Elemental Bonds
From AdamWiki
Contents |
1. Core Ethos Sentence:
In a desperate struggle for power, competing deities send heroes to search a strange elemental world of air, earth, fire and water for the shards of power that will mean the difference between victory and defeat.
2. Who are the heroes?
Mystery and adversity shape the heroes of Elemental Bonds. Some are oppressed serfs born in squalid huts or escaped slaves. Some are the restless daughters of strict guildsmen and the wayward sons of duchesses. Still others are Azerian fire dwarves, rogue Formian ant-soldiers, mergnomes, cloud elves, and mudlings. They are shard seekers, flameblades, divine couriers, and elemental zealots. Yet, they all share a common desire to understand the essential nature of the elements and a common struggle to channel the Quaternion for the cause of Good. And all of them are left to wonder if they have a divine soul.
3. What do the heroes do?
Most often, the heroes of Elemental Bonds serve the divine rulers of the world’s city-states. These immortal regents charter groups of heroes to explore the world and obtain knowledge and items of power, since they themselves fear to stray too far from their sources of strength. Shard seekers do their dirty work, looking for nodes of elemental power. Temple raiders infiltrate the cities of enemy gods and rob and raze their holy places. Divine couriers carry the messages of their monarchs to distant places — sometimes bearing bad news to other gods.
Some heroes do not care to serve their divine sponsors, but instead seek personal power. A sorceress may collect elemental shards to empower her magical spells. Elemental zealots may proselytize in the streets to convert unwary to their “pure” philosophy. The best and greatest heroes master the elements within themselves to gain control of a great shard and ascend to divinity themselves.
4. What are the threats, conflicts, and villains?
Elemental Bonds is fraught with danger. Heroes navigate deserts of flame, vast underground ocean communities of the tritons, and the floating glass cities of the archons. Anyone who journeys too far from the protection of the city-states must contend with mephits, ice wolves, rasts, dust weasels, and remorhazes. A daring hero can beat the system, gaining the trust of his liege and earning rank and title. While exploring the maze of Byzantine politics, an ambitious courtier will face scheming nobles, backstabbing assassins, and truth-seeking inquisitors.
Where there is power, there is corruption and oppression. Eurycion is the most powerful of the godlings, and the most evil. Eurycion enslaves the weak and destroys all that challenge him. As the fingers of Erycion grasp outward for more land and power, war erupts between his state and others. Some of these smaller city-states are ruled by benevolent godlings and are inhabited by good people. Some fight openly. Others take the war underground, figuratively and literally, using tunnels to rebel against their evil oppressor.
Bards sing a prophecy of a godling that will rise from the ranks of men to defeat Eurycion. This only spurs the dark god to work harder to find those who show divine potential and crush them under his boot of fire and earth.
5. What is the nature of magic?
When the world was formed, the elements were united, but a mysterious force split the harmony into the four notes of the Quaternion. The blast scattered balls of elemental energy across the world, and these nodes changed everything they touched. Rock affected by elemental energy formed a special kind of gemstone, which people called shards. Shards are only one form of trapped magic, but they form the largest deposits of elemental energy. Enormous crystalline boulders became city sites, as warlords and wizards tapped their power to ascend to divinity. Divine immortality does not prevent death. Rather, when a godling dies, he is reincarnated decades later and slowly begins to remember his past life in during his adolescence.
Magic is the elemental force that pervades every living and inanimate thing. Certain people or objects are inclined towards one or more of the four elements.
6. What is new? What is different?
The focus on elemental magic, places and creatures gives the potential for epic clashes of spiritual and primal forces. It gives heroes strong role models to follow and terrible enemies to fight. Moreover, the earthly presence of the deities makes every peasant a believer, and the prophecy makes every hero a potential God.
