Intro

The world as you know it is a mysterious, yet boring place.

Mysterious because it’s full of colossal abandoned buildings and ruins that nobody knows who left there.

Boring because there is apparently no way of knowing better, with books rarer than gold, and most of them telling stories that are not even trying to explain the past, or even the present.

For generations, life has been going on as usual (that is, with hard work and very little happening), then something really strange happened.

Some kind of choir was heard coming from the skies, apparently sung by angels. This has sparked spiritual ecstasies in many people, now declared saints, who interpreted the words and created a code that was at once law and religion: unimaginatively called “The Choirs”, it gave birth to what is just called, again seemingly for lack of imagination, “The One Church”.

That was approximately thirty years ago. Some of you remember it well, some of you were not even born.

During this time, the influence of The One Church has spread like wildfire, and so has artistic production, especially of music, but not limited to it. Writers, painters, sculptors and even mages have all been inspired by the One Church and The Choirs, but in general life is still hard: the land is hard to work, giving scarce crops of vegetables and even scarcer meat. The forests are said to be extremely dangerous, and only princes and dukes venture there to hunt, accompanied by huge cohorts of knights that often return injured or killed by the fierce beasts that inhabit the wild.

This is life in the Allied Realms of the known earth, with very little known of the outside, except for one fabled city: Whiteshard.

Whiteshard is a city so prosperous that it doesn’t even need a proper government to work, nor an association with one of the Allied Realms. It lives of commerce and, unique in the known world, of intellectual research: teaching magic and science in its ancient schools and academies.

Being far-removed to the East from the Allied Realms, the many races living in Whiteshard don’t know yet how the One Church is expanding in the West, and how its priests look at the City of Wonders with envious and suspicious eyes. On the contrary, Whiteshard is more and more open and interested in the realms, which host a lot of the most mysterious ruins from the unknown ancestors of these lands. This is why many institutions routinely send scholars and archeologists to study the artifacts and remnants of this mythic past.

Adyss and Karsten are among these travelers seeking long-lost knowledge far from their lands, or at least so they say to others (and only if they really have to).

Different kinds of visitors to the realms come from the White Sea to the North. The Sea People, or People of The Runes, have visited the northern coast of the realms for generations, and even gave name to one of the most beautiful port cities: Seyrune. There they trade a lot of magical artifacts they themselves create, using knowledge that they tend to keep for themselves.

The ongoing construction of the Pan-cathedral in Seyrune is a growing shadow on this type of commerce, which is being restricted more and more, leading Erik, a young sea trader, to travel to the much smaller city of Daggerfall, an unwieldy port set on a cliff and using ancient cranes and structures to tend to the ships from the high Slanted Plains, where the city unevenly lies.

This is the only port of the much more earth-born realm of Heiltal, where to find a good market Erik has to venture way more inland than he would like to, to the crossroads settlement of Fritdorf: an isolated and poor place that becomes lively only during the open market days, and in the recently-built Frit Mühle tavern, in the following evenings and nights.

To the same spot, attracting travelers like a lantern with flies, comes also someone from the far South, a land so far-removed that a simple mockingbird seems to be the most exotic avian creature to Jager, a traveler on his own business that keeps talking to the bird in whispers, draped in clothes that make him look even more obviously foreign and strange than Adyss and Karsten who are not even human.

This menagerie of strange faces is the reason why young Valth (diminutive of a longer local name) comes to the Frit Mühle even against the prohibition set by his father, worried that the strange people from far lands may trick his naïve son into who knows what deals and businesses.

He is one of the few to notice the fact that Karsten and even more so Adyss look like elves: creatures that his great grandma told him about, and he thought were the stuff of bedtime stories only.

An even more curious eye is set on the foreigners and on Fritdorf itself by Azari: a very attractive woman staying at the Frit Mühle and being pretty much the center of the attention for many men intent on drinking. She is not what she seems, but only the attentive eye of Valth seems to notice that: for the others her beauty, soft manners, and fascinating ways of dancing and singing are far too distracting (or enraging, when it comes to local women...)

In reality, she is an agent sent by the One Church to observe what is happening in Fritdorf: the production of the so-called Swamp Beer was an incredible success in the region, and even the capital of Sofithall seems to have noticed. Production of the swamp cereals the beer is made from has spiked from what was once an unproductive marsh, and soon after, the animal stocks of the wooded hills (where Valth’s family is located) started to suffer, instead. The rumors say animals have been found dead, drained up till their last drop of blood, with strange injuries to their eyes as the only obvious clue to their death.

In this particular time and place, under the shadow of the majestic trees of the “Safe Vale” (meaning of the local name of “Heiltal”) and the many scattered ruins, this strange group of people meets thanks to the one thing that is common to all its components: their love for the marvelously intoxicating swamp beer!