The Judges of Tehom

This is a Setting in progress by RPGnet user Nick the Nevermet.

Parameters

I am making this with a (weak) assumption that I will be using Heroquest to run it. As such, I am going to describe the game & setting as Robin Laws suggests one does in the "Parameters" section early in the book.

Premise

The characters are Heroes who will either use their public personas for public and personal benefit, or become consumed by fame and the Tide's Eye.

Genre

Superheroic celebrity-aristocrats rule high tech city states in a world with supernatural forces reminiscent of "Lost".

This needs to be unpacked a little. This will be done by taking a bit of the above, stating what it is not, and the defining what it means.

Superheroic rulers

• The PCs are not assumed to be Conan or a wandering adventurer.
  • They have temporal power. In classic legends, the king of one city is a great hunter, the princess of another is a sorceress, and a baron two kingdoms over is unbeatable in single combat. These heroes (called "Ceren" and "Shoftim" in-setting) are superhuman,

"celebrity-aristocrats of high tech city states"

• This is not a low-tech fantasy setting.

Setting

• Tehom is a world that was settled and terraformed generations ago. The project (and the colonists) were abandoned when the world's psychic consciousness took notice of humanity and began to resist terraforming efforts.
• Society has since stabilized, though the Raquiya System and the planet Tehom are still cut off from interstellar human civilization.
  • A thin band of ocean and islands near the equator have been fully terraformed, though the colder reaches of the planet are a hybrid of the planet's original ecology and the Terran one engineered by humans.
• Tehom has a "world mind" that amplifies and aggregates psychic energy. A population's conscious and unconscious desires effect the world.
  • The primary effect of this is that entities gain tangible benefits (or problems) from reputation. Some places are "cursed" while other cities just seem to be cleaner and healthier.
  • This can happen to people (and lineages of people) as well. Heroes gain power with their renown, pushing well beyond what is "normally" human. Overtime, these heroes, called Ceren / Lords and Shoftim / Judges, have become the political elites of society.

Mod

This game will be a hybrid of some degree between 3 modes:

• Epic: a sweeping tale of heroism, against a backdrop of great historical events
• Chronicle: the lead characters manage the economic and political affairs of a community (or other unit, such as a corporation), often over a large span of time.
• Procedural: as part of their job, highly competent professionals solve a succession of problems, perhaps interspersed with ongoing stories of their personal lives.

Links

History of Tehom

System information

• • System: Raquiya
  • Technology: 1/-1 (“Cerentech” vs. standard society)
  • Environment: E0 – 1 garden and several barren worlds
  • Resources: Rich

Primary Actors

• • Ceren – the Lords
  • Shoftim – The Governors – leaders of the Lords
  • Tehom – the world of Raquiya IV
  • Mevakeret Tavul– The Fascinated Traveler, Steward of Tides, the world mind or psychic aggregator of Tehom

Political entities

• • The Ten Horns – The ten great cities of humanity
  • The Little Horn – The Commune, aka, the Communal Republic
  • The Seven Crowns – the Seven great Shoftim