Is it Shaker!?

I had a city for a Blades in the Dark game mocked up, but the faction I was most happy with was called the Scriveners Consortium, a group that was made up of the various artists, librarians, accountants, and bookkeepers in the city. The artist could use magic through their art. The more talented the artist, the more powerful the effect. A statue could animate or a painting could create some piece of equipment or explode or whatever. Less talented artists would have to put more effort into the painting due to a lack of magical training for a similar effect of a master's few stroke sketch. The art was basically the conduit to channel their magic through.

Think I had a dormant God in a mountain nearby with people made of waxy amber serving it.

I've got a fantasy setting where one of the major themes is death and rebirth. I thought it'd be fun to tie it to the first campaign I ever ran.

My first campaign was a tarot themed magical girl game using dnd5e (terrible idea. I switched to Genesys part way through). I went all out with this one, overkilled on prep, even had a table of magic items tied to specific tarot cards. It fell apart due to burn-out and a player repeatedly making a last minute no-show.

Cut to a later fantasy pirate campaign (Spoilers; I had a falling out with the group and never finished this one either) set in my world of Renferai. It's known that the world had ended before and been restarted at least five times. The players were on the hunt for religious artifacts and what I eventually wanted to do was have them explore some old cave ruins where they'd find the PCs from the magical girl game in a crystalline form. From there they'd be able to put together that the first campaign was set in a previous incarnation of the world.

My last D&D game: the high-society warlock who headhunted the party as adventurers-on-retainer sent them along on a phoenix hunt, with the soothing justification that if their pet adventurers took it, it was going to end up in a private menagerie, not rendered down for alchemical ingredients.

The long game, which never got close to the reveal, was that phoenixes were non-D&D-canonical spirits of not just literal fire but life and metaphorical light of knowledge, and the warlock's patron — in line with the running joke that everybody they met turned out to be Total Bastards — was the Phoenix Obscura, a nega-phoenix of darkness, ignorance, and entropy; and that their intention was to hold the captive phoenix in order to interrupt the continuous transmission of its ancestral knowledge via fire-based rebirth, incubating its eggs in a mundane furnace in order to hatch tabula rasa phoenix chicks as a massively arcanospiritually charged fuck you.

I had so much fun laying the groundwork — the warlock's ancestral mansion falling apart on the inside from deliberate neglect, the courtyard fountain being a rotting mush of soaked, disintegrating books sacrificed to the will of the Phoenix Obscura....