RECKONINGS: an RPG campaign

The world of Urdu is old, the oldest thing in this incarnation of the universe, the point from which all else came into being. For billions of years people have lived and fought and died on it. Mighty empires have rose, fallen, rebuilt themselves, been ground into ashes by those who came after them Over all of this the gods have watched, sometimes playing games, sometimes now, feared and worshipped, they were pieces of the universe given form, powers beyond human ken who built their cities in the heavens from which to watch all that passed below them.

Until the Cataclysm. Until the terrible event over 300 winters ago when the heavens themselves fell down, destroying the entire southern continent, obliterating tracts of land and reshaping the world in a fury of fire and the death screams of the gods. Those who could Channel their power did so, in one last moment as the gods tried to halt their demise and failed. The ancient wizards, whose bargains with Mors and Arth'Ba'Toch failed as Death and Time died, passed on, and most magic in the world was lost or shattered by the loss of the gods.

The world has never recovered, though nothing has risen to replace them, no terrible Power come to claim the world as its own. There is only the loss, and the building of the new world from those terrible moments and the ashes of all that had come before.

Into these times come your characters, drawn to the city of Estavia (one of the few to have grown in strength when all the empires were shattered), a haven of modern alchemy trying to find new ways to do for people what the gods always did. You are, each, the relics of an old age, one of the families of those Gifted with magic who remain in the present age and have not been destroyed by the Hands from Bremen or died out due to inbreeding. Almost the last of those gifted, a three hundred year program to make Gifts strong enough to face down the remaining Wizards, but no one living knows why the Gifted families went this far, nor what was intended....
most believe it is the salvation of the world and the restoration of the gods.

Player info:

I plan to run this game very much in anime style. There should be lots of interpersonal conflicts, there'll be lost of conflict of other types, and PCs should get to do Cool Things.

Risus system, 12 dice. Each PC can have 4 dice (max.) in any cliche. Cliches can be increased from d6 to d8 or d10 via an extra die (said extra die does NOT count towards total dice in cliche). There must be at least 2 dice in a cliche to do this), so a PC could have Singing Gift (3d6), swordsmanship (3d8), Acrobatics (3d6) and Gambling (2d6) as cliches as an example.

A Gift is, basically, a single kind of magic. Fire, Water, Swordsmanship. That sort of thing. The Gifted families (one family, one gift) have been around for a long time, though no one knows how they came about. When a family dies out, their Gift is gone forever. A Gift is kept within a family, so inbreeding among cousins and siblings is the norm, since breeding with outsiders only leads to children with weak (or no) gifts.

Once the gods died, and terrible things like plagues and birth defects came into the world, the gifted have been fighting a long, losing battle. Few of any generation are whole in body and mind; fewer still have powerful gifts. Of your generation, you are one of at best five of your Family with a powerful gift, and have been sent to the city of Estavia and the Inn of the Lost Rainbow because of an agreement so old no one remembers it.


If one player takes a gift, no one else can. All PCs come from different Families. if you wish to play something other than a Gifted (or a Gifted Channeller/Wizard/Alchemist), talk to me. The following Gifts are not available for PCs: Shadow, Death, and Fire.

Other notes: magic can't be used to change people, save for alchemy (and even then, it is very limited in usefulness). There are no transformation gifts, no healing gifts and such. No Wizard spells for such either.


CRUNCHY BITS:
- You CAN adds hooks (2 max; 2 free dice maxiumum). (In fact, the GM encourages it.) A Hook, in this instance, counts as a character flaw (sworn vow, crippling thing etc.) (you get 1 die for every hook you have, 2 if it's a really severe hook.) You CAN get tails, via the risus rules, but only by supplying pic/drawing PC and more background than usual. (Normally, I'd except 1 pqage including bacckground, family the PC left, PCs family life -- did the famiytl breeding for gifts put engenics to shame? etc. -- and anything on PC personality. More would be, well, history of parents, some family lore/secrets or whatever.)
- PCs are human; there's no elves, sentient dogs etc. on this world.
- Think Cliche. That's how Risus works. More dice in a cliche is skill; increasing dicepool size is power. (This is a general rule, not specific)
- Keep in mind that there are items of magic etc. out there to increase power and the like available. PCs tend to be exceptions to rules. (For example, somerone with 2 gifts could be possible.) Invent cool Tricks for the pc.