| No matter how grey and dreary our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it over so beautiful. - Spoken by Dorothy in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz |
When the age of reason swept the world, it gave many things: some power, to the masses; knowledge, to those who looked for it; a promise of utopia, to those who dared to dream. But most of all it offered safety from the darkness and things lurking under the bed or in the dark corners of the mind. It offered a reason for things, it gave order and meaning to the world, and it was accepted gratefully by some and forced on others. If one listened, on a bright summer day, one could hear the march of progress like John Henry Iron's legendary hammers driving iron into the earth in a race of man against machine. Whether man or machine, it mattered not - progress marched, and railway lines replaced ley lines, forests of named species replaced the magic woods of the past and the world was a changed place.
The passenger pigeon. The dodo bird. These are some of the more well known victims of progress, some would say. They forget the Mammoth, but men always like to believe the past to be a golden age, even if they refuse to understand why they fled it to embrace reason so readily. There were other extinctions: the pucks died on a warm midsummer night not many years after Shakespeare wrote his famous play, the gremlins who expired over worked and hated by man, the fairy circles that closed as magic vanished slowly but surely from the world of man as humanity began to grow up and leave the nightmares of it's childhood behind, nightmares forgotten and, many thought, unmourned.
The new millennium has dawned, and science is the only god left to the world of man, one many hold to because it is a good god, one that - despite it's detractors - seems the best chance for a future among the stars. But something is missing: more people are ending up in insane asylums (and insanity is synonymous with 'does not fit into social norms'), the world is considered a darker place than it was even fifty years ago - when people had perhaps more cause for their beliefs in the darkness of mankind. Psychiatric and depression cases have skyrocketed and children are talking refuge from the world in video games and sports and other fantasies of mankind's making. Magic is missing, and no one really understands what that means anymore. The magics are gone, the white and the black and all the many shades between. But the memory of them lives on somewhere, and perhaps magic remains in other worlds. Perhaps it's just over the next hill or around the next corner: perhaps it can be found again, under other stars and distant suns.
It is this hope that has created science fiction and fantasy, and all writing is fantasy of one form or another. Somewhere inside everyone, in the places deep in the heart that reason and logic fear and cannot touch lies the tantalising whisper of "What if?" It is this dream, of magic and wonder many think science has removed from the world, that keeps many going. We call it imagination, but .... why do we imagine these things? From whence come dragons and vampires, gods and demons, mystics and fundamentalists? We imagine there is more to the world than what we perceive - in order to bear living in the world as it is.
- Liane Hunt, "Magic and the Mind" from the American Journal of Psychology, June 2002, p 14-17.
| A dragon lives forever, but not so girls and boys Painted wings and giants's rings make way for other toys. One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar. |
Welcome to Worlds Within Worlds, a fantasy campaign unlike most others. Traditional fantasy offers many tales of travellers from our world entering into others. Alien abductions, fairy rings, Dante's Inferno - all are about people of our world ending up in another world. In modern times, fantasy novels deal with that same theme. From Anthony, Hambly, Huff, Kay etc. we get stories of people from Earth ending up in other lands. For various reasons, few campaigns ever explore this theme in any depth.
This campaign means to try that, and to skewer quite a few fantasy cliché’s, novels and ideas in the process of having fun, since games are about fun. All players get to make a PC either from this world or, perhaps, stranded on it for some reason or (for the real fantasy cliché) from the other world, and raised here unknowing of their true heritage. Anything within reason is accepted, as long as the PC made fulfils the following criteria:
A list of players will be posted on this site so they can talk with each other about ideas for the world, their PC, the game etc..
Game Moderator Note: This game was originally conceived as being a D&D game but the magic system devised by Alcar and aslhk necessitated a different game system being made just for the world. It's really easy to use.
The game premise is that the PCs are people from earth drawn to the other world by luck, change, desire, fate or something far more elusive, like a dice-rolling fire elemental. If a player wants to make a non-human PC (or someone/thing that looks human but isn't) talk to Alcar. It may be allowed, but with certain restrictions. The PCs will all begin mostly ignorant about the other world, so take that into account when making your PC.
| Introduction | Character Creation |
Players & Campaign Info. |
The World | Contact, Credits & Updates |