Monster Cavaliers C

History & Setting

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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.

Click to View Terminology 

Those with a bullet point are unique to this chronicle.

Accursed: People who have a Damnation, a powerful curse that causes them to become more than human as a sort of cosmic balance, and granting them the power of magic.

Battleground: A plane of the Outside that is effectively a zone where the Outside is trying to aggressively impose its laws on Earth's reality. Only Accursed can enter them safely at all.

• Cavalier of the Night: Formerly a term for Accursed who were knights and lesser vassals of the Peerage, often the middle class of their highly stratified society. Now a term for those Accursed who are also venators, due to the vast majority of Cavaliers siding with the Nightbreak rebellion.

• Chalice: The vast arcology that used to be the holy city of the Peerage of the Gloaming and the Sangreal Church. Now the heart of human order in the world, though it's notoriously prone to sacrificing freedom for security.

Curse: The mystic waste heat of entropy, "what could have been" given a will. The basis of all magic. The sum total of all curses is sometimes called the curseweave, as greater entanglement in it results in greater power.

Damnation: A powerful curse that transforms a mortal into an Accursed - also the basic way they feed their magical reserves, like the alternate feeding form a Hungry needs or the emotion a Dead most enjoys. Depleting yourself of magic causes a "fall to Damnation", a starving state where the Accursed goes mad with need (many compare it to their blood set on fire) until they feed. "A beast I am lest a beast I become", since a starving Accursed is unable to think in the long term from agony and/or controlling their powers.

Epoch: A Liminality born when a major historical event causes time to fracture, creating an alternate world that time itself seems to regard as a splinter, making them very dangerous as the continuity tries to unmake it. Presumably use of them would allow for actual time travel, but even the Peerage didn't figure out how to do it - or wanted to.

Family: A subdivision of a Lineage that share similar traits, especially their particular form of Damnation. The Raptors of the Primal Lineage are legacy-obsessed werebirds, for instance, Reeves of the Sorcerer Lineage are necromantic druids, Chimeras of the Outcast Lineage are mad doctors whose true forms resemble abstract angels, the Egyptian pantheon, or both.

Interstitial Space: A sentient Liminality that manifests as a pocket in space, and a notoriously clingy one that desires to be lived in. That being said, they aren't Shattered Spaces - it's hard to leave, but they make sure residents are safe, leading them to be filled with colonies in the modern day, if rather insular-by-necessity ones.

Liminality: A place where potent curses have caused the area to become more like an Outside, ie a haunted place. The Crystal Scar is rife with them, as the Sand Plague was already a curse-based form of life.

Lineage: The five general types of Accursed, as far as Accursed know - Dead (body-riding ghosts who bask in emotion to remind themselves of life), Hungry (vampires, who have rarified and particular tastes other than blood), Outcasts (half-Outsiders constantly trying to connect with the world despite knowing instinctively their ancestors were banished to mortal form and suffering generational sentences for it), Primals (werebeasts with a Creature, an id-born animal personality that loves them, but feels the need to imprint itself destructively on the world), and Sorcerers (wizards addicted to magic in the same way one gets addicted to food - they need to cast to survive, and they must sacrifice to control and feed their powers). In the Fifth Synodic Era, Primals are generally the most accepted by mortals (as it's very hard for them to extend their lifespans, and what techniques there are often depend on metaphysical cannibalism, meaning most Primals had a grudge against elders and were often elevated from mortal populations), and Hungry most disliked (as immortality, and distance from the quick, is kind of inherent to the undead condition - and Dead have a Damnation that forces at least functional empathy).

Outside: Sometimes Outsides, any plane that isn't Earth's native one. A notorious source of troubles due to curious and hungry inhabitants crossing over, plus ruling archons who want to exploit Earth in some fashion.

• Peerage of the Gloaming: The Accursed nobility that owned most of the world (and abused it) during the Fourth Synodic Era after they rebuilt it, very close to being a modernized neofeudal system more akin to the Holy Roman Empire except worldwide. Their fall was the Nightbreak, and today, the remaining Peerage is a source of perils in the world in order to destroy the new world or bring it back to their time.

• Sand Plague: The curse-based bacterial bioweapon, meant as an environment destroyer, that destroyed the Third Synodic Era when it was combined with limited nuclear war. So called because it crystallizes biomass, causing areas ravaged by it to become deserts of colorful, crystalline sand with odd outcroppings. May possibly be semi-sentient, but what mind it has is thankfully more interested in survival than being a bioweapon - it seemed to help quarantine itself once it discovered how to delay death so it could reinfect potential hosts. People infected by it often report conversing with figures that claim to be Death in fever dreams or delirium, though whether or not this is proof of the Church or the Plague using a common myth to communicate is a subject of much debate.

• Sangrealian Church: The dominant religion of the Peerage and the Fifth Synodic Era, albeit much less organized and far less snide towards mortals. A mix of Abrahamic religions, especially Catholicism, with somewhat Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and a lot of knowledge worship. They hold that Accursed are fundamentally beings who would have been born in different realms, but are born human to learn the joy and sorrow of it before remembering their powers. The Peerage claimed this made them inherently better, but the Church's lay members grew to resent the cavalier way they were treated, mortal and Accursed alike. The modern Church is quite unlike the Peerage's idea, with most settlements - and the Capital - pushing the idea that Accursed and mortals have much to teach each other, and so should be equals. (As a side note, the modern Church looks very askance at immortality - they say it's self-torture in the long term, and the only truly eternal being that isn't God is Death, who is a capricious entity who is by turns cruel and kind due to being unable to perceive anything except the world changing around them - and even Death dies to be replaced by a new Death on occasion.)

• Selenite Calendar: The Sangrealian Church version of the Gregorian Calendar, dating back to the official founding of Chalice - and back in the days of the Gloaming, the Pontifex that ruled the religion.

Shattered Space: A Liminality that has turned predatory in some fashion, and sentient enough to seek food, often because of a portal to a hostile Outside. A frequent non-Peerage enemy of Cavaliers, especially since Outside invaders often use them as symbiotic beach heads and bases, and they sometimes come to an understanding with bandits.

Venator: A monster hunter, mortal or otherwise. Tend to either be the noblest people around, bandits with self-righteousness, or both.

Crew Roster & Goals

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Sera Cross (Battlefield Angel)
Progression		Contacts				PC Bonds		NPC Bonds
Entanglement: 1 EXP (Unspent/Total): 0 / 0		Jane Faraday: +2 (Archive, Security) WO Gideon Rusk: +1 (Mentor) Tessa "Coyote" Vane: +2 (Dangerous, Sneaky)				Diana: +X		NPC +X
Torments						Aspirations
Lineage: Like Flies to Shit (Giving in summons a hostile Shiver adversary to the Area) Personal: Escalate directly to physical violence (Trigger: Seeing a close bond demeaned or abused)						[S] Impress hard ass CO (and maybe get him off my ass!) [S] Knock XXXX warlord down a peg [L] Discover what happened to mother

Template
Progression		Contacts				PC Bonds		NPC Bonds
Entanglement: X EXP (Unspent/Total): 0 / 0		[Name]: +X [Name]: -X				[PC Name]: +X [PC Name]: -X		[NPC Name]: +X [NPC Name]: -X
Torments						Aspirations
Lineage: [Lineage Torment] Personal: [Personal Torment] (Trigger: [Trigger condition])						[S] [Short Aspiration] [S] [Short Aspiration] [L] [Long Aspiration]

Template
Progression		Contacts				PC Bonds		NPC Bonds
Entanglement: X EXP (Unspent/Total): 0 / 0		[Name]: +X [Name]: -X				[PC Name]: +X [PC Name]: -X		[NPC Name]: +X [NPC Name]: -X
Torments						Aspirations
Lineage: [Lineage Torment] Personal: [Personal Torment] (Trigger: [Trigger condition])						[S] [Short Aspiration] [S] [Short Aspiration] [L] [Long Aspiration]

Template
Progression		Contacts				PC Bonds		NPC Bonds
Entanglement: X EXP (Unspent/Total): 0 / 0		[Name]: +X [Name]: -X				[PC Name]: +X [PC Name]: -X		[NPC Name]: +X [NPC Name]: -X
Torments						Aspirations
Lineage: [Lineage Torment] Personal: [Personal Torment] (Trigger: [Trigger condition])						[S] [Short Aspiration] [S] [Short Aspiration] [L] [Long Aspiration]

Template
Progression		Contacts				PC Bonds		NPC Bonds
Entanglement: X EXP (Unspent/Total): 0 / 0		[Name]: +X [Name]: -X				[PC Name]: +X [PC Name]: -X		[NPC Name]: +X [NPC Name]: -X
Torments						Aspirations
Lineage: [Lineage Torment] Personal: [Personal Torment] (Trigger: [Trigger condition])						[S] [Short Aspiration] [S] [Short Aspiration] [L] [Long Aspiration]