Log 155-195: Heroes Unlimited Part 7: His Power & The Forgotten Ones

Disclaimer

I lost my detailed notes from these adventures years ago and I’m guessing for some of these details, but I want to provide a coherent story with these logs so I’m piecing it together as best as possible from my remaining notes.

Log 155-195: Heroes Unlimited Part 7: His Power & The Forgotten Ones

I really messed up my game when I took time off during the summer between my first and second years of college. I was working a lot and I decided to write a novella to progress the story. I had no idea how devastating my two month break from the game and my novella would be for my players because I failed to consider the ramifications of removing so much player agency while moving the story along in the direction I wanted. We also entered a time in our lives in which everyone was working and/or going to college. Schedules were much busier and, once they had fallen out of the routine of regularly meeting to roleplay and hang out, it wasn’t easy to get my players back.

JerVerse Adventure 155: His Power

I wrote a 117-page (62,610 word) novella that I titled His Power to detail new events in the RPG saga. While I absolutely loved planning and writing the story, I must admit when I look back at the work that it clearly was written only for an audience of my players. As an epic sci-fi fantasy novel, the book contained so many characters and references to our gaming universe’s events that someone unfamiliar with our stories would surely be lost trying to make sense of the plot.

The story focused on the secret return of Zahadoom and his rise to power as he found a way to attempt to become Ruler of the Universe so he could achieve god-like omnipotent power. I wrote Zah as the ruthless, conniving villain that I know AJ always wanted him to be. In fact, out of all of my friends who read the book, AJ liked the story the most. The rest of my players rightfully complained about how I portrayed their characters. Mostly, they were bothered with how Raven betrayed the Scaline Empire to assist Zah and how easily Al and Feli were tricked by Zah. The good heroes were all sidelined: some of them were imprisoned in an HI cylinder, some of them were petrified/turned into statues, some were distracted by a mission to a “Forgotten” part of the universe, some of them were put into stasis in a mystic painting, and others were killed off.

The book also contained a subplot in which Draconias was secretly helping Zah in exchange for the children of the adventurers. When the good guys were all sidelined, Draconias and Meli took their children and raised them in the temporally-different dimension that Draconias owned. When I was writing the book, I intended for this to allow for a new generation of characters to be able to come to the forefront of the story. But why did I do that? Looking back now, I realize I should have asked my players about this. Did they want the children of their characters to take over the story? Apparently not. Oops.

I also advanced the universe over 5,000 years (though the people in the “Forgotten” space only experienced weeks and the people in Draconias only experienced about 15 years). The plot culminated with Zah and his brother Temptrick relying on Al’s son Kenshin, who had been raised by Draconias, to help Zah activate a special artifact that would shift his soul into it and allow him to ascend to godhood. The Connected Meerkat tried to stop Zah and Kenshin pulled off a special three-way soul swap that caused Kenshin to be the one to become Him (the Ruler of the Universe) while putting CM in Zah’s body and Zah in Kenshin’s (half-elf/immortal-fairy-cosmosian) body.

JerVerse Adventures 156-195: The Forgotten Ones

At this point, I need to share some bad news. Even though I no longer have my detailed notes from the campaign adventures, up to this point, I have been able to rely on general summaries, old NPC notes, and character sheets to piece together the details of the adventure sessions. Going forward, I have the opposite. Instead of those types of notes, all I have are the lists from my daily planner that I kept back then that show what days we gamed on and who was in attendance at each session.

For this part of the RPG saga I need to just provide more general summaries instead of session by session reports about the adventures. We played these sessions during my second year of college. Players included: NH, LH, BD, AC, MW, JFP, BK, TK, AJ, and BW - but initially, for about 3 months, the sessions were just NH and LH with me as the storyteller.

Femme, Scrarr, Sarxen, Pyr, and Turlock went on a mission in a portal that was said to go to a “forgotten place” in the universe because their friend the Connected Meerkat (CM) had gone in there looking for some sort of secret ancient artifact. Even though CM ran off without asking for their help, the group wanted to pursue him and find out what he was up to; the Scaline High Priest approved their mission and wished them luck. Thus they left Posnarah and the normal universe behind…

When people entered through the portal to the forgotten place, they were given a new body -  except for Femme. She found out this was because something about herself was shielding her body, protecting it from changing. She also found out that she had a bunch of forgotten memories and the NPCs of the forgotten place encouraged her to find them. Since CM had come through before the group, the "new bodies" issue meant he could be anyone.

The group explored a fantasy world with farms, where Turlock took ownership over a vampiric cow named Norman and tried to romance a witch. When Turlock and the witch argued with each other, she cursed him to temporarily leave the forgotten place (but he soon came back). When Turlock was back in the normal universe, he realized there was a time differential going on such that each day they experienced in the forgotten space was happening at the same rate as a month going by in the outside universe. Femme and the rest of the team couldn’t worry about that. They had their quests to complete.

On the trail of CM, Femme and Turlock’s team encounter ancient beings. They fought against and later befriended Mayhem and Chaos (an ancient dragon and bat duo). They found the missing Cassandra Fox and teamed up with her to solve some of her problems.

When Scaline Special Forces sent more people into the portal Femme met up with Charr, Thomas, Xoq pox, and Nova Kaine. Femme’s team discovered a “forgotten” race of ancient beings caleld the Vemniriscotts. One of the Vemniriscotts, a man named Valas, joined them for some adventures. Valas also enjoyed going on several side missions on his own.

When Lott and other members of Scaline Special Forces showed up, Femme grew more concerned about the urgency of her mission. They brought news about problems back in the Scaline Empire and the suspicion that CM was seeking an artifact that could allow him to retake the universal throne and attain absolute power. When the team found CM they realized he had been difficult to find because his body in this place was that of a woman. CM also took the time to have a child with Pyr, not because they were romantically in love, but because they wanted to help repopulate the fairy race.

The team worked together to help CM find the artifact he needed, but CM and Sarxen ran off with the item before the group could stop them. By the time the rest of their team escaped the forgotten place, they were far into the future: 5,737 years had gone by in the outside universe. It was the year 7,777 and Femme still didn’t have her forgotten memories back. They found out about how both CM and Zahadoom were thwarted in their quests to take over the universe by Al’s son Kenshin (who used his abilities to perform a triple soul swap, leaving CM in Zah’s old body (the Maximus body) and Zah in Kenshin’s body.

Due to an agreement between Temptrick and the heroes of the Scaline Empire, Temptrick took Zah 2 billion years into the future so he couldn’t hurt anyone in the present timeline.

Reflections

For a game that goes on for years and years, I think it’s important to change up the setting every once in awhile. That’s why every six months to a year I would try to send the team to a new place or a new time to have new people and places to meet and explore. I originally called the "forgotten place" the Forgotten Realms, but later realized it was confusing since D&D's planet Toril was referred to as the Forgotten Realms setting.

While I realized after the fact, based on the reactions of my players, that I shouldn’t have written the book as part of the RPG story, I really enjoyed the process of writing. Even just reading back over the book to write this log has made me want to write a new book (one that won’t impact any of my current D&D games). Hmm...