And of course they explored about a thousand dungeons and had a thousand adventures. There was the urban conspiracy one. The icy northern one that explained the elven tribes, the one about the swamplands, the one about the dwarven empires, the weird plane-traveling one, the forestlands, the drowned ruins one, the vampire one.
The Heroes saved the world and acquired vast riches, as one does, but when next we would meet them they were always back to square one, broke and first-level. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
After that… things got weird. If you paged through enough rule supplements and unofficial spin-offs you could find rules for almost anything—rules in case characters dimension-traveled into the Old West or postapocalyptic Earth, for example.
The Soul Gem turned the time line back on itself, stretching and looping it forever. The Heroes even turned up in the First Age from time to time. Rumor had them fighting in the final siege of Chorn, or seeking out Adric from his wandering years and putting him on the path homeward. People said Leira’s child was Adric’s and was the true heir to the crown before he fell. Or that one day the far-future heroes Pren-Dahr, Ley-R4, Loraq, and Brendan Blackstar would travel back in time to save the Third Age, or perhaps doom it, whatever that means—people are always dooming things in fantasy. The Third Age kind of doomed everything anyway.
As I thought of it, the First Age was like childhood, years of long-ago upheaval, trauma, and unbearable longing, during which our characters were formed.
The Second Age was high school. Battle lines were drawn, alliances hardened into place, strategies tested, scars acquired. The crimes committed in this Age would fester for millennia.
And the Third Age was everything after, when we went our separate ways and order was restored but nothing quite forgiven or forgotten. There was also a Fourth Age no one much bothered with, which marked the retreat of magic into mere legend and superstition and the ascendancy of humankind—i.e., the time when we grew up and got boring and our hearts, generally speaking, died.
I gathered there was a certain amount of armchair quarterbacking in the lower ranks of Black Arts, about how we were a little too loyal to the Realms of Gold thing. Don still believed the franchise had legs, that with the right game behind it, RoG could be as big as Final Fantasy or Warcraft, with bestselling tie-in novels, conventions, maybe a movie. But for now it was just another medieval pastiche, a sub-Narnian, off-brand Middle-earth, waiting to be a forgotten part of somebody’s adolescence, all the knights and ladies and dragon-elves left behind along with high school detention and Piers Anthony novels.
On the other hand, there were, out there, players who genuinely cared about the third Correllean dynasty, who read the cheaply ghostwritten tie-in novels, who were emotionally invested in the war against the House of Aerion, and who considered the death of Prince Vellan Brightsword in the Battle of Arn to be an event that genuinely diminished the amount of goodness and light in the world.
But it wasn’t as if Black Arts suffered from an exaggerated reverence for its own intellectual property. Maybe at first, but all the high-fantasy gravitas in the world wouldn’t survive the sight of Lorac hiking up his robes to nail a tricky hardflip-to-manual transition in Pro Skate ’Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich.
The four crowded awkwardly into the skate shop.
“What are we doing here?” Brennan said, gazing around at racks of boards and skatewear.
“I think it’s important,” whispered Leira. “I think we’re here for a reason.”
Lorac scowled. “This is humiliating.”
“Shred regular or goofy-foot?” asked the teenager behind the counter.
“Regular?” Brennan said uncertainly. Leira and Prendar shrugged—regular would be fine. After an agonizing pause, Lorac replied, “Goofy.”
The skate shop attendant showed them an array of possible T-shirts. Lorac chose a black one. He was a necromancer, after all.
They found themselves in the parking lot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Elementary.
“Skate!” cried the arch-lich. “Skate!”
Brennan scanned the others’ faces grimly. “Aye. We will skate.”
They learned to ollie and nollie and heelflip and air it out and, yes, grind. Prendar kept an eye out for cop cars while Leira tentatively worked out half-pipe moves in a concrete spillway to a grunge-and-speed-metal sound track. Lorac had promise as a tech skateboarder; Brennan went in for vert. When perfected, his double-handed Decapitation-Vacation 360-degree grab raked in a huge bonus.
They improved. They got licensing deals and won competitions. And there really were