Short and spindly, there’s undoubtedly halfling in Lilann’s blood, just not enough to matter. Tainted is what you see, from the blue skin and curved horns, to the bright eyes and tail. Her parents could have been Gnomes, she’d still be cursed—and shorter.

So she’s gone out of her way to ensure the first thing people notice about her is something else. She wears a hat many times too big for her head, and often dons a thin, painted mask when performing. Her coat is thickly furred and its layers are manifold. The blue hair, which falls in abundance down her back and about her shoulders like a drape, also grabs attention as a sign of aetherborn abnormality.

Lilann Storyborn (Formerly Livean Shol)

18

Female

Genesian, Alteration

Lilann’s abnormality presents as a sort of localized bioluminescence. When exposed directly to light, she seems to absorb and diffuse it to her hair and her eyes. Her hair, normally a soft black, takes on a bold, deep blue hue, and her dim, icy eyes become azure lamps. She does appear to exhibit some level of control over this, able to burn through the stored light quickly, usually to ensure she isn’t disturbing others at night. As well, wearing her hat cuts back on the absorption significantly.

Despite being a storyteller, Lilann is just as adept a listener as she is a speaker—it’s other people’s stories she’s telling, after all. She is insatiably curious and fiendishly persistent, but not impolite. She maneuvers through most conversations with fair amounts of charm and wit, and enjoys studying the people she meets, scrutinizing them as if they might be the subject of her next tale. If she weren’t a Tainted she would be called “charismatic,” and might have eventually found herself neck deep in the intrigue of the noble courts, whispering into the ears of the rich and powerful.

Beneath the generally friendly demeanor is a bitter, cunning cynicism. For all the work she’s done forging people into heroes, she still expects them to fail, not just in their duties but in their actions as well. She expects them to fail as people, because the truth is that Lilann does not believe in heroes, only heroism, and heroism is fleeting. In a way her stories are games, and they’re rigged, because no matter the length, no matter the path, no matter the triumphs, the endings are always disappointing.

She makes sure of it.

The question is always, “Where to begin?” Finnagund is much too early, but to pick up in Dranir would be missing the point. Better instead that we start in that liminal space where warm plains become cold stone, and blue skies become gray. Where given names shed themselves to become names chosen. Where endings become beginnings.

Yes, we’ll leave young miss Livean out of this, for all sakes. Her story was brief, and would make for poor conversation.

Lilann’s began at the age of eleven, in a cart bound for Dragon Rock. She was a pitiful thing, without coin or direction, shivering in clothes unfit for Dranirian weather. The other passengers were little better—transients leaving Finnagund, ironically, in search of greener pastures. The fact that these pastures lay in the inhospitable mountains of a land wracked by civil war should tell you plenty about their circumstances. Among them was a man named Oranwulf, who had been hired on as the sole protector. His armor was dented, his sword poorly cared for, and the first words out of his mouth were lies about the scars on his face, which were numerous but unflattering, though they could hardly make him uglier than he already was. Not a famed, seasoned knight by any means, but then, you get what you pay for.

Those of you that frequent taverns in southern Dranir might recognize that name—we were getting to that, but perhaps it’s best if we skip the part you already know, and jump to the truth. The truth is that, when the pair of giants attacked, Oranwulf hid in the cart, and became trapped beneath it when it was flipped over, along with our own Tainted girl. Twelve passengers were reduced to five before one of the giants fell, entirely by accident, over the side of the cliff chasing after the survivors. While the remaining giant picked through the carnage , Lilann had what we could call a, “growing moment.” Still a young and inexperienced aetherborn, she only managed to infuse the wreckage with a sliver of her own aether. Blessedly, that was enough. The cart didn’t fly off into the air, or explode, or turn into dust, but it did lighten enough for Oranwulf to create a gap—which he would have dropped right back onto her had she not scrambled out ahead of him. Under cover of the fog, they ran for Dragon Rock.

And that was that. No, Oranwulf the Brave did not push one of the giants off the cliff and face the other alone, nor did he catch its blade with a single hand, and cleave its head from its shoulders. He was not a man of “peerless valor and mettle,” and the Fated Empress did not “weave a stitch in her pattern to accommodate his honorable path.” The first thing he did at Dragon Rock was threaten to break Lilann’s neck if she ever told anyone what had happened. The second thing he did was beat the snot out of her to ensure she knew he was serious. Then he went and got terribly drunk.

“But that’s not his name—” Shh. We’re getting there.

The reality is that Oranwulf’s story didn’t truly begin until almost a week later. Lilann had found work in a tavern sweeping floors and running drinks, and one day she saw a familiar face. It was one of the other passengers who had fled early into the attack. When they pressed her for answers, Lilann, fearing retribution from Oranwulf, lied.

No, the story of Oranwulf the Brave did not spring to life from the words of an eleven-year-old. Lilann Storyborn is good, but she didn’t start out that good. She told the survivor that Oranwulf had not hidden, but rather, he had tried to protect her. One of the giants had fallen, and while the other was distracted, Oranwulf struck it down. It was vague enough to be believable, at least to the drunken ears listening, and she figured that would be the end of it. Not so. Days later she heard that same story spill from the mouth of a complete stranger to a tableful of his friends, only the details were different. Oranwulf had not simply saved a little Tainted whelp, but all of the survivors as well. He hadn’t snuck up on the giant, he had challenged it boldly, and parried its blows as though they had been swung with the strength of a halfling. A nearby patron, overhearing this, chided the man for fudging the details, and corrected that Oranwulf had not parried, but blocked the strikes outright, matching the giant muscle for muscle—he had heard this from his friend, who had allegedly been on that fated cart, and whose words were thus beyond reproach.

This fascinated Lilann, who even then could see that a hero’s legend was budding right before her eyes, from a seed sewn by her own hands. Over the next weeks Oranwulf’s story continued to morph, and all the while she listened, learning which embellishments were more readily believed and which were waved off and discarded, seeing how far the truth could be stretched before it passed into bold-faced fable, and then, which fables sunk and which fables were met with toasts and hearty laughter.

The next time Lilann wove Oranwulf’s story, it was from the golden threads plucked from a hundred different iterations. The giants struck on the back of an icy morning fog, slaughtering the driver and all four of the mercenary protectors. While the passengers scattered, Oranwulf took up a fallen blade, sliced a giant’s ankle and sent it hurtling over the cliff. The last charged him, roaring with bloody fury, but Oranwulf stood strong. He was a man of unshakable faith, so confident in the will of the Fated Empress that he held up only his hand for protection. As the cleaver came down, it was stopped upon his palm by the fateful strings of Lady Azaiza herself, and with a single swing, Oranwulf severed the giant’s head. In the aftermath, he pulled an Elven girl of five from the wreckage, who to this day lives happily with her mother in Relfin.

It landed. Beautifully. Lilann’s story was received so well that she found patrons calling her over when their friends would mess it up. “Where’s the little imp?” they’d say. “Bring her over, she tells it best."

She only ever saw Oranwulf again on his way out of Dragon Rock three years later. He was a knight then; his armor was splendid and there was a ruby in the pommel of his very expensive sword. He was on his way to Cloud Hold, answering a prestigious summons for his heroism. Of course, he never made it. He died in an altercation with a single Gnomish bandit, falling from his own horse, accidentally castrating himself with his fancy sword, and bleeding to death on the side of the road clutching his own severed cock. This is why you and most people instead remember him as Oranwulf the Gelded.

See? We got there.

Much like his legacy, this too was a lie. But by then Lilann had learned a valuable lesson about storytelling: the only thing people enjoyed hearing more than a hero’s rise to glory, was their fall from it. She had bruises to repay, and nothing bruised as easily or as lastingly as reputation.

This isn’t about Oranwulf, but telling his story was necessary because Lilann created it, beginning and end. That, you see, is her story. She didn’t stop with him; even after Oranwulf’s tale fell out of fashion she kept her ear to the dirty ground of every tavern, listening for the signs of burgeoning heroes. She stayed in Dragon Rock until she was fourteen, and by then she had crafted no less than two dozen other stories, ranging from the triumphs of unassuming adventurers, to the frightening attacks of bandits and giants. Once or twice she tried her hand at retelling the legends of old, but found her interest waned when faced with the annals of history. She didn’t want to recite legends, she wanted to make them—and sometimes, break them.

When she left Dragon Rock, she donned a hat to hide her horns, a mask to hide her face, and long, flowing coats for her tail and skin. People were more receptive to her stories when she made it easy for them to ignore that she was a Tainted. She found great success in the taverns and streets of various cave-towns, and a plethora of stories on the journeys between them. She spun yarns for merchants and mercenaries, and once or twice even for bandits. Travelers who saw her in their carts knew they would not want for entertainment.

At sixteen she came to Norn Thul, having decided against trying business in Cloud Hold—even she knew better than to push her luck in such a spiritual place. It did not take long to establish herself, even in taverns where no one knew the name Lilann Storyborn. Her bardic skills aside, she had done careful practice with her aetherborn abilities, and began implementing them into her work. Her talents were still minimal, she could float one or two small props, or make her lyre play a few tender, ambient chords while she spoke, but theatrics went a long way with crowds who were used to getting their stories from poems and drunks. Nothing could ever truly compensate for her heritage, but she kept patrons drinking and eating, and that was usually enough to prevent her getting the boot if her tail happened to slip from beneath her coat.

Two more years she spent with Norn Thul as her nest, venturing out with slummy trade caravans and vendors desperate enough to take coin from a Tainted. Once or twice she dipped down into Relfin, to Buscon, where the fairer attitudes and close-knit community of Tainted nearly tempted her into staying, but not quite. Whenever she returned to Norn Thul, it was always with new stories to build.

Valan, the Gnomian Wolf. Sedrica Half-Hymn. The Man Who Was Kindling. Drang, Who Climbed Dragon’s Demise. The Secret Concubine of Rhogar Sadaar. The Seven-Headed Beast Behind Galken’s Door. The Fey Pirate King. Some of these names you know, others you don’t yet, but will. All were woven by the words of Lilann Storyborn, true in degrees often varying from “hardly at all” to “not even a little bit.” That doesn’t stop them from being heard, or, importantly, spread. Some become distorted, or claimed by other bards. Some have made their heroes into Oranwulf the Brave, others into Oranwulf the Gelded. More than once has she been threatened to stop, more than once she has been bribed to continue. Neither mattered much to her. After all, whatever one’s reputation, all it takes is the right story to set things moving the other way.

With the next Great War looming on the horizon, Lilann’s interests have naturally been drawn to the Bounty Houses established by the enigmatic diplomats of Veraz Althma. Oh, the stories to be born from the sorts collecting there, the triumph and tragedy awaiting them, the legends in making. But if she was going to uproot herself again it would not be for some glorified bounty board. Word of Lord Mystralath’s own venture reached even to Norn Thul, and she knew instantly that she would go there.

There was hesitation, of course. The gods had cursed her with a long and lucid memory, and though she had been Lilann Storyborn for many years, Livean Shol still paled at the idea of stepping foot in her homeland again. She would have rather stayed in Dranir, and lived out the rest of her days quietly.

But Livean’s story was over, and Lilann would not let that end hers, too.

When deep in thought, Lilann has a tendency to unknowingly burn through the light stored up by her abnormality, making her hair and eyes an occasional giveaway that something is on her mind.

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Welcome to Amygdala Circuit, a mecha-horror RP in a world beset by the Modir: bloodthirsty, interdimensional giants wielding devastating weapons and magics. To face these hellish invaders and the hordes of horrific creatures they lead, your characters will need to arm themselves with humanity’s only real hope at survival, and perhaps even victory: the monsters themselves.

But outside of the cockpit, the world is no less dangerous. While some of Illun’s people enjoy living in “post-war societies,” this international peace is often tenuous, and exists on the exploitation and suffering of smaller nations without monsters of their own. With armies rendered nearly obsolete, the struggle for power revolves mostly around the unspoken threat of violence carried by these reined-in monsters. From nation to nation, pilots are revered as everything from celebrities to pariahs; symbols of peace and the faces of oppression.

Your characters will endure hell, both from without and, especially, within. Together they might just survive, but alone they could become the things they fear most.

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Nothing brings people together like the threat of extinction.

Illun faces an alien enemy that cannot be reasoned with, which knows no fear and wants without compromise the complete and utter annihilation of every living thing. Naturally, when presented with the option of dying on principle, or uniting and surviving, the people of Illun chose the latter. The best and brightest minds from across the world came together to develop a means of fighting back against their invaders—and fell embarrassingly short. Even their most advanced weaponry could only slow the tide of lesser creatures, to say nothing of the giants, from which they drew nothing but the meagerest drops of blood. It wasn’t until they began experimenting on the strange, dead things that headway was made.

The shift in power was gradual at first, and derided by most for the secrecy shrouding it; no one knew how these weapons were being developed, how long it would take, or if they’d even work at all. The people were met with complete radio-silence, and a fearful unrest began to boil: until the first of the Modir fell.

Awe silenced man and beast alike. Government militia swooped in like vultures, the giant was ripped apart limb from limb until nothing remained but the head and torso, and then it was carted away into the deepest, most well-protected bunkers. Nothing was heard again for months. The attacks resumed, increased in frequency and fervor. Cities crumbled, millions died. Humanity was once again pushed to the brink, and in what would have been its final hour, it found deliverance.

A man-made Savior.

The taken giant emerged, its body restored, and turned its weapons and magics against the other Modir. More of the enemy fell in one day than had fallen in years, and when the dust settled, the Savior remained. It knelt to the ground, a hulk of flesh and alien metal steaming with Modir blood, and went slack like a puppet without strings. From the back of its head arose a lone, human woman.

In the aftermath, the fallen Modir were once again cut apart and dragged away. Another Savior emerged, and another, and another. Before long the reined giants were at every invasion, ready to repel the Modir and their ravenous armies. The war was no longer so devastatingly one-sided; humanity could finally fight back. For the first time since the invasions began, Illun found hope.

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The better half of two hundred years has passed since the first Savior rose, and the war between Illun and the Modir has reached a plateau. The Modir’s forces are seemingly endless, but the human-piloted Saviors are, generally speaking, much stronger. Now and then a new variant of the giants will emerge, wielding some powerful new weapon or hitherto unseen magics, and they may succeed in felling one or two Saviors, but if the bodies can be salvaged, Illun is always ready to replace lost pilots.

The depths of Modir intelligence are not fully understood, but they seem aware that they tend to lose man-to-man confrontations, and so their personal appearances are rarer these days than earlier in the war. Nevertheless, their invasions continue, and wherever the singularities appear, tides of smaller—but hardly less deadly—creatures pour forth.

The mightier nations of Illun are more than happy to keep the stalemate going. Smaller nations without Saviors of their own find their larger, more fortunate neighbors often leveraging their safety for compliance in border disputes, and leniency in trade deals. Governments like to tote that their people live in post-war societies, where international conflicts are resolved with diplomacy and, failing that, the silent threat of whatever horrors might be wrought by homeland Savior warfare. Minor disputes are sometimes handled with a degree of theatre, wherein nations will send one or two Saviors to remote areas desolated by Modir invasions to duel.

The reality is that much of the world lives under the iron boot of a privileged few nations, and the post-war bliss that exists for some is more often a pre-war anxiety for most.

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Humanity’s hope: the enemy, weaponized against itself. So much about the Saviors is kept hidden from the public, and even from the pilots. Most assume that the people inside simply puppet the dead giants around, but this is only half-true.

They aren’t dead.

When a Savior is made, a section of the subdued Modir’s brain is removed, rendering them essentially comatose. That void is filled by the pilot, who, once linked with the Savior’s mind via the cockpit, is able to control them with as much ease and familiarity as their own body.

Here are some key aspects to piloting a Savior:

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The advent of Saviors quite literally brought humanity out of the dirt. Gone are the days of bunker-cities and strongholds built beneath mountains, of disconnection and power-scarcity. The biggest cities of Illun are incredibly advanced, with skylines comprised of massive towers and roadways that sprawl and wind, connecting hundreds of miles of urban landscape together. Titanic space stations orbit the planet, housing Saviors to be deployed at a moment’s notice wherever they may be needed.

Outside of these cities the world is still widely modernized, however the propensity for singularities to appear in lesser-populated areas has led to more than a few towns being cut off from the rest of the world by ruined, untraversable terrain. This is especially true in less powerful countries without Saviors of their own, who have had to make compromises not only for the lives of their people, but then for the aid in rebuilding afterwards.

Here are some of the major players in today’s world stage:











And here is a timeline of some notable events:

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Welcome to Regenlied, a sci-fi/fantasy RP set in a world where humanity is forced to harness science and magic in order to survive. With most of civilization confined to oasis cities amidst vast expanses of barren desert, the days of international conflict are ancient and gone. Now, the Regentier are the truest threat. The horrific creatures from above, the torrent that nearly drowned the world, and may yet still wash it away.

It is the duty of the Sonnelied National Defense Program to protect not only its largest city, but its numerous territories as well. From defensive expeditions, to large-scale hunts, where the Regentier fall, it is said, the SNDP rises. Once a singular entity, in recent decades a schism has formed. The old guards of the Vulkan Division prioritize the research and development of high-powered energy weapons, and are responsible for nearly all of the SNDP’s technological advancements since its foundation. Conversely, the newer Sarkaturges have pioneered the practice of grafting: drawing out humanity’s latent affinity for magic by grafting parts of dead Regentier to their bodies.

As the program’s newest recruits, your characters will discover that, while the Regentier may be the existential danger, they are not the only danger. Sonnehall’s High Command has been ordering joint operations between the divisions, and while the Vulkans and Sarkaturges may be working together, they are nonetheless competing, both for funding, and legitimacy in the eyes of High Command, and the people themselves. Tensions are high, interdivision conflicts are common, subterfuge and sabotage are the lull between the Regentier storms.

Hard falls the rain that scorches the earth.

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Seated with the Bay of Kings to its back, and the Aegaen Wall at its face, Sonnehall is the oldest and most well-protected city in the country, perhaps even the world. While the vast stretches of barren plains between oases lead to an unorthodox rule, it is nonetheless absolute. The entirety of the nation’s defense program rests comfortably behind Sonnehall’s walls, and as such, the other cities and settlements must often rely on outriding forces to come to their aid. In most cases they arrive before they’re needed. In others…

Like most cities, Sonnehall is built downwards. Above, buildings rarely extend more than two stories high, and instead run several down, often connecting to one another. Streets and highways mark up the topside, while cavernous plazas and intertwining railways make a web of the undercity.

The Bay of Kings houses Sonnehall’s modest yet well-guarded harbor, and opens up into the brackish waters of the Engel Sea. Beset by beast and pirate alike, it is sailed elseways by only the brave, the foolish, and the greedy. Somewhere within lies the sovereign atoll called Forra, from which trade occasionally makes its way to Sonnehall’s docks. Little is known of the place; its sailors say nothing to the public, and little more to interrogators. In the absence of any recorded hostility, commerce continues.

The Aegaen Wall, older than the city itself, is Sonnehall’s first line of defense. It has not been breached in decades, and what Regentier do approach the wall are usually meager, and dealt with in swift exercises often televised to the public. On the other side of it is the Plain. A simple enough name for a simple enough place: miles upon miles upon yet even more miles of exactly nothing. Hard, dusty earth, sand in some places, rock in others, all of it utterly barren save for the pockets of arable land, which have become the basis for settlements, towns, and even a handful of cities, though nothing quite rivaling Sonnehall’s size.

Further and further out into the Plain, the oases became fewer, smaller. The Reachline, well past the most outflung settlement in Sonnelied, is the point past which there is, as far as anyone knows, nothing. Expeditions have been conducted lasting several months, and each time its members return claiming there is not a single speck of healthy earth to be found. Flat, lifeless, and seemingly endless. Some of the more delirious explorers claim that the sun never set again once they passed the Reach, others say it never rose. Most were unable to say anything.

For better or for worse, this is your home. Now when the storms come, it is your duty to help weather them.

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When you ask questions of a storm, it answers in torrents and flashes of lightning. No one knows where the Regentier came from, or why they do what they do—they can’t be asked, they answer in nature’s own fury.

They are old, that much is known. As long as there have been clouds, there have been the beasts that come with them. They are also many, perhaps even endless. No matter how many are slain, more always come; there is always another battle.

Their appearances and abilities vary, and while there are records of recurring species, it is not uncommon for a new beast, or some hideous chimeric evolution to appear. Thankfully, the size and severity of a storm is often a reliable indicator of the power of the monsters within it. Currently, storms are categorized as follows:

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Dating back to the country’s founding, there have always been individuals brave enough to fight back against the storm. Over the centuries, technology has evolved almost hand-in-hand with research of the Regentier. Modern hunters have access to a wide array of advanced weapons, armors, and vehicles.

However, in recent decades, the SNDP has been split into two competing divisions: the old guard Vulkans, and the newcomers, the Sarkaturges. While both divisions utilize humanity’s latent affinity for magic, their methods are wildly different from each other.

Vulkan Division

With black powder an ancient, unattainable relic, weapons are operated and enhanced via the energized remains of Regentier. As well, by tapping into a person’s latent well of power, they can be used like a battery, allowing them to operate arms and armor that would normally be unfeasible. Vulkan hunters are given access to high-potency energy weapons, as well as power armor, speed-enhancing exo-skeletons, and state-of-the-art prosthetics. They cannot, however, truly access their magical capabilities.

Sarkaturge Division

Having only emerged in the last few decades, the Sarkaturges carry a heavy stigma for turning people into monsters. It is true, of course—at least in a way. Sarkaturges tap into their affinity by grafting pieces of dead Regentier to their bodies, allowing them to perform extraordinary feats typically only achievable by their monstrous donors. The process is notoriously dangerous, with a mortality rate that would have landed any other procedure on the medical blacklists. In some places, that’s exactly where it is; in fact, the only place grafting is done is in the Sarkaturge Division’s wing. It is worth noting that the abilities granted by a graft are not the same as magic, though having a graft does enable one to learn it. Spellcasting is an entirely different and nascent art, with little research and very few practitioners. For the most part, Sarkaturges are limited to the feats granted to them by their grafts.

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Name:

Age: (Vulkan applicants are typically age 17-18, while Sarkaturges recruit from 13 but do not send hunters into battle until 16.)

Place of Birth: (If not from Sonnehall, give an idea of how far from city your home is.)

Division:

Background Check: (Brief history of your character, what led them to join the SNDP, and why they chose the division they did.)

Graft/Weapon Specialty: (You are fresh off the operating table. Vulkans will have limited control over their power supply, and thus will begin with less-extreme weapons until they learn to channel properly. Sarkaturges will have minor grafts to start, which will be added to/replaced/enhanced over time.)