Under the Bus

Under the Bus was a long-running D&D campaign set in the distant past of the campaign world—roughly 10,000 years before the current era and about a century after the catastrophic events that ended the Age of Wonders.

The campaign began on a considerably smaller scale.

A group of adventurers from the Outlands town of Carlson became involved with an ancient organization known as The Chosen. What began with local adventures, training, and a growing threat from werewolves eventually expanded into a conflict involving forgotten history, ancient magic, religious conspiracies, the legacy of The Five Gifts, and forces attempting to reshape the world.

Along the way, the party acquired the Sunchaser, fought dragons, became gladiators, explored the ruins of Aegea, confronted Cain, became caught between armies of undead and werewolves, uncovered the truth behind Filtiarn, and learned that much of what the world remembered about its ancient history was incomplete or simply wrong.

By the end, their actions had become part of that history themselves.

The Party

The adventuring party changed somewhat over the course of the campaign, but its core and recurring player characters included:

• Bo Duke — Ray's human monk and a devoted follower of Magerris.
• Tim — Nate's human wizard and eventual leader of the party.
• Smah Tepants — Tammy's human wizard, with a particular interest in ancient magic and lost technology.
• Dew Gooder — TJ's human cleric of Demmazon.
• Dugan Lifebrew — Haf's brewer and diplomat, whose talents generally lay outside direct combat.
• Malachi — Jones's paladin, who combined martial ability with divine powers.
• Tashiro Sunshine Eastforest — Noel's half-elf fighter/ranger and the party's firearms specialist.
• Kamal — Kevin Dahm's paladin, who joined the party later in the campaign.
• Dunno Mename — Chris's character and one of the original members of the party, who later returned for a guest appearance.
• Clowe — John Finlay's rogue, whose skills gave the party capabilities when he was present that it otherwise frequently lacked.

Other guest characters joined the party for brief periods as well.

The Players

Under the Bus also left behind a history that doesn't exist within the fictional world at all: the things that happened around the gaming table.

Ray, Nate, Tammy, TJ, Haf, Jones, Noel, Kevin Dahm, Chris, and John Finlay formed the regular and recurring group at different points during the campaign, with Martha, Josh, and Mike Erdman making guest appearances.

Their individual player entries preserve the other side of the campaign's history: running jokes, memorable quotes, terrible ideas, extraordinary dice rolls, arguments about the rules, character decisions that nobody ever forgot, and stories that continued to be told years after the campaign ended.

Among them are Ray's increasingly unfortunate feud with the Dodge feat, Tammy's remarkably durable opinion of Brance, TJ's unconventional method of escaping a collapsing pyramid, the party's attempts to weaponize Deskin's severed mustache, Noel's improbable survival after being dropped hundreds of feet by a dragon, and Kevin Dahm discovering that apparently never having played Battle Chess before was no impediment to winning very quickly.

Those stories aren't necessarily important to the history of the campaign world.

They're important to the history of the campaign.

The Chosen

The Chosen were at the center of the campaign.

The player characters discovered that they were Chosen and were brought to the Tower of Plinth, where they trained under members of an organization whose history stretched back to the aftermath of the Fall of the Age of Wonders.

The Chosen possessed unusual powers beyond their ordinary abilities, but those powers came with obligations, traditions, and mysteries that the party only gradually came to understand.

Among the people they encountered through the Chosen were Effron, the organization's leader; Marcus, one of their trainers and eventual companions; Demetrius, whose faith and prophetic experiences became increasingly important; and Brance, who managed to make a particularly lasting impression on at least one member of the gaming group.

The origins of the organization—and the story of the Founders of the Chosen—eventually proved important to understanding what was really happening.

Enemies, Allies, and Mysteries

The campaign's conflicts gradually revealed that several apparently separate threats were connected to much older events.

Samos began as an important religious and political figure whose relationship with the Chosen became increasingly complicated.

The werewolf threat led to the Gauntlet of the Moon, the Temple of the Moon, and ultimately the mystery of Filtiarn.

Cain and his undead represented another ancient threat. His forces and those of Filtiarn were enemies of one another as well as enemies of the party, at one point leaving the Chosen caught between two hostile armies.

And behind much of the campaign was Stegner, one of the scholars responsible for translating the ancient Pythia writings and a figure whose true role in events was far greater than it initially appeared.

The party also encountered figures whose lives reached back to the Age of Wonders, most importantly Thorn Runehammer. Finding Thorn—and discovering what he actually knew—became one of the keys to understanding the ancient past.

Exploring the World

The campaign eventually carried the party far from its beginnings in Carlson.

The Tower of Plinth became their home with the Chosen and eventually the target of a major assault.

In Toreon, the party became entangled with Samos and the local church, was imprisoned, and ended up fighting as gladiators.

The ruins of Aegea gave the party a direct connection to the lost civilizations of the ancient world and to secrets that had survived since the Fall.

Godsmount, the Peak of the Gods, became central to the prophecies and plans surrounding Filtiarn.

And the search for answers eventually took the party aboard the Sunchaser all the way to the End of the World, where they finally found Thorn Runehammer.

The Ancient Past

One of the major themes of Under the Bus was the difference between history as the characters knew it and what had actually happened.

The campaign took place only about a century after the Fall, but even by then important truths about the previous age had been hidden, misunderstood, or deliberately distorted.

The most useful starting points for that larger history are:

• Age of Wonders — the age that preceded the world in which Under the Bus took place.
• The Fall of the Age of Wonders — the catastrophe that ended that age and fundamentally changed the world.
• The Five Gifts — the extraordinary magical artifacts created by Demmazon whose history connected the ancient world directly to the events of the campaign.

Those pages lead naturally into the people, gods, artifacts, and events involved in that history without trying to reproduce the entire ancient-history archive here.

About This Archive

This archive was reconstructed many years after Under the Bus ended using surviving campaign emails, session recaps, DM planning notes, character sheets, and memories of the people who were there.

It therefore contains several different kinds of information.

Some entries describe what the player characters knew and believed at the time. Others incorporate truths revealed later in the campaign or established through later campaigns and surviving DM material. In a few places, memories have filled gaps left by the written record.

Where those sources disagree or uncertainty remains, the archive attempts to preserve that uncertainty rather than invent an answer.

The original campaign correspondence has also been preserved as source material, allowing the history to be revisited if some long-forgotten question comes up again.

After more than fifteen years, some details have inevitably been lost.

Others—including an alarming number of the ridiculous ones—survived.