Scion 2E Masks Of The Mythos: Through Timeless Nights

Scion 2E Masks of the Mythos: Through Timeless Nights

You remember a time that never was, and might be.

You don't know why you were chosen, or even if that was intentional on anyone's part. All you knew is a sensation of strange pressure, a moment of time as large being of towering flesh - and then you were in an Earth without a visible sun, or frequently, visible stars.

If you told them, to your surprise, the people of this time simply nodded, before ushering you to the vast historical archives of the tower of stacked cities called the Last Redoubt as a whole. Apparently, someone being lost in post-cognition is accepted, and capitalized on as a rare sight into the mindset of the distant past while the reincarnation's memories resolved. Whether told in dialogues by the archivist-adepts as they interviewed you or having learned from observing the world around you, they called the Earth of this era the Night Lands, and that the sun had been dark for centuries. There were still stars - it was the world of Night, not of Darkness, and most humans had left the now nearly-uninhabitable cradle of mankind at the cost of their physical humanity, reshaped into beings that could survive passage to and upon alien worlds. The Redoubt was what was left behind to those who wished to make something of the darkened, now-alien world of nocturnal plants and roving beasts, by-blows of the Old Ones' post-Shrouding awakening, the twisting of the sable-sun's eldritch radiations...and the brutality of man without any humanity of mind.

They aren't the only ones out there. Some are simply peaceful villages - maybe it is was or will be different, but not all of the Night Lands are hungry horrors or in thrall to what the Redoubt calls, prosaically, Forces of Evil. Humans are stubborn creatures, and with a sorcerer, Denizen, or Scion at the helm, life can be eked out even with the stars themselves usually hidden by the Shroud of a pitch-black sky in less hostile places. But then there is the Tsan-Chan, and the House of Silence's cultists. The latter is an old threat - the strange living mansion that takes explorers from the Last City into itself and Destroys them - not kills, for their souls go on to the afterlife and their next incarnation, but so wounds their spirit they are caught in an agonizing half-life as bodiless spirits that are just alive enough to suffer - has a sect of mystical bandits that serve it for power over the monsters of the waste, in hopes of power over humans. The former is new - the shapers of flesh like clay and cloth, who disdain mercy as venerating weakness, and have made their own domed cities in the image of the castles of empire - one that seeks to expand.

It all ended along the same lines - you met an Old One in some way, and experienced the terrifying wonder of the sublime - and whether by intention or coincidence, you were sent back to your time, where you were out an hour - and knew your fellow reincarnates' names.

So you sought them out - but in the process, you made a discovery.

The Tsan-Chan are many things. Authoritarian, brutal, and contemptuous of anything that smells of sentiment that disrupts their precious order and its desire for growth. But they think of themselves as akin to eusocial insects, all serving the Empress their divine founder made to oversee after he passed from mortality into a representative of the divine, like many a Caesar before him, as workers serve their queen - which is to say, she is their heart, not their brain, the Chani make decisions that do not concern Her on their own. One of the things that struck the more culturally aware of you is that the Chani often represent themselves as honeybees, from their art to their sigil, a bee in flight over a strange letter in Aklo you are told means both "divinity" and "shadow."

Variations of that same honeybee symbol - when you were looking online, you saw that many posters that grew suddenly hostile to you have it in their profiles, and threatening sigils were left incorporating it stenciled near your homes.

Perhaps in that world, the Shrouding was thousands of years in the future - but it is clear a terror of it is present now.

Links

Recrutiment: [1]

House Rules

- Nothing mechanical, at the moment.

- PBtA style questions, please post your answers to these on your character page.

• Who were you in the Last Redoubt, and who, if anyone, knows you’re being ridden by a past alternate ancestor?

• What is something good about the Redoubt that makes it worth fighting for? What is something that is bad but could be reformed?

• Have you met any survivors with humanity out in the Night Lands? Why aren’t they “human survivors”?

• What is awful enough about the Tsan-Chan to make you realize that the Last Redoubt deserves to win their cold war?

• When and how did you encounter your new patron Old One, and how did they send you back? Is there something alien about the transformed world of the Night Lands you actually enjoy?

• Have you met the Brethren of Silence? What made you fear the House of Silence without seeing it directly?

• How did you figure out others had the same disjunct you did, and how did you figure out there are people who want to be the Tsan-Chan, including probably darkening the sun?