The City Is Forever

The Fortress Eternal takes place in The City. To explain The City, and the concept, I have to enter into a digression on the subject of magic as it applies to The Fortress Eternal.

Magic is capable of three things, though these categories are quite broad: Magic can create, magic can preserve, and magic can destroy. At some point, the idea that The City would fade and be forgotten so terrified someone that the greatest Preservation ever wrought was placed upon it. The City would always be preserved. The City would last forever - eternally present throughout time.

This could not be, and thus was the kharmic cycle, the thread of reality, the will of Fate - call it what you will - torn asunder. The World thus moves in an uneven and unknown cycle of Epochs, and The City is present throughout it all - hidden just beneath the fabric of The World like a splinter buried beneath the skin. In The World, time moves on - people are born and die, wars are won and lost, nations rise and fall, the tide ebbs and flows, and The World turns.

Within The City, things are somewhat different. Those who enter The City cannot die - even if they fall to the blade or poison, The City's enchantments return breath to their bodies.
Over the long years, people have come to The City - how exactly varies from person to person. Sometimes it is the result of a lifetime's pursuit of half-forgotten legends, sometimes they have merely sought shelter from a storm in a building that looked out of place and, upon emerging, saw alien structures towering above them against an unfamiliar sky.

Those who come to The City can be grouped into four known Epochs: Those from The Time Before, those from The Golden Age, those from The Killing Years, and those from The Long Twilight. Scholars attempting to write histories of The World as they knew it are confounded by the tales of other visitors to The City - even visitors from an Epoch that sounds much like The World they knew often hail from unfamiliar countries or profess ignorance of the legends and places the scholars share with them. No work has yet been able to conclusively fit together the four Epochs into one linear history.

So The City lasts forever and has been made eternal - this in itself is a corruption of nature, and so The City, though a place of wonder, should not be. Its towers are high, its streets long, and caverns and tunnels run deep beneath it. It is everywhere and nowhere, and time has bent beneath the strain The City has placed on it. It is sparsely populated with visitors who have had no hand in building it and who cannot die - though every time they return to life, they are bound that much closer to The City. In all its castles, palaces, temples, inns, and dwellings there is no sign to be seen of anyone who claims to be a native of The City, and inhuman creatures - as lost in an unfamiliar world as the visitors - are rumoured to wander the dark and unknown districts of The City.
The City is a place that defies reason, and in it the most valuable commodity one can possess is trust.

So where do the players fit in this? The players represent a group of visitors - perhaps from one Epoch, perhaps from different Epochs - who are part explorer in and part prisoner of The City. They each define what they seek from the The City - truth, escape, seeking someone lost - and their trust alone keeps them together.

The Fortress Eternal: Basic Concept

In all honesty, I probably ought to get the central idea - or at least the initial draft of it - down on paper. I work around it a lot; this is much the same as what I used to do in art class, when I'd do very detailed drawings of people, paying attention to everything except their faces. The odd faceless portraits I ended up doing creeped the art teachers out, and I never had time to add faces at the end of the class.
What I'm doing here - sporadically, I'll admit, but still technically doing - is similar. I've had a fair few ideas for roleplaying games over the years, but nothing ever really gets done with them. So, I thought I would get the actual core notion behind The Fortress Eternal written down so I can see it, modify it, and get some ideas behind what it actually means. So, here it is:

The players are explorers lost, or trapped, within a city that spans eternity and where death has no meaning. They seek to unravel its mysteries and perhaps escape - though to when, they cannot be sure.

So there it is: The Fortress Eternal. The City is Forever.