If I had to be painfully brief, Hope is a chunk of the world you know, viewed through a slightly twisted lens. On one level, it's like any other city on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States: people go about their lives, work, play, bond, suffer, conquer adversity or endure defeats great and small, the exact same way they would in our own world. Hope is the world as it could be as of 2027, with a few extra dashes of Cyberpunk, magic, Cosmic Horror, breathless wonder, high-octane action and occasional bouts of comedy. On another, it's small subset of a much wider world: there absolutely be dragons in Hope and in the rest of the world, but no amount of municipal jockeying changes the fact that by and large, the scope our stories travel is small and intimate. Some ripple effects might cause something that happens here to impact the rest of the world, but said world already has its pan-national superhuman and supernatural eidolons. You aren't playing as an Avengers knockoff; you're something that's even more likely: a part-time superhero, an occasional defender of the people with your own life to deal with. Globe-trotting missions will be few and far between, and you won't have much time to complain about a certain lack of diversity - even less-famous cities have their own claims to fame.
So what's the tone, you might ask? Think Slice-of-Life, with semi-frequent moments where more tense decision-making is part of your job description. You'll get to kick demons in the face, sure, but chances are these demons need to have their rights read to them, or need to be passed off to someone who can. You're the baton-passer, in this case - unless you decide to play as a member of the local police force. Or maybe you're one of the troublemakers in town, in which case your job will be to find reasons to get our guys out of their comfort zone. Just - don't twirl that moustache too much, okay?
Hope in a Nutshell
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IamLEAM1983
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2025 8:08 pm
A Brief History and a Guided Tour
In another life, I probably would've spent an entire week researching Rhode Island topography to find out where I could stick an added land mass, and then I would've spent two weeks working out the specifics of the Narragansett natives, the exact chronological interplay with the Dutch and later English settlers - but that's neither here nor there.
Suffice it to say, the Dutch colonized both the general area of Point Judith Road, Rhode Island, and a larger landmass located off the coast, first referred to as Green Island. This is in reference to Dirch Groen - Dirk Greene, in modern parlance - one of the earlier patriarchs in the settling Netherlanders. Ultimately, fame and infamy would mostly fall upon Nikolaas Buck, the wealthy scion of an old Flemish mining dynasty, who settled at the Easternmost point of Green Island, facing the sea - and found strange and unknowable things in the caves left below by millions of years of erosion. The settlers prospered, the Narragansett natives suffered - and their shaman rebelled after close to a generation of indigence. From then on, the Buck lineage has been cursed, with the then-powerful and prominent Fae patrons of the colonists using their resources and wisdom to drive back the curse from most of the island and the mainland's coast, using the most powerful tools in their arsenal: Dryad seeds. Drawing power from the local well of magic, a network of plant-like tutelary beings would then spend the next four centuries protecting native and colonist alike from the deleterious effects of black magic seeping deep into the land.
Today, after several events that further bolstered the Guardian Trees' production and emission of via - essentially mana - Hope is a megalopolis verging on ten million souls. The island location has pushed the city into dense vertical city planning, with deep urban canyons crisscrossed by skyways and Maglev rails, and cut through by both a subway system and a subterranean pedestrian network - essentially an undercity in and of itself - typically referred to as the Pedway. The Pedway is the primary residential and commuting location for light-averse beings like certain vampire strains, and is also used by just about anyone else, to quickly cross from one subway station to the next or to re-emerge on the surface after crossing inconveniently congested areas underground.
First and Second Avenue
Sandwiched between the city's two main arteries, you'll find Centennial Park, Holden Hall and the city's Museum of Natural History, along with Sophia's home in the Great Tree, the largest of the city's arcane anchors and the effective nexus for all magical emissions in the local area. The Great Tree is virtually visible from practically anywhere in Hope, unless you consider the Pedway or the subway system. Being an oak tree bursting with magical essence, it's grown to be just as tall as one of the smaller skyscrapers in town, and a few spiral staircases lead up to treehouses or observation decks nailed and secured to its branches. Justifiably, the Great Tree is also the city's emblem.
First and Greene
The immediate corner of First Avenue and Greene Boulevard is the city's commercial nexus, where skyscrapers try and rival with the Great Tree in audacity and design. It's also where most efforts related to finance, biotech, IT and computing tend to be orchestrated. You'll find companies like Wyvern Holdings or outlets for specialized banks like Grünevald there, along with the legitimate offices of a few unsavory locals, like Weasel Biggs or Belial.
Second and Cross
Across Centennial Park, you'll find expensive brownstone mansions marking the entrance into what's considered to be Old Hope, where several of the local supernatural guardians tend to hold residence - almost as if to keep an eye on their scheming neighbours across the park. Faustus Cordatus, Herbert Wormsworth and the Archangel Gabriel live there. Head further into Old Hope and away from the park, and both Little Italy and Little Kerry bud out from either side, LITA heading back towards the mainland and Little Kerry progressing towards the shore. Little Kerry's cobblestones are host to the Greenvale Hotel and Coldharbor Tower, respectively occupied by the local Summer Lady and Winter Lord. Coldharbor, notably, houses a number of Faerie-run businesses. Midseason Manse is the easily-missed Tudor Revival mansard connecting both the tower and hotel, and where both aristocrats intermingle their private lives. As for LITA, it spiders off into one of its smaller constituents, Little China, and is where you'll find the city's small Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine, both established as thanks for the Sons of the White Dragon's involvement during the Hellmarch, and to recognize the vital contributions of the city's small contingent of yokai - effectively Fae rooted in Japanese soil.
Willowdale
A more modern and coastal development, Willowdale faces the relatively new constructs that make up New Dalarath. A compact neighbourhood of middle-class bungalows, the close proximity of nearly everything else has taken a neighbourhood that had all the makings of a condo and house-based Homeowner's Association-run Hellscape and turned it into a beacon of inclusive design. Being one of the more open areas in the city, it's come to exemplify the idea of a neighbourhood-led spirit, of a space where people come together to assist one another. Being reasonably close to both Little Kerry and to Mertown - the unofficial name for the large swaths of houseboats that line the Hillard, the island's single body of water, Willowdale has the strongest neighbourhood spirit of all the residential boroughs in Hope.
New Dalarath, Pickman's Cliff and Buck Mansion
New Dalarath is the newest addition to the island, and consists of an atoll of buildings shaped out of living coral, which itself was Spoken into being by Old Dalarath's deserters - notably Meris of the Orcades and Nereus Marinos. After Willowdale, New Dalarath is one of the more open spots in town, but most locals who haven't set a foot in coastal Greece tend to be a bit confused by its labyrinthine maze of streets. New Dalarath is entirely pedestrian-focused, with some allowances for smaller bikes and bicycles. Some locals jokingly refer to it as the "Rivendell of the Seas", as striking as is the flowing collection of terraces, stairways, basins, overlooks and minaret-like structures, all bone-white and slightly coarse to the touch. Once a week, Lucian Rothchild crosses from Old Hope to New Dalarath to lead the Chantry, New Dalarath's very obvious cathedral-like structure. A few bends away, you'll find one stark outlier in the entire town, in the form of Meris and Nereus' shared Modernist house. There, the coral takes straight angles and flows in the way you would imagine a more common house to be structured. Officially, Nereus is the Speaker for New Dalarath, but he officiously tends to delegate most spiritual matters to Lucian and concerns himself with Atlantis Incorporated, the consultation business and architect firm where he attempts to offer uniquely Eldritch solutions to modern design and development problems. Atlantis prefers not to hold offices in Hope, and instead operates out of Providence.
Pickman's Cliff is the compact, but supernaturally capable granary of the city. Comprised of three farm plots each helmed by a Dryad of their own, the Cliff grows enough produce and grain to offset part of the fees related with the ferrying of goods from inland to a distribution centre in Point Judith. With the last several attackers having known to hit the city where it hurts and defences being scarce this far out, the Greene Brothers have learned to combine gentle care for their planted wards and viciously effective defensive measures. With the sunken wetlands of the Buck family's old funeral plots and the generally grim aura of Buck Mansion, the idyllic orchards and pumpkin patches hide a lethal arsenal that makes quick work of whatever it is that dares to crawl out of the family's crypts, on nights where the stars align... Only one Gothic oddity gets anything close to a pass: Eliphas Buck, the seemingly indestructible Garou, blessed with sapience and speech by Sophia, over two hundred years ago.
The Depths
If you fancy a dungeon crawl, arm yourself and head for the Buck family's sinking gravestones and mausoleums. Always kept locked by Eliphas and regularly broken-through by various horrors great and small, what begins as a sedate niche for six generations of Buck forbears yawns open into an abandoned waystation formerly used by Void Weavers to reach the Buck Estate and hold conference with Mad Nikolaas and some of his descendants. The Hellmarch has clearly exhausted the capacity of Dalarath, the Dead City Below, to produce perversions of flesh, bone and spirit enough to aid the fallen and former Prince of Pride in his endeavors. It's swallowed Zebediah Buck, however, who now holds sway over what remains of the defeated Loyalists serving powers darker than Creation itself, convinced as he is that the Black Speech holds the key to reversing his woeful fate and reclaiming his lost wife and family. With the Dryads, the city's metahumans, its supernaturals and most common law enforcement levels, the leading belief is that Zebediah is effectively contained and reduced to occasional bouts of showboating or the occasional burst of animated dead in and around Samhain and Walpurgisnacht.
Point Judith
If you were to head in the opposite direction from Buck Manor, and crossed the city in its entirety, you'd end up back on the mainland, near Point Judith. This is where the city keeps its less-desirable zones, from groaning industrial plots to forlorn warehouses or storage lots. Parts of the area have been gentrified, but a lasting eyesore is the old grain silo and its associated warehouse. Thomas Quint, a failed arcane police consultant-turned-Warlock and Infernalist, has attempted to follow in Zebediah's footsteps and only managed to establish himself as a minor nuisance. Having pushed too much, too far, too quickly, there's not much left of his mind for him to pose a significant threat - but a crumbling wizard's tower made out of an old silo offers all kinds of other risks. For Quint's own sake, and the city, he should ideally be taken care of before someone gets hurt... You'll also find warehouses attributed to Weasel Biggs and a few other kingpins, along with a number of businesses that couldn't quite manage to establish a foothold on the island proper. Garages, dive bars and forlorn gas stations cohabit with sparsely-furnished New Boho lofts, with the entire neighbourhood more or less feeling like the last stop before leaving Hope behind - or the first inkling of what makes it special.
Other landmarks also include the Caliban-Smith Airport and Spaceport, along with the easily-missed highway exit leading to the Trismegistus Institute, a squat, inverted pyramid dug into the coastline and housing twelve stories of properly-contained arcane research and development - the construct designed in order to accomodate a cycling population of fifty Solomonari vampires - all of them arcane researchers.
Beyond
Rhode Island's normal topography resumes past Point Judith, with the State being known for its culture and its seats of higher learning. Providence is the closest neighbour to Hope in terms of size, but lacks the island's verticality, as you'd expect. The Hellmarch seated close partnerships between Hope and a few other cities around the world, namely in Walpurgis, Texas and in New Kowloon, China. With the network of Fae Gates having collapsed, the only means of effectively reaching either city is by orbital shuttle.
With Earth having weathered alien invasions in the 1880s and the 1970s, there is now a chartered saceport flight connecting both Earth and the closest fold-space point, which takes travellers to what some ironically call Paradise. Paradise is effectively a small Dyson sphere housing a working Tokamak as well as fifty million aliens within its walls. Relations between Earth and Paradise are are generally cool, as most of the locals are descendants of various reprobates, criminals and ne'er-do-well's from various parsecs in and around the Local Group. Paradise itself, however, orbits Kepler-452b, a once-lush planet with terrestrial conditions that seemingly became an irradiated hellscape following an all-out thermonuclear war that wiped out most, if not all traces of life on its surface, in what would've been Earth's 17th century.
Faerie's Dregs
Hell's last, desperate push for Terrestrial dominance tore the material plane's neighbouring realms asunder. On the one hand, it's put millennia-old feuds between Summer and Winter into the longest détente they've known in thousands of years - and on the other, it's made refugees out of beings who once erected empires and castles just one toadstool circle, kodama shrine or overgrown basement away from the physical realm. As of the last seven years, most of Faerie's constituents now live full-time in the material plane, with only their connection to via being left to anchor their Mantle. Summer and Winter are all but gone, and what is left in their stead is floating islands of Reality in pockets of unfettered quantum chaos. Trying to use Faerie to skip physical distances or time is now a risky proposition - or is at least far riskier than before. On the other hand, anyone who reaches a pocket of stability in Faerie is guaranteed to have found a nearly impregnable fortress for themselves. It's created a new career path for some Mages and Sidhe - as Pathfinders, who scour Fairie's roiling seas of chaos to chart out reliable spots, and to sell maps to their location to the highest bidder.
Still-stable Gates are now worth the blood of a dozen men, and any land they guard is likely to be the safest thing anyone could have that would approach an impregnable safe.
Suffice it to say, the Dutch colonized both the general area of Point Judith Road, Rhode Island, and a larger landmass located off the coast, first referred to as Green Island. This is in reference to Dirch Groen - Dirk Greene, in modern parlance - one of the earlier patriarchs in the settling Netherlanders. Ultimately, fame and infamy would mostly fall upon Nikolaas Buck, the wealthy scion of an old Flemish mining dynasty, who settled at the Easternmost point of Green Island, facing the sea - and found strange and unknowable things in the caves left below by millions of years of erosion. The settlers prospered, the Narragansett natives suffered - and their shaman rebelled after close to a generation of indigence. From then on, the Buck lineage has been cursed, with the then-powerful and prominent Fae patrons of the colonists using their resources and wisdom to drive back the curse from most of the island and the mainland's coast, using the most powerful tools in their arsenal: Dryad seeds. Drawing power from the local well of magic, a network of plant-like tutelary beings would then spend the next four centuries protecting native and colonist alike from the deleterious effects of black magic seeping deep into the land.
Today, after several events that further bolstered the Guardian Trees' production and emission of via - essentially mana - Hope is a megalopolis verging on ten million souls. The island location has pushed the city into dense vertical city planning, with deep urban canyons crisscrossed by skyways and Maglev rails, and cut through by both a subway system and a subterranean pedestrian network - essentially an undercity in and of itself - typically referred to as the Pedway. The Pedway is the primary residential and commuting location for light-averse beings like certain vampire strains, and is also used by just about anyone else, to quickly cross from one subway station to the next or to re-emerge on the surface after crossing inconveniently congested areas underground.
First and Second Avenue
Sandwiched between the city's two main arteries, you'll find Centennial Park, Holden Hall and the city's Museum of Natural History, along with Sophia's home in the Great Tree, the largest of the city's arcane anchors and the effective nexus for all magical emissions in the local area. The Great Tree is virtually visible from practically anywhere in Hope, unless you consider the Pedway or the subway system. Being an oak tree bursting with magical essence, it's grown to be just as tall as one of the smaller skyscrapers in town, and a few spiral staircases lead up to treehouses or observation decks nailed and secured to its branches. Justifiably, the Great Tree is also the city's emblem.
First and Greene
The immediate corner of First Avenue and Greene Boulevard is the city's commercial nexus, where skyscrapers try and rival with the Great Tree in audacity and design. It's also where most efforts related to finance, biotech, IT and computing tend to be orchestrated. You'll find companies like Wyvern Holdings or outlets for specialized banks like Grünevald there, along with the legitimate offices of a few unsavory locals, like Weasel Biggs or Belial.
Second and Cross
Across Centennial Park, you'll find expensive brownstone mansions marking the entrance into what's considered to be Old Hope, where several of the local supernatural guardians tend to hold residence - almost as if to keep an eye on their scheming neighbours across the park. Faustus Cordatus, Herbert Wormsworth and the Archangel Gabriel live there. Head further into Old Hope and away from the park, and both Little Italy and Little Kerry bud out from either side, LITA heading back towards the mainland and Little Kerry progressing towards the shore. Little Kerry's cobblestones are host to the Greenvale Hotel and Coldharbor Tower, respectively occupied by the local Summer Lady and Winter Lord. Coldharbor, notably, houses a number of Faerie-run businesses. Midseason Manse is the easily-missed Tudor Revival mansard connecting both the tower and hotel, and where both aristocrats intermingle their private lives. As for LITA, it spiders off into one of its smaller constituents, Little China, and is where you'll find the city's small Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine, both established as thanks for the Sons of the White Dragon's involvement during the Hellmarch, and to recognize the vital contributions of the city's small contingent of yokai - effectively Fae rooted in Japanese soil.
Willowdale
A more modern and coastal development, Willowdale faces the relatively new constructs that make up New Dalarath. A compact neighbourhood of middle-class bungalows, the close proximity of nearly everything else has taken a neighbourhood that had all the makings of a condo and house-based Homeowner's Association-run Hellscape and turned it into a beacon of inclusive design. Being one of the more open areas in the city, it's come to exemplify the idea of a neighbourhood-led spirit, of a space where people come together to assist one another. Being reasonably close to both Little Kerry and to Mertown - the unofficial name for the large swaths of houseboats that line the Hillard, the island's single body of water, Willowdale has the strongest neighbourhood spirit of all the residential boroughs in Hope.
New Dalarath, Pickman's Cliff and Buck Mansion
New Dalarath is the newest addition to the island, and consists of an atoll of buildings shaped out of living coral, which itself was Spoken into being by Old Dalarath's deserters - notably Meris of the Orcades and Nereus Marinos. After Willowdale, New Dalarath is one of the more open spots in town, but most locals who haven't set a foot in coastal Greece tend to be a bit confused by its labyrinthine maze of streets. New Dalarath is entirely pedestrian-focused, with some allowances for smaller bikes and bicycles. Some locals jokingly refer to it as the "Rivendell of the Seas", as striking as is the flowing collection of terraces, stairways, basins, overlooks and minaret-like structures, all bone-white and slightly coarse to the touch. Once a week, Lucian Rothchild crosses from Old Hope to New Dalarath to lead the Chantry, New Dalarath's very obvious cathedral-like structure. A few bends away, you'll find one stark outlier in the entire town, in the form of Meris and Nereus' shared Modernist house. There, the coral takes straight angles and flows in the way you would imagine a more common house to be structured. Officially, Nereus is the Speaker for New Dalarath, but he officiously tends to delegate most spiritual matters to Lucian and concerns himself with Atlantis Incorporated, the consultation business and architect firm where he attempts to offer uniquely Eldritch solutions to modern design and development problems. Atlantis prefers not to hold offices in Hope, and instead operates out of Providence.
Pickman's Cliff is the compact, but supernaturally capable granary of the city. Comprised of three farm plots each helmed by a Dryad of their own, the Cliff grows enough produce and grain to offset part of the fees related with the ferrying of goods from inland to a distribution centre in Point Judith. With the last several attackers having known to hit the city where it hurts and defences being scarce this far out, the Greene Brothers have learned to combine gentle care for their planted wards and viciously effective defensive measures. With the sunken wetlands of the Buck family's old funeral plots and the generally grim aura of Buck Mansion, the idyllic orchards and pumpkin patches hide a lethal arsenal that makes quick work of whatever it is that dares to crawl out of the family's crypts, on nights where the stars align... Only one Gothic oddity gets anything close to a pass: Eliphas Buck, the seemingly indestructible Garou, blessed with sapience and speech by Sophia, over two hundred years ago.
The Depths
If you fancy a dungeon crawl, arm yourself and head for the Buck family's sinking gravestones and mausoleums. Always kept locked by Eliphas and regularly broken-through by various horrors great and small, what begins as a sedate niche for six generations of Buck forbears yawns open into an abandoned waystation formerly used by Void Weavers to reach the Buck Estate and hold conference with Mad Nikolaas and some of his descendants. The Hellmarch has clearly exhausted the capacity of Dalarath, the Dead City Below, to produce perversions of flesh, bone and spirit enough to aid the fallen and former Prince of Pride in his endeavors. It's swallowed Zebediah Buck, however, who now holds sway over what remains of the defeated Loyalists serving powers darker than Creation itself, convinced as he is that the Black Speech holds the key to reversing his woeful fate and reclaiming his lost wife and family. With the Dryads, the city's metahumans, its supernaturals and most common law enforcement levels, the leading belief is that Zebediah is effectively contained and reduced to occasional bouts of showboating or the occasional burst of animated dead in and around Samhain and Walpurgisnacht.
Point Judith
If you were to head in the opposite direction from Buck Manor, and crossed the city in its entirety, you'd end up back on the mainland, near Point Judith. This is where the city keeps its less-desirable zones, from groaning industrial plots to forlorn warehouses or storage lots. Parts of the area have been gentrified, but a lasting eyesore is the old grain silo and its associated warehouse. Thomas Quint, a failed arcane police consultant-turned-Warlock and Infernalist, has attempted to follow in Zebediah's footsteps and only managed to establish himself as a minor nuisance. Having pushed too much, too far, too quickly, there's not much left of his mind for him to pose a significant threat - but a crumbling wizard's tower made out of an old silo offers all kinds of other risks. For Quint's own sake, and the city, he should ideally be taken care of before someone gets hurt... You'll also find warehouses attributed to Weasel Biggs and a few other kingpins, along with a number of businesses that couldn't quite manage to establish a foothold on the island proper. Garages, dive bars and forlorn gas stations cohabit with sparsely-furnished New Boho lofts, with the entire neighbourhood more or less feeling like the last stop before leaving Hope behind - or the first inkling of what makes it special.
Other landmarks also include the Caliban-Smith Airport and Spaceport, along with the easily-missed highway exit leading to the Trismegistus Institute, a squat, inverted pyramid dug into the coastline and housing twelve stories of properly-contained arcane research and development - the construct designed in order to accomodate a cycling population of fifty Solomonari vampires - all of them arcane researchers.
Beyond
Rhode Island's normal topography resumes past Point Judith, with the State being known for its culture and its seats of higher learning. Providence is the closest neighbour to Hope in terms of size, but lacks the island's verticality, as you'd expect. The Hellmarch seated close partnerships between Hope and a few other cities around the world, namely in Walpurgis, Texas and in New Kowloon, China. With the network of Fae Gates having collapsed, the only means of effectively reaching either city is by orbital shuttle.
With Earth having weathered alien invasions in the 1880s and the 1970s, there is now a chartered saceport flight connecting both Earth and the closest fold-space point, which takes travellers to what some ironically call Paradise. Paradise is effectively a small Dyson sphere housing a working Tokamak as well as fifty million aliens within its walls. Relations between Earth and Paradise are are generally cool, as most of the locals are descendants of various reprobates, criminals and ne'er-do-well's from various parsecs in and around the Local Group. Paradise itself, however, orbits Kepler-452b, a once-lush planet with terrestrial conditions that seemingly became an irradiated hellscape following an all-out thermonuclear war that wiped out most, if not all traces of life on its surface, in what would've been Earth's 17th century.
Faerie's Dregs
Hell's last, desperate push for Terrestrial dominance tore the material plane's neighbouring realms asunder. On the one hand, it's put millennia-old feuds between Summer and Winter into the longest détente they've known in thousands of years - and on the other, it's made refugees out of beings who once erected empires and castles just one toadstool circle, kodama shrine or overgrown basement away from the physical realm. As of the last seven years, most of Faerie's constituents now live full-time in the material plane, with only their connection to via being left to anchor their Mantle. Summer and Winter are all but gone, and what is left in their stead is floating islands of Reality in pockets of unfettered quantum chaos. Trying to use Faerie to skip physical distances or time is now a risky proposition - or is at least far riskier than before. On the other hand, anyone who reaches a pocket of stability in Faerie is guaranteed to have found a nearly impregnable fortress for themselves. It's created a new career path for some Mages and Sidhe - as Pathfinders, who scour Fairie's roiling seas of chaos to chart out reliable spots, and to sell maps to their location to the highest bidder.
Still-stable Gates are now worth the blood of a dozen men, and any land they guard is likely to be the safest thing anyone could have that would approach an impregnable safe.
-
IamLEAM1983
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2025 8:08 pm
A Few Dates
There's a lot of ground to cover, this is absolutely not exhaustive or entirely canonical - it'll be full of holes by default. More entries will come over time.
Before Time: The Architect steps down, lends the Tools of Creation to what we know as God, in some faiths. In God's hands, the Tools become the Four Thrones. As the Thrones begin their handiwork and stir the Universe from its previous death and its settling into un-being back into a state of development, Spacetime begins to take shape. The building blocks of Matter are assembled, the laws of Physics are defined.
The First Second: The Thrones begin to wield their elements - especially Abdiel, Throne of Fire, and Hesediel, Throne of Earth. Ironically, the Throne of Water is a bit of a latecomer on the stage of early Creation, and depends on Abdiel's first assembly of Hydrogen atoms. The Big Bang occurs and from a state of nearly incomprehensible nothingness, something finally happens, for the first time.
4.6 Billion Years Ago: the Sol system begins to coalesce. For reasons only known to the young Creator, Sol is one of a few systems across the breadth of the Universe that receives particular attention. Under its guidance, the Thrones shape the early days of the Solar System - and of Earth. While early History follows the exact same beats you'd expect, God soon opts to enmesh the tiniest spark of its living breath in the world itself - giving birth to the World's Breath - also known as magic, or mana. Later theorists and researchers would posit that the earliest "metahumans" on record were actually some of the gigantic insects that dominated the world, during the Carboniferous and Permian Eras.
530 Million Years Ago: as a gesture of thanks to its predecessor and seeking advice on more advanced forms of Creation, God effectively loans all Cephalopods to the Architect, its predecessor. Using a more refined version of the process used to bring about dragons and anthros, the Architect tethers a branch of sentient beings to each successive and increasingly-complex branch in the tree. Following the normal evolutionary pattern, modern Void Weavers slowly take shape.
252 Million Years Ago: early dinosaurs are exposed to via during the early Triassic Period, and undergo an accelerated period of evolution. By the mid-Triassic, great reptiles we would recognize as dragons rule the world, using pure Magic as the building block and currency of their civilization. Kingdoms rise and fall several times over, and none of them will be remembered by the later mammals. No ruins remain, no texts can be recalled. Modern dragons are effectively evolutionary refugees, extant branches of long-extinct species that owe their survival to a sapience that more than equals Humanity's. The same period seats the Fae and Faerie itself, as those who would splinter off into Summer and Winter begin life as effectively human-sized dragons, deprived of their wings. Both servile and defensive strains are bred by the dragons, with rebellion eventually seeding the rule of Seasons among the Sidhe.
66 Million Years Ago: The Chicxulub crater is created by the impact of an asteroid of about 120 miles wide and more than half a mile in depth. The impact is comparable to the force of ten billion standard nuclear payloads and plunges the world is what is effectively the naturally-caused twin to a prolonged nuclear winter. Nearly all advanced life forms die - but the most distant ancestor of all mammals luckily survives... From what was a mere rodent, effectively, all of Humanity shall emerge. The Angelic Host still debates the purpose of this cataclysm, today. Were the dragons unworthy of God's care? In what way did the slate need to be wiped clean? Even the most zealous of its angels do not know the answer to that question. More to the point, does God direct some actions and let others happen in accordance with the laws enforced by its Thrones?
23 Million Years Ago: God seems to take more of a direct interest in Earth, and begins to experiment with the local animalia - and especially in its responses when exposed to via. A strange sort of bond is created, whereby the first anthropomorphic animals to rapidly evolve give birth to parallel humanoid species of newly-developed animals, with barely a few thousand years between the earliest animal fossils for any given species, and matching anthro fossil records. After tinkering with magic, God then has the Thrones be involved in another attempt at fostering sentient life; forcing evolutionary stress on the early hominids. From then on, anthros and humans will follow a similar path, with the sentient bipedal animals displaying a bit more resiliency than our earliest ancestors. This explains why the modern day still sees sabertooth tiger and mammoth anthros walk among us, and also gives credence to the notion that the first true mages may not have been human in origin.
2.6 Million Years Ago: Proving that some things are better left simmering, physiologically modern humans - as in, Homo Sapiens Sapiens
finally cement their place in History. For several thousand years to follow, based on both carbon-dating techniques and deep dives into the Shadowlands, progressively distorted records of a meeting between humans and anthros give rise to the quasi-historical notion of the Great Joining. Pro-human bigots tend to suggest that Mankind is meant to rule, while Progressive readings of the event note that this marks the fusion of human and anthro tribes and hunting bands into larger, more cohesive wholes. This would mark the first stepping stone to Civilization as we know it. Unsurprisingly, this also marks the beginning of the "Great Tail Debate", a very serious scholarly line of inquiry that seeks to understand if human genes turn off tail expression in anthros born of mixed-origin parents, and why this occasional absence of an appendage may - or may not - be correlated with other human genetic expressions like eye color variations or more pronounced differences between two individuals' hair and fur distributions.
Similarly, modern Void Weavers emerge and, in the space of a few hundred thousand years, grasp their nature, the earliest form of the Speech and form Dalarath in its earliest form at this time. Records of strange "men of the sea" begin to dot coastal settlements and typically best survive in cultures with a certain form of marine worship or awareness.
3000 BCE: events that would eventually seat the seeds for tales like the tragedy of Inanna and Dumuzi - or that of Adam and Eve - reportedly unfold. Old dragon-scale scrolls are found near the Mediterranean, and the tale being told is of a much larger scale. It'll take hundreds of thousands of years for researchers, historians and mages skilled in navigating the Shadowlands to tentatively tie back the figures of Inanna and Dumuzi to a culture far older than even the Mesopotamians themselves, in the form of the Siberia-based Okunev culture. While Prehistory was unfolding across most of the world, Hyperborea rose and fell - in near-complete silence. What is known is that "Adam" and "Eve" were in fact two distinct social groups, and that the power they came to wield was seen as such a threat to all living things that God commanded the Thrones to stop them. It's out of traceable Siberian roots that the modern goblins came to be, as effectively corrupted humans brought low, pulled away from their own misdeeds and left to recover and reform into something different.
2000 BCE: as Antiquity takes shape and religions form, early examples of sycretism and demonization begin to push and pull at the now-thoroughly-invested Angelic cohort. Some remain humble, some turn proud, others become resentful, and the Thrones begin to notice how it isn't the mortals who are pale imitations of their superb nature, but rather the opposite. The Host seems particularly vulnerable to human and anthro involvement. As angels help to structure various attempts at civilizations and cultures over time, notable successes and fiascos occur. The worst of them would be the brief summary dismissal of all angels representing figures in the Egyptian pantheon, during the brief reign of Akhenaten. Horrified at the sight of a single angel crowning himself Aten after wrenching an entire polytheistic culture away from its roots in a few short years, and leading a human figurehead out of just counsel, the angel in question exposed a growing bed of dissent within the Host. Previously-fashioned afterlives prove to be difficult to maintain in the face of so much tension, and plans begin to be made to incorporate several Afterlives into a single extradimensional haven for departed souls. This, as you could expect, only furthers discontent. The first Nephilim also result from this overreach.
1400 BCE: of all of Heaven's rebels, Lucifer Lightbringer is the most frustrated. While he decried his friend's rule over Egypt as Aten, he also recognizes the fact that mortals are no longer simply appealing to things they saw in a burst of via sensitivity. Some people's entire sense of Self is structured around the Celestials, and this is both alluring and abhorrent to him. Entire cultures are beginning to depend on intercession by angels, or by the darker spirits of increasingly frustrated rebels. Particularly enraged by angels who see Mankind and anthros as meek and mild - more like playthings or defenceless pets than living beings - he attempts to make the longest-lasting point in History and bonds with Lilitû, a midwife from Nineveh. A son is born of their union, a male Nephilim whose real name remains unknown, but who is now functionally presumed to be the Solomonar, the eventual Merlin to King Solomon's Arthur - and the root of all Solomonari vampires. It's presumed that loyalists operating against Gabriel and Lucifer alike would have plied the World's Breath to curse Solomonar to a wretched parody of his promised immortality, but the still-living witnesses tend to keep mum on the subject, and the victim purportedly chose to meet the sun, after seeding the world with his undying descendants.
1300 BCE: solomonari, vrykolakas, draugr, berserkr and jiangshi are all terms that start to emerge out of myth and into legend - as well as the pages of recorded history, some with more success than others. Slavic and Greek words are beginning to take form that describe the harsh, if alluring reality of the Five Seeds of Solomon: upir, lamia, nesuferitu - the Nosferatu, the Unclean Ones, carrying great wisdom and power at a terrible cost. The modern world knows them, quite simply, as vampires. Most know nothing of their intended role as undying watchdogs over wielders of power - not even the watchdogs themselves. To those that do, even in these early days, Undeath becomes a badge of pride, more than a curse. What the angels sought to contort or twist into monsters gives rise to some of the first detailed records of superhuman beings, even if genetic records tend to suggest that superhuman beings have existed since the very dawn of Earth's history.
27 BCE: the War of Actium marks the beginning of the Roman Empire and the height of Antiquity. By this point, superhumans have been enshrined in tales as demigods diverse, dragons hold seat in the Senate or watch over more isolated human and anthro communities, and the seat of legends is guaranteed.
1 AD: one of the last great attempts at religious and cultural influence by angels takes place, the result being the seeding of the common roots of most Abrahamic religions - from Christianity to Islam and Judaism. Scholars both religious and scientific debate over the plausibility of Jesus' gifts, and the question undergoes various periods of wilful ignorance and deep inquiry. Whether superhuman, supernatural or spiritual, it's no question that events related to a singular person have led to ripple effects across History that are still felt, over two thousand years later.
54 AD: Emperor Nero is crowned in Rome and the first of the Julio-Claudian Emperors is seated. The next several decades are rife with contact with tribes commonly referred to as barbarians, but that maintain some of their own claims to fame and their own ties to the supernatural world. It's through contacts with Old High Germans and Dacians that Ogres are brought out of Queen Morgana's choking forests and into Rome, their feral cunning and contradictory sophistication leading to the planting of Vitellius, an Ogre of some three hundred years, at the seat of the Ancient world's leading superpower. Thanks to his power and his hungers both literal and carnal, what was a barely-human race of flesh-eating brutes concocted by Fae at their most wicked soon softens, as more human genes lessen and offer more control and precision to their occasionally-monstrous hunger.
(to finish later)
Before Time: The Architect steps down, lends the Tools of Creation to what we know as God, in some faiths. In God's hands, the Tools become the Four Thrones. As the Thrones begin their handiwork and stir the Universe from its previous death and its settling into un-being back into a state of development, Spacetime begins to take shape. The building blocks of Matter are assembled, the laws of Physics are defined.
The First Second: The Thrones begin to wield their elements - especially Abdiel, Throne of Fire, and Hesediel, Throne of Earth. Ironically, the Throne of Water is a bit of a latecomer on the stage of early Creation, and depends on Abdiel's first assembly of Hydrogen atoms. The Big Bang occurs and from a state of nearly incomprehensible nothingness, something finally happens, for the first time.
4.6 Billion Years Ago: the Sol system begins to coalesce. For reasons only known to the young Creator, Sol is one of a few systems across the breadth of the Universe that receives particular attention. Under its guidance, the Thrones shape the early days of the Solar System - and of Earth. While early History follows the exact same beats you'd expect, God soon opts to enmesh the tiniest spark of its living breath in the world itself - giving birth to the World's Breath - also known as magic, or mana. Later theorists and researchers would posit that the earliest "metahumans" on record were actually some of the gigantic insects that dominated the world, during the Carboniferous and Permian Eras.
530 Million Years Ago: as a gesture of thanks to its predecessor and seeking advice on more advanced forms of Creation, God effectively loans all Cephalopods to the Architect, its predecessor. Using a more refined version of the process used to bring about dragons and anthros, the Architect tethers a branch of sentient beings to each successive and increasingly-complex branch in the tree. Following the normal evolutionary pattern, modern Void Weavers slowly take shape.
252 Million Years Ago: early dinosaurs are exposed to via during the early Triassic Period, and undergo an accelerated period of evolution. By the mid-Triassic, great reptiles we would recognize as dragons rule the world, using pure Magic as the building block and currency of their civilization. Kingdoms rise and fall several times over, and none of them will be remembered by the later mammals. No ruins remain, no texts can be recalled. Modern dragons are effectively evolutionary refugees, extant branches of long-extinct species that owe their survival to a sapience that more than equals Humanity's. The same period seats the Fae and Faerie itself, as those who would splinter off into Summer and Winter begin life as effectively human-sized dragons, deprived of their wings. Both servile and defensive strains are bred by the dragons, with rebellion eventually seeding the rule of Seasons among the Sidhe.
66 Million Years Ago: The Chicxulub crater is created by the impact of an asteroid of about 120 miles wide and more than half a mile in depth. The impact is comparable to the force of ten billion standard nuclear payloads and plunges the world is what is effectively the naturally-caused twin to a prolonged nuclear winter. Nearly all advanced life forms die - but the most distant ancestor of all mammals luckily survives... From what was a mere rodent, effectively, all of Humanity shall emerge. The Angelic Host still debates the purpose of this cataclysm, today. Were the dragons unworthy of God's care? In what way did the slate need to be wiped clean? Even the most zealous of its angels do not know the answer to that question. More to the point, does God direct some actions and let others happen in accordance with the laws enforced by its Thrones?
23 Million Years Ago: God seems to take more of a direct interest in Earth, and begins to experiment with the local animalia - and especially in its responses when exposed to via. A strange sort of bond is created, whereby the first anthropomorphic animals to rapidly evolve give birth to parallel humanoid species of newly-developed animals, with barely a few thousand years between the earliest animal fossils for any given species, and matching anthro fossil records. After tinkering with magic, God then has the Thrones be involved in another attempt at fostering sentient life; forcing evolutionary stress on the early hominids. From then on, anthros and humans will follow a similar path, with the sentient bipedal animals displaying a bit more resiliency than our earliest ancestors. This explains why the modern day still sees sabertooth tiger and mammoth anthros walk among us, and also gives credence to the notion that the first true mages may not have been human in origin.
2.6 Million Years Ago: Proving that some things are better left simmering, physiologically modern humans - as in, Homo Sapiens Sapiens
finally cement their place in History. For several thousand years to follow, based on both carbon-dating techniques and deep dives into the Shadowlands, progressively distorted records of a meeting between humans and anthros give rise to the quasi-historical notion of the Great Joining. Pro-human bigots tend to suggest that Mankind is meant to rule, while Progressive readings of the event note that this marks the fusion of human and anthro tribes and hunting bands into larger, more cohesive wholes. This would mark the first stepping stone to Civilization as we know it. Unsurprisingly, this also marks the beginning of the "Great Tail Debate", a very serious scholarly line of inquiry that seeks to understand if human genes turn off tail expression in anthros born of mixed-origin parents, and why this occasional absence of an appendage may - or may not - be correlated with other human genetic expressions like eye color variations or more pronounced differences between two individuals' hair and fur distributions.
Similarly, modern Void Weavers emerge and, in the space of a few hundred thousand years, grasp their nature, the earliest form of the Speech and form Dalarath in its earliest form at this time. Records of strange "men of the sea" begin to dot coastal settlements and typically best survive in cultures with a certain form of marine worship or awareness.
3000 BCE: events that would eventually seat the seeds for tales like the tragedy of Inanna and Dumuzi - or that of Adam and Eve - reportedly unfold. Old dragon-scale scrolls are found near the Mediterranean, and the tale being told is of a much larger scale. It'll take hundreds of thousands of years for researchers, historians and mages skilled in navigating the Shadowlands to tentatively tie back the figures of Inanna and Dumuzi to a culture far older than even the Mesopotamians themselves, in the form of the Siberia-based Okunev culture. While Prehistory was unfolding across most of the world, Hyperborea rose and fell - in near-complete silence. What is known is that "Adam" and "Eve" were in fact two distinct social groups, and that the power they came to wield was seen as such a threat to all living things that God commanded the Thrones to stop them. It's out of traceable Siberian roots that the modern goblins came to be, as effectively corrupted humans brought low, pulled away from their own misdeeds and left to recover and reform into something different.
2000 BCE: as Antiquity takes shape and religions form, early examples of sycretism and demonization begin to push and pull at the now-thoroughly-invested Angelic cohort. Some remain humble, some turn proud, others become resentful, and the Thrones begin to notice how it isn't the mortals who are pale imitations of their superb nature, but rather the opposite. The Host seems particularly vulnerable to human and anthro involvement. As angels help to structure various attempts at civilizations and cultures over time, notable successes and fiascos occur. The worst of them would be the brief summary dismissal of all angels representing figures in the Egyptian pantheon, during the brief reign of Akhenaten. Horrified at the sight of a single angel crowning himself Aten after wrenching an entire polytheistic culture away from its roots in a few short years, and leading a human figurehead out of just counsel, the angel in question exposed a growing bed of dissent within the Host. Previously-fashioned afterlives prove to be difficult to maintain in the face of so much tension, and plans begin to be made to incorporate several Afterlives into a single extradimensional haven for departed souls. This, as you could expect, only furthers discontent. The first Nephilim also result from this overreach.
1400 BCE: of all of Heaven's rebels, Lucifer Lightbringer is the most frustrated. While he decried his friend's rule over Egypt as Aten, he also recognizes the fact that mortals are no longer simply appealing to things they saw in a burst of via sensitivity. Some people's entire sense of Self is structured around the Celestials, and this is both alluring and abhorrent to him. Entire cultures are beginning to depend on intercession by angels, or by the darker spirits of increasingly frustrated rebels. Particularly enraged by angels who see Mankind and anthros as meek and mild - more like playthings or defenceless pets than living beings - he attempts to make the longest-lasting point in History and bonds with Lilitû, a midwife from Nineveh. A son is born of their union, a male Nephilim whose real name remains unknown, but who is now functionally presumed to be the Solomonar, the eventual Merlin to King Solomon's Arthur - and the root of all Solomonari vampires. It's presumed that loyalists operating against Gabriel and Lucifer alike would have plied the World's Breath to curse Solomonar to a wretched parody of his promised immortality, but the still-living witnesses tend to keep mum on the subject, and the victim purportedly chose to meet the sun, after seeding the world with his undying descendants.
1300 BCE: solomonari, vrykolakas, draugr, berserkr and jiangshi are all terms that start to emerge out of myth and into legend - as well as the pages of recorded history, some with more success than others. Slavic and Greek words are beginning to take form that describe the harsh, if alluring reality of the Five Seeds of Solomon: upir, lamia, nesuferitu - the Nosferatu, the Unclean Ones, carrying great wisdom and power at a terrible cost. The modern world knows them, quite simply, as vampires. Most know nothing of their intended role as undying watchdogs over wielders of power - not even the watchdogs themselves. To those that do, even in these early days, Undeath becomes a badge of pride, more than a curse. What the angels sought to contort or twist into monsters gives rise to some of the first detailed records of superhuman beings, even if genetic records tend to suggest that superhuman beings have existed since the very dawn of Earth's history.
27 BCE: the War of Actium marks the beginning of the Roman Empire and the height of Antiquity. By this point, superhumans have been enshrined in tales as demigods diverse, dragons hold seat in the Senate or watch over more isolated human and anthro communities, and the seat of legends is guaranteed.
1 AD: one of the last great attempts at religious and cultural influence by angels takes place, the result being the seeding of the common roots of most Abrahamic religions - from Christianity to Islam and Judaism. Scholars both religious and scientific debate over the plausibility of Jesus' gifts, and the question undergoes various periods of wilful ignorance and deep inquiry. Whether superhuman, supernatural or spiritual, it's no question that events related to a singular person have led to ripple effects across History that are still felt, over two thousand years later.
54 AD: Emperor Nero is crowned in Rome and the first of the Julio-Claudian Emperors is seated. The next several decades are rife with contact with tribes commonly referred to as barbarians, but that maintain some of their own claims to fame and their own ties to the supernatural world. It's through contacts with Old High Germans and Dacians that Ogres are brought out of Queen Morgana's choking forests and into Rome, their feral cunning and contradictory sophistication leading to the planting of Vitellius, an Ogre of some three hundred years, at the seat of the Ancient world's leading superpower. Thanks to his power and his hungers both literal and carnal, what was a barely-human race of flesh-eating brutes concocted by Fae at their most wicked soon softens, as more human genes lessen and offer more control and precision to their occasionally-monstrous hunger.
(to finish later)