The Turakian Age is Seriously Underrated

[DShomshak]

Interesting speculation on the Nagas, LL.

 

Back when I created the Nagas and the Dragon for my own campaign, I had a secret origin for the Nagas. Fortunately, I realized it was blithering idiocy before the PCs ever got a chance to learn it. From then on, I decided to keep the Nagas' origin a mystery unknown even to myself, and kept that approach in The Mystic World. Leave it open for GMs to decide on their own, if they thought an origin was necessary.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

Sound policy from a game-supplement perspective.   I'm one of those GMs who felt an origin was necessary, to give me an idea of where to go if it ever seemed right for the campaign to go there (which it never did).

 

And no, said origin isn't what I wrote above.

 

But the way my mind works is to always be on the lookout in world-building like this for possible connections between characters, historical events, plotlines, concepts, with potential to take them farther; whether those things were intended by the author or not. I've noticed quite a few elements like that in the Turakian Age, although some would require me to modify the default setting to fully implement them.

[ScottishFox]

15 hours ago, DShomshak said:

From then on, I decided to keep the Nagas' origin a mystery unknown even to myself, and kept that approach in The Mystic World.

 

Having pieces of the story that cannot be known by anyone adds some mystique to the setting.

 

Otherwise players have a tendency to boil it down to:  All Narfs are from Flarg and swear profusely.

[DShomshak]

Ting is, I've learned that the first idea is often not the best idea, and sometimes the best worldbuilding strategy is just to throw things out and see what connections develop on their own. Let me give an example:

 

As part of my Mystic World playtest campaign, I ran a story arc set on my Jack Vance "Dying Earth" homage, the world of Loezen. I'd already decided that saving Loezen would involve time travel: The PCs would need to go back in time to obtain the lost artifact they needed. (Lost, in Vancian irony, because they stole it.) So I dashed off a list of fruity-sounding past ages for Loezen: Before the modern age (not yet named because it's still happening) was the Age of the Road Builder. Before that, the Age of the Cloud Lords. Before that, the horrible Age of Red Shadows. And before that, a mishmash of Ages that were often nothing but names: the Arcuate Age, when people wrote in characters made of short, curving lines; the Age of Towers, inferred from certain massive ruins; the Anaglyphic Age, for the picture-writing carved on buildings; the Trilunar Age, when Loezen apparently had three moons (it presently has two); and the one that mattered for the plot, the Age of Six Sovereigns, when six immortal and ultra-powerful wizard-tyrants contended for rule of the world.

 

Okay, so one of the PCs already had a time travel spel... with a control roll. Which the player blew. Badly. Instead of 8,000 years into the past, they went 8 million! No problem, I'm good at improvising. The players enjoyed an hour seeing the very strange world Loezen had been before its sun began dying. They obtained help from the;;; mages?... of that time. Not wanting to trust another time-jump, they sought other ways of reaching the Age of Six Sovereigns. I had one of their new allies suggest placing them in suspended animation, packing them into a ball and launching them into orbit, to descend and wake up at the proper time. (IIRC I'd recently read one of Cordwainer Smith's stories that had a person who'd awakened in the future this way.) The PCs agreed. Then one player's eyes widened. ""It's us," he exclaimed. "We're causing the Trilunar Age." And they all wondered how I'd set it up.

 

Well, either my unconscious mind is a genius, and possibly precognitive... or I just got lucky, because the PCs did something that could tie into the blither I tossed out before. And the more of these fragments of information you provide, the greater the odds that something will later become useful in ways you never expected.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

That's something many GMs don't instinctively grasp: you don't have to work out everything in advance. Sometimes you can just drop mysterious details into the mix, and let them rest there until the campaign events, or the players, provide you the perfect justification to integrate them. Then you can claim you planned it that way all along, and look like a genius.

 

I've noticed that Steve Long is assiduous in sprinkling his game writing with bits of backstory or plot explicitly left deliberately vague, for individual GMs to adapt to their own campaigns; particularly his Hero books. As I mentioned earlier, my connection-hunting psyche gets off on filling in those blanks. 🔎

 

BTW Dean, I never twigged to Loezen being a Dying Earth homage.

[DShomshak]

Well, it's hard to get a sense of sources or style from the brief treatment in The Mystic World. I also drew a bit on The Night Land and maybe a bit of Clark Ashton Smith -- I try not to draw too much on just one source. You know the old saying about plagiarism and research. 

 

Dean Shomshak

[Tywyll]

On 2/12/2020 at 10:56 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

Science tells us that the universe we perceive is infinite; and quantum theory asserts that there are an infinite number of such infinities, many probably radically different from our own. Such mythic god-realms fit somewhere into that Everything, but then their created world is a speck, and the gods are nothing special, just big fish in a small pond.

 

Anyway, that's the perception that keeps me from fully enjoying them. I expect you perceive it differently, as is your right.

 

New theories actually state that though the universe expands, it's not an empty nothing expanding in all direction simultaneously. Instead, it's more shaped like a doghunt or tube, folding in on itself. If you went in one direction for long enough, you would fold back on yourself and end up where you started. 

[Tywyll]

One thing I've never found an answer to (or missed if I did)...what happened to all the non-human races after the TA? I know the snake people survived to the Valdorian Age and the Atlantean Age, but where did the elves, drakine, gnomes, dwarves, etc go?

[DShomshak]

Some of them, possibly, to the Land of Legends.

 

Or at least the stories of them did. I gather from what LL has posted that elves, at least, survived into the Valdorian Age... greatly changed. (Dunno about the others.) But it seems quite possible to me that many of the original non-human races died out in the various cataclysms that ended past ages. But they made enough of an impression on humans that the survivors still told stories about them, which re-created them in the Land of Legends. Though not exact copies, as stories tend to be simpler than actual people.

 

Though it's also possible that groups of actual people escaped into the Land of Legends. Over the centuries, though, they assimilated to the story-based reality of the Land and became legends themselves, as is happening to the mortals caught in the Even Wilder West.

 

After thousands of years, it may not matter which process actually occurred.

 

It's also worth remembering that the assorted cataclysms were at least partly supernatural. Earth's history may have been rewritten, along with the other destruction, to remove evidence that these non-human races ever physically existed. So, archaeologists are never going to find the real, unambiguous remains of a drakine city, or the skeleton of a dragon or troll. Or if they do find such remains (it's the Superheroic Age, after all, and reality is more flexible than usual), there won't be enough context to interpret them. (Such as not realizing that homo floresiensis were, in fact, halflings.) There'll be just enough for a crackpot/visionary scientist to issue some wild-sounding theories, and maybe cause an origin or two. "The fools! I'll prove that [fill in the blank] once walked the Earth -- by cloning them from these remains! That'll silence the mocking tongues of the Academy!"

 

Or whatever, The adventures almost write themselves.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Some of them, possibly, to the Land of Legends.

 

Or at least the stories of them did. I gather from what LL has posted that elves, at least, survived into the Valdorian Age... greatly changed. (Dunno about the others.) But it seems quite possible to me that many of the original non-human races died out in the various cataclysms that ended past ages. But they made enough of an impression on humans that the survivors still told stories about them, which re-created them in the Land of Legends. Though not exact copies, as stories tend to be simpler than actual people.

 

Though it's also possible that groups of actual people escaped into the Land of Legends. Over the centuries, though, they assimilated to the story-based reality of the Land and became legends themselves, as is happening to the mortals caught in the Even Wilder West.

 

After thousands of years, it may not matter which process actually occurred.

 

It's also worth remembering that the assorted cataclysms were at least partly supernatural. Earth's history may have been rewritten, along with the other destruction, to remove evidence that these non-human races ever physically existed. So, archaeologists are never going to find the real, unambiguous remains of a drakine city, or the skeleton of a dragon or troll. Or if they do find such remains (it's the Superheroic Age, after all, and reality is more flexible than usual), there won't be enough context to interpret them. (Such as not realizing that homo floresiensis were, in fact, halflings.) There'll be just enough for a crackpot/visionary scientist to issue some wild-sounding theories, and maybe cause an origin or two. "The fools! I'll prove that [fill in the blank] once walked the Earth -- by cloning them from these remains! That'll silence the mocking tongues of the Academy!"

 

Or whatever, The adventures almost write themselves.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

12 hours ago, Tywyll said:

One thing I've never found an answer to (or missed if I did)...what happened to all the non-human races after the TA? I know the snake people survived to the Valdorian Age and the Atlantean Age, but where did the elves, drakine, gnomes, dwarves, etc go?

 

While The Valdorian Age source book does provide some of those answers (which I'll get to momentarily), overall the process Dean describes is very logical and seems likely. During epochs of low ambient magic on Earth the creatures who were fundamentally supernatural would probably have withdrawn to Faerie if they could. In fact in the future of the official CU timeline, before the enchantment which changed the Atlanteans into water-breathers failed with the diminishing of ambient magic, they crafted a great spell to translate their entire city to the Land of Legends (see Galactic Champions p. 25); so the precedent is clear.

 

As for all the other sapient beings who were the products of magical accidents or deliberate tampering by gods and wizards, or genetic experiments by advanced aliens, or originally extraterrestrial themselves: it's my theory that they ultimately proved not as adaptable to Earth's changing environment and recurrent global cataclysms as the planet's naturally-occurring native sapient species, and died out over time. (Pursuant to Dean's point above, I often wonder how much evidence Champions Earth's scientists actually possess of their planet's prehistoric past, and how they interpret it.)

 

Now, as to your question, just keep in mind that the region of Earth described during the Valdorian Age, called "Il-Ryveras," is only that portion of the planet where civilization first re-emerged after the cataclysm. We have precious few clues as to what was going on elsewhere at that time.

 

According to VA, a group of Elves fled Ambrethel to escape the tyranny of Takofanes, establishing a colony on the island of Drindria in Il-Ryveras. Fifteen millennia of learning to survive in the harsh post-cataclysmic world changed this people now called the Drindrish, making them harder and more ruthless. When they discovered primitive Men proliferating in nearby lands, they used their still-potent magic, technologically superior weapons, and a group of dragons they allied with, to subjugate them. Their original intent was to "civilize" these Men, but over time they grew tyrannical and cruel. In other words, they went from Tolkien's Eldar to Moorcock's Melniboneans.

 

But with magic continuing to fade on Earth, the Drindrish were overthrown by the revolution of Men led by the champion Valdor. The remainder of them left Drindria to seek another home and better destiny, but disappear from history. (VA p. 161 mentions another small island colony of Elves which retained most of their original culture, separate from Drindria, but not what happened to them.)

 

A remnant of Dwarves continued to inhabit the mountain range known as the Cold Peaks. In the early post-cataclysm period they were friendly with Men, who called them the Gronard, and taught those Men some of their smith-craft; but conflicts between the races prompted the Gronard to withdraw underground. By their ongoing tunneling and mining they killed the great spirit which inhabited the Cold Peaks, known as "Old Widow Ice," and that seemed to precipitate a physical and mental change in them. The Gronard grew more wizened and ugly; they became devious, greedy, and spiteful, and lost much of their metalworking knowledge. (VA p. 160)

 

The Nightlurk Mountains were the home of a physically small, cruel and vicious cavern-dwelling race whom Men call the Night People, who were descendants of Turakian Age Goblins. Their shamans were known to be powerful necromancers; some of their magic was derived from the magically-polluted Lake Tah'nees, which lay directly above the deep underground prison of Takofanes. His influence corrupted the Night People physically as well as mentally, making them look more grotesque and decayed.

 

A few other non-human races are mentioned and briefly described in VA, scattered and few in number, of uncertain origin but who don't seem directly connected to peoples of Ambrethel. They either originated from elsewhere on Earth, or arose over the intervening millennia. But one other Ambrethelan survival is notable: the island nation of Ureth-Kalai kept alive the traditions of ancient Thun. The Urethi worshiped the Thunese gods, and were also ruled by sorcerer-priests. But they had lost knowledge of the locations of their gods' prisons, and lacked the skills and artifacts to commune with and draw power from them as the Thunese did. They often sent secret agents across Il-Ryveras seeking those things.

 

[Lord Liaden]

14 hours ago, DShomshak said:

It's also worth remembering that the assorted cataclysms were at least partly supernatural. Earth's history may have been rewritten, along with the other destruction, to remove evidence that these non-human races ever physically existed. So, archaeologists are never going to find the real, unambiguous remains of a drakine city, or the skeleton of a dragon or troll. Or if they do find such remains (it's the Superheroic Age, after all, and reality is more flexible than usual), there won't be enough context to interpret them. (Such as not realizing that homo floresiensis were, in fact, halflings.) There'll be just enough for a crackpot/visionary scientist to issue some wild-sounding theories, and maybe cause an origin or two. "The fools! I'll prove that [fill in the blank] once walked the Earth -- by cloning them from these remains! That'll silence the mocking tongues of the Academy!"

 

Or whatever, The adventures almost write themselves.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

This is one of the biggest things I really appreciate about the unified Hero Universe timeline -- the depth and diversity you can draw from for concepts, for plotlines, for characters. It helps if you look at the timeline as a resource rather than a distraction; as a springboard instead of a straitjacket.

[mallet]

A theory/idea I just had reading through the last few posts was that maybe with the loss of magic in the world, long lived races reverted to having just "normal" human lifespans, but, this was such a major cultural shock/change that it led to their species dying off. Especially if all the "elders" of the races quickly died off because the no longer had "magically" long lives, so for example every Elf or Dwarf over the age of 100 started to die of old age. All that knowledge and leadership would be quickly gone. Even if say in the first decade of magic going away, all the 800+ elves died off, then in the second decade all the 700+ year old Elves died off, then in the third decade all the 600+ year old elves died off, and so on, until only the elves and dwarves under the age of 100 were left alive. 

 

For example, Elves who lived for 800+ years, would only have children maybe at an age of 200-300+, it was just part of their culture and a way they developed overtime to keep their populations in check. But when fairly suddenly they were only living to 70+ years of age they didn't adapt in time to keep their population numbers up and almost completely died off. 

Same with Dwarves, but also if the Dwarves also lost some of their "natural" abilities to survive underground, but kept living underground because of their culture (and that is where their cities were) they would also mostly die out, possibly rather quickly. 

 

Other possibilities that are slightly "realistic" (as realistic as maybe can be in a fantasy setting), is that as magic died out and the Gods faded into the background, the "magic" that allowed so many different races/species to live together in the world also faded away, and diseases ran rampant. Humans, who were the most widespread of all species, ended up infecting almost all of the other species with viruses that up to this point had not existed or had been magically kept in check, leading to mass plagues and deaths in the other species. 

 

Anyway, just a few alternate ideas on how some of the other species/races might have ended up disappearing. 

[Lawnmower Boy]

As a historian, I'm fascinated by the question of what moderns make of the Turakian Age. (I also borrow from Chris Rowley and have them refer to it as the Old Red Eon, as names have power, and it doesn't seem all that healthy to be wandering around saying "Turak" all the time.) I'm pretty sure that they don't know very much, but the way superheroes get around, there's got to be some kind of connection, with people who have travelled back in time to the era, and forward from it, for example. And that's leaving aside all those cursed ruins manufacturing supervillains left and right. 

 

Also, there's the issue of survivors. While I've never made very much of the drakines or dwarfs, the Champions Universe if full of space elves (Martians and Mandalorians mainly), and conservation of detail demands some kind of connection. Elves are a huge part of traditional folklore. Turakian elves aren't immortal, but folklore doesn't necessarily say that elves are immortal. It says that they're cut slightly adrift from time, which doesn't really pass in the depths of an elfhill. That bridges the gap of 70,000 years and allows you to have an elf or two (or elf-friend) who remembers the old days of Kal-Turak even without immortal elves from the Lands of Legend. I'll also note yet another inspiration, the elves of Elfquest, who've been marking time for thousands of years in their forest at the beginning of the comic series. 

 

Anyway, long and the short of it, I ended up with a Batman pastiche whose Batcave was actually an elf hill, with Alfred as his liaison with an old elf colony upstate. Because hillbilly elves amuse me, that's why.

 

I also like the Drindrish, who just obviously escaped off planet and became some kind of Andre Norton-like "forerunner" people, leaving enigmatic and potentially dangerous ruins and relics behind them on rude, frontier worlds.  As for the Mandalorian-Martian-Elf connection, well, you see, it all starts with the Basilisk Orb . . . . 

[Brian Stanfield]

3 hours ago, mallet said:

Other possibilities that are slightly "realistic" (as realistic as maybe can be in a fantasy setting), is that as magic died out and the Gods faded into the background, the "magic" that allowed so many different races/species to live together in the world also faded away, and diseases ran rampant. Humans, who were the most widespread of all species, ended up infecting almost all of the other species with viruses that up to this point had not existed or had been magically kept in check, leading to mass plagues and deaths in the other species. 

You know, this is really interesting. I can’t remember who brought up the idea a few pages back about the humans being the mongrelized version of the other “pure” races, but this fits well with that idea. Pure bloods are in red and don’t have the same resistance that mongrels do, so the humans ended out eliminating the other species (I can’t use “race” in this context: it makes no sense) through disease and whatnot. Maybe not intentionally, but hey would have been the ones to survive any post-magical pandemics. 

[Lord Liaden]

Dean Shomshak wrote a relevant passage referencing Takofanes in The Mystic World p. 55: "The “King of the Throne of Human Ivory” terrifies other mystics. Sorcerers have gleaned some information about the Archlich’s identity, power, and goals through potent divinations and queries to spirits of knowledge — that’s how anyone even knows Takofanes’s name and self-assumed titles. The Undying Lord’s origin lies so far in the past, however, that even the gods can’t find much information about him." That indicates that concrete knowledge about such antediluvian eras is hard to come by, and not widely accessible. However, some sources do exist. TMW p. 36 notes that the closed stacks of the Library of Babylon host collections of written works lost to the modern world, even as far back as the Turakian Age; although those collections are far from complete. Some modern immortals were alive back then, such as a few Empyreans, and the mysterious mystic called the Witness. But none of those are sources the vast majority of people can just look up out of curiosity.

 

Once you start looking at the various gaps left in the "history" of the Hero Universe, they usually evoke interesting conjecture and suggest possible connections. Let's take Lawnmower Boy's mention of the Basilisk Orb as one example. The earliest era one can trace it to is that of Tuala Morn, Hero's proto-Celtic fantasy setting. Near the beginning of that age, some time after 28,000 BCE, the Orb was in the possession of the great wizard Coruch Crotha, counselor to and protector of the early Tualans. Pp. 207-08 of the Tuala Morn source book describes its appearance and powers, but gives no suggestion of the malevolent influence it exerts on people who found it closer to the modern era. TM p. 265 asserts that the legendary Wild Huntsman survived until the present day, but somehow became the corrupted fear-demon moderns call Samhain (Champions Villains Volume Three). It's certainly tempting to suspect some common force or agency of having tainted both survivors...

 

BTW LB,  when you mention CU "space elves," rather than "Martians and Mandalorians," I suspect you may be thinking of Malvans and Mandaarians. Those other two are different franchises.
 

[Lawnmower Boy]

Serves me right for not checking the text. There's definitely Martians in the CU --the people with the advanced civilisation two billion years ago, or 1.8 billion years before the "flowering" of the Milky Way galaxy and its earliest recorded civilisations. 

 

My idea was that it was the Martians who created the Basilisk Orb. Its original purpose, was to protect the Milky Way from Qliphotic intrusions by causing fluctuations in the galactic "magic field" that would reduce ambient magic below the levels Qliphotic beings needed to survive. 

 

Being not entirely unaware of the huge target the Martians were painting on their back, they planted the Basilisk Orb on the uninhabitable, molten hellworld next in from them from the Sun, where there was no danger of indigenous life eventually evolving to poke the Orb with sticks and set it on fire to see what happens. Best laid plans of cryptic aliens and all of that . . . 

 

Something happened to the Martians after that, and while we don't know what that might have been, perhaps some wise and long-lived scholars might. And, what do you know, who should show up in the Sol system just a few years ago other than the Mandaarians. They haven't visited Earth recently, but I fail to see how they could possibly be ignoring the enigma of Mars. Now, the Mandaarians are mostly a very nice people, but there's at least one Mandaarian who has a very different agenda . . . 

[Lord Liaden]

Cool. 😎

 

The Basilisk Orb is described as a sphere of greenish crystal carved with nine interwoven basilisks. Each basilisk represents one of the powers of the Orb, and when that power is called upon the basilisk glows, and sometimes seems to rise up and affect the target directly. Because of that motif my working assumption has been that the Basilisk Orb was created by the Nagas to aid Men against the Dragon and its followers; and the latter were responsible for its corruption, and perhaps the collapse of the civilizations extant alongside Tuala Morn.

 

As for the Martians, another working assumption is that 1.5 billion years ago, when the civilization on Mars ended, is when the Kings of Edom came rampaging through the Hero Universe, scouring countless worlds of life and destroying many civilizations. That's my explanation for why the next recorded major era of interstellar civilization started about five million years ago -- it took that long for life in this galaxy to recover. But the cosmic beings called Galaxars are each the sole survivor of one of the more advanced species during the Edomite incursion.

[Scott Ruggels]

Wow. this has finally drifted away.  I have been reading Turakian Age in small chunks in preparation for a Turakian Age Game taking place later this year.  Discussions with the GM just had us replace the Erqigdlit  with my Lupines as they make a better PC choice.

The GM is using a custom magic system, and is enforcing a late bronze age tech with iron/steel being a rarity. So it's not entirely out of the book and have a flavor straight from the GM.

 

This may be the second time I have played a halfling, though HD has a problem with STR subtraction for the halfling Package Deal (or Template as it's a 6e game.(

 

[Lord Liaden]

9 hours ago, Brian Stanfield said:

You know, this is really interesting. I can’t remember who brought up the idea a few pages back about the humans being the mongrelized version of the other “pure” races, but this fits well with that idea. Pure bloods are in red and don’t have the same resistance that mongrels do, so the humans ended out eliminating the other species (I can’t use “race” in this context: it makes no sense) through disease and whatnot. Maybe not intentionally, but hey would have been the ones to survive any post-magical pandemics. 

 

It would be easy to assume that, for example, the experiments on the ancestors of homo sapiens by the alien Progenitors didn't just produce us and the Empyreans. They could have tested the flexibility of the genome by spawning other variant races, such as the Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and maybe the likes of Orcs and Trolls -- which could be one reason why those species are interfertile. So human "mongrelization," which in the real world we know occurred between homo sapiens and neanderthals, could have crossed even more branches of the family tree.

 

I was also thinking that something similar could have led to the rise of the several reptilian sapient races on Earth during TA, although not necessarily due to Progenitor actions. Champions Beyond notes that, while the Selenites inhabiting Luna have almost no memory of their origins, they were actually created by would-be rivals of the Progenitors, the reptilian Sleynu, to tend the observatory-city the Sleynu built to monitor the Progenitors' experiment on Earth, hoping to learn something to their benefit. It wouldn't be unreasonable for the Sleynu to have attempted to emulate the Progenitors by conducting their own genetic tampering on Terrestrial life forms; nor for them to choose reptiles/lizards as their subjects.

 

Now, here's where my obsession with finding probably-unintentional connections in game settings comes into full play.   Aside from being reptilian, the Sleynu aren't specifically described. However, the oldest surviving Selenite, and the only one with any memory of the time of their creation, can recall "a large, green, multilimbed being yelling at him" (Champions Beyond p. 54), that most likely being a Sleynu. I also noticed that the descriptions of S'taa'sha, the god of Talarshand and some Seshurma during the TA; and the deity of the Serpent-Men/Ssujala, Sha-tael, as presented in The Atlantean Age, are both reptilian humanoids with six arms. And while it's more of a stretch, it need not be a coincidence that the pantheon of the Drakine consists of six gods. It's my theory that all of those divine manifestations could be the product of these species' memories/legends/race memories of their Sleynu creators.

 

It was actually from this point that I leapt to making Krim an aspect or avatar of The Dragon, as I mentioned earlier on this thread; because there were initially six Crowns of Krim, and the seventh, which Kal-Turak fashioned to control the others, is known as "the Dragon Crown." My rationale is that the six Crowns were "gifts" from Krim to the Drakine gods, for their favored followers, but were actually intended to corrupt them and enslave them to Krim's will.

 

I even built a "myth" around the Dragon and the Drakine gods. As I developed it, Krim was the creator of the gods, but also the ultimate evil in Drakine religion -- kind of a combination of Satan and Tiamat. He formed the gods out of each of his own shed skins and his blood. Ultimately the war-god Terrut-Seh led the other gods in rebellion against Krim's tyranny. The battle was terrible, with grievous wounds dealt on both sides, but the gods finally bested him. Terrut-Seh even tore off one of Krim's wings. Yet they were unable to kill Krim, and so they bound him for eternity.

 

From Krim's teeth torn from his mouth during the fight, the gods made their mightiest servants, the sorraga. From his broken-off claws they fashioned the first dragons, and from his scales they made the Drakine (and the Seshurma, according to them). But out of the blood shed by Krim, and the venom spilled from his fangs, demons arose; and his torn-off wing morphed into Krim's "sister," who would be called the Dark Mother after giving birth to Kal-Turak.

[Lord Liaden]

24 minutes ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Wow. this has finally drifted away.  I have been reading Turakian Age in small chunks in preparation for a Turakian Age Game taking place later this year.  Discussions with the GM just had us replace the Erqigdlit  with my Lupines as they make a better PC choice.

The GM is using a custom magic system, and is enforcing a late bronze age tech with iron/steel being a rarity. So it's not entirely out of the book and have a flavor straight from the GM.

 

This may be the second time I have played a halfling, though HD has a problem with STR subtraction for the halfling Package Deal (or Template as it's a 6e game.(

 

Yeah, sorry for the drift. I did try to reconnect the thread to the topic, though.

 

Interesting take on TA. I'd be intrigued to hear how much canon stuff your GM actually uses.

[Scott Ruggels]

9 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

Yeah, sorry for the drift. I did try to reconnect the thread to the topic, though.

 

Interesting take on TA. I'd be intrigued to hear how much canon stuff your GM actually uses.

I will post some reports. It will also be using the TTS Hero Mod as the players are widely geographically separated. Lots of stuff to report. 

[Brian Stanfield]

59 minutes ago, Scott Ruggels said:

I will post some reports. It will also be using the TTS Hero Mod as the players are widely geographically separated. Lots of stuff to report. 

I'm really interested in hearing how TTS works with he HERO Mod. Keep us posted! I'm still trying to get my head around everything there--I feel like an angry ape with a stick when I try to figure out how to use it! Advice and suggestions would be a great help.

[mallet]

What is TTS? 

[Scott Ruggels]

18 minutes ago, mallet said:

What is TTS? 

TTS Stands for Tabletop Simulator. It was originally a Kickstarter project that successfully funded, and is now available for purchase on Steam.  What it is is a Physics enabled, VR capable (but not necessary), simulation of a  Gaming Table top  for up to 8 individuals to play. It is $19.99 on Steam, and has a large amount of games implemented on it.  It requires all participants to have a copy of the application, but is a one time purchase. 

One navigates their POV using WASD to move the camera around, and the Arrow Keys to re-orient one's camera.  One uses their mouse to pick up, manipulate, and drop objects onto the table. Each participant picks a "color" which corresponds to their seat position at the table with  the host, or GM being black. By Default the table comes with a chessboard and decks of cards and some other items. but users have made multiple Modules for it, for Card and dice games, Classic and current board games (such as Settlers of Catan. or Monopoly, though I think within the last month, Steam has removed some of the games at the copyright holder's request), and Tabletop RPGs, such as D&D 5th Edition, and now, Herosystem 6th edition (and fifth is currently being implemented). All of the modules are available on TTS's Steam Workshop as Downloadable Modules, most of which are free.

The Herosystem Module was coded in Lua (the native programming language for TTS), by user Brennall, who is publishing not only YouTube tutorials on how to play, but has also published video play throughs on his 1935 London campaign, with some of his players having no experience with Herosystem picking it up fairly quickly using the module. Brennall's purpose in publishing the module was his attempt at bringing new players to Hero, and making it much easier to play.  He, and the community over on the Herosystem Discord Server are very much interested and following along as Brennall posts his adventures and tutorials. The Module supplies a free  HDE plugin for Hero Designer that will convert characters into JSON files that are read by the module and import the character into it's "combat controller", and also suppies areas at the player's seat to load PDF files for in app reading and reference.

 

2 hours ago, Brian Stanfield said:

I'm really interested in hearing how TTS works with he HERO Mod. Keep us posted! I'm still trying to get my head around everything there--I feel like an angry ape with a stick when I try to figure out how to use it! Advice and suggestions would be a great help.

 

First:  What are you having problems with? Basic camera Navigation?  Manipulation?  General complexity?  Remember that TTS can be used in three levels.  The first level , with the Herosystem mod loaded as a simple hex grid display, and Dice roller.  The second it can be used to load characters, and prepared map images, and the third level can be used as a fully functional combat manager, with miniatures inside of fully 3D terrain with weather and lighting effects (which the 5e, and pathfinder guys seem to use to great effect as well), with a wide array of miniatures, scenery and terrain available for free, but will have to be pre-prepared and loaded for your scenarios.  Like most computer assisted tasks these days,  the time is spent in set up to make the actual play experience rather smooth and quick.  So far, it seems that for TTS it's sublime to be a player, but a lot of work to be a GM.

 

Second, have you looked at the video tutorials?

 

 

 These are what is posted right now.

To get a new User's  perspective on TTS, you may want to DM User Lensman here onthe forums, as he is the GM for the above mentioned  Turakian Age campaign, and we are going through this together, figuring out how to make maps, and pre load things.

 

I really hope this helps.