Excession

INHERITANCE - transhuman sci-fantasy space opera, bespoke system

@Abstract Proxy you may be full with with Pirates and other things besides but I wanted to throw you a tag because I would sincerely love to see your take on the material, should you have time and inclination.

Righteous Fiends; original dark fantasy with a custom system

I call dibs on Shade of the Divine.

@rush99999

A terrifying prospect. Very good

INHERITANCE - transhuman sci-fantasy space opera, bespoke system

Dropping the beta lore & rules

Righteous Fiends; original dark fantasy with a custom system

I'm seeking five players to take on the roles of warrior-priests to an enigmatic cult, serving their god and working to protect their people from destruction by their enemies.
The system is quick enough to learn, a dice-pool system that's easy to use but has mechanical depth if you want to engage with it.
No prior experience with this game or tabletop games required.
All skill levels welcome.
One post a week is ideal, once a month is acceptable.
No set post length - just post what you feel is necessary to move things along. Neither constant one-liners nor endless text.

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For over ten generations, you have fought for your freedom.

Confined to the tip of a barren peninsula, under constant siege, you have struggled to survive and grow. Your enemy view you as monsters, your neighbours as devils from their vision of hell. Your children must be raised as warriors, your lives spent in conflict.

All this for your faith. The essence of your struggle, the strength in your hearts, the thing which makes you righteous. All this for the blessing upon you, and the responsibility which accompanies it; to protect the mortals beneath you and spread the word of Vasnok.

You are of the Twilight Caste, the Savaan; those closest to God. Her power flows in your veins and you are honoured to hear the words of Her devas. You are warrior-priests and guardians of a solemn lineage, earned in trial and light.

In ancient times, She birthed you. In times of chaos and persecution, She guarded you with wings of night. In these troubled, embattled days, She prepares to take the mantle of Destroyer, and wipe this wicked world clean. Vasnok: The Living God, who struck down the architects of the world for their cruel tyranny and jealous anger, and in turn was cursed to live on the blood of her children.

Now you have been chosen, Her stalwart paladins and sanguine scholars, to undertake a special task in Her name that might change the destiny of your people and end the deicidal ambitions of your enemies.

Vasnok needs you; slip into your Living Armour, take up your khopesh, and bring the freedom of endless night to this ungrateful world.

==============

Learn cool martial arts! Wear biotech power armour! Fight monsters worse than the vampires you worship!
We need, ideally:
3 Twilight Guard, the warrior-priests of Vasnok, Kromsian aristocracy, clad in biomagical power armour.
1 Twilight Surgeon, a member of the Savaan gifted with a shred of Vasnok's holy power, who cares for the bodies and weapons of their kin.
1 Shade of the Divine, keeper of their brethren, who has mastered the secret arts of murder and tends to the souls of their kin - and watches for any sign of treason or heresy.

INHERITANCE - transhuman sci-fantasy space opera, bespoke system

When a player character is woken up:

Hider

Once, there was an Empire

I am Juka Keyam 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 on a distant vertical orbit of our star.

It must be millennia old, and yet the traces of their might are impossible to ignore. Though their arcane machines smoulder and crackle 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. The language of the Magi 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 casually 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 cortical inlays. I trawl archival recordings and redacted archaeological reports with mounting desperation.

Where I had felt a righteous hatred growing, now there is creeping dread. We had believed the Bandi to be a myth, exagerrations of a lost golden age. Now, I had awoken one.

INHERITANCE - transhuman sci-fantasy space opera, bespoke system

Since it may also help:

Soulcages

Vala
The Flame of Justice
A solid all-round ‘cage, the Vala can project flames, heat the air, generate explosions, and increase their allies' resistance to mind-altering effects.
Vala are coloured in shades of fire and gold, and often the helmets invoke the Manticore of ancient times.

Sarda
The Icy Grasp
An agile ‘cage, the Sarda can slow and freeze enemies with ice, drown them, and inspire fear. Sarda is styled in emerald, white, and blue, helmets evoking sea serpents.

Nabi
The All-Seeing
A fast but fragile ‘cage, Nabi can see and manipulate Fate. Decorated in amber, silver, and clockwork motifs.

Chaya
Death’s Shadow
Chaya is the stealthiest Soulcage, able to manipulate darkness and shadow. Decorated in shades of black, often with something like a cloak attached at the shoulders.

Raksaka
The Glasswalker
Raksaka is a slow, tough ‘cage able to fold time and space. Decorated with components seemingly made of glass and sandstone.

Gaida
The Beacon of Hope
Gaida is a tough ‘cage that fires beams of light, can cloak itself, and inspire its allies. Decorated in gold and ivory, often with a mirrored helmet.

Separa
The Red Talon
A versatile, bestial ‘cage, Separa can reshape itself, delivers deadly killing blows, and can envenomate targets. Heavily organic, Separa look quite distinct.

Prem
The Thief of Thoughts
A light ‘cage able to probe and distort the minds of enemies. Decorated in ruby and violet.

Jadugara
The Soultaker
Jadugara is a much feared ‘cage, able to raise the dead and sunder souls. Decorated in black and purple, with a skull motif.

Kampa
The Earthbreaker
Kampa is a very durable, strong ‘cage that can shape and shatter earth and metals. Decorated in bronze, brown, and motifs of earth.

Bijali
The Cleansing Storm
Bijali commands air, lightning, and magnetism. Decorated in blues and gunmetal.

INHERITANCE - transhuman sci-fantasy space opera, bespoke system

Devil's advocate here but...

Playing as a Bandi, what sort of character personas do you envision for the cast?

@Polybius

Good question. In past, I've asked players to sketch out 3-5 evocative sentences describing fragmented memories of their Bandi, with impliations about who they were, or who they are at their core. Some of the game is based on self-discovery and self-definition from a relative blank slate.
The Soulcage your Bandi uses has some influence on what their persona might be, but in the past some of the personae players have rolled with include:
Enthusiastic, curious, and eager for teamwork, like an energetic scout type.
Thoughtful, ruthless, but content to follow allies.
Vicious and desperate to avenge some unclear wrong on whatever foes can serve as suitable surrogates.
Stoic but inventive, mainly interested in making and testing new weaponry or disassembling enemy tech for study.
Total mama bear, compulsively protective of anything that reads as 'child' but also a terrifying shapeshifting murder beast.

Really my preference is no one invested in omnicide, and minimal inclination to infighting at first.
It's totally fine with me if over time the group(s) fractures due to emerging ideological differences (non-intervention, conquest, manipulation, etc).

The Bandi don't quite know what to do without a mission and commander, so realizing you're allowed to decide for yourselves and then what you decide would, I hope, but a good early arc.

A example of what some of the character, eh, initial writeups were like other times I've run this:

Memory Fragments:
Attack ships on fire aff the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark.
Imperial banners scorched and holed, buried in piles of the dead, flapping in the breeze of an alien world.
The weeping face of a child and the solemn face of their parent, right before the looming claws of the autosurgeon descend.
It took twenty-one minutes for emergency services to arrive - I timed it to the second, headlights approaching through the night like radio signals from another star.
"4.6 billion souls and all the blood and dust of the world on your hands, my darling..."

Pirates of the Darkening Skies

Sorry to hear it, Fellsing. I hope things work out for you, and you're welcome back if you find yourself with the time and interest.

Pirates of the Darkening Skies

I had a really good idea.

Cold Hands is in the arena prison, arguably in the sorting for slavery.
Kontina is the only place where Necromancers don't get got for attempting true resurrection.
Most Vampires in the setting are 'natural'; no one is sure where they came from but they've been around for millennia.
When a Necromancer attempts resurrection, the result is a malformed, traumatically deranged Vampire.

So, hear me out - it might even be fun to start with this scene - Cold Hands is pitted against an Aberrant Vampire raised for a spectacle in the arena because they've mistaken her for one of the vampire-hunting monk orders.
Chwegwn is the only person who bets on her and when she wins (she has a secret weapon in this particular fight that even she doesn't know about, so I know she'd win with no dice fudging) he technically wins her indenture contract.
And presumably sets her free before she joins the crew.

INHERITANCE - transhuman sci-fantasy space opera, bespoke system

Some unreliably narrated in-universe lore, to draw folks in:

Hider

Once, there was a Republic

I am Enso Wylam, of Tombwatch. Don't let the name fool you - it's a nice enough city, all things considered. It's the view, you know? Up here on the mesa we can see the buried spires of the Tomb. They say it 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 - first planet colonized, first wave of colonists. Built for the harsh climes.

But then a cataclysm came, a war that destroyed the old Republic. In the stories, it's said that aliens 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. By the time they found a weapon to beat the invaders it was too late.

And just as soon as they appeared, the Others were gone and the Magi all dead. Chaos followed; the shipping lanes collapsed and vital infrastructure in ruin. 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 declared they were taking control in the absence of the Magus Council.

We had help, though, or so the stories say. No one has seen a Bandi in generations - 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. Kept us safe in the years after the fall and then were gone.

Still, we're lucky. There are former colonies out there that have forgotten civilisation, that really believe in gods and monsters. Others have been taken over by the Jukari, those cyborgs who worship their god-empress. 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 technology.

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.