Typhonian Reach

Introduction

Know, O Prince, that between the fall of the elder world and the coming of the great glaciers, there was an age undreamed of. An age of wonder and terror, when a newborn species of weak, ignorant, yet clever and ambitious apes gazed with fear... and avarice... upon the ruins of the world they had inherited by chance.

For uncounted epochs, monsters had crawled over the primeval earth, their wars and magics twisting land, sea, and sky. Yet all things end. Elder race warred with elder race, to their mutual downfall. Senescent species made horrible pacts with strange Powers to avoid decline. As elder things clung to life and power beyond their time, their wombs and cultures withered. The lands moved upon the waters, and monsters who had ruled over jungle and swamp shivered as the ice came. The life of monsters is as the life of stars, but even stars die. And finally the ancient world collapsed.

Continents broke; seas boiled as fangs of fire erupted from the deep; the stars of heaven lurched into new constellations. The elder masters' towers fell, their leviathan-gods retreated to nurse their wounds. From the heights of power and erudition, the elder lords were cast into savagery. And in the wreckage, the lowliest slaves... sequestered from the worst of the ruin as fodder for their masters' magics and military experiments... cast off their chains, went forth, and multiplied.

In only a handful of generations, mankind rose far: mastering fire and bronze, building cities in imitation of the prehumans', developing systems of writing and mathematics... and delving into the same dark sorceries that brought down their predecessors. Power fostered arrogance; wealth nurtured greed; the city walls that sheltered from the wilderness allowed vice to fester in their midst. And in their dark dens and hidden places, the surviving monsters of the elder world grinned in anticipation and stretched out their talons to goad man against his brother, that the world might be theirs once more.

Yet something happened unforeseen by man and monster alike. From among humans of all stations... from the mightiest hero-lugal to the merest slave... a divine spark alit in mortal clay. Human in form yet wielding the cosmic and elemental power of leviathans, these demigods went among the nations to work wonders and receive the awe of their fellows.

Did they defend their newborn species as guardians? Uplift and teach it as culture heroes? Oppress it as immortal tyrants? Fleece it as tricksters? Or betray their birth-kind to go among the elder races, not as slaves but as masters over a second age of monsters?

That tale remains to be told.

== Player Characters

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Factions

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NPCs of Note

Monsters

Ogres

Savage, degenerate, superstitious, and primitive, ogres lurk in small bands in the wilderness. They retain their ancestors' height (9-10') and strength, but the devil-kings' beauty has become ugliness and their intellect devolved to bestial rage. Prone to bouts of madness, killing and eating one another as readily as anything else, ogres are congenitally incapable of large-scale organization or planning; this gives smaller, weaker humans a fighting chance against the brutes. Despite their reduced mental state, they dimly remember what they once were... and what humanity was. And they hate. Woe to the human who falls into their clutches.

HD 4, AC 6 (hides + tough skin), Attack +6 (strong), Damage 1d8 +2 (strong), Morale 9 (savage but superstitious), Save 14+ (accursed - worse than normal), Move 30' run, Effort 1

Ogres commonly form Mobs; they are strong and ferocious enough to threaten even demigods and so have the Overwhelm ability.

Anakim (Ogre Magi)

Ancestors of the ogres, anakim were the first anthropoids to arise and challenge the monsters of the Elder World... though they were little less monstrous. In form they were near perfect: towering ur-anthropoids of sinister, satanic beauty, muscular and graceful (Araki's Pillar Men from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure mixed with Milton's Satan gives an idea). Combining unholy strength, magical might, and devious cunning, they beat back the declining elder prehumans, bound many lesser demons to service, made pacts with many leviathans, and carved out great holdings across the ancient world. Basically Moorcock's Melnibone or Howard's Acheron.

Yet in character they were cruel, decadent, arrogant, sadistic. Trusting their own kind but little (with good reason), engaging in vicious feuds and rivalries, they preferred to keep apart, each small cabal of devil-kings building its holdings on the backs of lesser primates raised as slaves. Practicing sorcery, breeding bizarre hybrid beasts, and trafficking with demons and leviathans, anakim sought ever greater power and knowledge: over their fellows, over the elder beast-gods, and most of all over life and death. Lacking the greater leviathans' divinity and immortality, they craved these things, and their laboratories echoed with the screams of their lesser kindred on whom they preformed experiment after unholy experiment.

Their society destroyed itself in the Collapse; whatever they unleashed twisted the entire species, devolving them physically and mentally into the race of ogres. Only 1 in 100 ogre births produces a new anak. Intelligent enough to know the numbers no longer favor them, anak lord over their brutish descendants as god-kings or, cloaked in illusion, walk among humans, undermining the new dominant species from within.

Common Anak: HD 8, AC 4 (medium armor, skill), Attack +10 x2 attacks, Damage 1d12, Morale 10, Save 11+, Move 30' run/45' flight, Effort 3. They have the powers attributed to AD&D ogre mages, but these are low-magic effects of limited use against a demigod.

Devil-King/Queen: An anak whose soul is sufficiently mighty to bear a spark of divinity. While they lack the sheer capability of human demigods (few have more than two Words, and they gain no benefit from cults except a boost to their overweening egos), they make up for it with power and malice. Each is built differently, but at a minimum you're looking at a splice of the Twisted Ogre (p. 151) and Greater Eldritch (p. 148) templates: 20+ HD, flight, 1d12 straight-damage melee and magic attacks, and usually some Sorcery and Deception Gifts plus a mystic Corona of Fury attack.