New Year
RPG world
intro story
c2023 1st draft
“The old world is dying and dead. It is a time for new heroes to emerge.”
Every generation says that same stale ritual. This time it is real.
The hatreds and bitter envies, vengeance and greed, delusions and aspirations of the elder generation was a maelstrom of hyped activity. An alien language to the youth who have survived.
A war came followed by plague and famine. The few who remain of our kind wander the empty lands and ruins, seeking to make sense of a fragmented history.
Legends abound of locations. The trade port of flesh and chain. The tower of learning. Walled farms.
Nobody knows the secret of the explosive black powder which wrecked stone fortresses. Nobody can imagine the number of people required to have built such places as empty towns and citadels.
Snow lays on burnt plains which once were farmed fields, so we are told by a few despaired elders. Those who gave up on teaching us the way of scrolls, of smithing, of carpentry, of tannery. I know these words but not of the crafts involved.
Now you stranger begin to understand what has happened here. We are accepting of the new thing. The elders say it is anew thing or that they were blind to it in their time of youth. Others such as yourself are coming in and wearing the bodies of our world as your own.
You know things we can not imagine. Some say it is demons summoned by a darkness. Others say it is beings of light sent to help by benevolent gods. We have no other sign of gods for they have left us if they ever walked amongst us. This is a time for new gods. Those we make by rebuilding a world.
You are one of the strangers wearing human form awaken from the shock and horror of our human condition. Somewhere in the wandering, you came into our world as one enters a lucid dream.
The strangers who tell stories of another world to ours where forces of which we have no comprehension abide. Lightning trapped into vines making glass light up like rainbow fire and talk with others far away. Armour large enough for many to wear which travel impossibly fast through sky and ocean, across land, drinking a liquid form of the black powder.
We need reinvent the black powder. We need reinvent the soap which our forefathers used to protect against fetid festering. We need relearn the art of planting food to harvest later.
The strangers know such things better than we children of war. Memories of your world teach us ways we never could have guessed. The skills of strangers are a blessing.