The Fey Isles are an archipelago featuring all of the following and more: ancient Fey wars, mysterious sky islands, serene Elven ecologies, beautiful coastal cities; terrifyingly experimental Gnomish airships; and vast subterranean libraries! They’re inspired by the art of Studio Ghibli, the worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea and Diana Wynne Jones’ Magicians of Caprona and Howl’s Moving Castle, and classic D&D settings like Ebberon and Forgotten Realms.
Your characters are all members of the Larksong Archive, a guild of adventurer archivists, cartographers, scholars, and explorers. Clients in need of the Larks’ unique talents send jobs to the Archive, which any member can claim and perform. Perhaps someone needs a mysterious island mapped, an ancient Fey artefact recovered, or a rival scholar’s plots foiled. Sometimes the jobs are legal… and sometimes less so. With completed jobs come glory, riches, and, of course, the respect of clients - who may ask you to complete even more challenging tasks!
As you play, you might begin to uncover greater secrets about the world of the Fey Isles, and begin to discover who else in these lands is searching for hidden, forgotten knowledge.
Your character may have joined the Archive for a multitude of reasons: profit; fame; a zeal for discovery; a side hustle while fulfilling some personal quest; duty; a love of knowledge; or perhaps you’re just sticking by your friend.
All the characters have a shared base of operations - a small castle on a island, about the size of an office building, called Pinion. Who made the island float, where it’s floating, and how to control it are all questions you may be able to answer one day. In the meantime, it floats slowly around the world of the Fey Isles, perhaps following some pre-programmed path. Luckily, Pinion has a large library and a magical door on the ground floor, which leads to a number of locations with a simple twist of the handle. One of these is is the Birdhouse in the city of Diadell, the great library and headquarters for the Larksong Archive. Other locations seem to become accessible for a while on the door and then disappear, subject to ineffable whims.
We use a simple XP system: at the end of a session, every character present gets 100 XP. Once you’ve got enough XP to advance to the next level, level up and reset your XP to 0.
