RISING, an RPG Campaign.

RISING, an RPG Campaign.

This is just an idea. I may make use of it in a novel, I may not. I'll never run it as a game, but I decided to flesh it out anyway. To whit:

In the Old Days, there were three worlds. The underworld of the dead, the middle world of the living and the high world of the Gods. But there was a fourth world as well, the prison of the gods of the dead. One day, they broke free. Or perhaps they have yet to, or never existed at all. The truth is that no one knows, but one day heaven fell to earth. The gods and stars plummeted from the night sky, and the very shape of the world was forever altered.

The gods were dead, but no one knew how, nor why. Five hundred years have passed, and the world is no longer what it was. Entire continents and empires ceased to exist as the citadels of the gods crashed upon them and new and strange lands have risen in their stead. Cities that no mortal has ever walked lay buried beneath oceans and the world of the living and the dead can be walked by almost anyone who finds placed where the falling stars of heaven shattered through the earth. The dead, of course, can find their way to the lands of the living by the same routes.

New nations have risen from the scattered remains of the past. Somehow, mortals have survived what the gods did not and there is something new in the world was that was not there before. The wise call it the magia, the Art of the Gods. Few can wield it, and no one yet understands it. Some claim those who wield it are the gods reborn, or being used by the gods from beyond death. No one knows, and everyone answer just breeds new questions. It is wonderful, and terrifying, and those few who burn with the very power of Creation and Destruction may well one day become the gods of this new world.

But that day is far off as fear and mistrust fill the lands and nations make war with artifacts of the old Empires and of the Gods Themselves. In some places the old religions remain, held by those who refuse to believe the gods died, or hope to resurrect them. In others, no one knows there were any gods and the Empires of the past aren't even stories told told by those who seek a new future unburdened by the past.

In every land, there is a feeling of wakening, of a breath slowly being released and new things loosed into the world. The world that was is gone, and it is up to all who live now to shape the world that will be. The gods have fallen, but we did not fall and all that remains is to rise.