Titanomachy

[Bordermarcher]

[ooc]Something I put together a while ago that been gathering dust in my Documents folder. I figured I'd toss it up here and see what you all think.[/ooc]

It is a myth as old as human history.

The Enuma Elish. The Song of Kumarbi. Æsir-Vanir War. The Titanomachy. The New Gods make war upon the Old, casting them down and imprisoning them, before assuming their position lording over mankind.

Well, it's true. Almost.

In the ancient times, the Old Gods really did walk the face of the earth, but they weren't any sort of god you would recognize, much less worship. They were god-monsters of enormous power and terrifying inhumanity, for they existed long before the most distant ancestor of Man ever came down from the trees. They were part of the world itself, true elementals. They were the living earth, the endless sky, the crushing pressure of the deep. They were the grinding inexorability of plate tectonics and the screaming nuclear fire at the heart of the sun. They were the killing instinct, the survival of the fittest.

They were the Titans. They were the Jotunn. They were Tiamat. They were Leviathan and Behemoth.

But in time, the clever apes that became mankind arose and spread and began to settle the land. As they built cities and farms and palaces for themselves, they began to fear and hate the primal cruelty of the Old Gods. They wanted gods of their own, gods who resembled them and thought like them, gods for their young civilization to worship in temples and ziggurats. So they assembled these new gods, a great DIVINITY-MACHINE. And the DIVINITY-MACHINE and the ANGELS and the AVATARS made war upon the Old Gods, forcing them from reality and imprisoning them in the Spaces Beyond Space. In the limbo, slumbering, dead but not dying, they remain.

In truth, no barrier is impenetrable, no prison inescapable. Cripples and fettered though they be, the Old Gods are still beings of unimaginable potency. In their deathless dreaming, they can manifest the slimmest shards of their power, thin enough to slither through the cracks in mortal reality. The these tendrils have wrapped themselves around the bloodlines of humanity, tainting blood, warping DNA, passing down tiny fragments of the Old God's power: a god-shard. Rarely, very rarely, this shard takes root in an unborn mortal. It transforms them, tainting their mind, body, and soul in a way unseen in nature.

Turning them into a godspawn.


What exactly is a godspawn, you might ask?

To be frank, they're the distant, distant offspring of an Old God. They have a beating, throbbing shard of raw, inhuman power buried deep within their souls and potent ichor flowing through their veins. They're an alien demigod, though nothing so neat and heroic as Hercules or Cuchulain.

There's no telling how many fragments of Old God there are, drifting through the human gene pool, and it's probably better that we don't know. Be it genetics, environment, random chance, or the unknowable will of an Old God themselves, every so often a shard sticks to some lucky (or unlucky, you decide) unborn child.

It isn't until puberty starts to set in that the changes really begin. There's the prelude: several weeks, maybe even months, of bizarre nightmares, unexplainable aches and cramps, unintelligible voices no one else can hear. They might vomit up bile, leak blood or mucus from places they're not supposed to, and it often feels like they have molten metal or liquid nitrogen running through their veins. It's all leading up to something. Something important.

The Metamorphosis: it's a horrifying, dramatic transformation, the point at which the unreality festering inside the young godspawn finally metastasizes. Flesh bubbles, ripples, and twists. Hair falls out; so do teeth. They sprout eyes, limbs, fangs, tendrils. Sometimes the pain is unbearable; sometimes, it's the absence of any pain that's the most disturbing.

And as they lie there, trashing, warping, they hear it. Whispering to them, in a language they have never heard but understand perfectly, is the voice of their progenitor. It is the first time, but never the last.

Like a butterfly gaining the power of flight as it emerges from its cocoon, the Metamorphosis grants the newly-ascended godspawn abilities commensurate with their divine heritage. While these may vary immensely, one universal to all godspawn is the power to summon up the unnatural taint written into their genetic code and assume a form befitting a descendant of an Old God. Popularly termed "the chrysalis", the transformation is not a direct one: there are several distinct stages each bringing the godspawn closer to the ultimate expression of their otherworldly heritage. That final form, the "Apotheosis", is invariably a terrible one. Well beyond the human scale and impossible to mistake for anything natural, its sheer monstrousness triggers a primal reaction in human witnesses, lizard brains shrieking in rejection of the thing that should not be. Even the most potent of godspawn cannot maintain this form forever, however: the pressures of reality eventually force them to assume a less-alien shape.

Related to the chrysalis is the ability to selectively transform individual body parts into inhuman appendages, one that virtually every godspawn cultivates at some point. These minor transmutations still trigger a reaction in humans who see them, albeit a much less severe one.

The majority of the godspawn's powers, like those of their Old God progenitors, are tied directly to their physical forms and the ichor that flows through their veins. They can...

Increase their strength, stamina, and dexterity to superhuman levels.
Turn their flesh into a natural armor, rendering it all-but-impervious assault.
Produce natural weapons, from fang-filled maws to lashing tentacles to clusters of wickedly-sharp talons.
Grow to enormous size, anywhere from a large SUV to a blue whale.
Achieve flight with or without wings.
Move with inhuman grace and alacrity.
Imbue their physical form, whether a limb or their entire body, with elemental energy: fire, electricity, nuclear radiation, superheated flame, etc.
Telepathically dominate lesser minds.
Render themselves impossible to perceive.

[ooc]To follow: the Old Gods and their get, the DIVINITY-MACHINE, Outer Demons, and sample characters.

Still no idea what system I'm going to use to run this.[/ooc]