In a post-apocalyptic setting, some GMs may want to offer races affected by the disaster.
MORLOCK
You lived your life deep underground in artificial bunkers, hidden from the world’s destruction and the brutal scavengers that live above. As a morlock, you have a keen mind for the technology salvaged from the before-time. In fact, every morlock comes of age by fitting a piece of morlock technology to its body to provide enhancement and extend its life. Which means that you are part flesh, and part machine. Your skin is pale as milk, except where it’s been replaced with strips of metal and glowing circuits.
You have the following characteristics: Enhanced Intelligence: +2 to your Intellect Pool.
Cyborg Body: +2 to your Might Pool and to your Speed Pool.
Partially Metallic: +1 to Armor.
Repair and Maintenance: As an entity of both living flesh and humming machinery, recovery actions you make require that you first succeed on a difficulty 2 repair task as part of your recovery action. On a failure, the recovery action is not used; however,
A terahertz scanner visor utilizes the same technology as is used in airports on Earth, but it is far more portable thanks to the relentless advance of technology.
Initial Link to the Starting Adventure: From the following list of options, choose how you became involved in the first adventure.
1. The PCs didn’t realize what you were when they asked for your help.
2. You’ve managed to hide your roach ancestry so well; everyone thinks you are like them.
3. You are the last of your kind.
4. You have a secret agenda, and the PCs were gullible enough to let you come along. Initial Link to the Starting Adventure:
From the following list of options, choose how you became involved in the first adventure.
1. The PCs found you in a collapsed subterranean tunnel.
2. The other PCs encountered you exploring underground, and you convinced them to allow you to accompany them.
3. You were exiled from the morlock communities, and needed help on the surface.
4. The only way to save the morlock community you hail from is to venture to the surface to find an ancient mechanical part needed to repair a failing ancient system.
ROACH
You are born of a race of evolved insects once called “cockroach,” but that is far in the past. Radiation and forced evolution have radically increased your size, shape, and ability to think. Your exoskeleton mimics the shape of a human being, though not perfectly. When you move about human society, shadows and cloaks are your ally if you wish to pass unnoticed. When those of your kind are discovered, it usually goes poorly for someone. You, however, have a wandering spirit and seek to explore the fallen world and find a new way forward.
You have the following characteristics: Scuttler: Your Speed Edge increases by 1. Sense by scent: You can sense your environment even in total darkness.
Cling: You can move an immediate distance each round on walls or clinging to the ceiling.
Carapace: +1 to Armor.
Glide: You can extend small wings from your carapace that grant an asset in jumping tasks, and allow you to fall up to a short distance without taking damage.
Skill: You are trained in disguise tasks. Inability: You are susceptible to disease and poison. The difficulty of resisting disease or poison is increased by one step.
Inability: You mimic a human, but are not as fierce. The difficulty of tasks involving combat— including attack and defense rolls—is increased by one step.
Insect Prejudice: The difficulty of all positive interaction tasks is increased by one step.
Chapter 4
MYTHOLOGICAL
witness how one Marvel comic franchise has spun those stories into mythological gold.
A defining characteristic of mythological fantasy revolves around the active presence of gods in the world, and how their plans affect regular people. Which means that characters in a mythological setting will not only have the opportunity to interact with divine beings; they may even be divine beings.
Note that just because the mythological genre has its origin in the far past, the genre could easily be set in the modern world, with gods secretly (or not so
secretly) dwelling among us. Some amazing examples of this concept include American Gods by Neil Gaiman and The Percy Jackson and the Olympians books by Rick Riordan. But far future settings that include ancient mythological beings are also something that fiction has done well: examples include the enduring Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods by Jack Williamson and the amazing Dan Simmons books Ilium and Olympos.
T
he mythological genre is a subgenre of fantasy. Fantasy features magic (or magic under a different name, like “psionics”) in the setting. Magic allows characters to accomplish things they normally couldn’t. But the mythological genre takes that concept and turns it up a notch. Instead of portraying mortals in a made up magical world, characters in the mythological genre play in a setting of real world myth, possibly one penned by Homer (The Iliad and the Odyssey), Aesop (the fables saved by the historian Herodotus), Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides), Euripides (The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, Medea, Helen, Andromache, Electra, Heracles), Sophocles, (Oedipus, Electra, and Antigone), and many more Greek playwrights. Of course, myths other than those inspired by the Greeks are entirely suitable for the mythological genre. For instance, the stories told of the Norse gods are just as rife with interpersonal conflict as those told about the Greek gods;of your world. Is it at peace or on the verge of war? For instance, consider the Greek Titanomachy, where the older generation of gods (the Titans) were cast down in a series of wars by the newer generation of gods (the Olympians). A theme that might emerge in such a setting is one of perseverance, or the importance of standing up for what’s right, or perhaps the inevitable end that faces all things.
When our mythological setting book called Gods Of the Fall was written, the theme that developed was simple: though the world is broken, hope remains. The arbiters of that hope are the PCs.
Now that you have a theme don’t let all your work go to waste. Recognize that an overt theme might be asking too much of the players to live up to unless you provide explicit, in-world help. If you want your game to unfold according to your theme, players need easy tools to help them understand their role. A great tool in a mythological setting is the concept of prophecy. Prophecies from gods of Fate and