The Campaign Builder's Guild

Ascension
In every epoch there are prodigies, beings who become gods '" or worse than gods '" and write their will into the law of heaven. That law is reflected in the pattern of our DNA. It is how the gods know who will succeed them.

Transhumanity
The girl called ILIL was the first of our kind. No one could contain her strength. They imprisoned her in a garden far away from the worlds of humanity and she crushed their cities in revenge. At last they surrendered and she became their queen. Her children, our fathers and mothers, are the lords of all worlds.

Instrumentality
Such power we have been given. We can break mountains with our hands. We can survive the deaths of suns. The greatest of our family will never die and humanity is our slave. We cannot understand the price of these gifts.

Earth has not yet been born and already humankind lives on a thousand worlds. If you said that in the end there would be only earth, in all its solitude, they would not believe you. We, who are gods, will not believe you.



Dissonance
The first worlds are all forgotten but we have carried their will with us into the dark. They were cruel ANANKE and joyous HEMERA; bounteous PHANES and the restless NESOI. There was EREBES also, whom we left in the ruin of our past.

When the stellar seed which births empires was stolen by mainyu, the worlds became spiteful and divided. ANANKE carried her law into unruly space and bade all to grovel at her feet. PHANES took what light remained and built the scattered kingdoms that would come into ILIL's possession. HEMERA did not stir from her golden seat and her children grew restless; that his how they came to war with the NESOI until at last the human tribes were abandoned and afraid.

Consonance
The ancient hope has been swallowed up by the void. What was the dream of black EREBES, or of mother CHAOS, first of worlds? What is the dream of mainyu, fulminant with hate?  It is human fear that has united such enemies as HEMERA and the NESOI, and quieted ANANKE's lust. We are the custodians of that fear, and its propagators.

Neoteny
Humankind is ruled by the ones called Endless, who are of two kinds. There is the vast conniving murderous bloodline with its origin in ILIL, the mother of transhumanity who is called SECOND CHAOS. There are also the orphans, born of human stock but possessing ascendent form. We do not know if they arise in opposition to our terrible clan.

[ooc]As usual I'm not yet certain what all this stuff means. Here are some thoughts on the first worlds:

ANANKE '" totalitarian world (and tributaries) of immense resource
PHANES '" a cluster of solar systems that possessed germination engines, which created suns
HEMERA '" an ancient confederacy of worlds
NESOI '" a vast diaspora of generation ships

Within the setting these ancient worlds have a mythic character (consider Earth in Battestar Galactica). Depending on the region a given first world might be invoked as a curse or token of fortune.

Principle influences are currently: Mass Effect; Nine Princes of Amber; Neon Genesis; and Code Geass.[/ooc]

You are called human and so are they, but you and they are not the same.

Consumption
Humans do not eat meat, though we hold some dim notion of cousins beyond the Rim whose appetites are so debased.

Communion
There are words which are transmitted by air and words which require no medium at all. With a nurtured thought any human can sing that airless speech across the void and into willing minds. This is not an easy thing but all consider it natural.

Consummation
There is a class of thoughts that fills the space between minds. They are frail but vast and in their commingling sometimes ancient beings are reborn: ASURAS and DEVAS, who predated even mother CHAOS.


Artefact
Many of our machines are older than our most ancient cities. We have woven them with nerves and threaded veins so that they may heal their hurts and live forever. Our spacecraft and fliers and thinking engines are living bleeding things.

Artifice
We have abandoned war but not its instruments. There are devices that scatter seeds from which whole peoples sprout fully formed. There are roaming fleshly giants in whose hearts burn nuclear fires; whose minds hold fires fiercer still. There are craft like miniature moons, hidden in the shadows of distant planets, that swallow up the lives of worlds. The hate of HEMERA and the NESOI once compelled such instruments '" and ones more terrible. Humans have learned their cost and so now they are silent.

Artilect
A machine alone is a silent thing. Though it has flesh and nerves alongside steel its brain is not wholly formed. In joining with a complete mind a machine finds its own completeness. This is how humans guide their ships or command the bodies of mobile armours. Our sole misfortune as the ascendant clan is that our souls are too full and would overwhelm an artilect's own being. Such unions are the making of monsters.

As always this sounds cool and as always I'm not sure what's going on ^^

artilects
   Awesome...

Is communion psychic ability, or something else entirely?

Quote from: GambleWolfartilects
Awesome...

Is communion psychic ability, or something else entirely?[/quote]It is psychic but I'm not sure if that word exists anywhere in the vocabulary of these people. They simply consider it their locus, a natural extension of their mind. Focusing the locus is called local projection. A person can train this ability like any other.

Some machines possess loci.

The intermingling of loci is what causes the rebirth of ASURAS and DEVAS. They are the true foes of the endless. Humans have attempted to engineer ASURAS (but not DEVAS; that would be insane), to varying success (the CHAOS SEEDS, who will be described later, are such creatures).

They have also attempted to artificially induce an endless' ascension through genetic manipulation. This wasn't a good idea.

Very cool to see your take on a setting further towards the traditional SF scale.

Are there any non-human/transhumans/biotech beings out there, i.e. "true" aliens?

mainyu is an alien, as are its children the druj and their enemies the adar.

They are all very distant from humankind. mainyu's last interaction involved the theft of the stellar seed. The druj may have been instrumental in the first birth of ASURAS and DEVAS but we do not know of their subsequent schemings. The adar live in stars, from which they project their minds as tangible bodies.

"Huamans have not become kinder"
Some appetites ahe progresses, others have not...spacships and cities as viving, and hurting things, but the personalities involved?

ILIL had eighteen consorts in the millennium of her life. They were princes and generals or gifts of fealty from surrendering worlds. They would be the fathers of the endless.

Consanguinity
Ninety-two were born in the first generation. They had their fathers' wisdom and their mother's strength. They did not inherit ILIL's ageless patience. They made alliances according to paternity and deluded measures of worth. Bloodlessly but jealously they divided humankind among themselves like chattels. In the wake of ILIL's transcendence her throne was left unclaimed.

Consolidation
ANANKE, forever proud, would not submit to the Endless Throne. The five ASURAS empowered the blind Imperator and made Him like a god. Many died and in the passage of their worlds through the void their grief scored welts and grey frustrations of materiality in the hollow flesh of creation. At last the Endless themselves went down into ANANKE's heart and butchered its lords and its masters and dispelled the five ASURAS.

YASTER DEVA was conceived in the pain of the war and born at last from the deaths of ANANKE's sovereigns. He drew all of that world's madness into himself and made a weapon of it. He killed billions. Twenty-nine of the firstborn died in the war before YASTER DEVA was himself dispelled.

Consolation
Endless can only conceive among their own kind. A half-human embryo is destroyed by its own awakening power or by the spirit of its ascended mother. The second generation were conceived entirely by the first and their parents feared that with so few unions their race could never flourish.

But others were born from wholly human stock. There was and remains no pattern to their rising. The Endless first feared that there would be other dynasties but these foundlings cannot breed except by union with ILIL's own house. Yet we fear them still because their blood has no history and no allegiance.

Pattern
The endless genetic code bears no resemblance to any organism in the animal kingdom. It is a thinking being. It has its own locus and a dream beyond the will of the one it inhabits. When scientists discovered the rudiments of its architecture they attempted to manipulate it into new forms against its will. The endless pattern rebelled and transformed. It became the TERATOGEN.

Conception
The endless pattern contains the human genome within itself. This is why a human and an endless may breed. We do not know why the process is flawed so that such children cannot survive. When two endless mate their human material is combined in the natural fashion and the endless pattern alters itself in unfathomed ways to create an original being.

Youth
When it is born an endless child is already stronger than a human toddler. By the end of its first decade even the weakest is stronger than most men. The strongest have no match among humanity. This strength is partly in the flesh but arises ultimately from the locus of the endless pattern, which emanates from the child's every cell.

Maturity
Fully grown they can tear tanks in half and (with a concealed grimace) endure the blows of cannons. They can leap one hundred metres lengthwise. Many of them can fly as jets fly, with a terrible roar behind them. Some can shape their thoughts into corporeal force, or transform the minds of armies, or give substance to sleeping demons. Humans also possess these latter powers in lesser measure.

Senescence
An endless' life is limited only by the harmony of their pattern and their mortal self. If their deeds are worthy of their birthright they will not diminish. Such ones are called patriarchs and matriarchs. They are loved and feared and often worshipped. Those who fall into disharmony will not grow old but will be consumed by their inner fire. They will die suddenly and quietly.

Transcendence
The greatest patriarchs and matriarchs will one day disappear and join ILIL in the dimensions beyond. Their images shall appear in the vast mandala which the first consort LIMITER painted, in the room behind the Endless Throne. The ones in that room are called the ETERNAL.

Resurrection
We can endure much. We can return from the near utter destruction of our selves. If the pattern yet lives and has need of us it will reweave us from even lowest matter.

[ooc]Taijutsu, Ninjutsu and Other Madness
I want combat to look like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySOfVchkMWE&feature=related) and this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRU5HdKL8gw&feature=related), and sometimes this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOOc6aFL1xw&feature=related).

I want Mobile Armour to look like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wImO8xZWQXY&feature=related). (I assume this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s65n0PmvIm4) is pushing it a little given the tone)

I want gigantic berserk artilects to look like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnsKeAejgs0&feature=related).

Gigantic transcendent artilects look like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pI6p9C-hV0).

EDIT: I'm not sure how conspicuously 'magic-like' I want the wilder abilities of the endless to be. What do you all think?

NOTE: In further answer to Steerpike's question about aliens, the ASURAS and DEVAS are born from human experience but are wholly inhuman in substance (though DEVAS, the more terrifying of the two kinds, often wear human shape).[/ooc]

You could keep the abilities sort of mystic and vaguely psionic, perhaps close to those of the Jedi, or Paul Atreides; but if that feels like the Endless aren't distinctive enough you could go wilder.  Do you want the the Endless to seem like colossal humans intellects, full of wisdom and strange tranquility and deific ego, or more like enigmatic, even monstrous beings, alien things that scarcely seem human at all?  Or perhaps more like 23rd century wizards?

Great clips, by the way!

I just thought I should say that I really do like this setting (obviously! it is right up my alley). I am interested in knowing more about human society and potential conflicts, though. Are there any other prominent territorial factions in the setting aside from what I am assuming is some form of empire ruled by the Endless? Is said empire a relatively decentralized state with multiple constituent members, or what?

The Endless don't have an 'empire', as such. They are distributed among the greater human territories in families and local alliances, and have no universally acknowledged 'right' to human fealty.

Human civilisation is still governed by humans. Humanity for the most part sees the Endless as a semi-divine extension of their own species (a sentiment which many endless do not share), so the Endless can and do take positions of power through legitimate means. This was not the case before the foundlings (endless born to human parents) began to emerge.

Briefly on Factions

There are hundreds of factions among the Endless. Most of them are very small and comprise both bloodline and foundling members. The largest factions are bloodline-driven and are guided by a patriarch or matriarch. Their relationship with the human population varies according to location and personal ethos: some act as humanity's guardians while others treat them as chattels, and others still prefer complete anonymity.

None of these approaches are inherently valued and no sane endless expects the respect of any human they meet: diplomacy, subterfuge and violence remain the Endless' tools of persuasion, just as they are the tools of human beings.

Human territories are largely divided between:

Sun Worlds, actual planets orbiting actual stars, descended from the vast alliance of Ancient Hemera;

Archipelagos, the five competeing fleets of allied Nesoi;

Drifting Nations, the unaffiliated Nesoi;

Ananke, the autocratic state ruled by the Blind Imperator and the Five Asuras;

The Endless House, a solitary Nesos and ILIL's former prison, whose unclaimed Throne is the Icon to which most endless look for guidance. The pure bloodline remains here. They have phenomenal power.

A Brief List of Rivals:

Enders, the people (usually human) trained to terrorise and assassinate the Endless, often employed by the Endless;

The Teratogen, the 'dark endless', mutated bloodliners with a whispering collective consciousness;

The many cults and organisations that worship Asuras;

TAREAH DEVA and her growing secret army;

ZEGREN DEVA, who bound himself to the body of a titan armour and was banished into subspace one millennium ago;

The Chaos Seeds;

Thousands of upstart generals and renegade princes and freedom fighters pretty much everywhere.

Quote from: SteerpikeDo you want the the Endless to seem like colossal humans intellects, full of wisdom and strange tranquility and deific ego, or more like enigmatic, even monstrous beings, alien things that scarcely seem human at all? Or perhaps more like 23rd century wizards?

All of the above. :)

One
...by then the genetic heritage of humankind had been so confused and perverted by self-manipulation that many of its bloodlines could not safely intermingle. There were people who could change their own shape and be some other person or even become things entirely unhuman. Others could not die but were forever and tumourously growing. Their cities were gardens of flesh. Some did not have human minds. They conceived of wholly foreign universes and in speaking made that strangeness partway real.

Each lineage had travelled so far from what had once been called human that they saw monstrosity in the natures of all other bloodlines. They divided up their empires and spread out into space on the Nesoi, ships that were as large as worlds, so that they would not make war and destroy the planets. The ones who had been the least changed remained, ruling over the true worlds, which are called the Sun Worlds.

All of this was many thousands of years ago. It is more faraway than myth.

Two
...there was a Nesos whose masters had transformed their entire home into a single intellect. They joined their thought with it and in such a transcendent state conceived a machine that could harvest the fire that lies between dimensions (the fire that the adar possessed in oldest Time) and use it to fashion new suns. That machine is called the germination engine. They took their world ship and their engine out into the void and made new suns, and drew many planets to them that then filled with refugees and colonists and conquerors of a multitude races. These sunmakers were like gods. They suffered the fate of all beings who draw so near to sublimity.

Mainyu is the creature farthest from human comprehension who can yet be called a living being and a fellow daughter of this universe. It saw that humans had an instrument of incredible power and it desired that power, so it crept into the sunmakers' world and took the secret of the stellar seed. Humanity had grown to rely on the limitless light and creation of the seed, for they were forever breeding and crowding their old homes. They grew desperate. Thus the Sun Worlds of Hemera rekindled the ancient human hatred of monstrous things and at last made war against the Nesoi.

In the midst of that growing chaos the sunmaker people took their empty ship into the void once more and in the great emptiness used the last seed to make two tiny worldless suns. They laid their genius ship to rest between those stars and were swallowed up by its ever growing mind. At last the ship grew mad with solitude and died.

Three
...a little girl was born into a family of merchant brigands on a planet whose atmosphere was being eaten up by fuming engines that no architect would claim and no science could disable. She glowed in the night and could run faster than the great panthers that terrorised the plains. The people thought she was only a mutation, a curse brought down from the degenerate stars, but when they tried to tame her blood they could not and when they tried to kill her she turned away their bullets and their knives before they touched her skin. She grew to womanhood among the scorched and rabid freedmen of the plains, became lord of them, and was captured at fourteen by offworld geneticists who desired the secret of her genes. She was stronger than any shackle they could make. Those she could not persuade she destroyed. She was a legend on a dozen, a hundred, five hundred worlds.

Four
...given the freedom to do so, the world ships would dwell in the hollow tracts between stellar belts and not trouble the sun worlds at all. But humans are no more temperate in these later years of their species than they were in elder time and the sun worlds are always hungry for new territory. The sun worlds called the drifting nations villainous, degraded, fallen. They sought to purge them and take them as their own.

To the drifting nations the woman of the burned world was like a sacred icon. They rallied behind her. She was too young to lead and in their very first confrontation with the might of Hemera her fleet was utterly destroyed. She was cast into space among the disintegrated flotsam of her flagship, then seized by her enemies and taken far into the great emptiness where a lifeless Nesos wallowed among twin failing stars. They imprisoned her there.

The Endless Throne
It is not truly a seat. It is curved like an irregular and slightly tipping bowl. A claimant is suspended in it by the ship's own psychokinetic currents so that they appear to rest as an infant might in a transected image of the womb. There were once other such seats here but they were all removed many generations before the ascension of ILIL.

The powers of the throne are thus: to commune with the undead mind of the world ship itself, which is the largest mind bound in mortal tissue anywhere in the universe; to see between our dimensions to where the generative fire and the chaos seeds and the other patterns of existence dwell, and reach into that place like an eager suicide; and to extend one's thought across space and speak into any living mind, and pour your will into them with such violence that their very soul is obliterated.

Four endless have sat upon the Endless Throne, and the act drove each of them beyond insanity. ILIL twined her power with the dream of the dead sunmakers and thereby crushed the Blind Imperator and the Five Asuras. Disirah, who was not worthy, was immolated as if upon a plasmic pyre. Shay cast his consciousness against the hungering monolith that was YASTER DEVA and was rent apart like unspun cotton, but wounded the creature so that the fourth, his sister Paya, could bind Him while their siblings scattered His will among the stars.

The Mandala
ILIL's first consort, whom we suspect was her truest love in the days before the war of consolidation made a ruin of her soul, was a master artist of the sort that can only exist in legend. His images could awaken sleeping spirits deep within human souls and bind the smallest design to the most immeasurable complexity so that a meagre gesture would, in sympathy, reshape vast reaches of Creation. His name was Limiter, he was wholly human (whatever that might mean), and he painted a mandala in the massive and empty room that lies behind the Endless Throne. It was a fatherly gift for a young woman who was, at that time, half a century his junior, though she would outlive him by almost a millennium.

By studying the mandala ILIL learned many secrets about the Cosmos, and about the DEVAS who are hatched from our own mad desires, and about the meddlesome druj and the shadow mainyu and the adar who are no more than the unfulfilled wishes of fading starfire. These are all wordless secrets and cannot be shared, only learned in solitude by all who walk the mandala. Limiter, who knew all these things and more, might have taught the endless, who have infinite potential, how to become perfect and measureless gods. But he did not. Perhaps that is why he is called what he is called.

When an endless grows wise enough they may hear the voice of their transcended mother calling them toward the world beyond worlds so that they too might transcend familiar dimensions. That is what is presaged in the picture of the mandala. All endless are welcome to walk and study that image, and the promising ones come to understand that it is not in this act that they will be judged worthy. Even so, most will leave that place feeling that they have somehow failed in their life's most important work.

The Endless House
The old inhabitants of this world ship have been dead for thousands of years. Now it is populated by the descendants of ILIL's truest allies, who are called the gene-sworn peoples (for they have sworn themselves wholly to the Endless' cause and the preservation of ILIL's line, though they as humans shall never be part of it).

Few endless are permitted to live here because the temptation of the ever-unclaimed throne is far too great. There are the very old masters and mistresses who have foresworn ascension and now serve as the guardians of their ancestral home, and there are the ambitious youths who arrive in pursuit of the mandala's infinite riddle. Emissaries and small collectives of the various bloodlines are welcome to stay for a time. They are watched very, very carefully.

Freakin amazing. Love it. Feed me more information!

Quote from: A Conceited BastardEarth has not yet been born and already humankind lives on a thousand worlds. If you said that in the end there would be only earth, in all its solitude, they would not believe you. We, who are gods, will not believe you.

Out of curiosity, does that imply that all this happens before earth occurs? Or is this left as a more mysterious, prophetic verse to parallel the sheer ability of "humans" to that of what we (you and I) perceive of the real world? My guess is both?

Regardless, very interesting choice of words. Thought-provoking.

I love ILIL*. The idea of some sort of deific girl floating through space amidst the remains of her discarded fleet is biblical on an artistic level. I'm curious as to how she was later imprisoned despite her power. Was it that she was weakened in her destruction?

Looking forward to more!

*I assume ILIL is the same girl from the "Three" and "Four" of your most recent post?

Quote from: The_Weave05Out of curiosity, does that imply that all this happens before earth occurs? Or is this left as a more mysterious, prophetic verse to parallel the sheer ability of "humans" to that of what we (you and I) perceive of the real world? My guess is both?

The idea of some sort of deific girl floating through space amidst the remains of her discarded fleet is biblical on an artistic level.[/quote]I'm curious as to how she was later imprisoned despite her power.[/quote]first[/i]. Many of the endless that exist today are more gifted than she was but she stood alone in a time when whole stellar systems were terrified by the future she represented. When her entire army was destroyed (probably including a number of worldships and therefore whole cultures of people) she went willingly in order to curtail any further reprisals. Because the endless cannot fly unaided through space the dead Nesos would have made an effective prison. Except that it housed the Endless Throne...

Starlight
Of all the times and places conceivable to human science the house of the sun is farthest from our understanding. It is where the life of the cosmos was born but it predates life and its essence is inimical to the living. That place is forever blooming with the eagerness of a garden over-nourished, spilling its fire into the universe and destroying worlds.

Chaos
The oldest world of humanity is named after misrule because it existed in an age of perfected science and heedless debauch. Perhaps the first germ of our immortal power was conceived within Mother Chaos and all the threads of future grief and glory have their genesis in her soil.

Cataclysm
A renegade Patriarch bewitched a world whose name is struck from history. Over five generations he sucked the life out of the planet until its very substance failed and came apart, and so overwhelming was this newfound strength within him that he went insane and tore himself to pieces.

A dynasty of merchant monarchs had once commanded the world that he consumed. They returned to it generations later when the storms of his agonised passing subsided, to salvage the planet's stone and dust for industry. But the Patriarch's own spirit had subsumed the base matter of that fallen world so that when they drew its minerals into their harvestships they found he was somehow still alive. They quarantined his essence. They summoned scientists to dissect it. They bargained away its fragments for a new and better world and became beneficent masters of that place and were much loved.

Infants Terrible
There are other stories of the tampering with inhuman spirits and of the evil that is its inevitable consequence. There have been telepathic empires that commingled into unintelligible noise and madness and echoed as a scream across the void. There have been generations born with the regressive shape of our cannibal ancestors, or with the souls of nations long dead, or without souls at all. Worse still are the children born from experimentation with the Endless pattern, for though that undertaking was long ago abandoned such offspring will arise again and again and forever through even unlinked generations.

A Deformed God
These are the names of the Progenitors who sought to betray the sanctity of the Endless Pattern. They are the Patriarchs Colotl, Anatser, Inim and Nihil; and Matriarchs Ergasti, Ercolou and Mag. They laboured under commission or in selfish pursuit to uncover the rhyme of the Pattern and after a thousand years of study took all that they had learned and introduced it to living flesh. In the beginning, only human beings seemed the product and no sign of the pattern was within them. But when the females of that generation were fully grown every one of them swelled suddenly with child and when the males were but pubescent youths they became cunning and cruel with lust and sought out mates wherewith to sire nameless and original beings.

That is more than two millenniums past. The accursed Progenitors are long-dead and their lines forever shamed. The offspring of the project were all hunted down and slain but that could not be the end of them, for what Colotl, Anaster, Inim, Nihil, Ergasti, Ercolou and Mag achieved was not a new bloodline among the endless but a sister to the Pattern itself. Just as there are foundlings among the Endless so too are there monsters born from human parents. Their forms are many and beautiful and irreconcilable with the shape and nature of civilised beings, yet for all that they might call themselves unique and squabble jealously they have but one mind. They are like a madwoman who strikes at the clawing hand before her without recognising it as her own.

Parthenon
Somewhere in the heartland of humanity is the nexus of that collective mind. Few who are not themselves beast-born can hear it and those few dare not seek it out. All who know of it know it as the Teratogen. None can discern its purpose.

Surreal and cosmic.  You manage to infuse SF with a sense of the mystic, something often lacking in SF (Dune does a good job and the original Star Wars movies did an OK job, but few other SF works I've read manage it).  I get a feel of sprawling galactic mythology and sort of biopunk space opera.

What system would you use?  FUDGE?  Diceless & free-form?  Something else?

The system shall be ORE, developed by Greg Stolze and featured in Godlike, Wild Talents and Reign. Early dalliances in the setting used Fudge but that system simply wasn't crunchy enough.

These are the divisions of our species as they are named by the geneticists, who chart the lineal face of our whole great family.

Proto sapiens
We are all the descendants of this race but we have neither their shape nor their incorrigible genius. Later races would appropriate the designs that were inspired in their drunken brains but never cast in flesh or circuitry. If not for their madness they might have made a beauty of their world but their days were extinguished long before such a miracle and that is why their world, which was the first world, is called Chaos.

Carnivora
The Pattern is a litany of many fleshly shapes and any shape that is written in it was once worn by human beings. Many of its forms are unkind and have wisely been forgotten by history, but they may be called forth again. Between the fall of first humanity and the birth of second, in the time it took for cities to unravel so that they were indistinguishable from common mountain stone, the plants of the world changed with the blackening planet and became poisonous. The middle people, who were the children of proto sapiens, turned upon the other creatures of the world and enslaved them and in time grew insane with the love of living flesh. The world became ever blacker until even the seas were like broad shadows that the sun could not frighten away. In that darkness the forms of the middle people became as degenerate as their appetites.

Panoply
This is how the vast majority of people are called. Though they are similar enough that they can breed together, they still express a multitude shapes. They might have varying numbers of limbs or organs or eyes. They might brachiate or bound with legs of stunning strength or speak at once with two voices while a third tongue does not stir. Yet they are still of the Panoply and they possess its familiar human soul.

Deomot
A chieftain of this name committed an indiscretion for which he would be forgiven after a number of years commensurate with his shame. He was cast from his nation's moon to the blasted world above, and because he loved his tribe beyond all other things, he swore to his god that he would not die until he was among them again. The world of exiles was scarred by the Ancient Wars. You could climb down into its wounds and witness the glacial seething of its innermost soul. In such fissures dwelled all the descendants of the shamed people of the moon and that is where Deomot went.

There were criminals of every sort, and dissidents, and the morally deranged, but there were also practitioners of brilliant science whom the moon tribes spurned out of fragile pride. Deomot studied among them and learned their secrets. He discovered new permutations of our pattern and old blasphemies in our nature. He corrected them all, over the centuries, until he had lived so long that four wretched upheavals had destroyed the old tribes of the moon. With the loss of the lunar law there was nothing to justify that prison of a world. The banished generations returned to the moon in their hordes and devoured what was left of it. Deomot understood that there was nothing left of his erstwhile home. He called upon a black ship of the Nihillant and went out into the cosmos.

There are many secret ways of prolonging one's life and a precious few that are known to most. Every one of them works a transformation on the human soul so that none who cherish their familiar selves would countenance the act. Deomot's science was contained solely within his pattern and was never passed on in instruction. Instead, when he mated with a woman the child of their union grew into a variation of Deomot's own pattern, and with each successive generation those children have branched into a variety of physiognomies. Whatever their variations, they are always male. They are always shedding their skins like serpents and that skin is blue or grey or a pale uneven green. Their eyes, when they have them, are lidless and without sclera but filmed with a colourless membrane. Often they have no eyes at all and depend on prosthesis. They are not always named Deomot but that is what they are collectively called.

Deomot have existed for more than three millennia. They do not flourish, because it is commonly known that to breed with one is invariably to create another. Because they can live for almost five hundred years they might theoretically replace a population. Absurd though such fears are, they have on occasion been hunted down as if they were a virus.

[ooc]TO BE CONTINUED (after a healthy night's sleep, fingers crossed) WITH:

Verdigand
Carcinomon
Pathogen
Nurist
Ergast
Zoanthrop
Nihillant

The names are, in the very least, highly suggestive of the peoples' natures.[/ooc]

Verdigand
There is a star called ARDENT. It is massive and dark and very long ago one of the nations of adar dwelled and danced within it (before human beings came and those people of light, fearing confrontation, moved to a smaller but brighter home). Ardent was circled by two habitable worlds. Beyond them were a further four that could not support life and only fugitives and fallen satellites would stray there. At the very fringe of that system is an asteroid belt that was ruled by the Nesoi who were called the Shadow Empire (there are, or have been, many empires by that name).

The first living world, which is the closest world, is called Tyrrha. It is barren and dry with shallow oceans and vast, hard, cold deserts. But there were once underground rivers of freshwater that coursed within it and where they breached the surface and the sun found them tiny jungles of moss and mushrooms grew. They were filled with little leaping or crawling plants made cunning by human science.

The Tyrrhan people lived sparse, naked lives but there was little hardship for them, for long ago they married their bodies with the algae of the underground. Thus they were nourished by Ardent's light. When their feet or fingers found proper purchase in the soil they likewise fed from that, and they needed no other sustenance.

After centuries of enmity the Shadow Empire declared war on the kings of the second world. They descended on Tyrrha and filled its deserts with their ships and from there staged attacks upon their enemy. So long was the war that both nations were left impoverished. The lords of the Shadow Empire, for all their desperation, were not honourless. They might have stolen the soil and water of Tyrrha, or mined the heat at its heart. Instead they only razed a dozen villages and took their people to be studied. They prised the secret of photosynthesis from tyrrhan flesh and remade themselves in that very shape.

In the later years of Ardent's life the embittered slaves of the Shadow Empire railed against their lords and slew them. They took command of its flagship, Verdigand, and fled the failing gravity of their star. Another Nesos, which was called Mitre, returned to the second world to save whomever they could but in desperation (and hatred, and probable mistrust) the natives destroyed that ship and all within it. We do not know what happened to the other worldships of that sorry nation.

The people of Tyrrha have gone deep into the planet's fundament. Their tangled and ropy bodies are strung like vines through low corridors in the earth and they drink the life of the planet's heart in lieu of stellar light.

The once-slaves of flagship Verdigand have scattered among the populations of other Nesoi and into any isolated place where they cannot conflict with other human strains. They are valued for those tasks that require great endurance or sacrifice. They are, by virtue of their absent appetites and consequent discipline, the favoured mercenaries of all known Space.

Verdigand are taller and broader than any other race. They have green skin and hair like weeds. They dine only as a matter of courtesy and otherwise require only water and prolonged contact with fertile earth. Their voices are astonishingly deep. If their limbs are severed they will, as with the Carcinomon, regenerate over time. They can also be resurrected whole by measures that would fail other human beings: their minds live partly in their symbiont companions and may endure beyond the destruction of their brains.

I want to play as a Veridgand mercenary!  Badass ents  IN SPACE!1!

Basically. :)

So, yeah.  I haven't gotten to read through much of this, but from the first couple posts it sounds awesomely inventive.  I love the premise, and the Artefact/Artifice/Artilect trio.  Machines that are alive and bleed, and self-heal.  What a concept!

Glad to hear you like it. Admittedly the most recent entries (when you get to them) tend to wander a little from the central premise (post-scarcity biotech space-wizard ninja superhero dynasties) but I hope I'm still hitting the living machine vibe pretty hard.

Briefly on Transhuman weirdness:

As the Panoply entry suggests, people can look pretty strange in this setting. It is perfectly legitimate to create a character with ten fingers and four thumbs and a mane of feathers running down their back, and call them human. The carcinomon, who will be detailed shortly, can reproduce by fragmentation like starfish. There are even those who grow their young on shadowy cliff faces.

[ooc]I am debating whether or not to ax the "special bloodlines" as they exist in their current form. Deomot and the Verdigand are both very interesting, but I wonder if they are perhaps a little too specialised and eccentric for the setting as it stands, and potentially distract from the "immortal sorcerer ninja superheroes in a biotech future" vibe that I'm aiming for.

What do y'all think?[/ooc]

I'm really torn.  I can understand your point that they might be a distraction from the chief focus of the setting.  On the other hand they're really, really cool in their own right, and they make the world feel more complete and real.  Perhaps it depends on what you value more - aesthetic unity of effect or verisimilitude and general setting development.

Even the Princes in Amber had random Shadow beings to contend with, though.  The Endless had to deal with gods and demons and fairies as well as each other.

That is a very good point. Thanks.