Editing Monster Cavaliers C

= Monster Cavaliers (Curseborne) =

<em>The year is 3044 by the Selenite calendar - about 5190, by the formerly heretical Gregorian calendar - and the world has died, reborn, and died again.

The first death was what mortals call the Nightfall, though the Conclave of the Sangrealian Church called it the end of the Third Synodic Era. It was partly nukes that did it - dwindling resources and the greed of old men in power do not mix well. But there was surprisingly little in the way of actual nukes - no, what really did the world in was bioweapons. Mortals tried to use the power of curses to control the spread of the Sand Plague, even as it enhanced the viral crystal spread, rendered it even possible. Entire swaths of the world were turned to desert, alien landscapes filled with portals to the Outside and unstable Liminalities.

The Accursed saw it coming. Some of them had even worked on the early form of the Sand Plague, only to watch in horror as it was treated as a weapon of war than deterrence. So they spent over a decade saving as much as they could in Epochs, in Battlegrounds, even in a couple Shattered Spaces. That plan, at least, worked. The planet was devastated, but it had the perfect set of tools to rebuild. And saved population.

Thing was...the Accursed also had prime access to those tools. And all Damnations feed on humans in some way, or at least need them.

It did not take long for saviors to become rulers - and founders. The Lineages lent themselves well to a new aristocracy structure, with the Families becoming new Houses of nobility. The saved humans became the core of a serf population, and occasional source of new Accursed as elevated knights - a hope of some social mobility. It took the better part of a millennia, but in time, the world was built anew - in the image of the Peerage of the Gloaming, the nobility of monsters.

And they were magnificent. Terrible, yes, but magnificent. The Founders were the greatest scientists and magicians among the night people already, and their descendants and students only progressed more. With the power to tame curses, merging the power of magic and technology into the great Mystic Sciences, and not only did the technical base of the world recover, but passed a singularity - ecologies were easily replaced, great castle-cities arose in the ruins for singular nobles, and space became just another place to explore for the great guilds.

It was terrible for the mortals, of course. At best, they were second-class citizens - candidates for elevation into knighthood as Accursed, but little more. At worst, especially intelligent cattle - while not all Hungry vampires feed on any form of flesh to supply their power, they all need blood - and the certainly didn't care overmuch if a few unproductive kine were vulnerable to creations of the other Houses, or bandits. The Fourth Synodic Era was a world of wonders, but ones exclusively enjoyed by the lords of the night.

They really should have seen the growing resentment of the lesser monsters coming.
Decadence preys on all, as does stagnation. The Peerage grew ever more ossified and cruel, but the elevation from cattle to Accursed didn't stop - magic does not care, and curses take complacency as a challenge. And the thing is, one does not forget being a mortal - or often, that mortals cared for you more than your ostensible lords, even after your "ennobling".

The Nightbreak - the turning to the Fifth Synodic Era - ended much like the Fourth at its beginning, as the Gloaming turned on each other - but its ending was much different, as their ostensible vassals had been stewing in resentment and planning for more than a century at that point, building their own alliances for a mass revolt, and finding those few among the Peerage that had grown tired of their way of life for support. This was not something they ever comprehended could happen, and so the forces of Chalice, the Capitol of the World, were overthrown, and the entire world as it was collapsed.

Now the world is a wild frontier - in particular, the place where you live, the Crystal Scar, the great wasteland which still has remnants of the Sand Plague's decay ecology as it primary one. It's not nearly as lethal - the pressures of evolution selected for the Plague's own survival over lethality, and it rarely transmits to organic life that is not a product of it warping the curseweave in some way, and thus symbiotic. The new, mortal-lead government of Chalice attempts to keep order, but their authority does not extend far beyond the arcology's borders - and many outer settlements prefer it that way. The Scar in particular is a place where the remnants of the old Peerage hide, still clinging to their old holdings and dreams of turning the Era back, and that leads to many mercenaries, monsters, and bandits hiding behind the remnants' old power. The settlements who live there - ironically mostly descendants of escaped serfs - face constant danger, both from the remnants and from greedy tech hunters after the ruins of the Gloaming's study facilities of the Scar, and their magnificent mystic tech.

Which is why the old monstrous knights of the Peerage, impoverished and finally free, have a new profession - that of monster hunter, and more than that, explorer. The old devices of the Gloaming were made for Accursed after all, and whatever ability to insulate the defecting knights from using them against their lords was lost with the Chalice. More than that...thousands of years is a long time to be the literally monstrous ruling class. Fighting against the old night's monsters is one of the few ways to gain trust in the face of cultural trauma, and to feed the Damnation without feeding on mortals.

So it is with you. Sally forth, young Cavaliers of the Night.</em>

== Player Characters ==

* Sera Cross
* Diana
* TBD
* Name Here