A NOTE FOR D&D CAMPAIGN PLAYERS

The Ilixa pages contain history, lore and background information about the wider shared universe of Stray Spirits Club (named Ilixa), including worlds, realities and events that may extend far beyond the immediate setting of an individual campaign.

Some, or all, of this information may be unknown to your character. In certain campaigns, discovering the existence and structure of the wider universe is intended to be part of the story.

If you would prefer to discover Ilixa alongside your character, you may wish to avoid these pages until later, or ask your DM which sections reflect knowledge your character could reasonably possess. If you choose to read ahead, that is completely fine; simply keep a distinction between what you know as a player and what your character knows in-world.

The individual story and campaign pages under the Explore menu also contain more localised information about the specific world in which that story or campaign takes place. This material is presented from the perspective of that world and reflects what its inhabitants may know about their own history, geography, institutions and relationship to magic or other realities.

Some worlds possess extensive knowledge of Ilixa and maintain contact with other realities. Others understand only fragments of the wider picture, while some societies may have no knowledge at all that other realities exist.

For setting information that reflects the knowledge, assumptions and worldview of a particular world, refer to the relevant story or campaign section.

ILIXA

Other worlds are closer than you think.

Ilixa is a multitude of realities joined by ancient Pathways. For thousands of years, these roads carried people, knowledge, magic and trade between worlds. Civilisations grew around them, empires fought to control them, gods travelled them, and peoples who had evolved beneath entirely different skies met, traded, fought, worshipped and settled alongside one another.

No one knows who created the first Pathway, or even whether the earliest Pathways were made by the civilisations that later learned to build them. What is known is that, by the height of the Connected Age, new roads could be made between realities. That knowledge transformed Ilixa, but the same understanding of reality that allowed the great practitioners of the ancient world to create Pathways eventually allowed them to alter the foundations of worlds themselves.

Rival powers built increasingly terrible magical weapons, while gods entered alliances on opposing sides. A long standoff became an arms race in which war between a handful of powers threatened every world connected to them. Eventually came the Breaking, when the great magical powers turned upon one another. Mervaine, once one of the foremost centres of ancient magic, was devastated and its earth remains poisoned to this day. Gods and sorcerers were killed, disappeared or fled, while ancient magical institutions were destroyed and entire bodies of knowledge deliberately erased.

In the years that followed, worlds were Severed from one another. Some chose isolation, while others had it imposed upon them. Earth was eventually cut off so completely that its memories of the beings who once crossed into it survived only as stories of gods, spirits, demons, fair folk and monsters. The old weapons disappeared along with the knowledge required to make them, but something else was lost at the same time: nobody remembers how to build a Pathway.

The ancient roads that survived the Breaking remain the foundation of much of modern Ilixa. Trade passes through them, students cross them to study on other worlds, families live on opposite sides of them, governments defend them, and businesses rise and fall according to access to them. The Pathways can be maintained and, sometimes, repaired, but they cannot be replaced. Now, after surviving for thousands of years, some of them are beginning to fail.

Across Ilixa, a race has begun to recover what was lost. Universities search ancient archives, governments fund secret programmes, businesses pay fortunes for fragments of forgotten knowledge, and expeditions descend into the poisoned ruins of Mervaine. Old magical families search for the work of their ancestors, while others hunt rumours of sorcerers and gods who may have survived the Breaking and gone into hiding.

Whoever learns to build Pathways again could reconnect lost worlds, create new centres of trade and transform the balance of power across Ilixa. But Pathmaking belonged to the same lost body of knowledge that produced the ancient weapons. To rediscover one may mean rediscovering the other, and there are things buried in the old worlds that were buried for a reason.