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 and this, and sometimes this.

I want Mobile Armour to look like this. (I assume this is pushing it a little given the tone)

I want gigantic berserk artilects to look like this.

Gigantic transcendent artilects look like this.

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.