So, I'm gonna tell you straight up: I'm taking a little break from Mutant World. Now, now, calm down. Yes, there WILL be more Mutant World coming in the future. But I'm taking a little break to write up a few episodes of another series called...
I won't lie about it, Aurivyn grew out of Dungeons and Dragons.
I don't really remember when or how I first learned about Dungeons and Dragons, but I remember being completely enthralled with it once the concept was explained to me. My sister had the Basic Set, and I got to look through it and formulate impressions that have pretty much lasted my lifetime.
Played a few one-shot adventures, and collected books, adventure modules and the BECMI boxed sets. Of course, I moved up to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and 2nd Edition is the version that I played the most.
Over the years, I created a fair few continents...not really complete worlds...but definitely big enough to house several campaigns. Never really got to play them though.
Eventually I found the world of Mystara, and it quickly became one of my favorite published campaign worlds. I collected as many products related to it as I could.
Someplace along the line we had moved to another state and I lost my gaming group. Being socially awkward and the demented loner type in my younger years, I rarely tried to hook up with new players. Eventually I grew out of the habit of playing, and looked at the material as inspiration for writing and drawing.
That's the preamble, now for the beginning of the actual story!
I was taking care of my Poor Old Mother (TM) and somehow it was decided that my oldest brother's two boys should get to visit Grandma on weekends. We decided to take one at a time.
The younger of the two boys, my nephew Jason, came to visit for the weekend. I'm afraid he probably spent most of that weekend fairly bored. But he popped into my study to see what I was doing, and spotted my collection of D&D stuff, so he asked about it. I told him it was a game and that there was no board, you use your imagination instead. I told him some stuff about it and he decided he wanted to play.
So, I drew up a quick five-minute dungeon, we pulled out a sample character and a map from one the box sets and we played. I don't really remember why, but I figured he would dislike it and never want to play again.
Boy was I wrong!
So when I took him home, it was all he talked about. So of course his older brother--Richard--wanted to play, and I mus admit that I wondered how he would have handled the adventure. So he picked out a sample character and I sent him on the same adventure.
What was the adventure? Well, they lived in a rural town populated by a superstitious medieval people. A small statuette was positioned on the edge of town as a ward against evil spirits, and one day it was missing. Each of my nephews was sent off--separately and alone--to retrieve it. The search led them to a secret dungeon in the nearby forest, where they faced monsters and traps, rescued the statuette and found the person that stole it.
They both loved the game and wanted to play some more. So the next weekend, both came for a visit. They decided to keep the same characters and I sent them on a brief published adventure. Their third adventure was a watered-down version of yet another published adventure.
But for their fourth adventure, they were returning to the village where the first adventure took place and suddenly I had a problem: which one of them retrieved the statuette? They didn't go together. Some villagers would swear that Jason returned the statuette, while others would insist it was Richard. How could I fix this?
Suddenly it hit me: I had two alternate realities overlapping! The rest of the campaign was about them trying to fix this.
I've always wanted to write up these adventures, so I'm going to! I'm adding in some other elements from some of the other homebrew worlds, partly for plot purposes, partly for legal reasons--to differentiate my story-world from the published game setting.
I have written a couple of stories that take place in what would eventually become Aurivyn. The Saturday Serial story "The Crystal Cage" takes places there. So does the story "Buy the Sword" currently available in "The Adventure Sampler", which is a free gift received by the folks who sign up for my newsletter. But these were minor experiments while I was trying to hammer out the plot for the series.
I have the details worked out now, and I'm pleased to announce that I am working on the first installments of an Aurivyn story arc called "The Wrath of the Ancient Prisoner", and it all started on that weekend when my nephew wanted to play a fighter! Little did we know what that began...
Well, I'd better get to work, so until next time I wish you...
Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell
