Campaign ~ Making Your Monster ~ Powers! ~ PCs ~ The Way The World Is
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There are many legends on how we first began; references to Cain and Abel, to Lilith and demons mating with humans or older religions making us Titans or Giants or even Gods of old. As grandoise, profuoud, and in some cases utterly insipid as they become, these stories are nothing compared to the truth. They're nicer for one thing, and by far more easy to accept. These are the facts of legend, devoid of myth. I am the One who Remembers. That is what I do, and all I do. These are memories of what was, treat them with care.
Vampires are old, older by far that the humans and their ancestors. This is known. Vampires of species older than man, of cats and fish and the like, have existed and still do today, though those unable toassume human form have declined and faded with time. Vampires older than the Purge incapable of assuming humanoid form or hiding themselves from man are now increnibly rare. But to understand this, and the purge, one must reach back to the first vampires, to the ancestoral blood that binds us all . . .
65 million years ago an Event occured. Those of that time who ruled the world fought each other in the endles cycle of predator and prey. But one prey, one of the oldest of those who walked the lands, decided to challenge the inevitable death. Using the affinity with the world all had and reaching in a way none ever had before, for a goal none sought, it drew a piece of the heavens to the world, sent the Call out and brought a pieces of the stars home to roost. The resulting explosive contact ripped the world asunder, and covered the sky in clouds of unending dust for centuries. It's species vanished, save for a few it managed to save by changing them even as the Calling had changed it, by making them able to thrive in darkness and shadows.
But before the end, its kin called themselves, not the fire but light, memory given form and voice and created or perhaps gave birth to beings of light. Birthed by dreams and desperation, these beings were wild and chaotic, eventually merging with the remaning survivors of the Event who were not of the tainted race. Eventually, as time passed they grew bored of the wars of life and death and left, taking with them certain dreans of the worlds into another land. Left behind defenceless, nature developed its own plan, in mammals, bird and others untouched by the light bearers or cursed by the death born.
These ones learned how to take other forms, how to guard life and guide others, to use the energies of the world to heal and help. Eventually, their blood passed up the chains into apes and, somewhere around a million years ago, into those who would one day call themselves homo sapiens. They survived when their kin perished, continuing the ancient fight against the hunters of the night.
The Purge
Ten thousand years ago, humans invented something. They broke the laws of nature and put food under lock and key and created the modern culture we have now. They also formed villages and cities, and the weres and vampires found themselves a minority, and a feared and hated one at that. Vampires fled, while weres stayed, fuoght and ultimately were slaughtered. Many vampires, unable to stay away from the human prey, also fell victim to magics and faith. The weres have never recovered from the purge, and few powerful humanoid vampires survived it. Powers and skills used against each other were used on humans for the first time, which is the only thing that kept the weres alive.
Vampires are old, older by far that the humans and their ancestors. This is known. Vampires of species older than man, of cats and fish and the like, have existed and still do today, though those unable to assume human form have declined and faded with time. Vampires older than the Purge incapable of assuming humanoid form or hiding themselves from man are now increnibly rare. But to understand this, and the purge, one must reach back to the first vampires, to the ancestoral blood that binds us all . . .
In the beginning, when the world was young, two powerful Spirits fell to warring over the course of life. One wished for immortality, the other for death. In their war, they befouled the world and harmed it. Finally, they were melded into One being in their final conflict, which wiped out the dinosaurs and changed the world forever. Their power touched the world wildly in its last moments, gifting death to some and immortality to others, but at the price of killing. These benigs became vampires, preying on their race and other races and, eventually, moving up the scale of hunters to hunters until almost all vampires were human, for we preyed on each other as often as mortals.
Yet the price of immortality is fear -- we can be slain, but the mortals had nothing to challenge us with so they evolved a defense from those we had bled but not taken as our own, some with our blood raped mortals and gave birth to their own doom . . a tale that eventually became the Titans and Gods, with us the Titans. And there are the other, the other Spirits who call themselves Fey -- they are our foes, for they hold the Power our makers gave away, the key to true Immortality that some of us may grasp.
There are many legends on how we first began; references to Cain and Abel, to Lilith and demons mating with humans or older religions making us Titans or Giants or even Gods of old. As grandoise, profuoud, and in some cases utterly insipid as they become, these stories are nothing compared to the truth. They're nicer for one thing, and by far more easy to accept. These are the facts of legend, devoid of myth. I am the One who Remembers. That is what I do, and all I do. These are memories of what was, treat them with care.
Vampires are old, older by far that the humans and their ancestors. This is known. Vampires of species older than man, of cats and fish and the like, have existed and still do today, though those unable toassume human form have declined and faded with time. Vampires older than the Purge incapable of assuming humanoid form or hiding themselves from man are now increnibly rare. But to understand this, and the purge, one must reach back to the first vampires, to the ancestoral blood that binds us all . . .
Dragons were lords of the dinosaurs and abused it. They ruled them tyrannically and had no regard for the sanctity of life -- they became the first lords of death, if only in name. Finally, there abuses grew too strong and some of the herbivores decided to use their own magic, instead of repelling predatorsthey summoned The Predator: The metor that wiped their own race out. For this transgression, their spirits barred them from true death and condemned to live forever, supplanting the dragons and become true lords of death -- the vampires.
From the destruction the metor wrought, out of the elements generated by the meteor and the death it brought came beings composed of those elements; the fey, with the most powerful magic the world has ever known: Glamour. For millenia they and the vampires fought until the fey grew bored and made their own world of pure glamour and left. The price they paid for this desertion was being sundered into the seelie and unseelie counrts, becoming both life and death.
Eventually, from the animals arose the were to continue the ancient battle between life and death. There are also legends of vampire-kin who have gone beyond the war also, like the fey, but far into death, into Unbeing (i.e. khal'kru)
The vampires, being predators and almost without spirit, are forced to feed on the living to sustain themselves, and like any good hunter, they take the form of those they hunt. They were the darkness, the Fey the light. But the Fey, desperate to prevent themselves from giving into evil, made a Child of magic, who was named Lilith and charged her to hold evil from them. This child, seeing that such a request was evil, fled the fey land into the mortal world, where her magic burned itself brightly and consumed itself, remaking her. From the child, certain apes changed. Humans evolved further than they already were, and faster. Wary of new light, the vampires struck them, possessed them and eventually became them, hunters hunting hunters.
In humans, then, there was a balance between both light and dark, good and evil. The cold of death and and the fire of life. In them is the war of life and death personified. But with the fey gone, the gods of the time were forced to act, and followed the plan of the Fey, but turned animals into humans and humans to animals, moulding more fire into them and making the weres.
As more humans died, their spirits changed in death, becoming light or dark and only returning to this world at high cost. Realising the dangers this presented, the dragons dreamed the spirit world into being as they had always known they would. Being linked deep to death, the vampires found themselves able to summon back spirits into the world, creatures made dark by their cold power and capable of slaying the fey as the vampires weren't as easily able to.
It was then that the fey truly vanished into their self-made Eden, leaving the world of mortals and demons entirely. This left just the mortal weres to take the mantle of the lords of life in its entirerty, even though they have never understood what that meant. The lords of life - the were - are mortal, protecting the humans while the lords of death, the vampires, are destroying humans. For millenia this balance existed until the fey’s most powerful creation returned home fully mortal for the first time and brought death and winter to the Summerlands, forcing the fairies back into the world.
Campaign ~ Making Your Monster ~ Powers! ~ PCs ~ The Way The World Is
Main ~ Unpdates & Contact