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An introduction by Ike Bronzehammer
There be a million stories in the realm betwixt n’ between, the world set between yer real world, which we call Gaia, and many fabled fantastic and wonderous worlds that comprise The Realms. They said that The Realms were created by Angels of Gaia’s deity, Yeshu, to satisfy their curiosity over why their Father created Gaia, little do they know that it was tara’mont to biting that apple in the Garden er’ Eden. Or that’s what Yeshu would’ve called it…if He considered what they did a sin.
But while Yeshu did approve of what they did, He dinnae want their creations to interfere with his, so He an’ they created this world, Penumaria. Or so dat’s the prevailin’ wisdom. Take it what ye will. Besides, Yeshu is still the sole Deity who solely created and runs all of Gaia still, does he not?
Well, don’ answer that.
What ye are bout to hear is one of the many stories this world holds. Stories that we all tell ourselves, stories that’ve been forgotten, and stories that are t’ be rediscovered. We gots stories of triumph and of achievement, and stories of tragedy and of loss. Stories of the Celestials, the angelic hosts sent by the Yeshu and his friends in The Realms, to watch over it in dere’s stead. Of the Titans, immense beings of elemental chaos, which challenged the creation and tempered it ‘til it was strong. Of the First Age and its wonders, and that Age’s Sundering by the Forcelords. And of the many people who struggle ta pick up the pieces and rebuild the world into a better era than the one before.
One such story exists in the continent of Refugina. A patch of independent land kept free from th kingdoms surrounding it so that they can have a neutral meeting ground to discuss matters in peace. This autonomous region is named after its sole city, a sleepy village named Oakroot. Oakroot isn’t much to conquer or claim anyway, it’s just a humble waystation on an intersection of well-traveled trade routes both by road and river.
Okay, so de’r not so humble. But that’s not th’ reason why Oakroot is left be by th’ other kingdoms. Dat reason is that this village is near a very special forest. The Forest of Magic. This forest lies on a spring of magic, infusing all the flora and fauna in it with its intense flow of mana, resulting in a forest that not only boast unusual and dangerous beings, but its own sentience as well. Some say that the Forest of Magic has a will, a heart, and a soul of its own. But it dinnae gots a mouth, so the forest seeks out and takes in a special someone ta speak fer it. A ‘Witch of the Woods’ as they call her. (It’s usually a woman, preferably older, which explains the chosen pronouns.)
In exchange for being its protector and intermediary, the forest grants the Witch of the Woods its near-unlimited supply of magical energies, bringin’ her capabilities beyond what she’d thought possible, let along able to achieve without cheatin’ death. And yeah, they could live a very long time.
This is the story of th’ Twenty-First Witch of the Woods. Princess Amber Merichello, Mistress of the Touhou Arts. Dis tale starts off with her life as the apprentice of the Twentieth Witch of the Woods, Grandmother Nalladrie Emerisle. Followed up by the adventures and misadventures, trials and triumphs, twists and turns, and all sorts of other events on the way to her place in the heralding of the great Second Age.
Some say her story officially starts one starry night in the Forest of Magic, but I say nay-nay. It actually starts from another realm. And just just any realm. Amber nae calls it out in the open, but she has an accent that sounds exotic to some, but Amber herself just dismisses it as an country bumpkin accent.
Which is what Evansville, Indiana is supposed to be from what she told me.
I don’t know much ‘bout Evansville as well, and probably care less. All I care t’ know about Evansville is dat it had an abandoned fairground she wanders into when she needs ta think. This fairground had a dark ride, or so they called it, where people ride dwarf-style carts on track which takes ‘em through various scenes of adventures. Says that the ride starts with the tracks going through the mouth of a big ogre with green scales and long teeth. Meh.
One night, when her homeland was in some sort of melodrama I wouldn’t care much ‘bout, Amber wandered inside that ride. Maybe to get out of a storm, or to find a place to hide and wait out whatever was going on. Maybe she just wanted a find a place to sleep, under some fake mushroom.
But she walked inside it…and kept walking further in…and further in some more, though some bright sparkling mists that kept egging her forward…as she kept walking, further then she thought the building she was in contained…
And then, she kept walking until she found herself in a completely different place altogether…
A Content Warning…and an opportunity.
Before we start with Amber of the Woods, I must give you this heads up: Chapter 3 of this Episode is going to have some modern-day real-world content, including touching on some political and geopolitical themes just a little bit. The date Chapter 3 takes in should give you a clue over what is happening around them. (Please excuse the tangent both in this part of the story and here because I’m going to take some of the opinions I have and make something creative out of it.)
Neither Amber Merichello nor Donnovan are by any stripe political. In fact, at the time being discussed, they are in a national park, miles from anything resembling a drama. Be it a fight Amber had a couple of months earlier, supply chain issues that kept Donnovan away from his daughter, or any election by any sort. But as hard as I try to sanitize some parts of the scene…it just couldn’t be completely yanked from there.
So I switched tactics: The material I’m using in the passage is going to stay in the passage and not come into play with the rest of it. It’s purely backstory. Therefore, I decided to just plow through it and once I got past it, leave it behind me and move on. It’s only part of a flashback and nothing else.
But while I’m doing so, and if you can forgive the tangent, I’d like to share with you about another campaign setting I created; created over my fears of where the Current Year is headed. Let me introduce you to the Aethercoil setting.
I thought of Aethercoil while seeing two news feeds on different screens. On one screen, I saw Antifa tearing down a statue because they were convinced should not be seen in public today for being ‘problematic.’ On the other screen, ISIS was smashing down a whole UNESCO heritage site, and with it they rend every little scrap of history, sculpture, and artwork to dust and rubble and ash because they claim that it is against their religion.
I kept looking at one screen and the other and back. It was just like Animal Farm. What had happened to the scarved-up faces of the people on those two screens, I turned to look from Antifa to ISIS, and from ISIS to Antifa, and from Antifa to ISIS again…until it was impossible for me to say which was which. You had extremists on both sides, smashing, burning, and tearing down culture, even their supposedly common culture…until there was nothing left but dust and ashes.
That’s what brought me the idea for Aethercoil. Would this be the fate of Gaia in Tales of Penumaria? God help me if this is true.
Aethercoil is set in the real world, three to five centuries into the future. But instead of anything resembling a futuristic utopia, the world regressed back to the Middle Ages and maybe even to the bronze or even the stone age. It was as if our modern era never even existed. That is because everything even tangential to our Current Year, or for that matter, any recent history we know about, was not just removed from existence but from memory as well. This isn’t just the mere changing of history, but its total eradication. Tearing everything down and replacing it with nothing. Even the memory of knowing that they have lost something was lost. The Current Year has become a Dark Age, and with its disappearance, any and all minute progress in anything vanished with it. And humanity has perished for the lack of knowledge.
It started with something too many people find possible in real life: The collapse of modern society. In the wake of this collapse, a dystrophic authoritarian tyranny rose up, combining aspects of 1984, Brave New World, and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I call it ‘The True Order,’ and it’s what I think is the ultimate destination of what Critical Theory in all its forms will take us. (As I said, excuse the tangent, I’m getting to a point here.)
Critical Theory says that every social dynamic and interaction has with it an oppressed and an oppressor. No exceptions. The True Order tries—and in their eyes succeeds—in negating any possibility of there being an oppressed and oppressor by ensuring that everyone is equal. And by equal, they mean identical: they removed any differences a person would have with another, with the hopes that they would erase everything that would make one person better than another. That does more than just mean economic opportunity or education, but right down to the many differences a human being can have. This includes all the checked boxes in Twitter: Race, Sex, Gender, Ethnicity, Skin Color, everything that can be a checked box. That alone is enough of a horror, but it gets worse.
The True Order managed to unite everyone under a single personhood with a single culture and a single kind of being. Nobody’s smarter or dumber, nobody’s different in any way, and nobody has any differentiating characteristic. They all have the same face, the same height, the same skin tone, the same hair, the same eyes, the same everything. They even did away with names and just call themselves numbered ‘units.’ Every Unit is a true equal with each other because Every Unit is the same, right down to the DNA.
Their thoughts were so conditioned that they couldn’t think of any thought beyond 288 characters, and that’s including Emojis. That’s right, they would speak in acronyms and emojis. Any form of speech or thought or idea that was only held by one ‘unit’ was not only punished but erased, even if it means removing the brain cells that held it.
But the True Order didn’t stop there. They went further. Much further.
The True Order did away with anything that would put one society or culture above another…by erasing any shred of history and culture. Not just statues and old relics were put to the bonfire, and not just books, records, artwork, inventions, and even people who had a cherished memory or heritage or even a different way of thinking. Any form of art, literature, invention, any form of stored knowledge, historical records, religion, science, philosophy, anything that the dystopia did not find useful, they burned it to ashes, burned the ashes, and then salted the earth the ashes lied on. Anything…anything…that is different or unique is destroyed, and even just saying what it is would get the Unit that said it killed and their body reduced to spare parts.
Eventually, human history as a whole could not be remembered at all. Even the thought of the mass forgetting of what was a vital part of their existence was even forgotten.
This combination of a lack of genetic diversity (I mean, the True Order only had one single strand of ‘perfected’ DNA) and the utter lack of knowledge, culture, shared history, or even identity beyond being a numbered Unit no different than another caused this dystopia to collapse as well.
But something else happened in this collapse. The True Order rose to replace the previous society that fell. When the True Order fell…there was nothing to take up the place. Nothing but ash, rubble, and salted dirt. What was once modern civilization is now a mere deserted concrete and asphalt wilderness. There might have some things left, in various stages of being reclaimed by nature, but nobody would have a single idea about them. There was no link to any form of heritage, culture, history, nation, or personhood.
The human race was facing extinction, perishing by the lack of knowledge.
There’s a bit of a stretch at this point, but they get pulled back from the brink by an outside force. Maybe Mother Nature brought back elves and dwarves, maybe primitive tribes end up supplying the needed genetic diversity, maybe it’s Ancient Aliens. It could happen. But whatever happened that preserved Humans like a human would try to preserve an endangered species of animal, it also transform Earth into a world of magic, dragons, monsters, castles and dungeons.
But even though this outside force managed to pull Humanity back from extinction, Humanity still had a difficult time rebuilding their lives and their civilization. Without a common history or a known culture, Humanity had to rebuild itself from scratch and sometimes that proves impossible, especially when you don’t have a clue over what came before. The human race was still perishing for the lack of knowledge, and many peoples just wandered around without anything resembling hope. Some of them wouldn’t even know what they’re supposed to do beyond hunting, gathering, and a little farming until an errant cut or cough killed them. Some didn’t even try.
Until a spark of a lost age returned.
People found out that Earth’s lost Human History was not completely destroyed. Relics of the past still exist, hidden by the torches and pyres in dungeons, towers, deep in ruins, and tombs. An age of exploration and re-discovery begins (which is where Aethercoil begins) as adventurers go to various locations to find what is hidden and…if they can figure out what to do with it, find a way to re-incorporate it back into their world.
Would that be a good thing, though?
I’ll keep Aethercoil in the back for now. If enough people are interested, I’ll delve more into it, maybe even incorporate some parts of it in Penumaria.
Thank you for letting me ramble a bit. I hope at least we can start a conversation about this idea, even though I wouldn’t be able to do much about it now.
Download the PDF of the first Episode of Amber of the Woods at this URL: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AjNYReLtj6OInwHfAJemHeaZ__Wk
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Tales of Penumaria is Copyrighted ©2022 David “David Foxfire” Gonterman, and is licensed under the ‘BY-NC-SA’ Creative Commons License. All Dungeons & Dragons related material is available under the Open Game License from Wizards of the Coast. Follow this link for credits and details on the licenses.