Once our Old World had lost the thrill of adventure, the Explorers' Guild set sail for new lands. What we found in the middle of the Sea was much more: a portal to a New World, full of dangers and seemingly endless possibilities. Once we arrived, we defeated the Kobolds living near the portal and claimed the land as our own, naming the newborn city First Landing.
The Guild sent a call out for new recruits with a thirst to venture into the unknown. Every ruler sent their emissaries to secure the resources of the New World for themselves. Independents signed up with the Guild as well, be it to take a slice of the cake or simply to escape from what was now the Old World.
Inside the strong walls and teeming defenses of First Landing is relative safety, but outside are great risks and great rewards. The first pages of the New World's History are being written now. Will you be its protagonist?
Beyond the Portal is a Pathfinder Second Edition
play-by-post game, run in a West Marches format adapted from Pathfinder Society conventions, but otherwise using standard rules where possible. It features numerous characters in a variety of game mastering and playing styles exploring the New World and fighting or working with its native inhabitants, all while larger and more sinister plots slowly make themselves known.
Beyond the Portal contains examples of:
- Abandoned Area: Signs of collapsed or displaced civilizations are all over the place, as usual for a fantasy world.
- Abandoned Laboratory: Watcher's Island features some rather advanced dwarven ruins, with ancient constructs and technology aplenty...despite the complete absence of native dwarves.
- Abnormal Plushies: Semi-animated kaiju plushies were a fixture and reward in the Lunar New Year Tournament event. Of course, several of them also went rogue due to Phlebotinum Overload and became the main enemies for a quest, and several others ended up being used to bomb a building.
- Aborted Arc: Inevitable due to players and Game Masters leaving. More rarely, characters can also die with too little funding for (or interest in) their resurrection, ending their stories.
- Anti-Frustration Features: A good number of rules changes are meant to make West Marches easier to run and play in the fairly deadly and rigorously campaign-focused system of Pathfinder Second Edition. The most notable is likely the addition of recallers, magic items distributed to all Guild employees which allow them to teleport back to First Landing's portal.
- City with No Name: The entire world is currently unnamed, as it's seemingly a matter of little consensus or importance among the various natives that adventurers have spoken to. On one quest, kobolds of the Watcher Tribe revealed that they refer to it as the 'Egg' in keeping with their Creation Myth, but this hasn't caught on with the playerbase as a whole.
- Hub Level: Aside from First Landing, which is the site of every quest's beginning and ending, the Elemental Portal Shrine could be described as this, being mostly only populated by a few mephits guarding portals which lead to other locations in the New World (such as a continent where war is raging). As the portals require keys which have been scattered and lost to be activated, it also serves as a major source of meta-progression.
- Language Barrier: Downplayed, as many of the ancestral languages (Sylvan, Draconic, Amurrun, etc.) are spoken by the associated creatures on both sides of the portal. "Common", which all Old World natives know by default, is completely absent among New World natives, however.
- Mundane Utility: Unusually, the titular Portal to some extent. Recallers allow adventurers to quickly return to First Landing with it (sometimes posthumously, to be buried), goods and people are always traveling between the two worlds with it, and the square it resides in is generally described as busy with little oversight to the proceedings (at least on the New World side) considering its importance.
