Worth the Candle

Rune magic wasn’t hard to unlock: all it really took was gobs of money. We had been in the midst of liquidating assets in order to convert to gold and fuel gold magic, which meant that there were funds to slide the way of the rune mages. We went to one of the ‘satellite’ runeforges, […]

I sat in the domain of the locus, with it beside me, trying to think about how I wanted to approach the plan. Eventually, I got up and clapped my hands together, then drew them apart, wiggling my fingers. “Layman, I summon thee!” Nothing happened. “Welp,” I said, frowning. “That was worth a shot.” I […]

There were a lot of salient facts about Aerb, but the one that I kept coming back to was that it was really heckin’ big. What was more, it was big in a lot of ways that Earth wasn’t. I had never really been a huge fan of open world games like Skyrim and Assassin’s […]

The gods of Aerb were, in some respects, extremely important, but in most others, could be ignored entirely. Gods were a real pain in the ass when it came to worldbuilding for tabletop games, at least for most of the systems that we’d played. The big problem was that gods had a real presence in […]

Note: Like many Christmas specials, this is not canon, and in fact, takes place in an alternate timeline (a non-canon alternate timeline, just to distinguish it from a hypothetically canonical alternate timeline). It was Amaryllis’ idea to have Christmas, maybe to cheer me up, maybe because it was a kind of Earth-tourism that really appealed […]

Quest Completed: Fleshsmith – Pendleham will have to find a new moniker, because it is the City of Flesh no more. What will replace it is unclear, but with time, some sense of normalcy will set in, and a new member polity might find entrance to the Empire of Common Cause. Quest Progress: Slayer of […]

I wasn’t planning to be in the same place as Bethel. I didn’t want to be around her, and there was really no compelling reason for us to be in the same place at the same time. I tried, briefly, to think about how she felt, what emotions were stirred up inside her by briefly […]

It would be a homecoming, in a way, which was a bit of a funny thing for a house, if you really thought about it. Bethel curled up her body’s lips in faint amusement, without thinking about it. Valencia had asked about that, about how Bethel behaved when there was no one around, and it […]

“I’m going to need to rest soon,” I told the call of the gold as I landed in Necrolaborem. “Too much fighting and flying today.” It had been one of those long days, the kind that stretched on forever by virtue of having started early and been crammed full of taxing things. There was no […]

“We need to talk,” I said as I flew through the air. “You’re supposed to give me a break.” You couldn’t really carry on a conversation with the call of the gold, at least so far as I’d been able to find. It would give instructions, for some people as a voice in the head, […]

An Amaryllis had taken up position next to the manor entrance, which was now a large, burnt hole in the building. They had been lucky that the long elevator was untouched, because it would have complicated descent into the complex if it had been turned to slag. Unfortunately, the dragonfire was a mar on the […]

“What is this?” asked Amaryllis when I placed the uniform down on the table. It took her a moment to find the patches, and when she did, she stared at them for a moment, then looked at me. “I have theories,” I said. “The top theory is that someone from Earth came to Aerb, not […]

“I have reservations,” I said to the table of tuung. I did feel a bit odd, being the only human there, and I was definitely damp, since this room, like many in the complex at Poran, was equipped with a mister in the ceiling that sprayed at periodic intervals. Aside from me being human, I […]

I watched as the work crew dismantled Tommul. Dragon deaths were incredibly uncommon, the kind of uncommon event where a government workgroup might put together a committee to make a thick binder with plans and contingencies, which would then get left on a shelf for twenty years without being used, until the time a new […]

There wasn’t a lot of good information on who the most powerful gold mage of all time had been, but there was a decent chance that I was in the top one percent of all time. Gold mages were hampered by their quest for gold, and unstable by design, which meant that there were hard […]