Ethersea — Prologue I: Our Wasted World

Synopsis
Travelers from four war-torn kingdoms congregate at the edge of a fearsome storm, following a divine invitation emanating from deep within the Ethersea.

Join us as we build our next campaign while playing The Quiet Year, a brilliant mapmaking game designed and written by Avery Alder.

The map and notes for this episode can be viewed here.

Summary
It is established in the first Prologue episode using the The Quiet Year system that the inhabitants of TAZ: Ethersea originate from four previously land-dwelling kingdoms. The brothers play abstract social forces controlling a one-year history of these kingdoms, occasionally stepping in to fulfill characters in discussion. The four kingdoms are the magic-using Hominine, the industry-building Delmer, the Traders of the Southern Archipelago and the nomadic Einarr, who welcomed the former gods of this universe, known as Vestiges, into their arms. This is unpopular because one of the Vestiges, named Benevolence, divided the land into war by gifting magic to the Homonine people. The runoff from this magic became a pollutant, and now an arcane ocean threatens to cover the land with a never ending storm. A mysterious voice calls to a small number of both itinerants and scholars from all four kingdoms to gather and begin preparations to escape the storm and save their people by building a city beneath the waves.

Following a sermon at an unknown point in the future by a priest named Brother Seldom, detailing the above lore, the episode starts with the brothers sketching out the initial land the travelers see. At a remote stretch of coast where the Einarr Plateau and Hominine intersect, there is a pebble beach. Important geographical features of the area include a set of tidepools to the north, an impassable cave to the south that no one can enter, a sinkhole on the beach long used as a waste dump by local people, a river mouth, and a magical freshwater spring, which is of a different magic than the one that is currently in the ocean. The ocean-magic evaporates into a kind of arcane salt called Prestige, which can be used as fuel and runs along in veins of an extremely malleable ore in the local geology. The travelers settle at this beach, with a view of the slowly encroaching massive storm cloud offshore; it will arrive in a year. Also offshore are dangerous "blink sharks," (mutated hammerheads that can use short range teleportation) and an ominous black rock spiral staircase jutting out of an oddly calm patch of the waves.

Realizing they have little time, the people set to work constructing rowhouses from old cannon and battle weaponry, but the community finds them uncomfortable and quickly nickname them "shithouses." Elections are held, and they put aside their cultural differences to elect one representative from each nation. Scholars attempt to study the impassable cave, but more pragmatic individuals start investigating the ore, and, upon discovering an abandoned Hominine bathysphere, start putting together the rudiments of a plan to begin living underwater. A shipyard is built on the river. But one day a small boy, Little Peter, discovers an earthquake has split the trash sinkhole. It is now a trash geyser, spitting up old trash into the sky. Worse, the entire surface of the Einar Plateau vanishes one day, taken by the Vestiges to their home dimension and turning the nomadic people there into spirits. The episode ends when the beach community realizes the ghosts of the ascended Einarr people haunt them still.

Featured Locations

 * Ethersea