The first Scholar to be discovered was the Necromancer. His works were hard to ignore, as the undead he mistakenly raised thinking he was helping the peoples of Fort Ooshar and Sheljar broke the empire. That built a distrust for newly released magic.
Sheljar, Telse, Mira, Qin and the other cities near the Everflow and its two rivers.
This is likely why Chorl attempted to hide. Not only was his work in Transformation often done involuntarily, Chorl wanted to conquer. His goal was to fill the gaps from the Fall of Sheljar, taking over the Western Wildes via his hybrid peoples. For Chorl, in all his evils, was creating new peoples, a combination of humanity and their companions.
Some chose to be combined, these peoples frequently became his lieutenants and sergeants. Many fled. The breaking of his camps and the deaths of Chorl and his Student Anderson created an opportunity to escape.
Now, the Children of Chorl exist in mixed pockets of freedom almost always outside of the major towns and cities. They may want vengeance hating Scholars and magic; they may want freedom; they may want to be respected. They are all hybrids in the World of the Everflow.
Mechanics for the Children of Chorl
To play a Child of Chorl in the World of the Everflow select a hybrid species/race. There’s a long list of them available in DnD Beyond now, thanks to Wizards of the Coast adding the Humblewood setting.
Though none of the core species for 2014 or 2024 D&D are Children of Chorl the current list from official products includes;
Then select a feat or bonded companion. Though all Children of Chorl were a goliath, halfling or human combined with a bonded companion, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have more than one companion.
Decide what the character was before they were melded. They should generally be someone from the West. They can be someone who volunteered or not, that’s up to you.
Their background and class represent what they were before. How they present to the world now is similar to the X-Men.
My experience with Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t go back to the beginning. That would be kind of hard, as I’m not 50. It does go back to some of my earliest memories. For me D&D always started as a storytelling game, probably because the way the first DM I played under introduced it to me.
Derek convinced us to play because he was and is a storyteller. He knew that I loved The Hobbit, Narnia, King Arthur and Robin Hood. The pitch was simple — “Do you want to tell your own stories in the world?”
The answer was simply “Yes.”
We played with, those simple dice that needed a Crayon to color in the numbers. For some reason I only remember d6s and dungeons.
D&D is what started me on my journey to tell stories. I always thought those stories I would tell would be fiction. As of yet, conventional publishers haven’t accepted any of the short stories I’ve pitched.
But it also started me on the journey to be a journalist, and that worked out to be sports (mostly soccer) and then marketing tales. Derek’s connected to that journey too, but that advances several years into high school and again to when I was an emergent baseball blogger (which didn’t work out).
Later in my journey Dungeons & Dragons became the central point of my strongest friendships in those harsh teenage years. Like many GenX suburban white males, I was a latchkey kid in a neighborhood with cul de sacs and basements.
Those basements provided our play space and our avoidance. We avoided thinking about divorcing parents, impending nuclear annihilation, ozone depletion and whatever other terror the nightly news foisted on us.
Erik, Justin, Abel, Colin, Jacob, Andy, Chris, and the others — we hid from all of that. There were early video games, many board games, and other role-playing games, but it was D&D that was our unifying factor. The stories we told via rolling oddly shaped dice and convoluted rules gave us an escape. We were big, damn heroes. We were anti-heroes. We were thieves and priests and archers and wizards. We adhered to the noble codes that our imperfect real lives could not. We violated those codes to see what would happen.
That late 80s to early 90s version of D&D that we played was sometimes in dungeons and always dragons. Every world we played in had dragons in the background providing terror, often ending in a TPK.
My second D&D era was about avoidance. The stories and people helped me make it through the bad times — puberty, divorces, fights with friends, being the outsider from the in-cliques. Without that group I’d be a horrible athlete, the storyteller incapable of finishing a tale, a ‘gifted’ kid who avoided hard work, someone with constantly broken ankles and a body that doctors considered brutally altering because I was dramatically smaller than my peers.
In the Army I nearly avoided D&D. During my time at DLI I did participate in a Vampire: The Maquerade LARP in Pacific Grove, California. That was the only place I met non-military people while in that hybrid college-military experience. In 5th Group one of the 18D (combat medics) invited me to do solo play with him as the DM. That was basically impossible to keep up because our deployment schedules didn’t quite overlap. We also never played when deployed together. I’m pretty certain no one in his ODA knew that’s what we did when we hung out outside of work.
Then D&D disappeared from my life.
I thought I grew up.
I thought I didn’t need the funky dice, the tales.
5th edition brought me back after not playing regularly since 94 (the 5th Group experience was 97-98).
My current era of D&D is broader in playing styles, stories told and the people I play with. There have been two dozen people who have played in the now-seven campaigns within the World of the Everflow. Plus I’ve been a player in four campaigns and hosted a charity actual play for YachtCon.
Where my first era of D&D planted the seeds of creativity and the second era taught me math (and kept me as sane as I’ll be due to avoidance), this third era of my Dungeons and my Dragons is about exploring fellowship, exploring philosophical issues, confronting the issues of the era rather than avoiding them.
On this 50th birthday of D&D I discover that my eras of D&D are the eras of my life, showing a maturity in my life while being skills and abilities I continue to use in this life.
My game doesn’t really have dungeons. Dragons aren’t omnipresent. But it’s still the same game.
My game doesn’t roll characters. They’re created for story rather than optimization. It’s still the same game.
My game isn’t in the Forgotten Realms or another official world (or third party world). It’s a world concocted by me and mutually, continually created by us. It’s still the same game.
For forty years this game has been present in my life. At times it has been my most defining hobby. Other times it was locked behind a haunted door in my head, hidden but influencing my personal journey.
Today I don’t lock my passions away. People get to see them. They can judge me — whatever.
We’ll play in public today. Something that was nigh impossible in the 80s, when even my own family thought D&D meant devil worship.
All of the campaigns that have taken place win the World of the Everflow have focused on tracking down the various Lorebooks, with each group having other side quests, generally towards making the world for the common peoples of the Lands of the Six Kingdoms.
They’ve run counter to the Proctors, an evil faction that is trying to control knowledge of magic, and rogue Scholars who are spreading knowledge of magic in order to control people. Necromancy and Transformation are the ones most counter to traditional D&D goodness.
The only other super-natural organization is the Orthodox Church of Quar. The Quarites control access to the Everflow and a massive merchant endeavor with their churches also working as trade posts and shops for what are in game terms healing potions.
This world has no equal to the Factions of tradition D&D, or the Knights of the Round Table, or Templars or other super-national knightly orders. No one has wanted to be in one.
But if a player wanted to play a character with these kinds of ideals and/or oaths, we’d talk about how it would fit. Knowing my player base the inspiration would be the Free City of Sheljar, the egalitarian re-founding of Sheljar after the early campaigns purged the Necromancer, his agents of undeath and the Tunneling Nightmares (they’ll be the subject of a future Lore 24).
Based off the players and characters that founded the Free City such an idealistic organization would look similar to the Harpers, with a dash of de oppresso liber and a side of asymmetric organization.
Determination for all peoples Kin, Ken, Kon and any who think.
Share knowledge, so all in the world may live better lives.
Defend those that cannot defend themselves and their companions
Judge behavior, not the companion, the nationality or the faith
Recognize successes at spreading the word of a Free Shejar and Free Everflow
Like the oaths of D&D paladins, these ideals within the oath are aspirational. They aren’t to be perscriptive.
A player wanting to be part of this order wouldn’t necessarily pledge to sergeant or knight. They wouldn’t need to swear fealty to the current Mayor of Sheljar (Samul). The order would rise because the oath is a bit viral — it’s one that encourages heroic actions and fulfilling quests.
A band could be one halfling and her dog, or an entire airxip of goblins, or an adventuring party, or three elves visiting the Everflow that abandon their fey pacts, or a group of Mehmdians, or a village near Telse, or a tribe in Crinth. A band inspired by the ideals of Free Sheljar aren’t sworn to them, in fact the current governance of Kirtin-on-the-Lake is inspired by Sheljar, but free from them.
That’s the knightly order I would make if I were to make a knightly order.
One of the great parts of Dungeons & Dragons is the impromptu nature of it all. When you’re at the table, especially for a homebrew campaign, things just happen. The participants riff off of each other and a story is created that shouldn’t exist and can never exist again. It is a moment in time. Mijdaf was born in one such moment recently.
Mijdaf, the paddler
Mijdaf is an NPC in the current campaign. He started because the group needed transportation up the river from their neighborhood to one on the very edges of urbanity.
Me: There’s a barge pulled along the ropes on the side of the river.
The PCs: That seems slow.
Me: There’s also a paddleboat operated by a goliath.
The PCs: We take that.
That’s how a desert goliath living in the largest city of the region started to grow into relevance in the game. But at this point he’s just a ferryman in a boat. Sure, he’s huge and can paddle upriver faster than those humans can pull themselves, but he’s not yet unique.
PCs: What kind of birds does he have?
Me: Four seagulls that mostly rest on a branching perch above his head. He asks where your companions are.
PCs: We’re trying to get a new one for Lauray. Do you know a good breeder?
As Mijdaf I talk about two options and why he has one that he prefers. It’s one that doesn’t recognize the current government. Mijdaf starts talking about the history of the region that connects to an artisan that they’d met in the previous session.
They riff off of this, pulling more information from the goliath. It’s interactive at this point. They roll very well. I start playing into Mijdaf being willing to talk, constantly. Soon the PCs figure out that the reason that Mijdaf was available is because no locals will ride in his boat.
He’s not just a talker — he’s a conspiracy theorist.
Mijdaf pulls out a slate with tangential connections between various politicians, professors and military leaders. He keeps going.
At the table this was great. The players with me that day were smiling, nodding and laughing. The total scene may have been 10 minutes. There were some social dice rolls and a lot of me as the DM picking up on table clues to see what the group was enjoying and emphasizing that.
And then Mijdaf reached the destination, dropping them off. He and they never expected to see each other again.
A day later in game time the group needs to get back from the nearly rural neighborhood to their home base deep in the port city. They recognize a paddleboat, but don’t see Mijdaf. They steal the boat.
That’s how Mijdaf, the paddler, went from a simple single scene NPC into a character with purpose, gaming joy, and just possibly a problem for the future.
Within the World of the Everflow magic is relatively new, well besides the Everflow’s healing power and ability to flow in two directions and the powerful bond between beast and Kin. In the current Proctors of Song and Book magic returned ~27 years ago. First that was via the Born Generation when over a period of a year every child of Kin came of age knowing a single cantrip. About 7 years ago the Lorebook of Divination was found and over the following years, magic started to spread with the realization that there were 17 or so Lorebooks scattered across the lands.
The current campaign takes place in Sas Rurulit, where the Proctors are attempting to collect two Lorebooks. But the ingenious groups that control the Lorebooks down in this land broke them up. The Lorebook of the Book are people who cast directly from books and scrolls.
These peoples are manifesting magic at various colleges. The college of metallurgy used every fire and electricity spell to forge metals. The college of hydrology was water and air spells, with a bit of illusion. The Proctors (PCs) have essentially destroyed these two schools ability to function by either capturing or damaging the master books there.
In the last session they visited a public park that is also the School of Herbimancy.
Unlike traditional D&D approaches to herbs, the School of Herbimancy isn’t about ingesting herbs in some fashion to gain magical effects. Instead, the plants themselves are the magic.
For example, the paths in the park were softly lit at night via the glowing flowers of a particular plant (a version of Dancing Lights). Maybe the smell of burning needles from a deciduous tree heals (Healing Spirit). Fallen branches from a tree are a magical staff (Shillelagh). Within Sas Rurulit, this school’s magic is artifice meets druid — the plants are simultaneously technology and magical.
The group failed a series of checks, one with a natural 1, so they don’t know the professor in charge of the school. Instead, they got the name of the banker financing the project. A way to turn a nat 1 into a meaningful failure!
They also didn’t quite figure out that the seed room may be the equal of a scroll room or library at the other schools they’ve raided (some read this site and it would be a natural conclusion for the characters to reach after fleeing the fires they set to cover their raid).
I’m doing Lore 24, an attempt to write small lore elements daily in the year 2024. Each element will be something that’s come up in play or will come up in play within my homebrew World of the Everflow — there will be actionable threads for PCs to grab onto and advance the story.
