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Dawn Bringer Invictus
Guest
Original poster
General Overview
In a future not too far away from our own, scientific breakthroughs have allowed mankind to finally enter the realm of the world beyond this one. This is the realm of our religions, mythologies, spiritualities and other similar belief systems. It should have been a wonderful time, an enligtening one, to finally be able to meet the very beings in whose name many of us died, killed, and sacrificed for years.
The problem was that it was anything but that, and that if anything, all our holy texts and sacred beliefs were not even slightly close to the truth of what they really were.
When we passed through the gate, we were not met by beautiful, glowing, heavenly bodies or fiery brimstone and demonic figures. There were no blonde people in white with dove-like wings, glowing red men in pitchforks, spirit animals, people who had achieved transcendence, and other familiar shapes of the immaterial.
For the most part, they seemed amorphous, numerous, horrific, the complete opposite of what for years we believed them to be. Worst of all was that most were seemngly brainless, in more than just a few occasions lacking sentience. They seemed like little more than overgrown Lovecraftian terrors, every shape seeming like some base, simplistic living thing. Most seemed like micro-organisms; bacteria and protozoa, looking like severed internal organs, latching onto the strange fabric of the beyond, pumping out hellish wastes and sucking up energies like brain-dead parasites. An equally large portion resembled primitive and sometimes pre-historic invertebrates, not yet fully like the ones we find under logs and rocks, sometimes blurring the line between mulitple species. There were ones with far more familiar and less grotesque shapes, but they were far outnumbered by their more repulsive counterparts.
Within months of the way to the world beyond being unlocked, our world started changing immensely. Ever religion, spiritaulity, and mythology collapsed, the masses horrified by the true face of "divinity". Society went through great upheaval, in some parts of the world, anarchy and chaos reigned. Countries began dividing and some were basically wiped out, breaking into smaller dissenting, confused, chaotic sub-states. Wars erupted all over the world, their combined fury putting to shame any past conflict in human history, further destroying the earth, one another, and whatever nations still remained.
This was the least of our troubles though.
The actual realm we had unlocked had started bleeding into ours, ripping open spaces in existence between the two and the horrid contents began spilling in. The destruction and madness increased a thousandfold, as genocide, mass possession, excorcism, and massive sections of the otherworldly realm crossing over into ours, as if the difference between reality and mythos was suddenly no more. The abominations spilled out, slaughtering, consuming, taking bodies, seemingly at random; they were unpredictable and almost soulless in their actions.
Combined, the two forces radically changed our planet, as man and monstrosity fought in wars against foes both material, immaterial and whatever was between. This worldwide violence devastated, twisted, mutated, and altered the nature of the world around them. Whole nations were reduced to rubble, yet from their ashes new ones would spring. Other times, countries would be split between this world and the one beyond it. Over fifty years later, the dust finally settled, and some sort of semblance of "normal everyday life" returned. Man was forced to exist alongside the beings he used to only read about in holy scriptures and ancient myths and they were forced to live with us, sometimes inside of us. New nations rose alongside old ones, or at least what was left of them. Some parts of the world had become lawless no-man's lands, others turning into gateways into the otherworld or basically fusing with it.
In this savage world, where hordes of occultist barbarians roam the vast expanses between nations, where massive spiritoid entities glide over vast cities and unconquered wilderness like airborne whales, where sometimes the physical world is overlapping with the world beyond, and man lives alongside spiritoid, life survives against foes both human and inhuman, and whatever is inbetween.
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The Particulars
This RP will be less of a really planned out effort and more spontaneous and free-for-all-ish. I'm not coming into this with a huge epic sotryline, I won't put in chapters, and it will be more of just letting individual posters carve their own pathways right out of their imaginations. You get the general setting, and then you create something out of it that will hopefully go places. Of course, if need be, I could whip up something epic.
Technology of a modern and futuristic level will appear but at the same time there will be what some of us call "magic", "sorcery", "energy manipulation" but it all boils down to basically manipulating the power from the world beyond. Possession will also be quite important; having one or more entities within yourself grants you great power and enhanced/extra capabilities, although possession is not necessary for "magic". Mind you, it can be unhealthy as well and sometimes, if the entity is in control, not you. Multiple entities too sometimes.
When it comes to technology, some places in the world are simply more advanced than others; some will be more modern than futuristic, while others will be rather ramshackle, salvaged and improvised. Sometimes all three can get mixed up. Weaponry can come in the form of the modern (assault rifles, rocket launchers, shotguns, magnums, crossbows, submachine guns etc.), the seemingly outdated (knives, swords, axes, scythes, spears, and so on), and the futuristic (energy blades, shock cannons, pulse rifles, plasma guns and other such things).
Of course, you can mix these together and then things get complicated when the otherworldy gets involved. It's possible to have something like say, a large double-bladed scythe (which can be split into two)that generates a disruption field on its blades, is possessed by four different entities that grant it interesting abilities (creating rifts between this world in the next, enhanced damage against possessed beings or entities from beyond, it has weaponizable otherworldly energy etc.), and has a fire-arm like mechanism inside of it fires demonically possessed bullets.
In other words, don't be afraid to get hella creative but don't make yourself indestructible and here's a big eff'-u to anyone who wants to god-mod as well.
Character sheets are not required.
Got any questions or suggestions?
Fire off!
Fire off!