Location
Towns and Town Centers
Gated settlements with quest boards
In the Codex
A mentor in town (an elder or retired magic-user, not necessarily called "wizard") recognizes the potential and sends the player on a quest to learn more about magic, in a Hobbit-style send-off.
Players may choose to be evil, but then they're largely confined to an underworld with other bad actors, and may be refused entry to towns, villages and cities by gate guards.
Side quests are crucial: a very large library, available anytime from town centers and bulletin boards (e.g. escort a shipment from here to there).
Velan is thousands of years old, and most of its history survives as legend. Every side, faction and town tells its own version, and the versions disagree. (Idea) Some legends to seed:
Only a Warden court can do it, and only after a crime: casting a forbidden spell on Evane people or inside an Evane town, and getting caught. Casting Facet spells in the wild never risks it.
Past: born in Twinhold to a Warden family; a mender by twenty-five, one of the Evane casters who seal warps and enforce the rules; later a company captain under Ondine Ash. Twenty years ago at Corran, a Facet town beside a widening warp, Ondine ordered a five-person mirrored seal. Aske argued against it, then cast her part. The seal held the warp and froze the town with it: Corran's people still stand in clear glass, mid-step. She blames Ondine, and herself more.
The shard: as the seal closed, a Corran girl pressed a shard into Aske's hand, one half of a Facet glyph her mother was teaching her. The girl still stands in the glass beside the town well. The other half was lost; the player picks it up in the Shardfield in Act 2 without knowing what it is.
Halfway, the neutral market town: both sides trade under truce. Introduces the Market (section 9) and the Proving Ring, the PvP arena (section 10).
Corran, the stilled town. The player learns Aske's story from the glass itself.
- Name
- Aske
- Side
- Unaligned, ex-Warden of Measure
- Role
- Mentor; Sallowbank ferry keeper
- Hook
- Froze a whole town on orders twenty years ago and has not cast since.
- Side
- Facets
- Role
- A town frozen in glass
- Hook
- About 200 people standing mid-step for twenty years; the test at the heart of Act 3.
- Place
- Halfway
- Side
- Neutral
- What it is
- Market town under truce
- Look
- Stalls in pale blue and amber side by side; the Proving Ring in an old quarry
- Story use
- Act 1 hub; Market and PvP arena