Oh boy so it all started one night like last year when Emily afford came to me in a dream and told me about a game the intrepid heroes played of the bad kids set like around 10 years from fhjy. Gorgug is a teacher at Augefort, Fabian an occasional pirate, Adaine a professor, Fig and Ayda have a kid, Kristen has to deal with the memory wiped tabaxi kitten Kalina, and Riz is tangled up in a mystery following Sklonda's death and a halfling child named Biff that won't leave him alone.
I then expanded it all, like Adaine is a professor working with college students with high divinatory potential, Gorgug's still in Elmville at Augefort being a barbarian teacher, Fabian travels between Solace and Leviathan by ship a lot, Fig and Ayda's kid is named Pyre Faeth-Augefort and the three of them don't settle down anywheres for a while, Kristen is still trying at gaining and keeping followers for Cassandra all around Spyre and figuring out the complications of Kalina existence now, and Riz is working on his various college degrees in Bastion city and still doing regular detective PI stuff. And they're not really a proper adventuring party anymore, obviously still friends and still occasionally go on adventures, but they all have their own jobs and lives in different parts of the world. They try to meet up when they can and call all the time.
Then I figured out how they all came to those places, worked backwards from there to the now. And the thing I felt I couldn't skip over was what happened to Sklonda.
And the mystery with Riz and Biff I've expanded so much, and I'm about 10k into it and I've exclusively only gotten through Riz and Sklonda stuff and that's it. At this moment everything is just them, I kinda sorta have plans for everyone to appear later. But at the moment it's Riz going through it without telling anyone what's going on. Lol.
Have a nonspoiler snippet!
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It's an hour or so later when Riz makes it back to the hospital. He would have been there sooner, but on his walk he stopped to gawk at all the new things in town he hadn't seen in so many years. There was a supermarket now, Super-shop-spell-savers-mart. A real mouthful.
He'd missed so much.
The Elm Valley mall was gone, torn down and made room for more parking for the Supermarket. Half the places were closed down and abandoned, or torn down, or renovated and unrecognizable now. Houses and streets that used to be there were gone and turned into something else, and new ones took their places. New people, new things, new places. It was different. Almost unrecognizable. The playgrounds he grew up in were gone, the corner stores torn down, the buildings abandoned. The place he lived in for most of his life was not the same as it was in his childhood. The town, it had always seemed like it was locked in a time of its own, was changing. Without him. It had already changed, and he hadn't been there to see it. He missed it.
Everything had changed and moved on without him there to see it. The unfamiliarity of it all gnaws at his gut. He doesn't know where home is anymore.
