Hekinoe

Hekinoe is the name of the planet that I write in and DnD in. I only came up with that name last month. Here is how I came up with it: the folder for this campaign and the stories I write in it was called Heck If I Know because I never knew if the campaign world material would get used and I didn't know what to call it because not all the stories were written about The Known World, so on a whim I crammed all the letters together and deleted some and added an eee onto the end. Hekinoe. I do a lot of goofy stuff like that to come up with names.

Anyway. I feel like writing about the history of Hekinoe, but from the "metagame" standpoint and not the "seven thousand years ago so and so conquered a meaner so and so and thus the world was saved" standpoint.

It all started with d20 Modern and the Shadow Chasers campaign. The original intent of that campaign is irrelevant, I was just getting sick of it. Everyone seemed to think it was about killing monsters, so I stopped caring and kept trying to do silly things with it in my head and it became this kind of haphazard collection of scenarios that were only partially related, and the guys kept killing monsters. The only two scenarios I really truly enjoyed were clearing out the Bay City Mall and shutting down the Shadow Gate that had popped open in it and the Groundhog's Day scenario that involved Shadow itself trying to lock the guys into a coma as they relived the same day forever.

Anyway, as time progressed I was putting more and more work into the Heck If I Know folder and less into Shadow Chasers, so I was looking for a way to bring the two together. I made a scenario that plopped the guys down into another world at its start, total railroading. I'm not sure how they felt about it and at that point I doubt I cared. I recall it was a world with pine trees of blue crystals that the guys used to fuel a car that someone they killed had willed into existence. They also encountered someone called The Guardian and were tasked with procuring a skull of brass and bronze by some guy they encountered that had horns on his head.

Those crystal pine trees were the ancestors of the Eldumans and The Guardian was one of their descendants that was a former builder-slave of Kaleshmar. The orb he used to contact beings from other planes and realities was the Kaleshmar internet. We never played again after that scenario, but I had planned to make the stealing of the skull of brass and bronze sever this world from Shadow and trap the guys there. We would then switch to 3.5 Edition DnD and they would play the same characters in a fantasy setting trying to find their place in this world they had helped to apocalypse-ize. What I later decided had happened was this:

They would have eventually found a glassy black monolith after following a glassy back road north. There were also swords and walls that were both glassy and black, apparently I was into obsidian then. Inside the monolith they would have found a creature chained to a strange and alien device that caused their teeth to vibrate unpleasantly in their skulls.

The chained up creature would have been like ten feet tall and fanged and taloned and kind of monstrous and inhuman looking. He was something called a saevoi, a race that has had a lot of impact on poor little Hekinoe and the thing he was strapped to was a cosmic engine. The cosmic engine was a storehouse of energy drawn from everywhere at once. In my little mythos there is this energy that moves the cosmos, where it comes from and how it is generated I do not know, but it makes planets spin and stars continue to burn. The saevoi and their sibling races can draw on this cosmic energy and manipulate it, they are the creators of the cosmic engines. Anyway, this particular cosmic engine was malfunctioning badly and the people of Kaleshmar decided to capture a saevoi and lash the sucker to the engine in the hopes that its presence would stabilize the engine and keep it from malfunctioning too badly. It would have been better for all of Kaleshmar if they had captured a conteog, a race that embodies all the natural checks and balances that keep the universe from spiraling out of control and into oblivion. Saevoi embody that spiral, so the saevoi's presence juiced up the engine and had it providing all kinds of power for the Kaleshmarians. The process worked so well that Kaleshmars basically began dragging whatever cosmic entities they could find down out of the sky and slaving them to the engines they had powering their society.

To continue, the saevoi probably would have howled at the PCs a lot and begged for freedom or something. They would have killed it because it was big and there and they thought they were supposed to kill it and they never question anyone that ever gives them a quest of any kind, even if he has horns and offers no explanations or has a bearded metal face like Adras did.

When it dies and they remove its brass and bronze-like skull, all the juice that powers up the cosmic engine cuts off and suddenly the cosmic engine has to do all the work on its own. The engine breaks and probably explodes. The PCs don't know that because the horned dude that needed the skull whisks them away from ground zero.

Kaleshmar at this point is in serious trouble. Because of its huge output of resources they had come to rely on this engine for all manner of things, when it broke a lot of stuff stopped working on Kaleshmar so they began scrambling for solutions to their energy crisis and in the ensuing tizzy they really didn't have the resources to figure out what the PCs and the horned man were up to. Meanwhile Mr. Horn Head had the PCs venture forth to other cosmic engine sites to kill whatever cosmic entity was chained to them. The horned man was a bit of an anarchist and sought to bring Kaleshmar to its knees.

I'll clear up something right now: the horned man is still around in The Known World and has achieved his goal, which was to bring Kaleshmar down and to ensure his survival till time itself dies upon the black blade of entropy. He is not Keroen Skathos, Cenn the Reaver, Cernunnos, or Kern Yew'nose.

So the guys systematically cause Kaleshmar's power grid to go almost completely dark, but they (Kaleshmarians) are not stupid. They live on a floating continent and have backup systems to keep it floating even when they do get stupid and frantic. The horned man knows this and steps from the shadows and says he has captured the players, the villains that were slaying the cosmic creatures that were bound to the engines. He tells his peers that there is a way they can save Kaleshmar and return its might tenfold. He has the skulls the players have stolen and he believes that with the proper alignment of forces he can use the skulls of the creatures to seek out others of their kind and bring them to Kaleshmar against their will. Being desperate, everyone gets on board (Except A'lst?).

What the horned man intended to do never happened. There was a war going on in the stars above Hekinoe and it had just ended. The most potent weapon in that war had been decomissioned and the wielders of that weapon knew that many of their kind had come to Hekinoe and never returned. They cast the weapon down out of the sky and it struck Kaleshmar and split the floating continent asunder. All that is known about it was that it was a projectile of some kind that fell from the sky trailing thick clouds of grey smoke. It didn't burn or scream out of the sky, it just fell trailing grey and plowed right through Kaleshmar, further disrupting the power grid of the continent. It wasn't a massive missile or anything, what destroyed Kaleshmar was the energy associated with its passing.

I just learned that high velocity bullet wounds that pass through flesh have this effect called cavitation where there is a pressure wave that results from their passage through your tissue that knocks everything around and messes you up. Its like that.

It's at about this time that the timeline associated with my DnD campaign comes into play, so there you go. I'm not going to lie and say all of that was the plan from the beginning. I knew that the whole skull stealing bit was going to reboot the world and allow me to get in some fantasy play time. I only later began to try and synch everything up the way it currently is now and I kind of like the way it turns out. It ties my sci-fi stuff to my fantasy stuff in a way I like. If you find it interesting and enjoyable as well, cool.