Pandora's Inheritance - Modern Fantasy RPG

[Guest]

It's July, 2009 and the uncertainty of life, often buried deep in the psyche of humanity, is suddenly a raw and very exposed nerve. Things have emerged and the false serenity of society is irrevocably swept away on a tide of the supernatural.

This is a tale of how the world copes with the imposition of a very different reality than what others know.

"I still can't believe what's been going on; the country's been locked down in a state of emergency because like a group of terrorists, here in the US, went on a rampage with the 'Devil's Curse' as the Evangelical Preachers are calling it. Not only were these guys killing and destroying wholesale in Indianapolis, but all sorts of others have been exhibiting signs of...aberrations. Deviance.

Some businesses and research academics are trying to study it. They're coming up pretty thin; some people are radically altered, physically and mentally, manifesting things like we've never seen, going insane in the process. Crime is up, and most people have no idea how to deal with a problem like this. Though some religious circles have at least one idea, not a new one...

In some places, there's been lynchings. In East Texas, a fringe Christian group started shooting up anyone who wasn't in their church because they were convinced that anyone who wasn't saved was going to start manifesting 'stigmata.' In Kansas, a certain group, with a much enlarged congregation nowadays, started burning people at the stake before they were finally taken out by the National Guard, with casualties on both sides; in the furor, some of the members of the Eatonburg Baptist Church 'manifested' 'aberrations,' 'stigmata' or 'the wrath of the Lord' depending on who you talk to.

They were able to destroy helicopters in the air.

All the same, to the believer, it looks almost as if the end is nigh, and even some unbelievers are turning to religion in their time of crisis.

In other places, new weird illnesses are cropping up, apparently related to all these phenomena. People exhibit the symptoms of a regular ailment, like the common cold, and suddenly then take a turn for the worse; hideously deformed or simply dying.

If that weren’t bad enough, the dead no longer seem to stay dead, not always.

Devil's curse, stigmata, aberrations, deviancy, wrath of God...

I call it the supernatural. Spiritual energy. Thaumaturgy. Magic.

I'm afraid I've been 'infected' too.

Ever since my day in Maine, I've been having the oddest sorts of dreams; I've been dreaming about the thing I saw; a black serpent, about the size, bodily, of a golden retriever, but for the long neck and the long tail that added far more length. In these dreams, I either am speaking with the serpent, or, more disturbingly, I see things through her eyes. I taste the venison she hunts. I enjoy the heat of flames warming my belly.

I don't know why she's a her. I just know that it disturbs me. I go about my daily routine, though I quit my job, with a sensation of something coiled in the back of my skull. I spend my days watching and reading the news, watching people in chat channels argue about all this, keeping my mouth shut lest I be pegged for...I don't know.

Other times, I test the edges of this; I light candles with force of will; I concentrate hard and seek to superimpose the image in my mind, of a simple flame, onto the candlestick; it's draining, hard work

When I'm angry, it comes easier to me, though I only did that once, because I set fire to the dumpster in the back of work; my boss had me running around all day doing thankless shit while he sat around and masturbated to anime on the video security system VCR in the back office. I wanted to do something to him, but instead I unconsciously set fire to the dumpster I was shoving trash into.

I quit after that, but I think I know why people are manifesting such power; angry and insane people don't have to work so hard at it; it comes impulsively. When repressed emotion boils loose, it fuels the magic.

I know from my researches that it manifests differently and uniquely with everyone. I don't need to vocalize, though I do need to make gestures; to light a candle, I have to point, as if showing my thought of fire which way it is to the wick. So much for "Open Says Me" and so forth

So far, I've kept it from my parents, but I'm worried. I mean, I haven't the faintest clue how to proceed with this or how, if possible, to control it. Will I start going absolutely insane? What will become of my family if I am discovered by the wrong people? What will the government do to me?

I can post this because I'm not coming back. I'm getting the fuck away from my parents and my loved ones, and I'm going to try to keep the fuck away from the religious psychos and the government alike.

I have no idea where I'm going to go, except that I won't be going back to school for my senior year; I think I just switched majors."

The world is turning upside down. Things are emerging from a long dormancy, their spirits either finding flesh on their own or fusing with the nearest host and twisting them into something else. From the beautiful to the freakish, it was almost as if someone unlocked a spiritual prison and threw the doors wide open, and all the inmates took their chance and ran out into the wider world.

This is an RP about how the world at large, our world, copes with the sudden onset of magic and the supernatural in their midst, and it is not a pretty RP. It is as much about the hysteria and paranoia of the average human and what happens on the mass psychological level when they get riled as it is about the emergence of magic.

The RP starts in a uniform fashion; the characters are just learning about themselves, and learning the true meaning of being alone in a very hostile world.

Humanity has certain reactions to the 'other' that have been used against fellow humans time and time again; the Holocaust is merely the most famous of these, but it is also often mistaken for a unique occurrence in history rather than an event that fits in the pattern of human behavior whose only real difference from other mass slaughters was the degree of modern industrial process that was applied to it. At its base was the same hysterical fear of the other, whipped into fine fettle.

One has to imagine then, what this fear of the other would entail against things that are sentient and genuinely not human. How would society cope, where would people go? Would there be any respite?

This isn't a setting of easy integration between magical beings and humanity at large. It is about time of tumult as everyone has to come to grips with the changes in their world. Some cope, and some take it out on everyone else around them.

--

I'm pretty loose on character ideas, but, ideally, I'd like some sort of mythological basis for the characters. That shouldn't be hard, as just about every bit of fiction we're familiar with has some sort of mythological basis itself.

I haven't gone into the details of how magic has affected the world, because I'm honestly hoping that you guys will help me. I know at least one other person, an old friend who I originally had this idea with (we've never done it on a forum, but tried an IRC channel for it once) will be involved on this one. We're hoping to get others as collaborators in the creative effort.

This is assuming people are interested, of course.

The idea of this RP is how people would adjust to the sudden emergence of magic in society, and I'm not sure if we are going to have characters group together or sort of go it alone; a series of vignettes by each poster as opposed to a group thing. It'll be up to the RP'er to innovate things and push their plot forward, to think 'what if?' and then work from there.

Suffice to say, this is more like 'Carrie' than 'Blade'; I'm not so interested in having long-established secret societies of vampires and werewolves emerge from the woodworks to take over the world. They, like everything else, are a fairy tale that suddenly shows up, and those people that do turn into them are as new to it as anyone else.

(That's strictly to avoid another Underworld/WOD type cliche of vampires secretly running the world-- there's plenty of those elsewhere. This is about something different.)

If that appeals to you, I hope we can get this going.

[Twoface_ecafowT]

I don't know what it is, but all of your ideas sound extremely appealing to me! You can count me in if this thing lifts off the ground.

I'm not stalking you...

[Guest]

I'm thinking at least one of the initial starting points for a character would be a refugee-internment camp of sorts in the Nevada or Arizona desert. It's the sort of thing that'd be done for a variety reasons, and it makes a good excuse for characters to be in one place if people want to start together.

And dude, I'm flattered rather than weirded.

[Twoface_ecafowT]

Mmm, I like that idea. I might do a character in the internment camp, though I was originally planning on making a crazy religious character in the fashion of Judge Frollo from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame.

And can you clarify a bit on the 'mythological basis' you want as far as characters go?

[Guest]

Uh, I just don't want something invented in an anime or whatever. I'd like it to have some sort of root in human mythology, even if it's just a bit of one. That leaves for a lot of room for creativity, as almost everything fictional tracks back to that. I mean, Tolkien is based on human mythology, in a very convoluted, roundabout way. If that rule's confusing, I might just remove it, because I doubt it'll come up much. It's a cover-butt routine to avoid Goku.

[Twoface_ecafowT]

Ah, that makes complete sense, not that I had any plans of going super sayan on you anyhow haha. I'll spend the next few days drawing up a character, or until/if you decide to make the OOC thread.

[Guest]

Well, I'm gonna see who else may be interested before going that far. Ideally a few people. Brushfire started with everyone scattered, this will probably start with everyone in the same place (with the option to scatter, I'm not really scripting this.)

[Ehoron]

I'm interested in this. It kind of reminds me of a game I played for the 360, Shadowrun. Basically, according to the game, magic rushes in and recedes in cycles. In an old temple in Sao Paulo, Brazil, an artifact is awoken and suddenly magic explodes into the world. Dwarves, Trolls, Elves, and all forms of magic suddenly manifest.

At any rate though, I've always enjoyed Modern/Fantasy set-ups.

[Guest]

Cool. I'm sort of going to wait and see who else gets in on this.

[Lara]

I've kinda been interested in this since you posted it, but I want to run a sort of character idea by you. The general idea would be something like the following:

A mother + daughter, with the child being the one expressing the 'supernatural' and the mother having to try to cope with something she doesn't understand, because though it's her daughter and she can see that, she's also afraid.

I don't know how well I'd be able to do this, but the idea's been nagging me since I read the plot line. Would this sort of thing be acceptable?

That aside, I'm still not a hundred percent sure as to what kind of abilities you're looking for. In my mind, the child's ability could be as simple as something like invisibility, or something else that I haven't the slightest idea about. >.< All I know is that no matter how harmless it might be, the mother probably wouldn't be able to cope for long without going insane. And again, we tip into "can I really handle something like this?" but I'd like to know a bit more before deciding.

[Guest]

I've kinda been interested in this since you posted it, but I want to run a sort of character idea by you. The general idea would be something like the following:

A mother + daughter, with the child being the one expressing the 'supernatural' and the mother having to try to cope with something she doesn't understand, because though it's her daughter and she can see that, she's also afraid.

I don't know how well I'd be able to do this, but the idea's been nagging me since I read the plot line. Would this sort of thing be acceptable?

It's not an angle I thought of, but that's RP; it's collaborative. I see no problem whatsoever with this.

That aside, I'm still not a hundred percent sure as to what kind of abilities you're looking for. In my mind, the child's ability could be as simple as something like invisibility, or something else that I haven't the slightest idea about. >.< All I know is that no matter how harmless it might be, the mother probably wouldn't be able to cope for long without going insane. And again, we tip into "can I really handle something like this?" but I'd like to know a bit more before deciding.

I'm pretty much leaving the determination of powers and so forth up to individual taste. I think we'd have a spectrum; people who have physically changed, people who look normal but suddenly are wielding what are considered 'powers' and perhaps even increase their ability to use them (I would assume with some sort of way to balance it, though I haven't really put much thought into that on a rules-scale) and then people who do one or two things really well.

I try to run things on a system where I trust people to generally be tasteful rather than impose some sort of rules system here, so while there is a threshold of being overpowered and/or a Mary Sue/Stu, I don't think your concept will have any problems there.

As to why the child is as she is, it could be a variety of things, and I only name a couple possibilities; possession/symbiotic relationship, genetics, or just being born/exposed to a ley line or site where the supernatural powers coalesce. Or perhaps she ran away one day and frolicked with a spirit or faerie that decided to 'do something.'

Because I am going to leave the source of these things intentionally undefined, it's incumbent on the player to sort of come up with the explanation of the how and why of what their character can do. Everyone will be different, right and wrong at the same time that way.

As to the politics, I can see them penning up a normal woman who decides she will not be separated from her daughter. On the other hand, there's little doubt she wouldn't dread what may well be coming, and is surrounded by a lot of people, plenty of whom are angry at 'normal' people.

I think you'll be fine.

[Lara]

Oh, I don't doubt she wouldn't be dreading going to the camp. But in the beginning, she's probably still concerned enough about her child, so she'd probably 'agree' to it - and likely end up regretting it, since I've been thinking about that part, too.

As to why the child's developed the abilities, it'll probably be more likely along the 'possession' lines, with the way I want to handle it. Genetics would make it easier to accept, in my eyes, and possession would be much more fun, since the child would likely progress to the point where it's almost like a bipolar personality, at least to the mother's eyes.

But I'll see where the profile takes me. Most of this, I'm just writing down so I don't forget it.

[Ehoron]

Out of curiosity....

Ever read El Goonish Shive?

[Lara]

If you're asking me, no, I've never even heard of it before.

[vitamin_kitten]

Okay, I just want to be sure I understand the basic idea: magic suddenly crops up in the world and creatures start showing up, as well as people being affected mentally and physically?

If that's the general idea, then you can pretty much count me in. This sounds ridiculously intriguing.

[Guest]

Yeah, that's pretty much a summary of it.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
-- "Ghostbusters"

[vitamin_kitten]

Sweet~~

[Guest]

I'll put up the IC tomorrow, since I'm about to hit the sack. That isn't very conducive to writing stuff up in a way that is comprehensible.

[vitamin_kitten]

No it's not. I'm really excited about this.

[Ehoron]

.... Must. Resist. Urge. To vaporize people's clothes on a whim.

[Igraine]

Hmmm... If there's still room, I think I'd like to toss my hat into this one, too. (No Kitten, not stalking you - more like Heysuess, actually... >.> <.< )

*nervous laugh* Kidding!

hehehehehe *runs and ducks*

Actually, if it's suitable, I kinda have a character I think would be more than "moldable" into this type of RP, should it still be open.

[Guest]

I haven't even put up the OOC yet, so I'd say it's fairly open.

[Guest]

The OOC is now created: Pandora's Inheritance - OOC

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