What We Lost

[SA]

WHAT WE LOST

ANANDA
an unopened book
...your forefathers cleaved to that solitary earth and feuded over it but no-one possessed the strength to claim it. Their wars were the same as our wars, as was their science, and their souls were just as hungry. The bomb lying pitted and expired in the ravine beside our village shrine (I know that you have played there though I tell you again and again that it is dangerous) is not much changed in design from the ones they used to destroy cities in the years before it could be done more cleanly with whispered curses.

At last they discovered sorcery and they believed that it would end the world, but when they sank whole cities and cleansed entire nations from the earth in preparation for that end they did not do it with magic but with their old familiar instruments. Science neither surrendered nor was reconciled with magical law.

SANKHARA
a nameless creation
Every earth on which men dwell is an imitation of the first. Perhaps it is prideful to call Earth the original at all: many other worlds are more ancient, and some that spin beneath younger suns and closer stars have seen more trouble in those brief lives.

Your forefathers entered these worlds by magic and found that magic had preceded them. Familiar continents swarmed with deranged ecologies. There were self-mobile jungles and autonomous hills; wyrms, wendigos, blood moths, seelies and mandragoras. In the sea were leviathans, while unimagined things slept in the uttermost trenches.  And there were yet other creatures, more mundane but made monstrous by their closeness to our own shape.

But there was also clean fuel and wide open space. Fresh water and fresh beginnings. Nations – or the promise of nations – untouched by tyranny, religious terror or the memories of old spoiled blood. For such possibilities men settled these worlds until the masters of our first earth saw these successes (small as they were) and purchased or killed for those half-tamed portions of virgin world.

That is how the New Societies were made. Wuzhen and Jerusalem and Kolkata. Surat and Guangzhou. Ananda and all the other damned cities.

SAMSARA
an unquiet garden
Beyond all the earths on which your forefathers have stood there are cultures built by altogether different races. I suspect that they are our cousins: changed by miracles as their very worlds have changed, yet ultimately men and worshipers of God. But they have done things that we could not and would not do, even with all the wicked strength which magic has given us.

At Earth's behest we waged war against one such race and whole worlds were damned by that war and its devices. Nothing was gained. Earth's final gift to us as the actors of their will was to close their gates to us, and to the demons and chimeras and contagions of their own creation.

SIDDHA
the lords of all worlds
If the lords of that faraway culture were as strong as we believed, I do not think we would be alive to speak of them. You have seen their bones out in the field: how small they are, and twisted by infirmity.

We know that they are not our only cousins. Other cultures, stranger and crueler - and yes, often kinder - are scattered across the multiverse beyond all the measured territories. What are their designs and what is the limit of their sorcery? What ancient enmities have they cultivated in the days before the birth of our own world?

When I was young I wasted many hours on that question. Later, I encountered such a magus as might have sprung from one of those venerable Earths and after surviving that disaster (though barely, and not entirely whole) I determined that the answer was not worth its inevitable cost.

MOKSHA
time's broken arrow
[spoiler=THE FIFTH, UNKNOWABLE PART]
Each moment and each micron of the cosmos stands alone so that even the gods can know only the tiniest part of reality. The further from their own vantage that they cast their vision the more varied and uncertain is that sight. Forward or backward, time is not made of promises but probabilities.

That is why when the humankind of the final days of the universe opened the way out of space and thereby Time to journey backward into their own history, they could not find that history; only the unnumbered and miscellaneous pasts that might have shaped their present state. By traveling such pasts they made them real, and they fertilised those ages and those worlds with their magic so that wild things grew there.

You might ask if, being the invention of Later Humanity, our own age can lay claim to a history of its own, but in asking this you have not understood the lesson. Our heritage was never more false or real than theirs and neither is our future. If they – our predestined selves – did not journey here to discover us they might never have exist at all.

These are the deeds of beings who are farther from us than we are from dust, so do not ask how I can possess this impossible knowledge. If you tell your father what I have told you I will pretend ignorance and he will beat you.[/spoiler]

[ooc]Inspirations

Films
Monsters
Predator
Pan's Labyrinth
The Chronicles of Riddick
The Fountain

TV Series
Firefly
Stargate SG1

Video Games
Metro 2033
Arma 2: Day Z
Dark Souls
The Last of Us

Tabletop RPGs
Ars Magicka
Diaspora
Dogs in the Vineyard

Comics
Witch Doctor
The Filth
Who Is Jake Ellis

ARGs
SCP Foundation[/ooc]

[LD]

I know SCP, but what is ARG an abbreviation for?

[SA]

Alternate reality game.

SCP is arguably less of an ARG and more of a super-extended creepypasta.

[Superfluous Crow]

Did the civilizations travel to other worlds or did they simply go back in time to a younger earth?
Or did I misunderstand this completely?

[SA]

Maybe you don't want Moksha explained, and prefer the ambiguity. If so, do not read the spoiler.

[spoiler]Both the past and future are unknowable until they are achieved. It is possible to travel sufficiently far backwards from a point in time and space so that if the same operation is performed multiple times, each trip will yield a different past.

When the human race that existed at the End of Time used magic to time travel they effectively created versions of earth that had never existed. By interacting with those earths they contaminated them with magic, which is how our Earth discovered arcana.

As far as anyone from our Earth knows, all worlds are in parallel. I don't know how it is that the narrator knows differently. As he says: it is impossible knowledge.[/spoiler]

[Rhamnousia]

Once again, your writing succeeds in completely blowing my mind.

I don't know how, but it seems like you have a setting capable of entertaining both sweeping, operatic horror and mystery, while also able to host more personal tales of survival horror. Impressive.

What I'd be interested in seeing is what sort of technology survives in the present. Will players be able to discover artifacts from the past and/or future, or will they be limited to what they can create themselves?

Also looking forward to hearing more about these "cousins".

[Tangential]

Is the future forgotten fully by Those Who Went Back?

[SA]

No. Not at all in fact. But in their own time the universe is cold and empty and the Earth itself is a hollowed rock sustained by insubordinate sorcery where all other substance has dissolved, so there is very little left of that time to remember.

The part about the past and future being unknowable is admittedly ambiguous and a possible source of confusion. How do we recall the past? By observing those present elements whose forms suggest am altered prior state. And how the future? By extrapolating later changes from the harmonies and conflicts of existing states. Because Entropy had taken such a massive toll in the time of those Future Humans, little remained with which to make those calculations. Thus time travel created alternate histories of Earth based on probability's best guesses.

But enough of that. Time to write something relevant to the game itself, and to the players.

[Tangential]

No. Not at all in fact. But in their own time the universe is cold and empty and the Earth itself is a hollowed rock sustained by insubordinate sorcery where all other substance has dissolved, so there is very little left of that time to remember.

The part about the past and future being unknowable is admittedly ambiguous and a possible source of confusion. How do we recall the past? By observing those present elements whose forms suggest am altered prior state. And how the future? By extrapolating later changes from the harmonies and conflicts of existing states. Because Entropy had taken such a massive toll in the time of those Future Humans, little remained with which to make those calculations. Thus time travel created alternate histories of Earth based on probability's best guesses.

But enough of that. Time to write something relevant to the game itself, and to the players.

Do players travel between worlds or are they stuck on one? What's Future Prime Earth's neighboring galaxy/solar system like?

[SA]

Do players travel between worlds or are they stuck on one?

They can travel between worlds if they really want to. The process is exceedingly dangerous for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which are A) Demons; B) Paradoxes; and C) Actual Full-Blown Bona Fide Archmagi. It's mostly rangers, raiders, sorcerers and the demon-possessed that brave the divide. All four groups are pretty crazy but sorcerers come up trumps every time.

What's Future Prime Earth's neighboring galaxy/solar system like?

Unutterably cold and devastatingly empty. Nothing except earth exists because Last Humanity had enough power to preserve their own world but not the trillion trillion other worlds of that disintegrated cosmos.

Future Prime Earth is far away from any place or time the players will ever see. Its humans are not human at all and they mostly have no comprehension of what humankind was like when we lived single lifetimes and didn't raise our immortal offspring in the bellies of demon pits and we had just-the-one soul and there was such a thing as a social contract because if you did terrible terrible things to other human beings like rape them for days or cannibalise everyone they knew in front of their eyes they couln't just shrug it off like a nasty remark and get on with their breakfast.

This is dreadfully important. While players will probably never encounter them, the deeds of Last Humanity send shudders through all the alter-Earths.

[SA]

LOCAL THREATS
which endanger individuals, communities and regions

• Overwatch in all its forms: agents, representatives, sleeper operatives and peacekeepers
• Men who have forsaken society but not its treasures and have turned to banditry
• Diplomats of the A.E.N., unaffiliated with Overwatch (these do not exist!)
• Desperate leaders who will do anything to maintain order and (sometimes) safety
• Sorcerers: in disguise or out in the open; feared or tolerated or indulged by their communities
• Guns-for-hire in the employ of any of the above
• Unfamiliar technology and unrecognisable magic
• Demons: shibboleths, obsessions, compulsions and transformations
• Earthly deprivations: hunger and thirst and disease; curses and the fear of curses

GLOBAL THREATS
which endanger vast, widespread populations, up to and including the entire human presence on a planet

• The indigo bomb and other thaumatological ordnance
• Men who have forsaken reality but not its pleasures and now plunder the world from its hazy margin
• Xenozoological migrations
• Temporal folding
• A lone archmagus with unknown designs
• Xenoculturual conflicts such as the White War, the Conflagration and the ongoing Cao Contention

COSMIC THREATS
which endanger every human being on every world in every age

• Heat death
• The Last people
• Vemacitrin and his innumerable host, at the beginning of time

ALSO...
an arbitrary glossary

• A.E.N. is the Alliance of Earth Nations. This is not the actual acronym, which is spoken in Hindustani and written in Hangul.
• OVERWATCH is a paramilitary intelligence agency that pursues AEN's interests on other worlds
• DEMONS are contagious ideas that slowly transform human minds into vectors for magical power
• the INDIGO BOMB is horrifying to behold
• TEMPORAL FOLDING cannot be perceived at all
• I have already spoken of the LAST PEOPLE
• I will not speak of VEMACITRIN

[Tangential]

Transformation demons cause physical changes not just mental ones?

The people demand Vemacitrin, they always have, after all.

[SA]

All demons are of the same kind...

Shibboleths: phrases or inconsequential statements pertaining to sorcery or secrecy that come frequently and unbidden to the possessor's mind, but have no emotive or philosophical effect on that person's behaviour.

Obsessions: with lies, with hidden or forbidden things, with extreme alterations or transformative experiences, with esoteric patterns or, less frequently or subtly, with magic itself.

Compulsions: to reveal, to comprehend, to transfigurate, to exalt or debase, to organise, to separate; and above all else, to do sorcery.

Transformations: at last the host is so filled with the love and comprehension of magic that they can do nothing that is not magic and they begin to perform it in ways that human beings of any degree of talent cannot. At this point the demon is no longer a complex of thoughts and actions but the actor himself: demon and possessed are the same. The purpose of a demon's life cycle is to separate its consciousness from its body and become part of the fabric of transreality, Thereby to join their father, Vemacitrin.

A great many people are infected with demonic shibboleths, but most shibboleths never mature beyond that stage. Demonic growth demands fertile intellectual ground. For a demon to progress to Stage Four it must be free to perform sorcery frequently and in a variety of circumstances. Most sorcerers are not demon-possessed, and have come to their art by natural human interest.