Davokar Persists

Approximate time to read: 1 minutes.   

If you don’t have quite enough places to chat about Symbaroum, it would be well worth your time downloading (or accessing) Slack and join in on the collaborative roleplaying chitchat.

On thing that came up recently was the whole business of Davokar and trees. Someone put forward a suggestion that they would have trees as markers for something in an adventure. I found the prospect of anything keeping still in Davokar impossible to imagine. It isn’t a forest in any natural sense.

I really see the land north of Ambria as a corruption Hot Zone. Seriously. Think radioactive meltdown but on a country-sized scale. The spell that contains this corruption is not fixed. This is a serious enchantment that created an adaptive management protocol (ha! That’s so obviously not very fantasy) to keep the corruption in check, but it’s only just handling it.

It’s like a mattress covered with a too-small mattress cover. When you tug on one corner, the cover comes off the other end. Davokar literally ebbs and flows, surging and receding. It’s an ocean of trees trying to put out a ‘fire’ that just won’t go out. Ever. Unless, of course, some deity decides otherwise. Trouble is, no single deity has enough power to do anything about it.

In the words of Billy Joel sung through by way of the Symbaroum elite – “We didn’t start the fire.”

In my opinion, the Symbaroum folks uncovered something and did some pretty bad things with it. However, they just applied their knowledge and tools to a new purpose. I’m inclined to think the fires been burning since the world started turning (to continue with the Joel analogy). Someone – or something – else is/was behind it.

So, anyway… no Davokar tree is a fixed point, anymore than there is a fixed drop of water in the ocean.

Next time your treasure-seekers head into the forest following a set of directions, remember that. And, Davokar’s ebb and flow sometimes leave things behind… remember that too next time your group heads out travelling.