Eumenides

The Vehmgericht
The Holy Vehm, also called the Sect of the Idiot, are the byproducts of the creation of the Martyrs of the Knife. They appear to be great black robes, in which can be seen only glittering eyes, and from which protrude hands with too many long, green and inhuman fingers. If exposed, their body is a terrifying combination of beautiful adolescent mortal human and mantis-like insect.

These beings are the monitors who enforce ignorance of the Executors among mortals on day-to-day matters. They retain the so-called camorrae of mortals to lead purges against witchcraft and spread false and dangerous sorcerous lore. They peruse the shelves of antique bookstores for too-rare finds. Where their prying eyes detect serious problems the Executors can search for an appropriate prayer to dispatch the eumenides or set down a haroun.

The Vehmgericht roam the byways of Tel Chesed as well as our world. In the mansions of the executors, they serve as the All-Lords’ witnesses to the honesty of various accounts and transactions where the presence of the eumenides or a tahsildar would bring more authority than necessary for a prosaic ordering of books. The vehm are most common in the bollwerk beneath the City of Mercy, where they have many secret facilities.

The Cammorae
The dark-robed Vehmgericht do not police the mortal world alone. They control many mortal servants, known as the cammorae. The precise nature of these dupes varies depending on the way the GM has chosen to depict the caryatids of his world. If the caryatids are mere cutouts, then the servants of the vehm will be terrible puppets -- caricatures of spies for the ultimate evil among the two dimensional puppets that fill their worlds. In the games of GMs who opt to populate the world with more realistic humans, the cammorae will be more realistic conspirators, humans enthralled to the vehm seeking to satisfy some lust, flatter their egos or meet some need.

Regardless of the specific nature of the cammorans, it is powerful organization. It provides the countless eyes by which the vehm spy out those who would meddle in the secrets of magic or pry at the door of the Lesser Abyss. Their agents are everywhere; they are the universal collaborator with the cosmic police state -- their presence s a constant, their influence all-pervasive.

They are also hopelessly corrupt. As the hand-picked servants of the Vehm, they are selected by habitually corrupt traitors. From their ranks spring many of the All-Lords’ enemies, for they are as treasonous and seeking of advantage as their dark controllers. This is apparently agreeable enough to the All-Lords that the vehm continue to perform their function in this fashion -- like many of the Executors’ other policies, it concentrates lust for power and ambition for station into a predictable framework that can be managed by regular prunings.

In most places and times, the cammorae are reasonably effective in policing the world for magic. In some places, they are too corrupt to be effective and in other places, they are totally victorious. Neither state persists for long, as the Executors prune out the too-effective and the terribly crooked alike to achieve a regular harvest of potential problems.

Still a bit rough; the curses grasped in its claws haven't had their icons filled in yet.

Most creatures travel the void between worlds out of necessity, for it is the only way one can travel from one reality to another. The Ur-Kali are truely dwellers in the Greater Abyss. They do not make their way across it, but dwell within it. It is unknown what their true origin is, but their ceaseless hatred for all that is suggests to many that they are a natural expression of entropy. These theorists among the eidolons suggest they are formed as a result of the sorcery and energy bound up in the creation and maintenance of worlds, not unlike the nikisi of the Tel Chesed. It is certain these beings have no fear of death -- perhaps they cannot truly die, or perhaps they simply do not care if they do.

But if they are like the nikisi in origin, then the Ur-Kali are greater than the earth-sprung as the universe is greater than the City of Mercy. Vast sleek avatars of destruction, the Ur-Kali are as feared as the svartalfar. Those among them that are truly great are vast beyond confrontation. Those that are lesser are merely mammoth.

The Ur-Kali have two primary modus operandi. The first is the rampage -- the Ur-Kali enters the Sea of Time and simply destroys everything it can before the Executors can mount a response. Sometimes the beast then departs our world when the Executors’ response arrives, others stand their ground and dispute the matter with arriving eumenides until they are destroyed.

Other Ur-Kali plots are more subtle. These creatures lurk just beyond the fencelines of our world, always listening for prayers that invite them in -- a practice not unlike that of the Executors. These Ur-Kali are the archeypal corrupting devils; they appear to the their supplicants in pleasing shapes, offering aid and power, their love or their divine conversation if only the supplicant will perform for them the tiniest of tasks. Place a cup of coffee on a certain wall and walk away. Break a crock in a certain place and leave the shards. Give the next man who asks you for money ten dinars, no matter how little he asks for.

These tiny gestures are never devoid of meaning, but are the key components of vast entropic rituals that these dragons perform primarily in the privacy of the Greater Abyss. Little is known of this in the specific, save that those involved with blood and breaking things serve to help open the way for rampaging Ur-Kali. Acts that seem more constructive serve as parts of long-term destructive rituals that, gaining power over time, can destroy nations and entire narrative arcs. It is unknown if the Ur-Kali serve some purpose other than vexing the All-Lords, but it is assumed they are somehow ultimately seeking to destroy our world in its entirety in a ritual-of-rituals.

The dragons of the Greater Void are as large as city blocks, ocean liners, centers of government and even geographic features. Those who travel the Greater Abyss hint that these are merely the largest of the Ur-Kali that can wedge their way into our world, and that the Abyss contains far larger specimens.

Enhanced Soldier [Mortal Equivalent 1]

Attributes (Power/Resistance): Physical 3/4 Occult 1/2
Competencies
Ranged 4R1, Melee 3, Miracle 0, Missile 3
Riddle 0 Bureaucracy 1 Dominion 2
Agility 3, Knowledge 2, Medical 2, Perception 3, Poise 3R1
Repair 2, Stealth 3, Survival 2, Vehicles 3
Move 8m/20m Speed Normal
Life 1 Stand Size 4 Armor 6R1, 6 versus non-gunpowder MCM 0

Special Abilities
None
Attacks
Assault Rifle Range 30/60/120 Attack 4R1 Damage 4 Ammo 10 Basic Load Loaded + 8 magazines Notes Burst
Grenade Launcher Range 40/80/160 Attack 4R1 Damage 6 hit, 3 blast Ammo 1 Basic Load 10 rounds Notes 2m burst
Pistol Range 5/10/20 Attack 4R1 Damage 3 Ammo 3 Basic Load Loaded + 2 magazines Notes PDW
Description
This represents an infantrymen who has some suite of biological, mechanical and electronic enhancements to his combat capability sufficient to give him a decisive edge over unenhanced human troops. These troops generally have aggression modulation, fear control and other attitude modification products installed to both increase their combat effectiveness and keep them functioning according to orders. Typically, however, these are not fully controlling mechanisms, and are reflected in the character's Poise ringer.

Early attempts to create supertroopers – for example, soldiers who are chemical commandos in the style of Soviet athletes, should use enhanced soldiers for their statistics.

The trees of woe dropping the puppets of ruin. The hand-thing is a bakegumo, a sort of semi-independent trickster / leader being that spreads along with the forest. Bakegumos, small ur-kali and a variety of other beings lurk in the forests of ruin, aided and protected by the trees they serve.

The Dreams of Ruin

Policy failure, government corruption, fetal abnormalities, rapidly metastasizing cancers, destructive storms, foodchain collapse -- these are the uncontrollable tragedies of our world, the hand of random mischance exposed. Or at least that is how it appears to those whose perspective is limited to a single narrative arc.

Seen from an extrahistorical perspective, however, it is clear that these phenomenon and many others are essentially interrelated and neither independent nor benign. Like viral cancers, their cause is a disease so subtle and so difficult to perceive from within the Sensual World that it generally goes undetected. In the case of these human, social and ecological failures, they causative agent is an ailment of worlds known as the Dreams of Ruin.

The Dreams Themselves
In their first stages, the Dreams appear as a regional or global run of misfortune. They take root in slums, shantytowns, prisons and asylums, where the despair of the inhabitants does something akin to preparing the soil for them.

In places where the Dreams have taken root, that which is bad can happen more often than would seem statistically proper, and such things often feed other ill developments perhaps more often than one might expect. At this stage, the Dreams are like the mycelia of a metaphysical fungal bloom, penetrating every part of the infected area. It is at this stage that the Executors prefer to remedy the infestation, and certain combinations of occult activity and community development can eradicate the Dreams before they bear their fruiting structures, the trees of woe and the puppets of hate.

The Trees of Woe
Where the dreams of ruin have grown too long in the soil of misery, they fruit into the trees of woe. These tall, stately trees erupt from the very soil of the land where the dreams have taken hold. Straight and evil, like a twisted, soot-covered ash, these trees are quite invisible to the humans around them. They have an aura not unlike the Illusion of Memory around; to the eyes of the observer, they are natural, they have always been there, they are beyond notice even when they choose to grow in the middle of the street or the front room of a house.

The Trees of Woe are suitable for suicide by hanging, for lynching and crucifixion, for the burial of sacrifices and secret murders at their roots, and every other unwholesome thing that might perpetuate them. Where they grow, these things will occur, and the trees will conceal them, and grow taller and stronger.

After three years of this unpleasant self-cultivation, the trees bear fruit, in the form of great white corpse-flowers, from which waft the pollen that will spread the Dreams throughout the Sensual World and, it is presumed, across the Great Void. Luckily for the Lords of All, while these plants first flower only three years after they appear, they bloom but every thirteenth year thereafter, so they rarely fruit twice.

Puppets of Ruin
Where the trees have grown long enough to bear fruit at least once, the Puppets of Ruin can be found tending them. It is believed they are some sort of occult symbiote that is bound to the trees, but it is also possible they are some sort of alternate form of the plant’s flowers or fruit. These faceless footsoldiers resemble articulated wooden artist’s models, and spring from the bones and blood of those who die among those gloomy orchards. Though they do not rise directly, but the puppets are connected through the power of Guede to the corrupted soil the Dreams have taken root in.

While they are at first few and furtive, as the orchard of the trees of woe thickens and darkens, the Puppets begin to rove more openly. As guardians of the orchards of ruin, the puppets are murderers. Alone, they are furtive killers, in groups, terrifying raiders. Where they prosper, men are driven out, and those places soon become the abode of puppets only. The puppets are as the falling leaves of the Trees of Woe, smothering out all things not of them and perpetuating their own habitat of gloom. The Puppets are quite visible and terrifying for mortals to behold, though they exude a certain social anaesthetic that prevents large-scale responses to their existence.

In Eumenides, the human race is divided into two groups, caryatids and cynosures. Cynosures are the "main characters", the people whom the Executors dote on in the story of history. The caryatids are everyone else. The game material leaves it up to the GM to decide how "real" the caryatids are, varying from them being totally normal people who just don't happen to have the attention of the daemon sultans, all the way to them being superficial imitations of people that are only "real" enough to fool the cynosures who meet them.

Visually, we came down on the far end of the spectrum of reality, with the non-cynosure components of reality as merely 2-d cutouts, able to fool the cynosures only with the magic of the Executors. This was just a matter of wanting to make a consistent choice as to how it was going to look, and to choose a really distinctive visual style that sets the game apart.

The arcane runes on the cynosure are the mark of the Executors. The nimbus is perceptible to all Initiates, and notifies the onlooker of the cynosure's protected status. Any supernatural influence on a cynosure is certain to draw the Eyes of the Executor, and shortly thereafter, a beefy response team of armed daemons as the All-Lords protect or avenge their beloved puppet.

Armed Caryatids

Armed caryatids are not regular foes of the Eumenides throughout most of history. The furies are the scourges of the All-Lords, and there is generally little a caryatid can do to offend the Executors. Rarely, however, do they directly draw the wrath of the All-Lords. More often, they come into conflict with the furies when they are complicit in the crimes of others or bystanders to an occult conflict. Thus Caryatids are slain now and again as part of Violations, and murdered by the billions when narrative arcs are twisted into Sealed Systems and cut out of history, but they are of little overall importance, no more than the individual year cells in a bread dough.

It is only in the Age of War and later that the mass of humanity becomes a regular enemy of the Executors’ stewards. The Lords of All are constantly channeling the attention of the resource-starved human race toward occult and geomantic concepts during its later history in order to bring about their desired technomagical apocalypse. Breaching the Maze of Black Doorways is a natural fixation for tottering military-industrial nation states seeking a justification for continuing their centralized policy structures, and so there are endless attempts to pry into the secrets of the All-Lords, ranging in size from small teams to vast national efforts. These efforts are often protected or spearheaded by elite military forces equipped with their sponsor’s most advanced weapons. These troops are the caryatids most often confronted by the eumenides.

Threat
Despite their personal frailty, these late-era caryatids can seriously wound or kill a eumenidon with man-portable weapons. Not every caryatid soldier will have weapons that can easily kill a fury, but these weapons are relatively plentiful in the sort of high-powered formations commonly encountered at job sites and due to mission complications. Furies in these periods must rely on stealth and misdirection, and not combat power when confronting such foes.

Most eumenides engaged in battle with Final Age or Age of War caryatids rely on attacks that target the frail psyches and selves of the mortals that operate these weapons. Only the Dukes of Thunder and the Scarlet Myrmidons take the field for direct engagements against striker formations from late history, and even these are marked by heavy realiance on teleport warfare and concentrated maskirovka efforts. Caryatids are merely the illusions of history, and their death is not worth any sacrifice whatsoever. As with their wars against the nikisi in Tel Chesed, the armies of the All-Lords know there is no victory in prolonged engagements with these phantom foes, only degrees of self-defeat.

Bleys has been developing special techniques for portraying the caryatids. This is what some caryatid war machines from the Final Age look like. He thinks the human pilots probably have their legs removed to cut down on the amount of space that has to be protected by the armored compartment, and wear cybernetic prosthetics or wheelchairs when they are not in the vehicles.

Sorry we've been out of communication for a while. We continue developing the project. Bleys has a nice new illo he's done for the assault carapace.

Choir Destroying Angels
Chorus Lailim
Pinions Eldritch
Gear Destroying Orb

Martyrs of the Knife
Like all eumenides, the Martyrs of the Knife are created for battle. Each member of the Choir is subject to dark and terrible Initiations during their creation rites. The cunning of the Clerics is developed during their training, when they are exposes to countless teaching mantras, meditation exercises and memory recordings of archetypal human behavior, until the whole of the human condition lies before them like a burning tapestry. All Martyrs of the Knife are also scarred due to mutilations suffered during their initial creation.
Choir Power Lashing the Dross: Whenever the Fury gains an Initiation that bears the tag DEFORMITY, he adds +1R0 to his Physical Resistance against damage. The character is also +R1 to Poise rolls against Fear, and immune to Fear effects without a Ringer.
Choir Taboo Phisiognomy Phrikodes: The Martyrs of the Knife suffer a -R1 penalty whenever they attempt to make a Savior Faire roll with non-daemons outside the Illusion of Memory, or any Savior Faire roll that does not involve intimidation and fear. In addition, after the character gains his second Initiation with the DEFORMITY tag, the penalty to Savior Faire rolls increases permanently to -R2.

Amphisbeanae
Snake-handed, snake hairs or poison-clawed, the hideous amphisbeanae are the assassins of the Martyrs. Their every blow a corrosive horror, the amphibeanae are as terrible in melee combat as the Destroying Angels.
Slots: Countenance + Melee 2, Ranged 1, Support 2
Chorus Initiation Vipera Apheliastes: The hands of the amphisbeanae forever drip venom. The classic amphisbeana has snake-heads for hands, but they take many shapes, and others have poison nails, or exude venom from their skin.
The character begins play with the equivalent of the Well of Poison support gear permanently equipped -- any attack they do that inflicts at least 1 Life after the victim’s Physical Resistance roll against damage does an additional point of Life. This requires no slots. Amphisbeana can use their hands normally, and can wear specialty countenances assuming they have the proper Initiations.
Chorus Taboo The Poisoned Prey: The character is an asp, not a constrictor. He can never wrestle individual opponents. The character can snatch weak foes as normal, but can never subdue a snatched-up opponent, only slay them.

Undying Countenance
Armor 4R2 Move 8m/16m MCM -1/-2 Clearance Basic Notes Character is Undying. If truly slain in this countenance, the character rises from the dead at the end of the Mission without loss of Initiation. At will, she causes Fear 3R0 in all who see her and Fear 4R1 in all who see her with the Illusion of Memory parted. Characters with the Prince of the Opened Tomb initiation automatically have 3 stands of Walking Dead if they desire them (V-3X as normal). The fury's Savior Faire is modified by a further -1R when she attempts interactions not involving fear or intimidation.
Description The character assumes the mask of guede. Seen truly, he is a withered and decaying horror. Even seen through the Illusion of Memory, she appears clearly dead or on death’s door due to grave general ill health.
The character is Undying and her bane is the attacks of those fighting to defend their beloved children or true loves, and of course any attack with the Bane note. This countenance incorporates a Gravedigger’s Lantern or some equivalent talisman -- characters with the Initiation “Prince of the Opened Tomb” can summon up their 3 stands of walking dead servitors without expending a support slot on the actual Gravedigger’s Lantern gear.

Flail and Crook [V-1]
Damage +4R1 Clearance Basic Notes +R2 to Melee attacks with this weapon. Successful attack causes a Fear 2R2 attack
The flail and crook are terrible weapons, signs of occult authority given into the hands of the Martyrs of the Knife by the Executors. Though they do little damage, their blows carry a terrible authority whose nature is written into the very fabric of reality. When the Flail and Crook is wielded against foes, its blows cause fear as well as injury.

The first of some previews of the game's more recent art, in case people think we're just working with the same beer-stained sketches I posted back in November. =)

Choir Martyrs of the Knife
Chorus Amphisbeana
Countenance Undying
Gear Flail and Crook

Wow, this game is really dark. Do you think this will have mass appeal?

Not necessarily, but I think the people who do buy it will be very happy about it.

Why did you make a game this dark and hopeless?

I wanted to make some observations on the concept of intelligent design.

This doesn’t even seem like a roleplaying game. It seems more like a kind of board game or parlor game. Does that bother you?

No. Why carry around preconceptions of what a game is supposed to be? Writing it as a game made presenting the setting in depth less awkward than writing it as a novel with big chunks of infodump, and gives people a way to really enjoy and interact with the setting and not just read about it.

Why would you spend a year writing a game that isn’t going to be a major success?

I just did a game that was a mass-market success, or as much of one as you’ll get in gaming these days. Why be repetitive?

You’re a big public proponent of measuring success by the reception the market gives a product. What gives?

This question has two answers:

First, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Even seen from a strictly commercial standpoint, my long-term development as a creator is more important than making a haul on each and every project. Taking into account that I have only one life to live, it seems extremely counterproductive not to enjoy myself occasionally.

Second, as I said before, I think “the market” for this product will be very enthusiastic. This is a game done by someone who is a fan of the genre deliberately setting out to address the shortcomings of previous efforts. It is just a relatively narrow market. If you don’t like the writing of Ligotti, Lovecraft and / or Barker, you probably won’t like this game, and I don’t feel compelled to sell it to you.

Isn’t that poor marketing?

Only if selling my game to people who wouldn’t like it is somehow “good” marketing. I hate the way people in gaming are expected to go around on bended knee shilling to each and every person they meet how they “need” this product. I mean really – you play the warrior-slaves of transhuman demon-gods. You either want that or you don’t. If you don’t, go spend your money on something you’ll enjoy more.

This is the taxonomic breakdown of occult powers that shape the Sea of Time in Eumenides. In some ways, it's just a footnote to some other things in the game -- the powers the Executors wield and spring from are separate from these. However, I think it's pretty clever stuff, synthesizing a lot of afro-carribean diaspora material with more conventional western occultism. The italics are art notes for the tarot arcana type plates depicting these forces.

The Eight Cthonic Powers

The cthonic forces divide naturally into eight taxa. These eight divisions are known to the Executors and their servants and to mortal sorcerers as well, for any careful study of the world’s occult principles will reveal them. These eight powers are often but not always made manifest as energies capable of resolving and directing the specific outcome of certain stereotypical chaotic systems like fluid dynamics or the interactions of plasma and magnetic fields. Though they are referred to by the names of individuals and spoken of as people or deities, these powers are thoughtless and without self-awareness, not deities but flavors of occult sheer and torsion. Deities spring from these powers, and may be quite formidable, but the powers themselves are not “gods”.

Hermes Trismegistus, Via Ad Portas
Hermes Trismegistus is depicted as a young child leading the viewer through a doorway, the door of which is open about 1/3 of the way. The road beyond the doorway is a rainbow.

The road and the doorway, the via ad portas is a force represented only indirectly. Hermes Trismegistus is the conduit of occult power that allows the Executors to manipulate and shape the other power of the Sea of Time, to move history and reality, to create and maintain the interface to the Maze of Twisting Stairs. This metaphysical force is the gateway through which the power of the All-Lords flows, and a great weakness of their reign. What they can manipulate, others can likewise twist. This force is the root of the Ariadne Heresies and mortal sorcerous Initiation. The Executors would surely cause it to cease if they could, but then the Dreamers would have no handle with which to shape the Sea of Time.

The power that arises from the via ad portas influences other cthonic forces. The Via Ad Portas is typically the source of power for Final Age scenarios where humanity creates powerful artifical gods.

Geburah Father of Laws
Geburah Father of Laws is depicted as an old man with his face half-blindfolded, in direct tribute to the Rider-Waite 9 of Swords and the one eye of Odin; perhaps he is justice peeking, perhaps he has paid the price of wisdom. In one hand he holds a pan balance with a heart and a feather on it. They are in perfect balance. With his other hand, he holds a sword, which he is cutting a child in half with. Two women wail but his face is emotionless.

Geburah Father of Laws is the source of all logical systems. Hierarchies, rules, heuristics, other formal second-order systems are the domain of this power. Geburah Father of Laws is present in mathmematics, engineering, legalism and the practice of law, science and theology. The power of Geburah is the mastery of ordering. That which arises from Geburah commands and is obeyed. Geburah, Father of Laws is a common focus for Final Age cthonic eruptions involving all-encompassing police states or viral takeovers of the populace by an invasive AI. Deities that spring from Geburah are beings of order and rules are most often sprung from books, artificial worlds and other second-order realities.

Stella Maris
Stella Maris is depicted as a direct tribute to the image Madonna in Heaven by Albrect Durer. No baby jesus please. Maybe add in some elements of Guan Yin, pouring out the bottle.

Stella Maris is the force governing oceans and the behavior of great bodies of water – tide, currents, waves and so on. It also governs the moon, and lunar influence on things other than the seas are also part of the Stella Maris. These elements of the Sensual World are so pervasive and the large-scale fluid effects so specialized that they have their own managing force. Stella Maris also manages plate tectonics and mantle-crust interactions due to relatively similar rules.

The Executors and mortal sorcerers mostly interact with the Stella Maris by commanding it to produce oceanographic phenomenon or tremblors. Its many complexities go largely unplumbed. Deities arising from the Stella Maris are known as undines. These beings are relatively common, but most are intent on aqueous matters and of little note to the human narrative. Those that do become involved in the mortal world do so as explorers and dabblers, and are called nymphs. These explorations can be quite destructive, as the mortal world is alien and mysterious to their watery consciousnesses.

The Stella Maris is often the source of power in Final Age narratives where the human race is dealt a terrible psychic injury by some experimental mishap or industrial accident, whose resonance in the cthonic fields leaves mankind broken-minded or totally insane.

Athena Oya
Athena Oya is depicted as a thin, androgynous man / woman clad in a Dukes of Thunder mobility carapace, carrying a lightning bolt. Like Loki, her red hair is an actual tongue of flame. She is depicted descending into a laboratory that mixes alchemical and scientific apparatus. She is causing a laboratory fire as well as bringing inspiration to the rapt eyes of a researcher. This is an archetypal prince of chaos – slim, andro, armored, beautiful.

The Athena Oya is the force of raw change and unfettered entropy. From it spring fire, genius, wind, storms, lightning and magic. The Athena Oya is often used in a technical manner during the shaping of reality and when engendering great changes or disasters in the world, but it has only a transitory place in the Sea of Time. This power’s arbitrarily destructive aspects make it erosive and unstable, and it will either grow and blossom into a conflagration or annihilate itself – it exists only to react.

Deities arising from the Athena Oya are called Surt-sylphs, and they are self-perpetuating bonfires of mutation and eradication. These vortexes of fire, wind and gold can be conjured and enslaved, but only at great hazard, for their isolation must be total. Final Ages that involve the Athena Oya tend to be those that seek to tap cthonic power for limitless energy or as power for terrible beams or bombs.

Yellow Emperor, Keeper of Grain and Soil
Yellow Emperor is depicted as a physically perfect man with completely empty eyes in kingly robes. He is standing alone in a wasteland, and smiting a great rock with his scepter of office. There is a crack in the rock where he strikes it, and both paradise and serpents are spilling forth in equal measure from the fissure.

Yellow Emperor is the governing force of the additive components of the natural process. It is the ruler of the spheres of growth and radiative adaptation, plants and other sessile animals, reproduction, digestion and metabolism. Yellow Emperor is balanced by Guede, and these two forces together form the equilibrium of the natural world, just as Sophia Tlazolteotl and Geburah Father of Laws form the central narrative of human civilization.

Deities arising from Yellow Emperor spring from large organized life-systems. These tend to be dense and offer a great deal of biological activity on several scales. Thus, forests are the archetypal locale for such a manifestation, as are coral reefs, but algal blooms are not. Yellow Emperor deities who are focussed on their locale are called dryads. Those that are focussed on the world outside it are called leshys. While Yellow Emperor is not as volatile as Athena Oya, its expansion into unutilized potential is certain and inexorable, and it too is ultimately erosive, though it tends more to subsume other powers into itself rather than merely exposing them to arbitrary change.

Yellow Emperor is the father of Final Ages where humanity achieve a new collective existence or group consciousness through the utilization of cthonic forces, but that mode of existence is not sentient or self-aware. In these existences, individual humans are reduced to mere tissues of a great hive, which lives, but lives to no end.

Sophia Tlazolteotl
Sophia Tlazolteotl is depicted as a demimondaine. Three well-dressed men sit at her table, exchanging money and favors, while heaping her with gifts. Her daughter sits at her knee learning her mother’s trade. Who would have thought Sarah Bernhardt’s mom would be one of the eight arrows of Chaos?

Sophia Tlazolteotl is the governing force of informal, diffuse and capillary structures. This force governs water runoff and river systems, the growth and development of offspring, and human social interactions involving emotion, crookedness, sexuality and vice. The Sophia Tazolteotl is one of the primary tools of the Executors in governing the human race. Through its interaction with Guburah Father of Laws is human political history shaped.

Deities that spring from Sophia Tlazolteotl tend to have a flow or cascade that powers them. Often this is a river system, but it can be a major hub in an administrative system dedicated only to the flow and processing of requests and reports. Regardless of if they arise in a river or data center, they are called rusalka if they merely linger in their place of origin to gossip, seduce and murder, and hags if they go abroad to seek out sexual encounter and wickedness.

Hags are hated by the Vehmgericht especially, as they compete with the vehm for the same niche in the occult-political ecology. This is the one kind of deity the Vehm can be counted on to suppress. However, those that do survive by subverting their hunters or stealthy growth into a political fixture are tremendously guileful. Sophia Tlazolteotl is the mother of Final Ages where the human race breeds cthonically-inhabited god-children, or poisons the entire world beyond habitability and slays all life incidental to pursuit of the cthonic powers.

The Wieland Force
The Wieland Force is depicted as a great engine hurtling along tracks that are about to end. On the front of the engine is the head of bull lowered to charge.

The Wieland Force governs the actions and states of those things that have the ability to change the world but no real volition in doing so. This is primarily animals and machines. The Wieland Force also governs the alien intelligences that arise from these contrivances when they are elevated beyond the level of mere tools and granted volition while still being creatures of purpose only.

Deities that arise from the Wieland Force are called magerrach. They are most common in the Age of Industry or later, where they sometimes come into existence in large industrial works. Those that become externally focussed often have an approach similar to the Interlopers known as Svartalfar without the emphasis on spreading between narrative arcs. However, magerrach are sometimes observed in large groups of animals, and they can also emerge among human mobs during riots.

The Wieland Force is one of the powers most commonly involved in the human race’s self-destruction. Final Ages governed by the Wieland Force are those where humanity is crushed beneath the iron heels of an android uprising or slain by its own machines. It also rules those where man is downsized out of existence by an emergent system of mechanical rule incidental to global automation of policy choices and financial markets.

Guede
Guede is depicted as a laughing, Grateful Dead-style skeleton-man in the tophat and sunglasses of Baron Samedi. He is opening the door to a hearse or funeral dilligence, and sweeping one arm elaborately to invite the viewer inside. “My Ride’s Here”.

Guede is the negative and subtractive hand of entropy. It is the force governing rot, decay, senescence and the passage of that which is to that which was through arbitrary circumstance. It is the punctuation of equilibrium and the downward pressure on curves in the Volterra-Lotka equations. It is also the patron of decay bacterias and fungus. Guede is Yellow Emperor’s natural complement, and shares its erosive kinship with Athena Oya.

Deities of guede arise from places of decay – ruins, cemeteries, charnel houses. They walk the line between life and death, exploring decay and ritual murder. These deities are called ghouls if they haunt their home, or manes if they walk abroad. Deities arising from Guede power tend to be especially terrible to the eyes of humanity, and even seeing them can often kill non-Initiates.

Guede is involved in the destruction of the human race primarily in those Final Ages where humanity resurrects the dead with cthonic power, either as black-masked slaves or in the form of electronically resurrected spirits of the human ancestry, but it is involved indirectly in every ending.

Ages since the last update, because so damn much has gone on.

We will not be using Savage Worlds, as the content control desired for the on the part the publisher was not acceptable for the kind of game -- they wanted a PG-13 product, which is not what the game demands, especially as PG-13 was the original rolling donut rating. They also wanted us to structure the project strictly in the Savage Worlds rules as presented in their core book, and they were not flexible enough to do what we wanted without serious reworking. So, instead of third party system, we'll be using a lighter house rules system.

So, the retooling involved with that, having to see someone off to the Underworld (RIP Ralph Gragg, US Merchant Marine), our layout artist's delivering a kid (Benjamin Logan Hargraves, 8 lb 1 oz) and the desire to get more art into the project than our previous timeline would have allowed have all delayed the project through the convention season. We are currently pushing for a mid-September release. I'm hardly heartbroken about this -- we have a commitment to bringing only really solid content to market, and we're very interested in keeping that promise. This is a game done for the sake of doing it right, and we plan on doing so.

In terms of progress on things overall, we are tying up the inside playtesting and primary project writing this month. We are looking for playtesters and readers willing to handle the product from early to mid-July to mid-August. We will be demoing at Origins for people interested in taking a look at the project.

I will be posting a couple more samples in the very near future (like, one shortly after I press the post button). Thanks for your patience in the long silent spell here.

Been a while since we updated.

We are slacking off on the playtesting for a couple more weeks. We've got enough material for force-on-force gaming, however, I've been too focused on cleaning certain portions of the manuscript up so I could show the people we are (hopefully) licensing the rules from to actually run the fights. This is especially true given that there doesn't seem to be much point in hardcore man-on-man testing until we find out if the licensors want to be identified with our little blasphemy. They've had it for about a week now, and I imagine I'll be posting which system we're using in my next update to this blog, along with how the Destroying Angels shook out in testing.

We've also been setting up some of the deeper back end to the game -- securing contractors, project financing, concept art to establish look and feel, showing it to people we know, etc. Things are very nicely in hand on that front; we are confident in the product, fully capitalized and we have what external talent we need under recruitment.

Things are, in short, going pretty well. I'm about to do the first major publicity post in a large forum and get things rolling on the game's public image. Welcome, new readers.