The Citadel of the Shadowlords Part 1

TL;DR: An introduction to the situation, backstory, catch up and where we are when we began.

The Citadel of the Shadowlords

Introduction

In 1990, I ran a campaign with maps, I really go into my maps, to make sure players could visit places more than once, I wrote a bunch of index cards, Major Cities, Smaller cities, Villages and Hamlets with details such as population, major industries, major locations of interest. On the green cards were those locations of interest, and the pink cards were meant to be NPCs of interest..

I'm not 100% sure why I never really filled them all out, maybe I wasn't such a studious GM as I am now, maybe the work and effort seemed too difficult for a 15yr old.. Anyway I managed to write out around 30-40 cards.

After opening a gaming club, writing a new game system, traveling the world and returning, I started a new gaming group at uni in my spare time, but instead of going to a lot of effort to start a new scenario as I did in Moscow, I wanted to test some new rules, but didn't want to mess up the new world with rules testing, so when I unpacked all my roleplay things in '12, I found this box of cards.. and thought.. hey.. thats interesting!

Curiously, I had added a land called RUASHA and a city called MOSKVAAR as parts of the lands, years before I had a thought to go there, but I guess I did watch a lot of bond movies in my youth.

Before I left Australia to travel, I wanted to bring my roleplay plots to a nice close, So I built an adventure about a secret cult that wished to destroy the world, and claim all the souls for their own purposes. One of the players was a spy for the cult, and through him, the evil shadowlords managed to do what they set out to do. All characters, the whole world, all destroyed..

Meta-plot I had enough of trying to write a roleplay game, without any real world experience, I wanted to make a decent system, a proper world, but this was before prominent internet in our lives, so I was going to do things old school. Travel.

Now, 2013, I'm testing the 4th edition of my system, I have all new players and I have this world to use.. but when I'm almost ready to publish, its time to port the characters over to the 'real world' and follow the original plot of the old world.. its destruction..

Yet the players have decided to thwart the GM, and save the world...

Backstory

In one group,There are six Uni students, they know my world is dark, dangerous and difficult. They also know that I have had seven GMs and over 100 players play in this world, live, and sometimes when they bump into other characters, such as heroes, they can't quite be sure they're not dealing with other PCs from another game.

So the players are always trying to mess with the world, so their 'marks' will be seen by other players in other games.. If that means making new forms of magic, or screwing with local guilds to never accept adventurers again.. so be it..

Knowing full well, that their current campaign is set in a 'past plot campaign' and that at some point (31 Dec 2015) the world is going to be destroyed, they decided it would be fun to mess with this too.. by stopping it.

So, There are five groups, Three run by myself, Two by two other GMs all in the same area, all players with the general knowledge (from multiple ways of in story exposition) that someone, somewhere is trying to destroy the world, and the flow of magic seems to centre on a site within the forests of Eastern Alexer.