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

xxxxx