D&D Group :: The Sekk Brothers

The Sekk Brothers Campaign consists primarily of a group of brothers who were cast out of their home in the savannah because of an incident involving their eldest brother and his coming of age ceremony. The ceremony involved direct contact with a monolith called The Wellspring. When Raahl touched the monolith there was a sound and the whole structure cracked. The boy and his brothers were cast out of the villiage that night after being labeled as 'tainted.'

The peoples of Sekkukahn were charged with protecting The Wellspring, and for generations it was a task they carried out without question and for this several of their elder families were given special powers. These bloodlines produced the powerful psions that made up the villiages' elder cast. Children in the village are taught of these abilities from an early age. Training in the mental arts, however, is not possible until the right of passage. And due to their current circumstance, neither of the elder brothers have been taught to wield their powers. 

The brothers have set out to uncover the reasons why they were cast out.. Along the way they have teamed up with a small band of heroes and are now working to right the wrongs befalling the world around them. 

Players:                [[ Ordered is by Age]]

Robert Wright      :: Faerna Torpor (23)

Derek Webb         :: Reddick the Ranger (23)

Chris Brinkley       :: Raahl Sekkukahn (elder twin; 19)

Zack Mock            :: Taaka Sekkukahn (younger twin; 19)

Hue Hugghis        :: Archeron Sekkukahn (16)

                            :: Falos Sekkukahn (14)

                            :: Dekkin Sekkukahn (12)

Prologue - On the Matter of Moorewind City

He smiled at the milky void of the opalescent orb as he set it in its place.

“Now, perhaps I’ll be able to leave this place.” He muttered, turning the object to its final position. The sound of it fitting into place was a near deafening, Click.

He stood up slowly and began walking away, back toward the staircase it had taken him so long to find. For the first time in centuries he smiled out of happiness. And as he ascended the first few steps he gently faded away.

*           *           *

“Everything’s so dull here,” a young girl whined as she crouched by a stream. She watched the reflection of the stars on its surface. Her mind drifting aimlessly over the many monotonous tasks that came with living in the small hilltop village called Moorewind City.

The ground shuttered a little; she felt the sudden change in the density of the air,

“It must be getting ready to rain,” she said as she got up and began walking home.

All the while, in the darkness, the lands were shifting, collecting, dividing, and resettling. The gears of creation had been reversed. And all that time had kept in measured distances were being forced into the same point in time.

“What is this now?”

The familiar path she traveled now had her facing a narrow space between two stone walls. The stone was carved smooth and clean; only showing blemishes where the occasional layer of sediment had crumbled out, finally freed after eons of being trapped within the stone.

She doubled back deciding to take a more open path through the fields outside the village. Following the smooth walls, she eventually discovered an opening into the fields she had loved as a child, and learned to hate as she had grown older.

“Stupid wheat,” she muttered, remembering the paints of the planting season just a few months before. She followed the curve of the stone around and examined how it led lengthwise through the field.

She didn’t notice the sudden shift in the field just at the edge of her vision, where the roaming distances of wheat had suddenly been separated and now a fresh stone wall was beginning to materialize in the gap.

She wandered on, gently running her fingers across the smooth stone. She noticed as she went several small boulders on the ground, with smooth sides, much like the newly formed walls.      As she walked on towards her home, one of these rocks she passed slipped downward into the earth, a faint, “Oooff...” was heard as it landed on the burrowing lad below the ground.

This young gentleman was confused by the sudden arrival of soft dirt in the stone caverns he and his clan inhabited, a place that had come to be called Grumbles Town. Though at the moment, he was at a loss as to how to get there. The cave system he had spent years traveling and mining had suddenly become blocked by smooth walls of a soft material that most would call dirt. Though this eager young dwarf had no idea what he should call it. And when he attempted to dig through the wall he found it gave easily, but was followed shortly by a rather abrupt thud on his head. For a stunned moment he observed his assailant as it lay on the cavern floor in front of him.

He turned and followed the caves back the other direction.

“I hope there aren’t any more of those odd walls, might make getting home near impossible,” he said gruffly, rubbing his head.

The caves in this area he usually found to be uninteresting, since much of the ore had long since been mined out, it was a quaint little passage that led down past the underground waterfall and then back up to one of the surface vents. Before it reached the vent there was a descending cave that would lead back to the central cavern.

Walking along he encountered another of the strange dirt formations, though this one did not completely cover the cave, instead it appeared as a sliver jutting out from one side. When he touched it, most of it collapsed to the floor.

Ages away, the girl had come upon a curious hole in the stone wall, as she was exploring the cave opening; she slipped and plummeted down the steep embankment into the depths below.

“Oh! Aaaaagg! Oomph.” She wailed, bouncing down the vent and landing on the stone floor a little ways past the junction in the cave.

He peered at it intensely before moving forward cautiously.

Before him sitting angrily and trying to rub several stretches of muddy rock and dampness out of itself was a vaguely dwarvenoid creature. “Owwww,” it muttered.  Although, he thought, it could be a mud creature.

At this point the being before him offered a variety of questions;

Where was it from?

And why was it here?

Could it be here for him exclusively?

Was it perhaps, here to offer him some violence for a reason as of yet (and possibly never) revealed to him?

Was it in collusion with the rock which had attacked him earlier?

Why was it so tall?

“You look a might stumpy.”

“What?” He exclaimed, “I’m a proper dwarven height for my age!” Quickly adding for the extreme offence and because it was true.

“It talks…” She mumbled quietly, her mud crusted face twisting in appalled disbelief. “It’s a tree stump that talks.”

“How dare ye!” He bellowed. “I know nothing of the stump or this tree to which you refer!”

As she peered past the offended little tree stump she noticed a change taking place in the caverns behind him. The girl, unfamiliar with cave systems, was not sure but didn’t think that there should suddenly be a rather large gap in the tunnel.

“Do they always do that?” She said, pointing behind him.

“Do what?” He spun around so fast that he nearly collided with the now solid expanse of dirt between them and the junction. “Serves me right for my curiosity,” he mumbled to himself, ‘a curious dwarf is most likely to be a dead dwarf,’ is what my momma used to say.” He added proudly.

“Alright then, I take it that means ‘no.’ Oh an nah, where am I?” She asked, of no one in particular.

“Why, you’re trespassing on the common mines of Grumbles Town!” He bellowed at her, trying to assert his authority. “I have half a mind to tie you up and turn you over to the guard; if I can get back to the guard that is.”

“What do you mean ‘if’? Surely you know your way around this place.” She snapped, now feeling very irritated with herself for falling into this mess.

*           *           *

Carn had always liked working in the ore refinery. He’d always thought it the proper form of monotonous labor for a dwarf of his intellect. For that reason he was rather upset to find that his refinery was split very wide by a rather quaint bit of grassy hilltop and a small thatched roof hut. The hut, it would seem, was collapsing in the way that thatched roof structures collapse when more than half of their walls are no longer with them. More unsettling was the rather tall, pointy eared creature, which had a sharp mind on a bit of rock on the end of a short stick he had placed between Carn and himself.

“What’ve you done to our village?” The creature had barely finished saying before being crushed by what Carn thought looked to be a large piece of ceiling.

A few bow strings forward of Carn’s new hill; Li’arrli was explaining the longer bits of little bits of rocks on the ends of sticks. And why elves kept such a keen mind on them. In as few words as possible.

Even firing, his eyes adjusted to the pitch of the cavern Li’arrli began to see broken clouds and the stars beyond. There came suddenly a terrific crash behind him as a large building exploded, leaving only a large stone. Without a thought Li’arrli was in a dash.

Across the square a fire burns. Around it a small collection of drums and abandoned food stuffs. The fire had barely noticed the change in scenery, what it did notice was a dramatic change in the number of smaller flames around it. Fires are very sensitive to that sort of thing. The fire had become worried.

It knew the bright blue flames, very reverent. They had kept the fire well into old age. An age not many fires grow to understand.  It had found shelter in the rain and fresh kindling to be fed. These bright blue flames had kept him well in earnest.

But now there were crimson, darker licks in occasion. They streamed out through the dark and sated their hunger for the blue flames. Even in the depths of the darkness that filled the fire’s world he could sense an older flame; one that had burned for ages in the deep molten forges of Grumbles Town. It was a fire so venerable that it had seen the arch of generations and knew of far more than the shifts of the moon. A bit of trivia the younger fire was quite proud of understanding. Suddenly, the fire understood why the new flames where so dim, they burned slow over eons.

For several minutes the two fires conversed while the crimson and blue flames warring around them. A conversation between fires looks, to us, like a faint interpretive dance and an occasional bout of steam. The fire told the history of those who had kept it so long; a task that took little time when compared to the first decades of history the older fire was telling.

Before the venerable forge had time to continue there was a soft “fooff” and the younger fire had gone, smothered by the weight of a wall collapsing on it. A thought crosses the sagacious forge’s heat.  Pity, I was just getting to enjoy the company. It noticed that most of the blue flames had been doused or gathered up, and it knew the chaos was over.

As a Matter of Introductions

Here I will display the active dialogue of a D20 system role playing game. Loosely fitted to the Dungeons and Dragons Core Rulebooks 3.5 and arranged in an impromptu world based in the imagination of those involved.

I find it necessary to discuss the nature of the role playing game. I always tell people that the game is very similar to storytelling, in and that, I am telling a story and he/she gets to play a role in that story. It is because of this that I often refer to it as Active Storytelling. While playing the game, we attempt to personify our characters to give more of an illusion of their depth. This may sound silly or even horrifying to some people; it is simply a pretext that can result in useful dialogue for the story. In the general sense the game goes like this: the players are put in a fictitious arena where they are free to do as they please. Behind this initial state there is a GM or Game Master, hence forth called the GM because Game Master sounds completely ridiculous. The GM is essentially playing the world, any situation that our player encounter is more or less the GM trying to kill or confuse them.

Some people may have an aversion to the idea of pretending to be someone else. The irony is that modern psychiatric study has proven that a form of catharsis is quite healthy for most people. There is a concern with some people that they may get completely lost in their characters and use them to escape reality. As the GM I watch carefully for these behaviors, as they are dangerous for both the individual and the game. Our purpose is not to divide ourselves from reality, but rather to have a good time hanging out with some friends for two or three hours.

The PC or Player Character is essentially based in the imagination of the player. The players are given choice of race and class as well as an abundance of skills, feats, equipment, and (in some cases) spell craft. A Dungeons and Dragons Character sheet is basically just a very large math equation with specialized spaces for note taking. The Idea is to let the player invent the character as he/she desires and then earn improvements for that character. The reason for this is that the player is asked to provide the depth of the character. And the Character is then asked to resolve the imaginary situation created by the GM.

There are two things that must be understood. In the generic RPG campaign the players are most likely a group of heroes who must diffuse some evil plot to destroy the world. On a closer level characters must carry out smaller mission style encounters and tasks. “Escort so and so to such and such place and find out whatever.” Through these little escapades they discover and vital clues and innuendoes about the true goal of their campaign.

In these games the GM acts as everyone and everything that is not a player character, these characters are referred to as Non-Player Characters or NPC’s. NPC’s must fill the void of people who inhabit the imaginary cities and country sides. They are the creatures that would kill the PC and the allies that could rush to their aid. They are the villains who would destroy everything or those that would entreat the PC’s to stop them.

These are the standard paths of any RPG, but this does not mean that they must remain as such. Players can be troublesome; they can meander about and do nothing or set out to destroy the world themselves. The option is theirs to take.

As a writer these games provide the critical subflooring for a good book or short story. Through the game that I am inventing for my players I hope to discover and develop an enjoyable fantasy story about a group of people and their quest. My process will be to take the events that we create in game and transcribe them into an episodic novel.