R E F L E C T I O N S
a canticle of light and shadow
History is written by the victors. I pray that the contents of this last tome of mine, the final legacy of an old man, can be forgiven by future generations. May these words serve you, esteemed reader, better than they have served your ancestors.Ilianro, First Scribe to Emperor Matok the Terrible
Cryptic epilogue to his Chronicles of the Third Age of Darkness
 Characters |
Story Arc |
Mechanics |
| The Land |
Yaro's Crossroads |
Combat Rules |
Time is circular. This much can be agreed upon by the revered astrologers at the Court of Ten Thousand Nights. The exact nature of time, however, has yet to be determined by even the greatest scholars, for the cycle of time is not a thing to be measured, so such-and-such an event happens after a set interval. No, rather, time moves along at its own pace. One can tell the progress of time through a Turning of the Cycle through the Conjunctions, those mystical occurrences of weighty significance.
Some say that the current signs and portents point towards the ending of this Cycle, into the Fourth Age of Darkness, the time when the Serpent is ascendant in the heavens and the ancient evils are again free to walk the land. The Age of Darkness will last until heroes can be found to once again bind the entities of darkness into their ancient prisons. The length of an age is always unknown; it may be months, or years, or millenia. The Age of Darkness is a time of turmoil, when the spawn of darkness attempts to tip the balance, seeking to break the Cycle of Time forever and leave the Land in the grip of eternal darkness.
Every child knows that in the Third Age of Darkness, heroes walked the land, heroes who outwitted the Phoenix, defeated the Kraken, befriended the Golem, and soared upon the wings of the Ifrit... the heroes who risked everything to rescue a princess from the Thousand Hells from which no others have ever returned, the heroes who declined a place in the Halls of the Gods in order to remain in the Land to guide its people... the heroes who sacrificed their lives and their very souls to bind the ancient evils once more within the Eye of the Maelstrom of Souls.
Such are the tales that the young people of Yaro's Crossroads, a peasant village huddled in the obscure wilderness of the Great Polar Forest, grew up with. Adventure, though, is theoretically the farthest thing from their minds. It's the Festival of Welcoming, the celebration of the new year, the first day of spring. It's the day of coming of age. It's the day whose omens will be the harbinger of the next year to come.
The omens this year will be very interesting indeed.
Reflections is a dark fantasy roleplaying campaign, based on an original world. It owes its background and genesis to a variety of sources, from the traditional Western European "Tolkienesque" influences, to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, China and Japan, and Graeco-Roman mythological.
The campaign's unifying structure is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the concept of the Hero-Quest. Conceptually, this game owes the most to the Aria roleplaying books (for the monomyth, world building, and so forth), and to Harn (for the overall "feel"). It also draws upon political concepts from the AD&D Birthright setting, and borrows certain elements of horror from the Kult roleplaying game.
Maintained by lwl@godlike.com
Created 03.09.98 | Revised 09.01.98