The Story Begins

This teaser was written by Hannah Lee, Theme Master for the 2021 D&D Super Dungeon. For details concerning the upcoming Super Dungeon, visit our web page.

First, they crawled out of the sea, weak limbs adapting to their first steps, ears twitching against the wind’s whispers,  eyes wincing and delicate skin peeling from the sun’s unfiltered spears cast through a vast blue sky. They could not speak then, but there was a touch of the magic on them already, a frail connection to a creature they only dreamed of in the dark chill of night: a vast slumbering beast beneath the deepest crevasse of the ocean.

These dreams changed as they changed. Some lost their scales and grew feathers. Some bristled with sparse hair, then grew sleek and slender to match the lengths of shadows beneath their forest homes. Generations passed and the touch of magic that made them look at the world with terror and emotion eventually saturated into their bones and brains and gave them… words.

Captivated by the power and beauty of their own forms, they found new ways to explain their own beginnings: a white bull mother crested out of the ocean waves, a cackling goddess with long fingers and the glint of dice between them, a moving speck of light that cast life into each animal and tree and rock to watch them grow. The stories they told entangled with their connection to the old one’s magic and gave shape to gods with freedom and wills of their own. These gods loved the storytelling mortals, but felt danger in every passing moment–a danger they could not explain, but threaded into their very existence. This fear brought them to open portals into the chaos beyond the Material Plane and create their own safe havens, their own children, their own worlds. Tenuously, they siphoned power and gave back only what the storytelling mortals asked of them. They needed that power, they reasoned.

They needed to save it for themselves.

For deep beneath the surface of this new and shining world, the old one slept. And as long as the old one slept, there was always a chance he’d wake.

Until the day the Six came into being–and everything began to die.