PrivateVentures — Roleplayer Guild

Dali glanced up when the two strangers sat down.  The first seemed to be some kind of white-haired ninja. That’s a lot of knives. Wonder if he carries a single pair of scissors, or if it’s all just knives. The second stranger appeared to be a child, possibly the ninja’s kid, but it didn’t seem like it. In fact, she looked like some kind of a thief, what with all the keys hanging off her neck. But the real kicker had yet to walk through the door. He bobbed his head in greeting to the two newcomers, and fiddled with the coin in his pocket.

And then, he did. A guy in a hooded robe. Dali tasted the air, tongue flicking fast. The guy smelled like brimstone. Wizard, maybe. The ninja, like liquor. The thief, like sweat. The wizard strode in proudly, arrogantly. Dali had to stifle a snicker as he tripped over the doorframe. Then, he was forced to hold down his indignation when the wizard raised a hand and summoned the bartender out of nowhere. WHERE WAS THE BARKEEP TWENTY MINUTES AGO? And then, the barkeep offered him a drink. And then he says “Lizard Lager”. That seems racist. I should probably say something… But he also found the bartender. Decisions, decisions… Dali decided he’d rather order a drink than start a civil rights brawl. He walked up behind the robed fellow just in time to see the guy checking out a little bronze coin with an eye on it. Stranger still was when this weirdo pulled down his hood. Bright red hair gleamed under the light of bioluminescence. 

”Triple rum, if you wouldn’t mind.” He tossed ten copper pieces on the bar. ”Keep the change.” He stepped up to the stool next to the wizard and asked aloud, ”Ssso, you got a coin, too, huh?” But at that very moment, the band left the stage, bowing quietly. He held up a finger. ”Hold that thought.” 

He jogged back to his table to grab his guitar. He snatched it up, slinging it over his head. ”Hey, Ninja-guy. Watch my ssstuff.” He jogged back to the bar, threw back his rum, and stepped onto the stage, still wincing from the drink, bobbing his head in typical Ophidian greeting. His parietal eye registered heat converging up here, but cold below. Band must’ve worked up a sweat. He raised his arm in greeting to the humans here, No scales in the room. Weird. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. He strummed a melancholy A-minor using the coin as a pick, and raised it so the patrons could see. “The Eye of the Cssyclopsss. The Watchful Eye.” The patrons watched him flick the coin into the air, then suddenly, a coin fell onto each table, bouncing, shining, ringing, finally landing, eyes facing straight up. But when they blinked, it was gone. Dali plucked the strings with his claws, masterfully weaving his old magic through the room, the ambient lighting absolutely perfect for the hallucinations of a practiced hand. 

e|---------------------------------------------------|
B|---------------------------------------------------|
G|---------------------------------------------------|
D|--------2-2-2--------------------------------------|
A|--------------3-3-3-0-0-0-2-2-2-------0-0-0--------|
E|--0-0-0-------------------------3-3-3-------2-2-2--|

Dali continued. ”The Eye watchess and waitss, watchess and waitss. It is the beacon of a madman, a hoarder of arcane knowledge, a mutant among sssane mindss.” To the listeners, there seemed to be a whispering floating through the room, and once more, Dali raised the coin. He’d stopped playing his guitar, but the music was still audible. The audience sufficiently pacified, the real hallucinations could begin. The eye of the coin held in Dali’s claws seemed to blink, and look around. It seemed to see inside the mind, to read one’s thoughts, to- ”It iss a little trinket, a little icon, an idol of the inner truth, of open eyess in the mind.” His Ophidian lisp began to lessen, more and more as he spoke.

At this moment, the light seemed to dim, the glowing sea-creatures seeming to fade away, becoming the silhouettes of different shapes, weird shapes, improper in a way, so much so that one might think that shapes such as those should not belong in a rational world. ”A man in black, nothing more than a sshadow with a pouch full of coinss, like the last whissper of a long dead god, fluttersss through the night, ssslipping little watching eyes into the pocketss of the destitute and outcasst.” Something flashes by in everyone’s peripheral vision. Something black. Something tall. “If you find such a coin, know this: It is a summoning. It is a calling. It is a journey to risk life and limb. It is a sacrifice of one’s soul. The Glutton’s Castle awaits! If you can find the path, and you can survive the journey, you may find what you seek. If not that, then you will certainly find something else.”  The whispers grew louder, the music more menacing. The stage seemed to rise higher off the floor, and the weird shapes in the fishbowls warped even more strangely. The shadows stretched and the air was filled with the chlorine smell of ozone. ”But beware, ye seeker of knowledge. Beware, for you may find what you seek. But in the end, it may be nothing like what you wanted.” Dali slipped a pouch from his pocket, and fished out a leaf. He licked it, leaving a trail of sticky saliva along one flat edge. ”For this is a quest left by dreaming Gods and things that have no name. “ He sprinkled little herbs from the pouch into the fold of the leaf and began rolling it into a tight tube. He slipped it into his mouth, and struck a match. It flared bright red in the dim winery, and lit up Dali’s face like a ghost. The music still echoed loud and clear, thudding like a heartbeat. ”Ye who have found thyself beneath the gaze of the Watchful Eye, make thine way unto the Ceaseless Feast. Thou wilst uncover a conspiracy of Gods and Demons. There is a Painted lady and a fatherless son. Thou wilst hear the voices of three faces that will speak in unison upon a hill, and the babbling old Gods will choose their champion.” The room went dark again as Dali’s cigar lit, and the match blew out. Dali’s face was obscured in smoke and darkness, nothing more than a little glowing red eye in the fog, as the music faded away to become one with the whispering.

Instead of just being an asshole about it all, I'd like to tell you about my own fantasy universe. I worked a long time on the inner workings of the world, and maybe it could demonstrate some of my points, instead of me just being a nitpicky dick about everything, lol.

The story itself is called Afterthoughts, but I'm just gonna tell you about the world.

I called it Transience, my characters called it "the Transient World", "Transience", "Temporary Home", and it was even called "the rental" by some characters, because it wasn't supposed to be permanent. Overpopulation became such a problem through reincarnation, being that so many were being born without having a full soul to inhabit the body, that those with fragmented souls were given a new place to reincarnate into. The god of this world, calling itself "Rim", and declaring itself "perfection in balance" ruled for a while with impunity, but soon left for other matters, leaving behind the new world to fend for itself. It quickly fell to mayhem, left to be tended by broken souls.

From our galaxy came Humanity and the Ve'lar, basically young gods who created humanity as a companion race, immortal alien entities with instant metabolisms and the ability to communicate with any other living thing through telepathic suggestion. They were perfect in every conventional way. Even down to their ethics and moral, they were perfect. Their written language is frought with certain pauses, represented in Phoenetic languages as " ' ", (apostrophes). These pauses are points at which certain telepathic visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations. It is oft-mentioned by other races that communication with the Ve'lar, while "interesting, and certainly a worthwhile experience," is "definitely something hard to get used to."

From the distant GNz-11 galaxy came the Areiaion Collective, pronounced "are-ay-eye-on", great entities composed of ferromagnetic fluid and electrical impulses, connected by a hive consciousness, (note: not a hive-mind, just the emotional and biochemical balance), that built for themselves massive shells of iron, copper, zinc, titanium, and E-M.16.3, an unknown metal found only in that galaxy, communicating by metal-on-metal screeching at varying frequencies for varying durations. Ex. "The Areiaion Collective" = 26GHz for 1.61111111111 seconds. 26GHz for 1.62 means something entirely different, and they are able to recognize this. The largest was the size of a city, miles across. The smallest, the size of a flea. The electric young sun in their origin system gave them life, and they continue to harvest the radiation they feed on from conquered system's suns. 

From a hole in our dimension in 2240 A.D., a new organism enters, a sentient being composed of thought, light, sound, and extradimensional aether. It is discovered in another, completely different story that they actually don't even come from a dimension at all, but rather, the space between, whence "light shines through the little perforations your people make". Humanity calls them the Captivators, but they don't call themselves anything. The beings latch onto the soul of a living entity, no matter how broken, and fill in the cracks with themselves, a parasite of sorts, despite it essentially being a symbiotic relationship. It gives insane insight, in addition to powerful telepathic abilities and intuitive abilities. But it's a drain. We see the hosts become corrupted, violent, unpredictable, and extremely dangerous. Naturally, the captivator itself doesn't care. Captivators can attach to anything, and they are intelligent in a way even the Rim cannot fully understand.

The Rim is almost god. It is almost omniscient, almost omnipresent, almost omnipotent. It can be anywhere and everywhere at once, but apparently must deliberately intend to do so. It seems to have no knowledge of events that occur outside of its presence, save by analyzing corresponding events. It can split its physical manifestation, a rippling humanoid mass of colliding blobs of blackness, and spaces of emptiness, into infinite forms, taking on any shape or size it chooses. It only likes to deal with physical entities with a physical body, preferring to apprehend Captivators in a more cosmic body. The Rim broke itself to give all of our dimension's life forms bits of itself, our souls, hence its imperfection. It is enraged at having returned to find the world it had left behind now dying, its inhabitants waging war on one another, and intruders from another reality vying for control. It declares armageddon, and sets about to reclaim the pieces of itself, intending to return itself to perfection, and start it all anew. 

The Samar are an enigma. They are an anomaly, resembling no other life form in existence. They, according to legend, are extremely strong, and can shapeshift. They are rumored to have once been the natural enemy of the Captivators, but no Captivator has confirmed this. Supposedly, they were the original inhabitants, before the Rim came to claim the world. They were forced from their home, unable to fight the Rim, and were forced deep into the earth. No one knows exactly where they went. Some of the older Ve'lar, the ones old enough to remember the beginning, refer to the Samar as "The Old Gods".

Timelines skewed, we often see the twisted remnants of races older than humanity, forgotten bits of old experiments gone wrong roaming the sulfurous plains of Transience. We see Areiaion that have been abandoned by the collective, forming their bodies into unprecedented shapes, becoming predators in the darkness, feral and savage. We see Ve'lar who have become corrupt, now blinded by ambiguity, unable to decipher right and wrong in the face of new and strange adversity. We see God lose its power as the life it sacrificed itself to produce turns against it, and proves to be more powerful than God ever imagined. And through it all, the Captivator rises.

It isn't magic, per se. It's manipulation. Through access to the Rim fragment deep within, designed to be activated by the surge of DMT on death, intended for enlightenment, a Traveler could manipulate matter to his or her own ends. Ex. 1: A Pyrokinetic, indending to strike a faraway target with a line of intense flames, would first need to depressurize the intended line and separate it into flammable components, creating a 'rail' of depressurized hydrogen or oxygen, and then providing a spark. By the same token, a Pyromancer could produce the blaze without the need for an external spark, but would be unable to control the fire very well. For some, this would be considered an advantage. Ex. 2: A biomancer is a mage with the ability to control pathogens and bodily functions through suggestion. They might eliminate a target by causing their body to start producing pheromones that attract flesh-eating insects, or by shattering the skull with rapidly expanding tumors, or even cause the body to rot while still alive and healthy. Biomancers typically are limited by the infection methods required for these tools. Ex. 3: The Gunslinger, a famous Traveler, holds all his power in his hands and his arcane knowledge, being able to draw his guns almost as fast as the speed of light, and fire them insanely quickly and accurately, while the runes carved into the inside of the barrels give the ammo impossible piercing ability and range.

Travelers are called such because they are the only ones who have unlocked the inner willpower necessary to withstand instaneous travel. They have gained the privilege to tear open holes in their own spacetime to jump from place to place in the blink of an eye, provided they carry with them special key stones. If all of one's stones are used, they cannot Travel. Their power has allowed them a position above the law, dealing justice as they see fit to the weaker civilian population. Few people even have full enough souls to become Travelers, but the Captivators are changing that, giving ordinary people the power to resist Traveler influence. However, only Travelers can use key stones. Those without the durability of a Traveler will die in the jump.

Travelers come from every race, save Captivator. There are many famous Human and Ve'lar Travelers, but only several Areiaion Travelers have surfaced. It is unknown how many Travelers the Collective keeps under wraps.

Upon officially being declared a Traveler, one loses their former name, and instead gains a title that the Traveler's Guild uses as both identification as well as a countersign. The title also serves to protect a Traveler's friends and family from retaliation against that particular Traveler.

Notable Travelers include: the Lightbearer, a New Ateran Gravito-Photomancer, and an extremely talented smith; The Ninth Peacemaker, supposedly the most powerful of all Travelers, armed with a suit of armor that is virtually indestructible and can shapeshift through a mind-meld with its wearer. The suit is passed down to the next Peacemaker when the previous one dies; The Gunslinger, a lightning-fast Ve'lar who can output ammunition from his two revolvers faster than any machine-gun; The Cartographer, a man who can find anything, anywhere, due to an impeccable sense of direction, aided by his Rimshard. He is well known for his gauntlet, a combination shield and gauntlet that can produce an EM shield that reduces all particle movement against to absolute zero, freezing bullets, energy pulses, swords, etc. in their tracks; The Lightningrod, a powerful electromancer famous for his ability to vertically leap to inhuman heights, before coating his body in white-hot plasma, impacting against the ground like a combination lighting bolt-meteorite; the Frostweaver, a cryomancer infamous for her ability to pull water vapor from the air, flash-freezing it into weapons, armor, even using it as razor-sharp, literally unlimited projectiles. She has minor telekinetic prowess; the Watchtower, a ninety-foot tall Areiaion with the strength to level cities, and extreme electromagnetic powers, allowing it to repel enemy fire, and even bend light to make itself into an invisible titan of excessive force.

Weapons are myriad, ranging from Human modern miliary firearms to Ve'lar neural pulse weapons to enchanted swords to a suit of armor that shapeshifts, anything and everything seems to be on the table. And there is no Geneva Convention.

Government is weak here in Transience, with the exception of the Traveler's Guild, a kind of a worker's union that attempts to organize people who are practically superpowered outlaws. The Traveler's Guild is really nothing more than a collection of wealthy merchants that pay Travelers bounties for completing jobs, often assassination, rescue, sabotage, or bodyguarding. Against common foes, a single Travelers is nigh-invincible. More than one is suicide.

The plants and animals of Transience are generally speaking, repulsive and horrifying. Most are violent, savage predators that bear toxins, venoms, poisons, and even acids to incapacitate their prey. Even Areiaion are known to be felled by a certain kind of corrosive fly. There is a predatory bipedal creature known as Mai Lao, or "Skinwalker", that kills Humans and Ve'lar, and wears their skin, using its worm-like muscle structure to fill out a skin of any size, to trick other creatures into approaching them. The plants tend to be bioluminescent at night, at least the ones with edible fruit, and even some of the ones that don't have edible fruit, pretending to be the former. Many of the chemicals that react to cause the bioluminescence run into nearby clean rivers and streams, causing the water to glow, and to require filtering before being ingested. However, much of the land is charred by overexposure, and in the hot, dry season, spurts of fire are known to burst from the ground in some places. In the cold, dry season, everything freezes, and many die. In the cold, wet season just before its drier brother, everything is primed during the day in awful acid rains, and then frozen at night. In the subsequent hot, wet season, the surviving predators abound, searching for the surviving prey, and even getting a Traveler from time to time. Even many of the plants have become predatory, some having evolved razor-sharp leaves, and learning to thrive on copper, dropping its leaves, allowing it to simply let its prey slice itself to ribbons, the trees feeding on the precious metals in its blood. Others use a more active method, having long, thin 'tripwire' tendrils which it hangs from trees, dropping toxic darts when startled, and using its tendrils to lift its prey into its main "bulb" in order to feed. 

Intelligent and organized clans of outlaws live in the wilderness, despite the harsh climate, and will assault anyone they don't recognize, both to defend their territory, as well as to loot or ravage the person they've caught. It is extremely dangerous to travel outside of Traveler company.

The world is dying, and its inhabitants are getting desperate.

Cities of Interest

New Atera: Built on a giant pillar of black obsidian from a volcanic eruption that engulfed old Atera when the first Traveler's War began, New Atera is the artistic and cultural hub of Transience, all races converging reasonably peacefully here, trading goods and knowledge between one another. New Atera's architecture consists primarily of massive, prismic, black-glass obelisks, hollowed into buildings, in which live artists, famous athletes, actors, musicians, and of course, the downtrodden and dreamless. New Atera is notable for having a gravity-forge smithy run by the famous Photo-Gravitomancer, the Lightbearer, as well a doorway to Mackey's Tavern, and last but not least, the infamous night club, A Most Enigmatic Evening. The city is surrounded by about fifteen miles of grey, dead land, in a circular shape, from the volcanic activity that devoured the original city.

Haawen: A walled in city built into a network of caverns sinking hundreds of meters into the ground, all artificial components composed of white marble, Haawen was once the center for scientific and medical research, making incredible breakthroughs in tandem with both the Traveler's guild and the resistance, a truly unbiased center of knowledge. In recent cycles, it's become a drug haven for all races, after a period of bad deals and old grudges resurfacing, and is facing severe economic consequences, as many of its now acid-rain filled cavernous segments are now gang-controlled. Some Travelers occasionally go there simply to 'relieve stress'.

Aathoth: "The Library. The Garden. God's Eye. It goes by many names. None who have seen inside have ever seen outside again. But not by their own choice. They found a calling, a quest, to journey far into places unknown, and risk their lives for truly infinite glory."- Something a guy in New Atera says

Amethyst/Ca'ar'Du'ul: Originally a Ve'lar controlled city until it was taken by the Areiaion briefly, then sacked by a team of Travelers, it is famously renamed Amethyst for its glowing violet crystal structures. The city is underground, in a gargantuan cavern system, and is most famous for its "Looking Pool", a seemingly endless and bottomless body of water so still, it resembles a mirror. The city itself is cut straight into the walls and cyclopean stalagmites, with upper lofts contained it the wide, thick stalagtites above. 

Sar'na'th'ar: Once a city controlled by what the Ve'lar called "Scale-men", not knowing where they came from or what they were. There are few records of what the "Scale-Men" looked like, what sort of scales were intended, or even what they called themselves or their city. The few attempts to communicate ended in horrifying murder, wherein supposedly, the "Scale-men" had "turned inside out" and devoured the ambassadors. The city itself is buried in the sand, and would require a powerful geomancer to exhume, the likes of which has not been seen for a long time.

Wonders:

The Sea of Bone: the site of a three-day battle between two human clans, pulling alliances into it, one after another until each side numbered over a million strong. The battle was horrifying, and the atrocities are still mysterious to this day, as most of the survivors refuse to speak of the battle, and the reports of the survivors willing to discuss it are barely credible, due to either inconsistencies in the story, or simply their mental state. Either way, the Sea of Bone is an approximately fifty mile wide, two hundred mile long stretch of nothing but dry bone dust and iron oxide. 

The Towers: Enormous pillars of the stuff of the Rim, they resemble 500 ft. tall lava lamps with no glass. Only the Rim can open them, but anyone can enter. No one ever has. 

The Looking Pool: A mirror-still body of water of unknown depth and unknown length. No one is allowed to swim in it, by order of the Traveler's Guild. It is beautiful, a popular tourist attraction. 

The Windows: A rocky, mountainous, treacherous expanse wherein quick doorways to other dimensions are known to spawn, collapse, and vanish in a matter of seconds. It is dangerous, specifically because there is no telling whether or not you're close enough to get sucked in, or where'd you'd end up if you did. Having said that, it's a popular suicide location. If you can find a good, safe vantage point where the powerful winds won't hurl you to your death, you can watch and see into other dimensions as they burst into life. Many have expressed good experiences. Some have been horrified into comatose states. Some now have no memory of the event and have picked up odd tendencies. It's all in the eye of the beholder. 

The Sinkholes of Sar'na'th'ar: Sinkholes where worms live. Giant worms. Giant, starving worms. Giant starving worms with regenerative capabilities, near-instaneous reproductiion by budding, and they swell up to almost twice their size when angry. It's also very sandy and slippery in Sar'na'th'ar.

Currency is simple. Metals. The more, the better. The more precious, the better. The more unusual, the better. Any metal will do, but some require a lot to equal a little of another. It all depends on the seller. But out in the wilds, a person can be attacked simply for the metal they carry, no matter how much it is, or what it's worth.

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