrayed and killed in action. His departed spirit was somehow recovered by his scientific fellows, called the deep thinkers, and placed in a brinar body alongside five other spirits, becoming the entity called Ampersand 5. This resurrection was protested, both by the parish and its ultra-orthodox offshoot, the Ordo Spiritus. Shortly after Phineas Call's ill-fated mission, a disease called the Salo took hold of the community. Quick preventative action kept losses to a minimum, but those who were afflicted began to grow subtle fish-like features, most common among them being catfish whiskers. The Council of Four, a ruling body with representatives from each of the four kingdoms, was overthrown following the loss of the child of Declan Cern, the representative from hominide.

In the chaos that followed, the Bhojar Hermene formed a new system of government, the ballast, where representatives. Presentatives from the community's various workforces and factions would come together to make the decisions that would shape the community. But the greatest hardship would come on the community's last day on the shore. The capital of hominine, using impossible magic and guided by enormous flying whales, was lifted into the sky and passed into the storm, creating a tidal wave that forced the immediate and permanent evacuation of the shoreside community. In their fleet of bathysphere houses, the people would leave the beach they'd called home for the past year, taking residents in their new undersea dwelling. A city they would come to call Founders Wake.

25 years have passed since that evacuation, and in that time, Founders Wake has expanded dramatically. An enchanted tower that once connected the Aynar Plateau to the world below, called the Crystal Ascension, sank to the bottom of the ethersea during the construction effort. It nestled against a sheer cliff face and now serves as the spine for Founders' Wakes' vertically stacked districts. At the top of the Crystal Ascension sits the ballast, the municipal hub and seat of government for the city. It was the first structure built below the waves, made from a repeat.

purposed arc, gifted to the community from the Southern Archipelago's fleet. Immediately below the ballast sits the Conservatory, the first expansion built by the evacuees, which houses the benevolent parish and the curator's many museums, parks, and menageries. The city's largest district sits immediately below that, the forecastle, where rows of thousands of bathosphere houses are arranged into ample residential quarters, built into a towering hall resembling the bow of a great ship. The forecastle surrounds and protects another district called the cradle, named for a beloved shipyard constructed on the shore above. Within the safety of the cradle, the city's essential utilities and life support systems are maintained.

At the base of the forecastle, an unintended district took form. Within this deck, less scrupulous operators could find cover from the ballast's watchful eye, and, when one thinks of unscrupulous operators, one name came to mind. And so this district earned the title of Joshy's Knuckle. Atop the cliff, a sprawling industrial complex called the Gunnell was built to give fisheries, farmers, and salvagers the space they needed to complete their vital work, though that work takes place in the shadow of a cloud of debris, remnants of the world above that have long since been sundered by the storm. Near the cliff's base, the coral spire continues to thrive as the city's deep thinkers built a massive laboratory surrounding the structure.

In this lab, far from the scrutiny of the parish and the Ordo Spiritus, the city's brightest minds continue development of new technologies, while tessellation continues the painstaking process of guiding the Inar spirits into their new coral frames. And at the base, of the Crystal Ascension, the city's newest district called the Gills, Humbs with activity. Here, ships of all shapes and sizes are built and maintained alongside a sprawling network of docks, shipyards, and modern commercial facilities. One such building belongs to a group called the Blue Span Brokerage, which facilitates the kind of undersea expeditions that might attract aspiring adventurers of a certain strike.

and it is here in the posh bustling headquarters of the Blue Span Brokridge that our story begins. Maximumfund.org Comedy and culture. Artist-owned, audience-supported.