Grey
Dialectical Hermeticist
So I'm idly making adjustments to a new setting, and I often find trying to run a short RP with new projects helps me to develop them, find flaws, that kind of thing.
But it's a big, complicated setting, and it's hard to decide from whose perspective to show it in an interest check, or indeed, which of the various factions would be good choices for players characters.
This will, at least in part, be easier when I settle on cultural and economic details for various factions (assuming I don't switch to a different metaphysical base and rewrite the whole thing, as a creative exercise), but for now I wanted to see how people respond to some potental pitches. Questions, criticisms, all welcome.
The Bandi Angle
Once, there was an Empire.
It stretched from the temple-cities of the homeworld to the furthest stars. It was built upon wonders of magitech that bent physics to their whim and laughed at the interstellar gulf.
It was a time of peace and enlightenment. No one now remembers what it was really like, but we know it was glorious - and like all golden ages, it was lost.
The Wild Hunt came screaming out of The Elsewhere, a dimension where reason and science failed, and tore apart the works of the Magi.
The war raged for centuries, and the Magi could not prevail, barely able to fend off the Others no matter how many weapons of apocalyptic might they forged.
Until they made you.
You are Bandi; and as you emerge from stasis, you find your memories of the past missing. Perhaps eroded by faulty protcols, maybe even tampered with.
But your body remembers. Even now, waking from millennia of slumber, your sluggish swordplay outmatches your foes. Your shoddy aim still fells four enemies in five. Your magic turns mighty warriors to ash.
And you are alone, save for the voice of The Dreamer over the datalinks.
The system is in turmoil, Bandi - will you take up your ancient duty as guardians of peace, or assume the mantle of rule as inheritors to the lost Magi?
The Colonist Angle
I am Enso Wylam, of Tombwatch. Don't let the name fool you - it's a nice enough city, all things considered. They say the Tomb was where the Magi of old times made planetfall here, that once it was a city of wonder and majesty that towered to the upper atmo. Now it's a barrow under the red sands.
My ancestors came to this planet with genes optimized to survive until it looked like the homeworld, but then a cataclysm came, a war that destroyed the old Republic. In the stories, it's said that entities from beyond the edge of the solar system arrived in ships of spun glass and living bone, and fought the Magi with weapons that shattered one of the moons of the homeworld. It's said that the Magi made their own monsters to fight back, and they got out of control, so they had to fight a war on two fronts. It's said their last experiment was a success, too late.
And just as soon as they appeared, the Others were gone. Chaos followed, the shipping lanes collapsed and vital infrastructure destroyed. Without the Magi, we were like children. To this day, we still don't know how their machines work, and we surely can't reproduce them. Everything we know about physics, they just... they ignored it. Bent it. We had to learn everything over again while renegade bioweapons terrorized the system and rogue military units declared themselves in control.
We had help, though, or so the stories say. No one has seen a Bandi in centuries - the eyeless sentinels who protected my ancestors in silence, appearing from nowhere to fend off threats with gun and blade, before disappearing as if swallowed by the sands. No great story about why they stopped coming; they just... stopped.
Still, we're lucky. There are former colonies out there that have reverted to tribalism, that really believe in gods and monsters. Others have been taken over by the Jukari, theocratic cyborgs with violet eyes and an immortal empress who calls the works of the Magi blasphemous. We still have an ancient orbital defense array intact, so they haven't got us yet. But it seems like a matter of time before we're enslaved, too. Can't match their tech.
Some of the younger folk are talking about going to the Tomb. They think they can wake up the Bandi, to save us.
Maybe they're right.
The Jukari Angle
I am Juka Deskar, and I am honoured to be twenty-third Archon of the Divine. Flesh of Her flesh, my cybernetics are light compared to my daughters and sons whose distance from Her renders them weak.
I lead them, now, my forty children armed as the Empire's finest, into the decrepit belly of a Magus Temple.
It must be millennia old, and yet the traces of their might are impossible to ignore. Though their arcane machines smoulder and crack behind the walls, or spin madly, without purpose in the echoing halls, even now a few function like they day they were made. The hull has been breached nowhere and the life support systems remain intact, and my scientists tell me more mechanisms within show signs of operation even though they appear dormant.
We still do not know how to combat the genetic decay of our people. The cloning cycles barely maintain our current stability, and our numbers cannot grow. It is my hope some secret in this place will cure us, and if not, might at least open the way to other hidden temples.
My children and I have descended into the depths of this facility, and fortuitously it seems to be a medical centre. Multisurgeons sleep like vast, spiny insects in the sterile darkness. Empty stasis pods hum along the walls like vacant tombs. Their language is stamped on surfaces everywhere. I cannot decipher more than two morphemes of any string.
"Archon."
My third-favoured son, Deska Hun. Speaking through comms from two rooms away.
"We have found a sealed stasis pod."
I do not hesitate.
The pod sits alone in an unadorned, circular room. I can see defunct security systems everywhere - in an emergency, this room was to be sealed completely, flooded with... something, and then jettisoned into space. What could be contained here? Could it be a living Magus?
For a moment, I consider instructing my children to enact those protocols and destroy this thing, but perhaps...
Our records clearly show that some Magi had power over life, creating living machines and altering themselves to better suit their needs. If there is a chance that one lives, might be compelled to save us, it must be worth the risk.
I have spent too long in contemplation; the seal is hissing. The sleeper is waking up.
I issue a command to ready weapons, and draw my sword. Forged by my own hand from the core of a comet, anointed in my sacred blood. Magi were powerful, but they could still be killed. I am confident this one will be no match for me if it chooses violence.
What emerges from the pod is humanoid in shape, but it is clad in sleek armour that moves almost like flesh. Ivory and gold, with a full helmet. I see my reflection in that mirrored faceplate, and then I am blind. My optics struggle to compensate, but my biological eyes are overwhelmed. I hear gunfire and roll for cover, and when my vision clears ten of my children lie dead, broken. One is incinerated beyond recognition. I allow my rage to consume me, to strengthen me, and charge this murderous ghost where it stands among the corpses, seemingly examining a rifle taken from the dead.
It doesn't look at me, doesn't react except to raise one long-fingered hand in my direction, and I realize I have made a mistake.
I awaken four AUs coreward and carry the fear of death into my new body. In two-hundred years, I have not been killed and forced to reinstantiate in a fresh clone. In an instant, that elder thing destroyed me.
As I wait for the meditechs to clear me for decanting, I pull up the facility database on fast new inlays. I trawl archival recordings.
Where I had felt a righteous hatred growing, now there is creeping dread. We had believed the Bandi to be a myth, and now, I had awoken one.
Thoughts? These necessarily imply different plotlines, but I want to draw people in with a feel for the setting and potential plots before getting to the nitty gritty. Thanks to the new Hosted Projects I could accommodate a characters from multiple factions with overlapping plotlines.
But it's a big, complicated setting, and it's hard to decide from whose perspective to show it in an interest check, or indeed, which of the various factions would be good choices for players characters.
This will, at least in part, be easier when I settle on cultural and economic details for various factions (assuming I don't switch to a different metaphysical base and rewrite the whole thing, as a creative exercise), but for now I wanted to see how people respond to some potental pitches. Questions, criticisms, all welcome.
The Bandi Angle
Once, there was an Empire.
It stretched from the temple-cities of the homeworld to the furthest stars. It was built upon wonders of magitech that bent physics to their whim and laughed at the interstellar gulf.
It was a time of peace and enlightenment. No one now remembers what it was really like, but we know it was glorious - and like all golden ages, it was lost.
The Wild Hunt came screaming out of The Elsewhere, a dimension where reason and science failed, and tore apart the works of the Magi.
The war raged for centuries, and the Magi could not prevail, barely able to fend off the Others no matter how many weapons of apocalyptic might they forged.
Until they made you.
You are Bandi; and as you emerge from stasis, you find your memories of the past missing. Perhaps eroded by faulty protcols, maybe even tampered with.
But your body remembers. Even now, waking from millennia of slumber, your sluggish swordplay outmatches your foes. Your shoddy aim still fells four enemies in five. Your magic turns mighty warriors to ash.
And you are alone, save for the voice of The Dreamer over the datalinks.
The system is in turmoil, Bandi - will you take up your ancient duty as guardians of peace, or assume the mantle of rule as inheritors to the lost Magi?
The Colonist Angle
I am Enso Wylam, of Tombwatch. Don't let the name fool you - it's a nice enough city, all things considered. They say the Tomb was where the Magi of old times made planetfall here, that once it was a city of wonder and majesty that towered to the upper atmo. Now it's a barrow under the red sands.
My ancestors came to this planet with genes optimized to survive until it looked like the homeworld, but then a cataclysm came, a war that destroyed the old Republic. In the stories, it's said that entities from beyond the edge of the solar system arrived in ships of spun glass and living bone, and fought the Magi with weapons that shattered one of the moons of the homeworld. It's said that the Magi made their own monsters to fight back, and they got out of control, so they had to fight a war on two fronts. It's said their last experiment was a success, too late.
And just as soon as they appeared, the Others were gone. Chaos followed, the shipping lanes collapsed and vital infrastructure destroyed. Without the Magi, we were like children. To this day, we still don't know how their machines work, and we surely can't reproduce them. Everything we know about physics, they just... they ignored it. Bent it. We had to learn everything over again while renegade bioweapons terrorized the system and rogue military units declared themselves in control.
We had help, though, or so the stories say. No one has seen a Bandi in centuries - the eyeless sentinels who protected my ancestors in silence, appearing from nowhere to fend off threats with gun and blade, before disappearing as if swallowed by the sands. No great story about why they stopped coming; they just... stopped.
Still, we're lucky. There are former colonies out there that have reverted to tribalism, that really believe in gods and monsters. Others have been taken over by the Jukari, theocratic cyborgs with violet eyes and an immortal empress who calls the works of the Magi blasphemous. We still have an ancient orbital defense array intact, so they haven't got us yet. But it seems like a matter of time before we're enslaved, too. Can't match their tech.
Some of the younger folk are talking about going to the Tomb. They think they can wake up the Bandi, to save us.
Maybe they're right.
The Jukari Angle
I am Juka Deskar, and I am honoured to be twenty-third Archon of the Divine. Flesh of Her flesh, my cybernetics are light compared to my daughters and sons whose distance from Her renders them weak.
I lead them, now, my forty children armed as the Empire's finest, into the decrepit belly of a Magus Temple.
It must be millennia old, and yet the traces of their might are impossible to ignore. Though their arcane machines smoulder and crack behind the walls, or spin madly, without purpose in the echoing halls, even now a few function like they day they were made. The hull has been breached nowhere and the life support systems remain intact, and my scientists tell me more mechanisms within show signs of operation even though they appear dormant.
We still do not know how to combat the genetic decay of our people. The cloning cycles barely maintain our current stability, and our numbers cannot grow. It is my hope some secret in this place will cure us, and if not, might at least open the way to other hidden temples.
My children and I have descended into the depths of this facility, and fortuitously it seems to be a medical centre. Multisurgeons sleep like vast, spiny insects in the sterile darkness. Empty stasis pods hum along the walls like vacant tombs. Their language is stamped on surfaces everywhere. I cannot decipher more than two morphemes of any string.
"Archon."
My third-favoured son, Deska Hun. Speaking through comms from two rooms away.
"We have found a sealed stasis pod."
I do not hesitate.
The pod sits alone in an unadorned, circular room. I can see defunct security systems everywhere - in an emergency, this room was to be sealed completely, flooded with... something, and then jettisoned into space. What could be contained here? Could it be a living Magus?
For a moment, I consider instructing my children to enact those protocols and destroy this thing, but perhaps...
Our records clearly show that some Magi had power over life, creating living machines and altering themselves to better suit their needs. If there is a chance that one lives, might be compelled to save us, it must be worth the risk.
I have spent too long in contemplation; the seal is hissing. The sleeper is waking up.
I issue a command to ready weapons, and draw my sword. Forged by my own hand from the core of a comet, anointed in my sacred blood. Magi were powerful, but they could still be killed. I am confident this one will be no match for me if it chooses violence.
What emerges from the pod is humanoid in shape, but it is clad in sleek armour that moves almost like flesh. Ivory and gold, with a full helmet. I see my reflection in that mirrored faceplate, and then I am blind. My optics struggle to compensate, but my biological eyes are overwhelmed. I hear gunfire and roll for cover, and when my vision clears ten of my children lie dead, broken. One is incinerated beyond recognition. I allow my rage to consume me, to strengthen me, and charge this murderous ghost where it stands among the corpses, seemingly examining a rifle taken from the dead.
It doesn't look at me, doesn't react except to raise one long-fingered hand in my direction, and I realize I have made a mistake.
I awaken four AUs coreward and carry the fear of death into my new body. In two-hundred years, I have not been killed and forced to reinstantiate in a fresh clone. In an instant, that elder thing destroyed me.
As I wait for the meditechs to clear me for decanting, I pull up the facility database on fast new inlays. I trawl archival recordings.
Where I had felt a righteous hatred growing, now there is creeping dread. We had believed the Bandi to be a myth, and now, I had awoken one.
Thoughts? These necessarily imply different plotlines, but I want to draw people in with a feel for the setting and potential plots before getting to the nitty gritty. Thanks to the new Hosted Projects I could accommodate a characters from multiple factions with overlapping plotlines.
Last edited by a moderator:
