GRAPES OF WRATH (Setting Primer)

PRIMEUMATON came up with a writing challenge: make a seven-hex adventure set in your bespoke TTRPG setting. I like this. Similar to eating your vegetables or properly disposing of a corpse, forcing yourself to write gameable content (instead of pages and pages of lore) is always a good idea.

I've been toying with a setting idea (Book of Enoch meets Ancient Greece meets Book of the New Sun meets DEAD gODS meets the Lovecraft Mythos meets Ogre Gods), so I'll be picking up the gauntlet. Any good project needs a name, and given my inspirations GRAPES OF WRATH is a strong contender.

Jacob Jordaens

VERY LONG AGO, the Gods descended to Urth and sired Nephilim with primitive Man. Then they left. This period is heavily mythologized, the nature of the divine is unknowable. Modern religion is an exercise in creative writing, the wishful thinking of demigods with abandonment issues.

"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, when the sons of God went into the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown."

Genesis [6:4]

LONG AGO, religion crystalized into using eugenics to sire the first wholly divine being. All Nephilim wanted a child who could speak the Gods, to ask them why they had been created, to understand what their purpose was and to explain why they should be the one rule to Urth above all others.

The reproductive arms race never birthed a Messiah, but it did create enough tangled marriage alliances that a single bridal kidnapping gone awry kickstarted societal collapse. The War of the Bride destroyed the Nephilim's complex palace economies, reduced their great houses to squabbling microstates and starved godlings into a state of feral cannibalism.

"They devoured the toil of all men, until men were unable to sustain them. And they began to sin against birds, and against animals, and against reptiles, and against fish, and they devoured one another's flesh, and drank the blood from it."

Book of Enoch [7.3-5]

YEARS AGO, disenfranchised Nephilim and rebellious exultants orchestrated the Zoanthrop Heresy. The apostates denounced dynastic eugenics, proclaiming Social Darwinism the only path to apotheosis - the strongest of Urth shall birth the Messiah, after the weak have been impregnated, killed or eaten. The heresy incites numerous internecine wars that throw the remaining Nephilim potentates into chaos.

"They were not men, although they were once men and still resemble men. They were zoanthrops. They see the animals and wish to become as they are, answering only to instinct and not thinking. They wish to turn their backs on all that humanity has done."

Sword of the Lictor [127-8]

RIGHT GODDAMN NOW, is an age of adventure. The power of the godlings is waning, their treasures lay unguarded and their armies are hungry for unscrupulous mercenaries. Poleis throw off the Nephilim's yoke, forging their own path and siring a generation of bright-eyed adventurers who've tasted freedom. So go out there, loot a tomb, kill a demigod, found a kingdom. Or die trying. 

Caravaggio

THE PEOPLE of Urth are exactly that. People. With the exception of the Nephilim, all the races of the world are evolutions of humans, created by the godlings via selective breeding and invasive surgeries.

Exultants (Elves) claim descent from the human wives taken by the Gods, mothers of the Nephilim. They're selectively bred as breeding partners for the godlings, part of their eons-long eugenics program to birth a Messiah. In the modern age they function as a hereditary aristocracy of bureaucrats, clergy and landowners, the almost-human face of the Nephilim's tyranny.

Chimeras are humans, or more typically exultants, mutated with magical surgery. As they are made, not born, they cannot reproduce naturally. Blemmyes, centaurs, cynocephali, harpies, minotaurs, nagas, satyrs etc. Most chimeras are warriors in the Nephilim's armies or priests in their cults.

Deodands (Wood Elves) are lobotomised supersoldiers tasked by the Nephilim to conquer Urth's wilds. The demigods wanted human wolfhounds, unthinking killing machines. They got the former, but not the latter - the slave soldiers killed their handlers and deserted into the wilderness. The wild men now prowl the primordial corners of Urth, hunting man, beast and Nephil alike.

Humans are the most populous people, serving as common slaves, labourers, lay monks and emergency foodstocks for cruel demigods. They are the true autochthons, the inheritors of Urth, kept bitterly oppressed by the Nephilim and their mutated collaborators for millennia. 

Sin Eaters (Dwarves) are enslaved molemen used as truffle pigs for rare earth minerals, imprisoned in Urth's sunless bowels to fuel the Nephilim's bottomless lust for metal, jewels and stone. Their bizarre cave-adapted anatomy affords them blindsight, immunity to airborn toxins and the ability to devour solid rock, at the cost of severe agoraphobia and ruined sensory organs.

Hogmen (Orcs) are the manflesh livestock of the giants, selectively bred by the godlings in industrialised factory farms. They are both prisoner and jailor - the families of collaborators are spared so long as the butcher-janissaries offer up someone else to the Nephilim's dinner table. Even after slave revolts freed many hogmen, cycles of generational trauma have begat a culture of violence and cruelty.

Ogre Gods