The Greening of the Blighted Land
The King of the Wood
Those who survived did so by living underground. Those who remained aboveground died by the hundreds of millions. This is what is referred to as Megadeath.
Megadeath came in a momentary flash of resplendent light, and departed leaving a poisoned land fit only for the hardiest of scavengers and nomads, and so things remained for thousands of years until the age of the communes began. As it is written: In the beginning, the Maker created Megadeath.
From it, a new world—the world of the Darkmanse—was born. In it, the seeds of the Greening were planted.
Sacred Grove
The Greening has turned a formerly barren continent into a land that is lush with strange and exotic vegetation. Sea life is abundant again. The forests and jungles are teeming with game. Magic has returned to the land as well, after having lain dormant and hidden since before even the Dead Hand and the advent of Megadeath. The mundane veil is rent. Gods and monsters roam the land once more.
Among the terrestrials, there is hushed talk of groves that open like strange flowers onto other worlds and alternate planes of existence—a vast multiverse where the death god of the Darkmanse religion is but one maker among many—but such flowers, they say, only bloom for those who know the formula. People speak of demons and other unspeakable things that have taken up residence in dark places, even within the sunless crypts and reliquaries of the Darkmanse itself.
Even the artifice of the maker seems to be weakening. There are strange stories told of secluded forest springs whose waters flow uphill, of islands that hang in midair, and magic glades that defy the natural laws of the maker. Even the Moon hangs unnaturally low in the night sky, as though it is slowly crashing down, edging closer and closer with each revolution. To the planetouched who have known the freedom of other realms in the multiverse, the maker and his laws are appalling. To them, the Darkmanse is a citadel of lies. But there are some planetouched who would bend the Darkmanse to their own mysterious purposes.
Mysterious Chapel
Players in this campaign will be thrown into a world that teeters on the brink of something new and terrible. Alliances will be tested, and at the end of the journey ahead, a difficult choice awaits. To quote again from The Golden Bough:
"For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere."—James George Frazer, The Golden BoughBefore there was the Darkmanse, the land is said to have been rendered barren by an event known to terrestrials as the Dead Hand. To the first builders—men whose names are forgotten today except among the priestly denizens of the Darkmanse, men who are long dead now, such as Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation, who designed the first catacombs—this event was known simply as Doomsday.
Those who survived did so by living underground. Those who remained aboveground died by the hundreds of millions. This is what is referred to as Megadeath.
Megadeath came in a momentary flash of resplendent light, and departed leaving a poisoned land fit only for the hardiest of scavengers and nomads, and so things remained for thousands of years until the age of the communes began. As it is written: In the beginning, the Maker created Megadeath.
From it, a new world—the world of the Darkmanse—was born. In it, the seeds of the Greening were planted.
Sacred Grove
The Greening has turned a formerly barren continent into a land that is lush with strange and exotic vegetation. Sea life is abundant again. The forests and jungles are teeming with game. Magic has returned to the land as well, after having lain dormant and hidden since before even the Dead Hand and the advent of Megadeath. The mundane veil is rent. Gods and monsters roam the land once more.
Among the terrestrials, there is hushed talk of groves that open like strange flowers onto other worlds and alternate planes of existence—a vast multiverse where the death god of the Darkmanse religion is but one maker among many—but such flowers, they say, only bloom for those who know the formula. People speak of demons and other unspeakable things that have taken up residence in dark places, even within the sunless crypts and reliquaries of the Darkmanse itself.
Even the artifice of the maker seems to be weakening. There are strange stories told of secluded forest springs whose waters flow uphill, of islands that hang in midair, and magic glades that defy the natural laws of the maker. Even the Moon hangs unnaturally low in the night sky, as though it is slowly crashing down, edging closer and closer with each revolution. To the planetouched who have known the freedom of other realms in the multiverse, the maker and his laws are appalling. To them, the Darkmanse is a citadel of lies. But there are some planetouched who would bend the Darkmanse to their own mysterious purposes.
Mysterious Chapel
Players in this campaign will be thrown into a world that teeters on the brink of something new and terrible. Alliances will be tested, and at the end of the journey ahead, a difficult choice awaits. To quote again from The Golden Bough:
"In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier."
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