The Non-Euclidian Staircase

With all apologies to Lou and Julia, whose original game world is home (or at least adopted home, in Gevrok's case) to several of my current characters, I have to go back a bit to give this its proper answer.

Back in the days of CompuServe's RPGames forum, I had the privilege to be part of Caroline Julian's sprawling Eollan campaign. Initially, I had no idea how deep and complicated this setting was, how rich its history and cultures, and how entangling its major NPCs' plots could become. I found out all of that as we played.

It started with the taciturn Emlyn, whose first scene was being refused as the human sacrifice for his tribe. To add to the insult, he was simultaneously chosen as champion for his people's Goddess, which he took as being rejected completely by the Hunter, whose service he has wanted to enter his whole life (he was, it turned out, completely wrong about that). Play continued with him pushed into a messy political situation he had no comprehension of, with several very different peoples. When last seen, he was in the company of a wolf gifted to him by the Hunter Himself and dealing with strange fey magics he had no hope of ever unraveling.

In the course of Emlyn's first adventure, he was sent off on a side-quest that took far less time to resolve than the activities of the rest of the PCs, and so I was offered a chance to create a second character, who turned out to be the selfish, snobbish, effete, and drug-addled bookkeeper Kusian. Oh, Kus was invaluable to completing the mission the PCs were faced with, but he really wasn't at all a nice person at all. Several people took up the goal of trying to make him a better person, or at least less of a danger to those around him, to differing degrees of success.

Next (and the only character here born for a face-to-face game) came Bernard, a crass mercenary hired to help in a rescue action who ignored some very good advice and retrieved a cursed axe that an evil priest had used to try to kill him. He came to what turned out to be years later, somehow freed from service to the axe, scarred and nearly dead with little memory of what he had done. I didn't get to find out just why anyone thought he was worth saving.

Then Thonia. Ahh, Thonia. A favorite character of mine, a walking contradiction. Shy, withdrawing, and inexperienced... but, at the same time, trained in dark magic and murder, probably my only PC who considers poisoning an appropriate response to a social slight. Her relationships (particularly with a kiss-stealing 'gypsy', her mysteriously unaging mentor, and a young relative with a penchant for finding secrets) were all terribly complicated and confused, and a little bit of baby-sitting turned into her strangest journey.

And, briefly, there was Lorenzo as well, a charming young schemer who had, when last seen, gotten himself in a bit deeper than he knew how to deal with, though he was quite confident he'd manage a way. The fact that he was actively working against Thonia's interests (though the two never met... which may be why Lorenzo was still alive when I last got a look into this world) made it even more interesting.

In many ways, that was the beauty of Eollan. It was large and complex enough that you could play several characters whose paths never cross, but who leave ripples other characters do encounter, sometimes decades later. There was magic and power, there were also people and simple problems that sometimes were harder to solve than those magic and power created. It also helped that the GM and players here were of the highest quality, but a lot of it was the work Carrie had put into the world, work that showed every new corner you looked around. It was also a world with extensive histories, which almost everyone believed and which were, more often than not, almost completely false. What went on behind the scenes are always more important than what was happening on the surface.

Unfortunately, real life distractions on both sides and the collapse of CIS RPGames left all of these stories unfinished. But for all of the 90s, this was the world I most looked forward to every chance I could get to play in it.