History in motion
The long waning of magic, followed by the living record of the party’s journey.
BEFORE THE CAMPAIGN
Years are measured backwards from the fall of the Safehold.
Stories spread of invasions involving barbarian hordes.
Contact with the gods becomes difficult. Divine casters receive only lesser spells through avatars, while arcane casters struggle to draw enough mana for powerful magic. Over the next decade, both traditions steadily diminish.
Minor objects, potions and charged items lose their power, followed by nearly all permanent items. Only the mightiest objects and artefacts endure. Cities dependent on magic fracture into riot, civil war and ruin.
All contact with the gods is gone. Temples can no longer answer mortal need, and much of the population abandons the cities for rural life.
Violent new forms of worship arise. Surviving magical creatures and objects are hunted as prizes, threats or evidence of forbidden power.
As trade between increasingly insular peoples collapses, strange towers appear across many lands. They have no obvious entrances. Those broken open appear empty, and public interest fades.
Belief in gods and magic is outlawed in many lands. Witch hunters prosecute suspected believers with extreme severity.
Without clerics or magical weapons, incorporeal undead become almost impossible to destroy. Entire regions are abandoned.
Tinkers, traders and other wanderers become the principal source of commerce and news for isolated communities.
Annual fayres bind distant settlements together. Tradespeople recruit apprentices there, and marriages between otherwise isolated villages become common.
Exceptionally talented young people are quietly identified at the fayres, befriended and eventually told of a hidden organisation that still believes in the old gods and magic.
The recruits travel to the organisation’s island stronghold: a vast centre of learning later known to them as the Safehold.
A group of ten trains together. Every member studies martial disciplines, practical skills, history, religion, magical theory, wizardry and clerical practice—even though no functioning magic is available to them.
This history is drawn from the original campaign briefing. Its mysteries remain unresolved unless later events reveal more.
NOW
The campaign record begins when training ends in fire.
The campaign begins
Barbarians assault the island stronghold. A Bulette tears open the training ground, the dwarven instructor entrusts Karl with a red gem, and eight survivors escape into ancient dwarven underways.
Read Day One →The forgotten proving ground
The party crosses a drowned causeway, defeats a giant crocodile and completes trials of strength, aim, balance and voice before approaching a tower behind living thorns.
Read Day Two →Beneath the underways
A rope descent leads to a forgotten laboratory. The party recovers usable alchemical flasks, a faintly pulsing lime-green gem and a strangely cold brass bell before returning past the ratmen cavern.
Read Day Three →The Order and the western mire
The party discovers a hidden watchtower of the Order, trades for equipment, then hunts Beastmen into the mire. Their druid summons a Purple Worm; Toby survives being swallowed, the druid falls and the party returns to the Order.
Read Day Six →Eyes in the dark
Two Drow bring a chained basilisk into the dwarven underways. Karl, Halen and Toby are petrified before Asuran attacks from concealment with alchemist’s fire.
Read Day Eight →Beyond the underways
An earth elemental leads the party through a tunnel wall into a demiplane of earth, where they shelter in a chamber sacred to Gond.
Read Day Nine →The demiplane of earth
The party survives clay-armoured warriors, a self-loading ballista and four wraiths before an amber portal draws Asuran between worlds.
Read Day Ten →The warning beyond
A Celestial Watcher warns that darker beings hear the party’s divine calls. Asuran begins to fade and takes Ghaunadaur’s symbol at the Library threshold.
Read Day Eleven →Fire in the primordial marsh
Toby infects a living tunnel creature before Karl calls on Kord and cures it. In the prehistoric swamp, Asuran ignites marsh gas to break a troglodyte ambush.
Read Day Twelve →Gods lost and souls adrift
The party cleanses a diseased swamp shrine, frees a trapped high priest and learns that divine essence may survive inside the dwarven gems.
Read Day Thirteen →Titans beneath the purple storm
Karl persuades a dryad to open the jungle path. Beneath a supernatural storm, Utabo confronts an unidentified dragon-demon titan while the party flees to the railway tunnels.
Read Day Fourteen →Blood beneath the ice
Days 15–21 pass strangely within the Library. On the frozen surface, a barbarian camp conceals a buried sanctuary where blood awakens an avatar of Laogzed and Karl attunes the red gem.
Read Day Twenty-Two →Where the ice is born
Glacially pure water, refreezing passages and a newborn ice elemental reveal that the advancing winter is breaking the boundary between worlds.
Read Day Twenty-Three →The fox beneath the snow
The party travels north through virgin snow, shelters beneath a deceptive ruin and meets Sebastian, a werefox and surviving member of the Order who maps the road ahead.
Read Days Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five →The wolf in the white
Beyond the wolf hunt and the corrupted polar bear, the party descends beneath the ice, discovers a dimensional mammoth-hide lodge and revives four champions of Telchur. They identify the green shards as diseased fragments of Morgion, the Black Wind.
Read Day Twenty-Five →The wall that walks
Telchur’s final ritual returns the party to the dead trees. Three new fragments raise their total to eight before they discover an immense wall of ice advancing south.
Read Day Twenty-Six →The drowned valley and the White Corpse
After crossing the drowned valley, the party learns that the glacier is Telchur’s transformed divine body. They survive Kraal, stop crystal parasites from possessing the Winter Knight and receive the first of five shard-keys leading to the Heart.
Read the Drowned Valley → Continue into the White Corpse →