[Spoilers Cloudward, Ho] Did anyone else notice the similarities between Eldermourne and Cloudward, Ho? Spoilers for both

Through a coincidence, I ended up listening to NADDPOD Campaign 2 for the first time at basically the exact same time I was watching D20 Cloudward, Ho, and I kept noticing some interesting similarities between Fia and Marya’s stories.

The biggest one was Fia/Irina/Batilda and Marya/Ludmila/Comfrey. In both campaigns, Emily’s character has this incredibly important relationship with a younger girl who disappears from her life, while an older woman who was a mentor to her knows more about what happened than she does. Then something that starts out as a really personal part of their backstory slowly becomes intertwined with the much larger plot of the campaign.

Irina and Ludmila even end up having weirdly similar stories. Both become connected to these incredibly powerful supernatural forces, both end up in positions where they are basically fighting against the party even though they aren’t really the enemy, and the goal becomes figuring out how to save them rather than defeat them.

I definitely don’t mean this as “Cloudward copied Eldermourne” or anything like that. If anything, going through both at the same time has just made me appreciate how incredible Emily is at creating characters with backstories that give the DM so much to work with.

I’m running a campaign right now, and watching these two stories at the same time has really inspired me to find more ways to do this with my own players. I think I have sometimes treated character backstories as something you occasionally reference or give someone a side quest about, rather than something that can actually become part of the main plot. Both of these campaigns are such good examples of how much more interesting a story can become when saving the world and resolving something deeply personal for a character eventually become the same story.

Anyway, I was curious if anyone else noticed the similarities between the two or other similarities?