About the Six Stones of Sorcery

When I was writing the introduction to this new campaign, I started thinking, "well, I am really ripping off the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Infinity Stones." Honestly, it was completely unintentional. Let me lay out my inspirations.

The campaign actually started back in 2019, when I ran a single adventure that I called Chaos Unbound. At the time, I randomly rolled for the boss and came up with a chaos lord. I then intended it to start a campaign against the forces of chaos. I lacked inspiration for the next chapter, however, so the campaign floundered.

The next step came because of YouTuber Seth Skorkowsy. He posts videos about various RPG topics; I find his videos to be interesting and informative. Anyway, I watched his video on saga vs. episodic campaigns. At 17:25 he introduces the idea of a blended campaign he calls the Five Glowing Gems.

The idea is that the campaign is essentially episodic, but has an overall story arc as the characters are trying to collect a series of artifacts (the gems are just an example) scattered across the world.

As I watched I realized that I have done this before. Back in 2016, I started a campaign for my LARP. The players had to recover the nodes of mana, concentrated particles of arcane power. These nodes gave the wielder access to incredible power (sound familiar?). Due to some drama in the group, the campaign fizzled out. But it seemed like a good idea for a Four Against Darkness campaign, especially since Khamen's expertise is in "retrieval."

There were 9 nodes in my LARP campaign, but did I want to do that many adventures? I decided to scale it back a bit. Then came another inspiration. Each node would be guarded by one of the 6 bosses in the original 4AD game! That would give me 6 nodes.

That created the next problem. Six Nodes did not sound very good. I gave it some thought and came up with Six Stones. Yes, that's it - the Six Stones of Sorcery!

As I was writing the introduction, I realized that my Six Stones sounded remarkably like the Infinity Stones. Any resemblance is purely coincidental, but if it worked for Marvel . . .