Let the drums play on...
There was an old saying once,
in the golden age. "Humanity is a rash on the Earth's back. We're just lucky it hasn't decided to scratch." They got to say things like that, back then. Back before the Earth decided to scratch. The old-timers say it all the time. They were just young kids when it happened. Ground started shaking, buildings started swaying and falling, planes dropped out of the sky like birds dying of heatstroke mid-flight. That's where Old Tom says Steelbird Landing came from. A couple of old planes went down in the same stretch of rainforest and managed to not fall into the new crevices. Old Rio, with its big statue of someone important now laying in pieces at the edge of the cliff-beach, has been absorbed by the green. The Earth takes back what the rash infected.
Out in the jungle, the lions and tigers and bears prowl. The Jaguares sharpen claws and obsidian upon the flesh of man. War-drums howl, hearts are consumed, heads are taken. The psychic screaming of the dead tickles at your nerve endings and peeks in with the venoms and poisons of the flowers and wilting fruits. Its glow fills the sky each night, draping colors across the sky like one of the silk-dancing women at the flesh-house. The sacred dusts and powders placed upon your guns are of little comfort when the rabid apes emerge from the jungle, a band of psychotics with the strength of two men each and the cruel glee of children. What is left of faith when you hear the screams of a man torn in half by an ape shrieking with laughter? What sort of god would even want that faith? Plenty would.
The only gods left to watch our wretched souls demand blood and suffering in exchange for each small boon. Or so their prophets whisper through painted lips sewn shut with barbed wire. They say that we are insects to them. We deserve to be thrown into the cracks of the world and be impaled upon the spear-rocks below. They say our heathen blood is a wine to the angry planet we are forced to scratch our livings from. We are little more than the last, persistent agents of its cleansed infection. The last vestiges of a virus too stubborn to die. Therefore, we are punished for our hubris.
So rise, remnant, you child of a dying breed. Rise, child of ash and rift and blood. Carve your place among the deadly green. Stand in the bleak sunrise, sweating from the midnight heat and panting for your morning water. Bathe yourself in the viscera of days long dead. Burn in the throes of passion, too alone to do anything but cling to what skin you can hold with desperate lips. Brandish your blade, your gun, your jaguar claw.
Power must be taken by force.
Enemies must be slain on altars.
Peace must be purchased with blood.
Knowledge must be written in pain.
The jungle will give you Nothing.
You are among the last remnants of humanity, stranded on the planet after a massive geological disaster changed the face of the planet and utterly destroyed human civilization. You are the children of those who were children when the world died. The world of before is nothing to you but a fairy tale told by those with gray hairs and feeble hearts.
You live in an area that would have been east of Rio de Janeiro way back when, the descendants of passengers on two commercial flights and one cargo flight that crashed within the same square mile. These planes teeter on brand new cliff faces, deep in the jungle. The world has changed since your ancestors knew it, with new horrors and realities to contend with.
The Maelstrom looms over everything, creating something of an Aurora Borealis at all times of year, but always in sickly and disturbing colors. With the right drugs, the right brain defects, or the right psychoses, it is possible to hear the whisperings of the dead, and have them reveal truths to you under the guise of metaphor and vision. Those who do this most easily go by many names: Seer, Brainer, Listener, Skull-reader. All of them the same: Lifeless, doll’s eyes watching the world around them, bending other to their merciless whims, playing mouthpiece to the gods… or taking the guise of gods for their own ends.
To the north, a tribe of formerly Brazilian men and women have reverted to the old ways, sacrificing humans to the sun god and beginning to have dreams of empire.
To the east, the broken remains of Old Rio sit in crumbling husks, almost picked clean and a hotbed of raiders, bandits, and gangers fighting like dogs over the last scraps.
To the south, slavers keep their camps, readying their catching hooks for “jungle cruises” where they’ll pick off the stragglers and haul them away to you-don’t-want-to-know.
To the west, a massive cleft that brings the sea deep into the heart of the land, where the wind sings terrible songs, and where monsters are said to creep from beneath the stony cliffs in search for something more than meat...
It is in this environment that you must carve out a living. This is where you will make your last, and only stand. Who will you be?
Will you be the Governor, keeping your settlement on the razor’s edge between too lenient and too brutal, struggling to protect what your ancestors built?
Will you be the Gunlugger, bristling with weapons and ammunition, the only one to recognize that the only price left to pay for anything is blood?
Will you be the Skinner, holding what fragments of beauty are left in the world between cupped hands, offering it to strangers with whispers of “come and see it, there is more than blood and rutting, there is music and light here, don’t worry about the cost…?”
Will you be the Brainer, dragging secrets from minds on puppet strings and staring into souls with the empty eyes of a thing long dead?
What else could you be? What else would you be?
Long story short, I need some people for a Post-apocalypse RP. This shit will be MATURE.
Expect some VIOLENT SHIT.
Expect some DRUG USAGE.
Expect some SEX. (But fade to black for the children, please. But you are allowed and encouraged to carry on in PMs and brag about it on Discord.)
Expect some HUMAN SUFFERING.
Expect some HAVING YOUR CHARACTER'S SHIT PUSHED IN.
Expect some VIOLENT, DRUG-INDUCED SEX THAT PRODUCES BATSHIT VISIONS OF DARK FOREBODING.
In short: It's rough out here.
If that doesn't tickle your pickle, GET THE FUCK OUT.
WHAT I NEED FROM YOUR SORRY ASS:
Make me a character. Use the following CS and Handy Dandy Post-Apocalypse Character Guide:
That's it. We're done here.
OOC HERE:
OOC
[GM NOTE: Yes, I did a stupid and posted this in the Casual section first on accident. Sue me.]
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