"When kingdoms fall, the sea provides
a home for all beneath the tides."
a home for all beneath the tides."
"I have witnessed firsthand the deep and restful slumbers that my sermons have induced among my congregations, so I will attempt to keep this succinct. Should you find yourself dozing off during this lesson, I wouldn't worry too much; by the time you hear this, the world I am about to describe will have long since been scoured from the map."
Brother Seldom, Prologue - Episode 1: Our Wasted World
In the early days of the world, god-like beings known as the Vestiges walked the world, being in equal measures worshipped and feared by the mortals beneath them. The Vestiges swore that they would never share their magic with mortals, but one Vestige named Benevolence coveted the worship of mortals so much that he broke that oath, and from his sin rose the Kingdom of Hominine which swept across the world on a crusade of arcane power. Eventually Hominine's advance was stopped at the face of the Einarr Plateau, who worked alongside their Vestiges to form a more mutually beneficial, if religiously zealous, society. Those who were dissatisfied and tired of magic split off from Hominine and settled into a hard working, agrarian life in the Delmer Wilds, while those who tired of the mainlands squabbles entirely went to settle the Southern Archipelago where they could focus on the finer things in life. And thus, the world settled into a newfound, if uneasy, peace.
Unbeknownst to everyone, magic has a cost, a sort of arcane pollutant that everyone's overuse of magic had suffused the world with, and more specifically the oceans. A century after the wars with Hominine ended, a massive maelstrom began to manifest in the sea that would, within a year, make landfall to cataclysmic result. Just when all hope of survival seemed lost, though, the ocean called out to a collection of people from all walks of life and every kingdom saying that if they wanted to survive, the the sea would provide them a home. After a year spent constructing this city in the sea and dealing with the push and pull of everyone's priorities, the maelstrom made landfall and scoured the world clean, leaving the only seeming survivors of the surface the settlers of Founders' Wake, where our story takes place proper.
The Adventure Zone: Ethersea is a Science Fantasy themed arc of The Adventure Zone podcast featuring the McElroy Brothers (Justin, Travis, and Griffin) and their father Clint. The arc started with a five-part prologue using the map-making game The Quiet Year
by Avery Alder to build the setting beyond its bare bones description, while the main campaign in and of itself is played in Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. Griffin is the Dungeon Master; the other three play as Bard Devo La Main (Travis), Ranger Zoox (Clint), and Monk Amber Gris (Justin).
This podcast contains these tropes:
- After the End: After previous generations caused an apocalyptic storm by using magic too recklessly, the city of Founders' Wake was created in one of the only habitable areas left in this world: under the ocean.
- Alternate Timeline: By repeating the Call into the past and adding a message to Orlean to bring his family, Devo accidentally splits the timeline in two. In this new timeline, Orlean never joined the church, and his mistreatment of Devo never made him leave, so he remains the Hand of Devotion while Amber and Zoox perished on their first mission without him.
- Apocalypse How: The storm that wiped out the surface was Class 3b, wiping out everything not evacuated under the sea.
- Ask a Stupid Question...: Amber sees how uncomfortable Devo is in the Benevolent Parish, and how he's borderline-hostile to the Hand of Guidance, and asks, "Who hurt you?"Devo: ...Her!
- Awesome McCoolname: Given how silly a lot of TAZ character names are, Finneas Cawl is immediately noted as having a truly awesome name.
- The Barnum: Joshy is a con artist and a liar and he barely even attempts to hide it. He's weirdly charming in an idiotic, Refuge in Audacity sort of way, and will sometimes pull strings to help out the people he likes, but he's also not the sort of person you'd leave alone in a room with your purse.
- Berserk Button: Joshy's whole existence is this to Brother Seldom, whose calm and academic demeanor in the prologue only cracks to complain about what an opportunistic scammer he is, ranting for a minute before collecting himself.
- The City Narrows: Joshy’s Knuckle is this for Founders' Wake, being where one goes for illicit work and products.
- Closed Circle: Two-fold after the destruction of the surface world by the Maelstrom;
- The citizens of Founders' Wake are more or less confined to their (admittedly spacious and well-supplied) city because, barring the Brinearr, none of them can breath underwater and the Ethersea itself is filled with all sorts of magically mutated monstrosities.
- More broadly, there is a magically-enriched halocline above the city and its surrounding territories (and presumably the entire Ethersea as well) that holds the ruins and detritus from the destruction of the surface at bay, essentially making an effective ceiling through which no sea-faring vessel can pass and expect to survive.
- Deity of Human Origin: The Vestiges were once ordinary people from another world who fell into this one. In the finale, Amber and Kodeira jump through a portal and become the gods of the next world.
- The Empire: Hominine was this in the backstory. With magic granted by their Vestige Benevolence, they conquered the world, slaughtering other Vestiges in the process. Their overuse of magic also caused the storm which ended the world.
- Everyone Has Standards: The Curator is sketchy and gives the distinct sense he's not to be trifled with, but he's genuinely disgusted by Guthrie's forgeries, since his goal is to preserve art from the surface — fooling people with fakes is the exact opposite of what he wants. He's also genuinely aghast when he finds out Guthrie killed a man, leaving his young ward an orphan.
- Famed In-Story: Amber Gris, for psychic shark-fighting.
- God Is Flawed: The Vestiges
- Hunter of Monsters: Amber, as with all the members of Ol' Joshy's school, considers blink sharks her sworn enemy and hopes to eliminate them entirely. She succeeds (in this dimension, at least).
- Intergenerational Friendship: Finneas Cawl and Hermine, an adult man and a (probably) teenaged girl, become thick as thieves when building the community, to the point where he throws his support behind her when she decides to remove the Council in a non-violent coup.
- Long-Lost Relative: The Auctioneer, the mysterious figure who ran the Abyssal Auction, turns out to be a young man named Tolliver Cern, the long-lost son of the Ballasteer Declan Cern. In the finale, Devo reveals to Tolliver that he is also a Cern; how exactly they're related is still unclear.
- Many Spirits Inside of One: Brinearr are coral robot-bodies, inhabited by deceased souls. However, it's incredibly difficult (and eventually impossible) for just one soul to operate a single body, so multiple souls take residence in the same body and form a new identity and personality (although in some rare cases, such as Ampersand Five, it's more of a "timeshare" situation, with the different souls maintaining a little more autonomy than in most Brinearr).
- Meaningful Name:
- Amber and Zoox have sea-related names. "Ambergris" is a whale byproduct, while Zoox (a coral robot man) is named for Zooxanthellae, a type of plankton that has a symbiotic relationship with coral.
- Devo formerly was a devoted member of the church. In Episode 7, it's revealed that his name was actually Devotion before he shortened it. Even better, his last name "La Main" translates to "the hand" in French, meaning his full given name is the Hand of Devotion, fitting with the Benevolent Parish's titles for their leadership.
- The Millstone: Ol' Joshy and his crew were this during the construction of the society, insisting on focusing energies on using psychic powers to fight the blink sharks. Absolutely no one likes them or takes them even remotely seriously. Justin outright says he introduced them because every major project has "a coalition of idiots" wasting time and resources and annoying the crap out of everyone else.
- Mundane Luxury: Spices are highly coveted in Founders' Wake, as most of them were lost in the storm that wiped out the surface, and a single plant can be worth a lot of money.
- Running Gag: "There's a hole for that!" whenever the technicalities of Zoox's body (how he can eat, see, smell, etc.) are discussed.
- Old Friend: Amber and Kodeira were friends on the shoreside 25-years-ago, but after Amber fell in with Joshy's crowd and Kodeira became a Ballaster, they've grown apart.
- The Old Gods: Cambria, a giant flatworm beneath the water who claims to be the ancestor of all life. It was the one who summoned the citizens of Founder's Wake underwater in the first place, although its plan to have them live with it didn't end up working out.
- Pieces of God: Koda was a Vestige who was killed long ago on the shoreside where the prologue takes place. The pieces of his body became a metal called kodite, which was used to create a ship called The Biggest Baby. His consciousness inhabits the ship, and he is able to speak directly to, and sometimes possess, those who work aboard it.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: One of the members of the Council in the prologue, Declan Cern, resigned from his position, declared a lack of faith in his fellow Counsellors, and essentially retired from public life after his son went missing and no one was able to even put out a proper search party because resources were spread so thin.
- Tranquil Fury: Amber doesn't need to raise her voice above a whisper to scare the living daylights out of you. You will know she means business from the very first word alone.
- Trigger-Happy: Zoox eagerly offers to pull his crossbow on somebody at least three times in the first episode alone, and finally actually does so when the group realizes Guthrie isn't being honest with them about the job he's hiring them for.
- Unfortunate Name: The Biggest Baby, the ship that defends the city, often elicits laughter when the name is brought up. Koda, the vestige who inhabits the ship, despises the name. It was originally going to be called The Big Baby, but when an effort was made to change the name, it got even worse.
- Vague Age:
- The Boyar Hermine is described as a "young girl" in the prologue, so she's definitely not an adult, but her actions and influence make it clear she's probably not what most people would consider to be a literal child. It's likely she's a teenager, but whether she's closer to 13/14, or nearly an adult at 17/18 is unclear.
- Zoox is simply said to be "not very old." Amber later says he "just woke up" and he doesn't dispute it, hinting he may have only gained consciousness in the last few weeks.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The focus of the prologue is how the people of four very different nations must come together to create a new society for the sake of the world's survival. While the crisis gives them a common goal and forces them to work together, there's also a lot of culture clash, not helped by the fact that most citizens don't exactly have a lot of faith in the Council they instilled to try and keep things somewhat in order.
- We Used to Be Friends: Amber and Shret were "practically raised together", along with a third friend, Kimbra. Kimbra began to use a drug called grotto and became violent with Amber and her little brother one night, before she disappeared. Shret now deals grotto, which Amber strongly disapproves of, and their relationship is openly hostile.
- Young and in Charge: It's unclear exactly how old the Boyar Hermine is, but she's introduced as a "young girl" in the prologue who nonetheless quickly accumulates a lot of influence in the community, to the point where she's able to dissolve the increasingly-inefficient Council and begin the process of forming a new government with basically no hassle.
- You No Take Candle: The blink sharks talk like this, likely because their language or way of processing reality is completely foreign to Zoox, the one who cast the spell that let him speak to them. That's because they're from another dimension.
