Everworld of Darkness

Jennkryst

I keep saying I’ll detail this, and maybe I have before, but I forget, so now I’ll do it for maybe the first time, maybe the ??? time, I still think this has legs for a oWoD setting.

We all know and love Trans-Ally Katherine Applegate’s Animorphs series… the anti-war, anti-authorian tale of teenagers given the power to morph into animals to ~~be child soldiers who commit war crimes to save Earth~~ fight off an invasion of mind controlling brain slugs from outer space.

She just so happened to write another series, titled Everworld.

The premise: All of the Old Gods are real, and they forsaw a time that their people’s faith in them would wane to nothing. To save the faithful from the non-believers or the new religions or whatever, they created Everworld. Which is described, metaphysically, in one book like this:

The Old Gods took all of their most devout followers, and went into Everworld… the balloon inside of the balloon that is reality. But they needed a bridge to connect this world to Everworld, which was a person.

Shit got real when Alien Gods showed up because they eat other Gods, so the Earth Gods start trying to run away to Earth which is where the wacky hijinks of the books comes through, but is unimportant to the MU because the whole thing is just inspiration for the actual setting:

Everworld of Darkness (sometimes called the City of a Thousand Horizon Realms, because its also a mish-mash of things like that one Valerian comic the film was based on) is not terribly different from Ascension Sojurns.

The World Ended. The End Times happened, and all was lost. Reality as we knew it is gone. There were those who fought back and most died. There were those who hid, many of whom died, but not all. Those who ran (distinct from hiding) got far and some made it far enough that Oblivion rising up and eating reality didn’t get them.

Be it through Mages doing Mage, ancient Bloodrites of the vampires, protection of the Incarna in the spirit world, dreamspun realities of the Fae, or [other spheres thematic mechanic], there are chunks of reality that still exist. These are all woven together into a new patchwork existence.

(… this is also how I picture the Matrix being laid out, singular city, specific areas, ‘Neo is in THE MOUNTAINS’, ‘Morpheus said to never get on THE HIGHWAY’, etc)

As this idea partially built out of ‘what if Darkcity WoD?’, we begin with… THE CITY. It can be as small as Manhattan or as large as Megacity 1, how big it looks, and its architecture, depend on the section you’re in. Easy enough to leave and go out to suburbs, but that’s not to say you cant navigate inside the city to other places, too.

There are different parts of the city, of course… you go far enough into China Town and you might wind up in a bit of patchwork mystic Wuxia land just as easily as you can end up in a part of THE CITY that looks like Beijing. Venture out of the city away from suburbia and into the forest and shit drifts into an Amazon zone, the barrier between a chaotic disregard for actual fauna biology. Of course there is a way to the Desert that gets you Persian or Middle Eastern or (dubious ethnicity that Eshu play off of). Somewhere there is Egypt-land, because of course there is.

Rivers can lead different places… the !Nile can get you to Nordic raiding villages just as easy as it can get you to Mesoamerica Aztec Sacrifice Land. Get on a boat and sail the sea to other places, because who doesn’t like boats. It’s all very Horizon Realm and the Dreaming and the Shadow and maybe even the Underworld, all weirdly pushed through the square hole.

While this is all oWoD terminology, but you can sub in nWoD/CoD stuff, too. Or use a clever explanation of ‘oWoD fluff, nWoD/CoD mechanics because reality is fucked’, whatever. Granted there’s less of an End Times plot, but this is a post-apocalyptic setting, so maybe details have been lost to history.

Go forth, coders, and use this idea for your own chicanery! I will probably show up at some point.

somasatori

you had me at “alien gods”

Jennkryst

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

you had me at “alien gods”

You don’t need this for Alien Gods, that’s stock standard Void Engineer plots!

somasatori

@Jennkryst said in Everworld of Darkness:

You don’t need this for Alien Gods, that’s stock standard Void Engineer plots!

Oh yeah, I know, but if there’s a mention about alien gods anywhere it’s definitely my thing. Time to ~~fuck~~fight Cthulhu!

labsunlimited

uuuuuuugh you had me until ‘oWoD fluff’

dvoraen

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

you had me at “alien gods”

Don’t we just call them eldritch horrors and assume tentacles?

Jennkryst

@labsunlimited said in Everworld of Darkness:

uuuuuuugh you had me until ‘oWoD fluff’

This is fair, but also… incredibly easy to shift to nWoD/CoD. It’s very wibbly wobbly. Something something someone ~~fed the God Machine ChatGPT code~~ tried to get the God Machine to divide by Zero, and reality is now extremely fucked up. Ancient Blood Rites for Vampires still valid, Incarna still valid for Shifters, replace Horizon Realms with something something ~~Atlantis~~ Supernal Realm, Fae… I want to somehow merge Dreaming and Lost, because ‘everyone is dealing with PTSD and your memory is fake’ isn’t… the best for everyone?

Also also, we wrote the original idea before Mummy the Curse, so that’s probably a factor why it is mostly oWoD coded.

@dvoraen said in Everworld of Darkness:

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

you had me at “alien gods”

Don’t we just call them eldritch horrors and assume tentacles?

I mean usually. But in reference to the book, it’s literal ‘another species from an alien planet showed up in our Old God Bubble-World, and they are mostly cool. Except they also brought their God with them, who wants to eat our Gods’.

He do be having Hentacles, though

somasatori

@dvoraen said in Everworld of Darkness:

Don’t we just call them eldritch horrors and assume tentacles?

yep! Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I do think you could do this without delving into the oWoD stuff. There’s a lot in the Hisil that you could use, especially if you were going the Mage route. The Shadow is part of the invisible realms and can link to the Underworld, the Supernal realms, the Abyss, etc. There are spells that allow for Mages to do things in the spirit world and create large-scale things.

If you go a little beyond that and draw some conclusions about Changelings, you could have the Hedge. It would probably just all be located in one area, near a gate that leads to the Supernal Realm of Arcadia. Then having bits and pieces amalgamated into a kind of island of matter (I’m just going to call it “island” from here on) that has a city constructed on it; if you’re leaning fully into Mage, could even be an old piece of Atlantis. The Changelings would be able to leave the “elemental pole of the fae/chaos” and also go close to it in order to acquire some of their tokens and hedge fruit. It’d be very Stalker-y/risk vs reward. If it was all centered in a single city, the area nearest to the Hedge/eventual entrance to Arcadia would be a terrifying and anarchic mess, likely with (probably extreme) arts and entertainment venues, and probably be stuck to the whims of the local Courts.

Uratha would be tricky but could work, especially if you had a verge or something within the island that humans could wander into and suddenly were outside of the protection of whatever was holding the island together. The Uratha would basically be beset on all sides since they’re occupying a small island of physical matter in a giant sea of Hisil/Shadow. If you had it all centered in one city, there would need to be a big park, maybe a small mountain or large hill with a lot of greenery and lush foliage around it, a sort of “elemental pole of nature/the earth” in the City and likely would be heavily guarded.

I don’t really know enough about Demon to figure that one out.

If you had a big city upon the island then Vampires would be pretty easy to add in with minimal updates other than noting that the Masquerade is undeniably shredded, so individual vampires would need to be strict about their personal Masquerades.

Sin-Eaters would probably require some connection to the Underworld. I think I would probably identify that as similar to the Changelings and the Hedge/Arcadia, where the Underworld is very easy to get into and as you get closer to like the “elemental pole of death” or something, you run into more and more ghosts that are causing problems. If it’s all contained in a single city, that part of the city is probably a rundown shithole that no one wants to visit, but socioeconomic elements force them to remain there. Where else are they going to go, after all? The world ended.

I can’t really imagine Prometheans lasting very long here, but that could be a kind of Bas-Lag Remade (Perdido Street Station/The Scar/etc.) sort of deal, where people are punished by being killed and made into Prometheans, or maybe just Remade (a la Deviant).

Jennkryst

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

I don’t really know enough about Demon to figure that one out.

God Machine divided by Zero and that basically nuked the Gauntlet, Demons are trying to build Infrastructure to re-stabilize things.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Sin-Eaters

… and Mummies, who also need the Underworld/Duat… but due to the shattered nature of reality, they are temporally locked to now, solving their time-travel shenanigans.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Stuff about Poles

Something something Exalted Creation something.

@somasatori said in Everworld of Darkness:

Prometheans

Always gotta do something about them tainting the land and drawing in people to kill them. It’s just the way of the MU world.