Dec
10

Eternal Lands Stories

Introduction

From about May 2004 to Feb 2007, I wrote stories and lore pieces for the independent fantasy MMORPG Eternal Lands. I wrote under two names: Lyanna, who was my main character in the game, and Shouja, which was a name I created later for anonymity after I had left the game for some time. As Lyanna, I became the Head of Storylines and Quests for about a year, in 2004-2005, and wrote several world-building pieces as well as trying to pull together various volunteer-written stories into a comprehensive whole history of the game world. However, subsequently in later years, the direction of the main story of the game has changed, and so many of the pieces that I had written are now non-canonical.

Most of my stories are set in a world in which a great war had just recently ended, with the conflict between the God of Evil (Mortos) and the Goddess of Good (Aluwen) creating a curse which made every living creature effectively immortal because they continually resurrected in the Underworld. Furthermore, because Mortos has vacated his position as the God of Death, the gates of the Underworld have been opened, and souls of people who were previously dead are now appearing back in the Eternal Lands again. This burst of new vitality and population pressure has prompted the discovery of a long-lost continent (Irilion) and a changing lifestyle.

Lyanna’s stories

These are the first few stories I wrote as Lyanna. They are short pieces scattered throughout the game’s forums, primarily whimsical in nature, sometimes written to describe phenomena observed in meta-play, mostly written upon request by other players. The “Memories of a Healer” duology are my first and last stories written for Eternal Lands, focusing on the story of my character Lyanna.

Tales of Irilion

In conjunction with the launch of a new continent in game, I also published a few lore articles about the new places, as well as orchestrated a series of press releases to generate interest prior to launch. This had the unexpected but pleasant effect of stimulating a burst of role-playing in the game. In any case, these pieces were my first attempts at serious world-building and lore writing.

Themes of Eternity

This was a series of one-shots written under my new pseudonym, Shouja. Each of these stories focuses on a particular theme or emotion, and are meant to explain and describe the Curse of Mortos and how it affects the lives of the people. It is perhaps one of my best pieces of writing. The original thread on which I posted (with comments) can be found here.

Tales from Ten Taverns

Again, this is a series of posts, this time written in epistolary format. Here I took ten tavernkeeper NPCs and attempted to give them personality and relationships. The original thread can be found here. Originally, I had planned for this to be in three parts: Pre-Reunion, Reunion, and Post-Reunion. However, because I lost interest in the game, only the Pre-Reunion segment got finished.

Pre-Reunion:

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  1. Updated with all of Eternal Lands Stories

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