The Ardent and The Bard

Introduction

Back in High School I started my first Dungeons & Dragons group. I, as the aspiring writer/actor/attention-hog, took the role of DM (That's Dungeon Master for those unfamiliar). It was my first time creating a world and populating it with people, monsters, gods, and stories.

That world was Domhanda. My own campaign setting made as an amalgamation of many official D&D settings. For the next four years, my friends and I would run two full campaigns in Domhanda before leaving it for new settings.

It's been many years now since I ran a campaign in Domhanda, but I still feel such an attachment to that world I built that I still write stories about what's happening in it. Oftentimes I gifted these stories to my players. Small novels to update them on what they're characters have been up to since they stopped playing. The construction of the Domhanda Expanded Universe, if you will.

This is the first of those stories. It features Shade, one of my player's characters, and Cole, an NPC that served as my surrogate in the adventuring party. Shade is a living scarecrow. He is an ardent, meaning he is able to psionically tap into the emotions of others, for either good or ill. Cole is an immortal bard who travels the vast reaches of the mortal world and planes beyond collecting stories and helping others.

 The story is set some time after the second campaign, where Shade helped in the defeat of twelve cosmic horrors known as the Obyrinths. For his efforts he was made a champion of Ioun, goddess of knowledge. Before ascending to the Astral Plane he was recruited by Cole to act as his assistant as he studied the various demiplanes of the cosmos, which is where we join them at the start of the story.

If you wish to know more about Domhanda and see new chapters early, I recommend you visit my main blog at https://taleofchampions.wordpress.com/.

Please enjoy, and thank you for your time.

~-~smzippyy