Today’s theme is portals, and as loathe as I am to keep banging on about my Dungeon World campaign set in Exodus, it’s got some sun experiences with portals which work for this day’s theme.

The initial premise of the campaign was that there was a light and dark world, Zelda-style. The light world was the world of Exodus, and the dark world was the old reality which the populace of Exodus fled from when it was taken over by Rath, The Antigod. In the prelude, the first portal had already opened. It was small, but there was enough space to get a beach ball-sized sphere through. It landed in the Elven district, Lasseska, and burst forth with an avatar of the Antigod. With enough power, he transported Lasseska to the dark world and a bunch of barren, dead woodland to the light world. For the prelude, the players saw all of this from the position of the heroes of the age, all corrupted by the Antigod into being the bosses for the first season of the game.

In the rules of the multiverse, Rath and the horrific undead gods had been caged in the dark world, unable to get anywhere. They needed things or people from other realms to charge up enough multiversal energy to open up portals. It took a thousand years and as many lost items from the multiverse for the big attack and now they had a ton of displaced elves to play with. They could only go so far, so they opened tiny portals to communicate to cultists, sometimes even sending the heads of their worshippers who could be reanimated and interrogated on the other side. The group saw this bit by bit, but mainly dealt with the sub-bosses in the light world.

There was a brief interlude where the group accidentally ended up in the dark world, eventually finding a shapeshifting gauntlet from another universe (specifically this was the arm of the shapeshifting liquid metal character Apollo from Masks, but that never really came out). With the help of Xel, a devil who’d escaped the dark world and really didn’t want to stay there any longer, they teleported home.

The season one finale had an amazing portal moment, as the group disrupted a wedding between the last surviving elf noble (who the group’s ranger fancied) and an elf forced into working for the sub-bosses. The ceremony was being used to gather the remaining elves together, open a door to hell and finish what the invasion of Lasseska started. The last of the sub-bosses they needed to deal with was a dragon the size of a small city, so things began to look tense when it showed up. The ranger rode in, rescued his elf girlfriend and rode into the hell portal which was opening, followed by the rest of the group. It made for a fun season end.

Season two’s first sessions were all about the group out of hell and back to where they thought a war was probably still going on. They found the few survivors of Lasseska, freed them from their dire situation and travelled to the walled city of Epitaph. One of the group, Grifford, was from a corrupted order, who had made Epitaph into their home, where they were consolidating multiversal energy to take the city to the light world. Oh yeah, and the city turned out to be a giant robot scorpion. You know, usual fantasy things. The group waged war on the city, took it over and drove it to the Lasseskan refugees, then activated the portal generator in the city’s tail.

The city was surrounded by prismatic light and ended up in the light world, in the barren land where Lasseska once stood. Rath was already in the light world in the body of an avatar, ruling Darkseid-style over the people of Verdant, the central city of Exodus, the main agricultural hub and the home of the group. They found their way in and stopped Rath, at the cost of the life of one of the group, but they sealed the portal to the dark world.