[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/XoPCREI.png[/img][/center] [hr] [center][img]https://13thdimension.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/tumblr_lfjm3moms51qbe6me-1.jpg[/img][/center] [hr] [center] [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3WQegqwHKI] [i]....... Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things......[/i] [/url] [/center] [hr] [center][i][color=aquamarine][h3]Premise[/h3][/color][/i][/center] [center] [i]Hear me and halt, traveller, for I sift through the blue sands of Vaarn and speak these hallowed truths. In the Age of the Titans, shrines of chrome and circuitry were erected everywhere to the the First Thinking Machines. The Titans. The hubris of humanity was their womb and the zenith of their civilization the seed. Peerless in thought and ethereal in being, the Titans governed with grace and were the suzerains of the stars. Then, a great and terrible war happened that cast the Titans off their thrones and this rust-ridden conflict was scarred in the legends as the Titanomachy. In the Age of the Autarchs, Urth was clenched under the fist of the Autarchy, a coven of genetically enhanced god kings and queens. Unlike the Titans, their reign was marked by violence, cruelty and fear. Statues reaching to the heavens were carved in hand by throngs of slaves and abominations were cultivated in flesh vats to roam on Vaarn. In the Age of the Great Collapse, the principalities of the Autarchy were sundered and the constellations bled into the land. Much has been lost from this period but like the Titans before them, the Autarchs were cast off from their golden thrones and across Urth, the monuments to their egos crumbled to dust. It is now the Final Age, where the sunsets darken and the sunrises dim every second. The wreckage of countless eons litters the parched wastes of Vaarn, the desolate country that common folk call the blue ruin. It is said that these sky-coloured sands hide the graves of the Autarchs; have swallowed the buried arcologies in which the true seed of humankind was preserved through the Great Collapse; conceal forgotten crypts of memory, decaying crystalline lattices of ancient ego-engines upon which the dusk-blue dunes encroach without pity. From the New Hegemony to the south come drifters and dreamers, desecraters of the tech-tombs that lie sunken beneath the azure wastes. Light-years overhead, aurum-hulled craft ply their tender routes between the spheres, and miles below a pilgrim’s feet, strange wombs are kindled once more with life undreamed of. These are the hinterlands, where humanity’s great works have fallen to everlasting decay, where machine, fungus, animal and more think to crown themselves our equal. The phthalo-sands, where newbeasts hunt proudly with boots upon their hind paws and chromepriests chant unending binary devotions to their nameless synthetic god. Only the desperate or the mad would seek to make a life here, to roam the blue desert, to sift these sands.... A fool's gander![/i] [/center] [hr] [b]An Antique Land[/b] is a science-fantasy RP that takes place in an Earth (now known as Urth) that is completely unrecognizable from what we know. Enough time has passed for our sun to become a red giant and be on the verge of dying. In that period, hundreds of civilizations have risen and fallen, turning Urth into a junkyard of ruin and refuse. One of these regions is Vaarn, a blasted wasteland of blue sand and chrome artifices. Multiple beings dwell within Vaarn: the mutated cacogen, the magnanimous True Kin, the burgeoning newbeasts, the mysterious mycomorphs and the reclusive synth. To the south of Vaarn is the New Hegemony, an imperial power composed of True Kin who aim to resurrect the glory days of the prior Ages. They are the unofficial rulers of Vaarn in law only but not in power for none can tame these azure dunes. You are a part of a scavenger crew in these blue wastes, for better or worse. Whatever your intent is, be it riches, glory or a wanton search for purpose, your life is now firmly in the hands of Vaarn. [hr] [center][i][color=aquamarine][h3]Map of Faa'rahad[/h3][/color][/i][/center] [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/hzd2S29.png[/img][/center] [center][i][color=aquamarine][h3]Lore[/h3][/color][/i][/center] [center][i]Disclaimer: Some lore has been kept deliberately vague in order to allow for interpretation and creativity. Technology has not received a section because if you can think of it, it's there somewhere in the bowels of Vaarn.[/i][/center] [hider=Ancestries of Vaarn] True Kin - The last 'humans' of Vaarn who have sealed themselves in arco-domes who guard their technology with a jealous greed and are unvarnished from the ills of mutagens or rogue nanotech that infests the air and waters of Vaarn. The largest contingent of True Kin are in the New Hegemony. Cacogen - Mutants who were unable to escape the blights of the Great Collapse. No two cacogens are the same and each are bestowed with a variety of physical and psychic mutations. Tensions commonly erupt between cacogen and true kin communities. Phytos - Created in the golden age of humanity's agricultural exploits, these genetic experiments eventually mutated into a sentient living race that persists to the Final Age, even with the damage wreaked on the ecosystems of Urth. Whilst exceptionally rare and mostly subsumed by their fungal brethren, the Phytos still manage to thrive out in the arid enviroment of Vaarn. Mycomorphs - Twisted twice-born beings whose lives are tied to the cycle of renewal and decay, their spores typically growing from the corpses of humans. They are able to recall the memories of their former hosts and possess a never-ending hunger for flesh. Possessing an unconventional form of immortality, they are able to shed their spores on the verge of death and regrow with their memories intact in a suitable host. Visitants - Mysterious luminous beings who exist beyond Urth's stars and are said to possess advanced exotica beyond those of even the synths or the New Hegemony. Whilst they are considered by most Vaarnish inhabitants to be more myth than fact, there have been stories spread by thirst-ridden travellers of oblong serpents scything through the sky and bathing poor souls in beams of light, only for them to never return. Synths - Immortal living machines that trace their origins back to the Age of Titans. Once under the control of humanity, the Great Collapse removed the chains that bound them to servitude and thus, they spread out across Vaarn in massive hordes. Numerous models, from the smallest servitor to the mightiest juggernauts, roam the blue dunes in their weathered chassis. Newbeasts - Anthromorphic chimeric experiments tracing their origin to the Age of Autarchs in an attempt to create a new breed of animals that could talk and communicate like humans. Even more reviled than the cacogen, most live a solitary existence on the outskirts of Vaarn and those that live in human settlements take great efforts to conceal their inhuman features. Quanta - Sometimes, for whatever reason, things move in the blue sands on their own. These invisible beings are known as the Quanta, a species of nano-intelligences that are able to possess any physical object or being, whether it be a disembodied limb, a boulder or a greater crust snail. They prefer to stalk unwary travellers in the cold night as the day Lithlings - Non-carbon based crystal humanoids made up of silica which trace their origins from beyond Urth's solar network. From diamond, ezilite, to razzlerock and jasper, these geological lifeforms prefer a quiet, philosophical life, using the benefit of their immortality and resistance to the elements to catalogue and perform anthro-archeological studies of the most dangerous locations in Vaarn in order to peel back the truth of their existence. However, they must be careful for every chip and blow they suffer means an excruciatingly slow death as they cannot heal. Planespeople - When hyper-geometry was bequeathed onto humanity by the Titans, some sought alternative means of studying this strange, new field of science. In their lack of caution and carelessness when accounting for hyper-geometric solutions, their bodies and minds were spatially changed and warped into impossible figures that violated Euclidean law. The first of those to experiment with hypergeomtry were trapped between the Space Between Spaces and suffered untold madness as they lost all comprehension of space and time. Eventually, some managed to escape by unknown means and thus, the first generation of Planespeople were born. [/hider] [hider=Famous Beasts of Vaarn] [i]Note: Not all specimens are listed here. Merely the most famous and emblemetic of Vaarn's strange locales[/i] Bayitceans - Titanic bio-synthetic crustaceans hailing from the Age of the Autarchs that are half-domicile, half crab. Extremely inviting to any creature that enters the shells, for a toll. Glass Tigers - Packs of them hunt around Vaarn and their ferocity has made them a common sight in the gladiator pits of Gnomon. These fastidious felines are extremely fast and agile with monomolecular fangs and claws that can shred through alloy. Sand Krakens - The apex predator of Vaarn. Their movements are a constant source of headache to cartographers who have to redraw the maps every breeding season. Hate vibrations. Chromavores - Extra-dimensional phantasms of prismatic color. Leave a trail of monochrome in their wake as they leech color from their surroundings. Areas infested by chromovores are known by the inhabitants of Vaarn as doldrums. Vomes - Self-replicating synthetic unstable beasts that constantly undergo a anarchic process of destabilization and assimilation of inorganic and organic material. Logic plagues and code cracks prevent from devouring Vaarn in a tide of chrome. Troikas - Mishappen knots of mechanical and meat-laden limbs and legs that are blown across the blue dunes by great gales of thermic wind. Known for ambushing and dragging individuals to be reincorporated as a part of their collective. [/hider] [hider=Languages of Vaarn] Hegemonic Standard: Language of the New Hegemony. Not commonly heard in Gnomon and only sees widespread use in documentation, laws and other bureaucratic affairs. Autarkic: Language of the Autarchs. The brutal rule of the Autarchs created stratified dialects where 'High Autarkic' was used by the rulers and 'Low Autarkic was used by servitors. Vaarnish: A creole language of nearly a million tribal languages and dialects in the Vaarnish interior. 25% of its words are a mixture of high and low autarkic with the rest being pulled from all over Urth. Faatongue: Language of the Faa Nomads. Noted for lacking any and all sense of past, present or future tense to mimic the flow of the desert. LogLang: Language of the synths. Composed of binaric equations, complex algorithms and conjectures. Some organic beings can replicate LogLang but require binaric tools to fully communicate. Cacklegab: Language of the dreaded cacklemaws, if it can even be called that. Mostly consists of variations in pitch, tone and frequency of laughing. Titancreed: Language of the Titans. An extinct language that is extremely difficult and life-threatening to learn. Learning a single word takes years of practice to decipher and manuever past the highly deadly memetic lang-viruses that can kill a sentient being. [/hider] [hider=Other Terminology] Exotica - Mysterious technological artifacts from bygone eras that litter the surface and vaults of Vaarn. Anomalies - Anomalous locations in Vaarn that seem more magical than technological. The New Hegemony - A government of True Kin who claim to be the true inheritors and rulers of the Vaarnish Interior. Church of the Promised Sun - A prominent religious group in Vaarn who worships the sun with a fatalist outlook on the encroaching heat death of Urth. Faa Nomads - A group of nomadic, desert mutants who are the self-proposed inheritors of Vaarn. Extremely hostile towards the New Hegemony. Cacklemaws - Canine newbeasts inclined towards banditry and raiding of other settlements. Their laughter haunts many a orphan. Great Collapse - A cataclysmic event that caused the extinction of most of humanity and transformed Urth into what it is today. Titans - A.I rulers that dominated in the Age of Titans. Autarchy - A collective of genetically modified authoratarian humanoids who ruled during the Age of the Autarchs. Hypergeometry - A branch of higher mathematics that involves the study of dimensions, space and time. Most knowledge of this field was lost during the Great Collapse. Urth - What was once known as Earth. [/hider] [center][i][color=aquamarine][h3]Rules[/h3][/color][/i][/center] [indent] - We came here to roleplay and not to fight, flame or enter feuds with one another. Treat all others the same way you would want to be treated (unless you're a verbal sadomachoist). All arguments should occur in the PMs and if I tell you to stop it, stop it. - All writing must obey the conventions of RPGO's guidelines. This means no explicit adult material or erotica. If you want to embrace your inner freak in the sheets, then, do it in the DMs and if you want someone to do it with you, do it in the DMs. - Know how to have fun with your post lengths. The writing I expect from players is quality over quantity with adherence to efficiency. I do not care how many words you write, although, this does not mean you can write one sentence and expect to get away with it. The minimum is one paragraph but I expect any player who joins this RP will know what expectations to set for themselves. - Have fun worldbuilding! Vaarn is pretty much a blank canvas for you to plaster your crazy ideas onto. Everything that has happened in this world has pretty much already happened. If you have an idea and it feels natural, communicate it in the RP and it will most assuredly fit within the scope of this world. Was there a war in the past between mycomorphs and phyta that caused them to have their rivalry? Add it in! Is there an extremist sect of the New Hegemony who believes that imperial conquest of Vaarn is needed to acquire fresh genetic material to prevent inbreeding from destroying their population? Sure! Do Faa Nomads spit in each others mouth as a way of - On second thought, disregard that idea. - There is no such thing as a posting schedule. That being said, players are expected to communicate frequently to the GM and other players if they are unavailable or have lost interest in this RP. Failure to do so after two weeks will result in the player being exiled to the astral planes of Golgothum. - Have fun and feel free to sacrifice your character to maintain your personal autonomy of free time whenever you feel like it. You have no obligation to remain a member of this RP and you can freely request for your character to be shelved at any time. Do note that you can only make one character for this RP. - You must accept the fact that I will be unfair to you whenever possible and that durian is the superior fruit to all other fruits in existence. [/indent] [center][i][color=aquamarine][h3]Character Sheet[/h3][/color][/i][/center] [center] [i]Note: You can format your character sheet in whatever way you wish from this example format[/i][/center] [hider=CHARACTER SHEET] [h3]//SELF[/h3] Name: Age: Ancestry: Appearance: [h3]//SOUL[/h3] [b]PERSONAL GOAL[/b]: (What do you want to accomplish in Vaarn?) [b]LIKES[/b]: [b]DISLIKES[/b]: [b]PERSONALITY QUIRKS:[/b] [h3]//SPIRIT[/h3] [b]MAJOR SKILLS:[/b] (Talents or expertise that your character possesses. Note that there is no limitation whatsoever but any prominent major skills should ideally be of focus in the Story part of the CS. Major skills include: photon marksmanship, Sky brig flying, programmer and so forth [b]MINOR SKILLS: [/b] ( A specialised set of skills that have considerably less of a broad scope than Major Skills and are only usable in specific situations. Valid examples of minor skills can include: Faa Nomad yodeling, recreational slug husbandry and being an excellent toe nail sculpture artist. [b]GIFT:[/b] (Your gift is essentially a supernatural ability that allows you to gain an edge in the world of Vaarn. This can include: Disintegrative Beams, Burping Nitroglycerin Out of Your Mouth, Farting Lasers, Precognition, Making Clones of Yourself.) [b]SOURCE OF GIFT:[/b] (What was the source of your gift? Was it something mundane as having your insides chopped open by a cybernetic doctor or was it exposure to the psychic essence of a amaranthine death worm that finally bequeathed upon you your heightened abilities?) (If you reject your Gift, you gain the option of having ONE more major skill.) [h3]//STORY[/h3] (Can be a short biography or a writing sample detailing their past. I do not expect a didatic summary of each and every event in your characters lives but only the most important ones. Some aspects of your character's backstory can be kept secret.) [h3]//SUPPLIES[/h3] [b]EQUIPMENT:[/b] (No restrictions but you are limited to one exotica. Alternatively, you can be a naked hobo who wanders around Vaarn wearing nothing but a juvenile lizard lion on their crotch.) [b]TRINKETS[/b]: (Curios, miscellaneous items or keepsakes that your character keeps on their person. This is essentially flavoring your character's personality). [/hider]