The Setting
As most mornings are in February in Hagerstown in western Pennsylvania, the 11th was a cold one. More than a foot of snow had just finished falling as dawn crept over the horizon, and for a few hours the whole world seemed at peace. Coffee was brewed and the morning news read, and life looked like it would go on for one more average day.
And then it happened. A flashing light in the sky, so bright it burned to watch. It hovered in place, emanating a blinding and pulsing light, then crashed to the ground in the wooded outskirts of Hagerstown. Dozens of people witnessed it and reported o the police. The local law enforcement didn't know what to do, so they tried contacting the state police with no luck, so they reached out to Harrisburg with no success.
People around town noticed a complete inability to communicate with the outside world, but all communication
in town remained effective. The internet loaded the local newspaper website, ads and all, and people could text their neighbors readily, but every attempt to reach somebody outside of Hagerstown was met with failure.
Similarly all travel outside of the area was impossible. The highways weren't destroyed, but people found it impossible to leave the greater Hagerstown area no matter how hard they tried. It was impossible to leave, and likewise it seemed nobody ever came into Hagerstown from the outside world. Not that they ever did, western PA town off the main highway and all that, but there was zero travel in or out.
The thing that crashed in the woods remained too bright to look at for days, and the town grew terrified of what it meant. On the 15th the glowing subsided and the strange object was shown to be, well, I guess it could be called a tower. Like something out of the Lord of the Rings movies, it was a towering spire reaching to the sky, composed it seemed of a single piece of stone or metal.
As the worried townsfolk gathered outside of the tower, scared silly but unable to look away, first contact was made. A door twenty feet in height opened at the base of the tower, and from it stepped a... a wizard? Yes, it was impossible not to see, an elderly man crooked and bent as the staff that kept him standing, wearing blue and white robes with golden accents, and a tall, pointy hat.
He looked at the crowd, and anybody who was there would remember exactly what he said when he first spoke, "It looks like I've come to the wrong place, but it is what it is. Gonna be here awhile, I think, I'm sorry for the changes to be made but I think you'll come to like them. Anyway, it's time for my nap. Talk to you soon."
And he went back into the tower, and that was the last anyone had seen of him since. His words were met with that carefully constructed sense of doubt we've all honed in our "show me" society, but damn, he wasn't lying.
It started in the forests. The trees seemed to grow overnight; the old growth trees to the north became a primeval forest with a canopy as tall as the redwoods, and the scrubby little fields around town grew into a mosaic of forest. Soon all of Hagerstown was surrounded by a massive forest, and from inside the woods came strange sounds, screams and shouts and sometimes the smell of smoke.
Local flora and fauna changed, where all deer became trophy bucks and Miss Bayeux's raspberries hellebore grew to staggering beauty and size. People's homes remained recognizably modern but were developing thatched roofs, front gardens with herbs and medicinal plants. Street lights began to flicker with a never-dying flame instead of ugly incandescent bulbs.
And the people. Oh, the people. They changed, too, but people were more variable in their reactions to what the newspaper called "Wizardification". It seemed the forests and the natural world were very eager to adopt these changes, and homes and streets were neutral to the changes, sometimes changing and sometimes not, but the people were confusing. Some of them resisted the changes, even to this day, and they have been effectively unchanged. It causes them no stress or ill health, they simply said "No" to what was happening, and themselves and their surroundings were largely unchanged.
Others embraced these changes readily and quickly began to turn into something different. Recognizable as their past selves, but... different. The bullies became orcish in their size and stature (and smell) and the studious became monk-like in their demeanor and presentation. Everybody reacted differently to the Wizardification, including you.
Proposed Challenges and Features
As if blending two ways of life from scratch wasn't enough, these are the proposed challenges and features characters may encounter. These items are what I've predicted at the time this story was created; additional features and challenges will include a date detailing when they were added.
- Basic Survival: I don't mean hunting for your own food and fighting for shelter, but basic survival in this new world requires a flexible skill set. That old couple who hates change still has their little corner grocery store with familiar amenities (and curiously shows no signs of running out of stock), and people can still go into their jobs. It's a very modern world with the typical requirements of job, shelter, food. But that world is increasingly changing, and people are finding themselves pushed in one direction or the other. It's difficult to balance a 9 to 5 with time to get a cup of coffee in the morning when you have spells you need to master at home before bedtime. This sort of survival is more about your inner survival.
- Magic, Monsters, Dragons: Rumors abound of weird stuff going on in the forests around town, strange creatures that roam and are getting ready to enter the town to take what they will. And magic is real, oh yes, it's real, but people are clumsy with it. Magic isn't about mastering a set of rules like one could learn from a physics class, it's about seeing, sensing, feeling the world around them in a different way. Nobody can teach another how to use magic (except maybe The Wizard), it's a very personal journey.
- The Wonders of a Fantastic World: Have some fun in this setting! Go wild with the imagination, imagine and tell whatever you want to tell. Create strange creatures and wonderful plants and decide that your sorceress likes to come home after a day harvesting herbs to drink a beer and watch some TV with her cat.
On NPCs
I have a skeleton crew of NPCs planned but want the prospective players here to be the ones who are the big to-do's of the story. After an initial roundup of players and characters we can start filling out necessary named NPC roles, but NPCs should be minor and in the background.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:13, Wed 29 Apr 2020.
