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Seeking the Gates is the record of the Material Plane party — the ones who did not fall through Oceanus. Ten sessions, from a nameless mountainside descent to the shattered Arcane Gate of the Faewilds, chasing the one question that drives everything: who closed the gates, and what did it cost?
The Ixvaldian Empire sealed the interplanar gates to hoard the ley-lines' power. A wizard called Jonah Sharpe wants them opened. A wild mage wants to go home. A rebuilt warrior wants her maker's throat. A monk wants his clan back. They are, collectively, opening doors that were welded shut for a reason — and the recorded warning at the bottom of the first temple said so in plain Common: "This facility and many others were built to contain a great threat."
Everything catalogued here happens before the events of Cosmic Echoes. The chronicle ends with the party stepping through a restored gate toward the Underdark — and then disbanding, unaware of what the next five years cost.
After Peril in Pink the party disbands. Some of them go on to form the party of Cosmic Echoes — and at that campaign's climax they tear open a gate with void magic, holding off an army and The Scourge, and fall through Oceanus into the Outlands. Five years pass everywhere in that crossing.
The rest stayed on the Material Plane and lived those five years the long way. Their story — and the full sequence of the tear — is in the After the Tear era, via the switch above.
End of Session X — the Arcane Gate of the Faewilds, restored and humming.
Ten sessions, as recorded by Josiah Robbins. Click any entry to open it. Names drift between entries in the source journals — Nyx/Nix, Jonas/Jonah, Tori/Toriana, Grom/Gorm — normalized here.
Seven who walked out of the mountains, plus the tabaxi they cut out of a cage in the Faewilds and the paladin who fell out of the sky at the very end.
How the party actually sees each other, scored 0–5 from what happens on the page — who bleeds for whom, who apologises, who gets shouted at. Click any cell or any line in the web for the evidence.
Allies, obstacles, monsters and gods — scoped to the era you're in. The pre-tear cast is the chronicle's; the post-tear cast keeps only those still live in it, since most of the original cast is dead, gone, or now in Cosmic Echoes. Filter by disposition.
Everywhere the story has touched — the Material Plane's lawless edges, a temple that bends time, and the amorphous Faewilds where the compass points to dusk, night, tangle and sea.
Empires, houses, monastic lines and things wearing the shape of a hand.
What the party carries out of ten sessions of theft, forging, gambling and grave-robbing.
Backstory first, then the ten sessions in order, then the tear.
Open questions, in rough order of how much they are going to hurt.
The story runs in four movements. Seeking the Gates (Sessions I–X, ending Peril in Pink) came first. Then the party disbanded. Then Cosmic Echoes — the sister campaign — played out, and at its climax that party tore open a gate with void magic, holding off an army and The Scourge, and fell through Oceanus into the Outlands. Five years passed everywhere in that crossing.
This — Seeking the Gates, After the Tear — picks up on the far side of those five years. This half stayed on the Material Plane and lived them the long way. (The crossing itself is laid out in the Cosmic Echoes tab.)
Five of the original nine are still standing: Toriana Nightcliffe, Doc, Rotik, Adam and Nix. Two new figures have attached themselves to them, and both are plane guardians — a spirit reforged to guard planar thresholds, and a ferryman of the Styx. For a party that spent ten sessions prising gates open immediately before the gates tore reality apart, that is not a subtle development.
Seven, five years on. Five carried across the tear; two came from other planes entirely. Sheet data is drawn from the post-timeskip character sheets; the story around it is still unwritten.
What the four survivors carry into the new era, and the gaps where the newcomers' relationships have not happened yet. Cells marked — are unwritten, not neutral.
Statblocks transcribed in full. Click a portrait to enlarge, or Original image to check the transcription against the source. Nothing here has appeared in a recorded session yet. Non-combatants live in Cast.
Those who were with the party at the end of Session X and are not in it now. Every one of them left a thread hanging — and two of them were keys.
The sister campaign, cross-referenced from its own records. The Cosmic Echoes party is the half that crossed; this is a bridge, not their full story — that codex lives on its own.
A second campaign in the same world (Meridran), which frames Seeking the Gates as "the story before." It picks up after the party disbands, follows the half that regrouped, and at its own climax — the tear — carries that party (and the whole world) five years forward. So its early sessions sit just after Peril in Pink, and everything past the tear runs alongside this codex's After-the-Tear era.
Current status (as of its latest session): the crossing party — Francheska, Jonah, Jocular and Orbek, around level 11–12 — is deep in the Outlands near the Norse town of Hrafnheim, in a Limbo × Pandemonium bleed-zone, working to recover Nyleth's dormant body.
One nuance worth flagging: the shared record ends with the whole party crossing one gate together toward the Underdark. The moment the two groups separate is never shown on the page — the split is inferred, not depicted.
How the other half reached the Outlands — and lost five years doing it.
Five, not three. The three who left the StG party, plus a promoted guide and a wholly new character.
Shared names, threats and threads that connect the Material Plane half to the crossing half.