Looking Back....

Already?

This coming Thursday marks the five-year anniversary of the beginning of my making public the adventures of Thorn & company. What began as a jumble of notes scribbled across four one-subject notebooks has grown into a 300,000-word (and counting) behemoth. 

It was supposed to be a travelogue, describing a druid’s journey through the various nations of the Known World. Somewhere along the way, he stumbled upon an exiled Imperial Princess and became embroiled in a struggle that began a thousand years before the Great Rain of Fire.

The initial cast of eight has swelled to nearly two dozen. The initial storyline has split into four distinct paths, spanning nearly five thousand years of revised Mystaran history. 

• The mainline Chronicle takes place shortly before the “present day” of the 1000A.C. Gazetteer-era.
• Rowena’s Crystal Chronicle examines life on Skothar shortly after Uther’s declaring Blackmoor independent of the Thonian Empire, and details the Twins’ involvement in the DA-series of modules;
• The Throne of Stars play by post flashes forward nearly a thousand years, to the decade(s) prior to the Great Rain of Fire;
• The Handmaidens of Petra was supposed to be story hour coverage of other basic adventure modules. It has since become something of a [Spoiler] time travel adventure/history lesson [/spoiler]for four five of Silva’s Army, currently stranded in [spoiler] Traladara during Halav’s time. [/Spoiler] 

Thorn & company’s journey is already fairly well mapped out in my head; I know where they are bound, where they will end up eventually. Rowena’s tale, too, has a definite end point, some three hundred years before the beginning of the Throne of Stars campaign’s events. Where the Handmaidens' adventures will take me may as well be Zirchev's best guess...

However many years it takes to tell these tales, I will enjoy the ride. I can only hope you’ll all still be with me there, reading along…