The tribes of Nynzalore have lived for thousands of years beneath the world. They live in the great caverns of the belly of the world. This world is dark and riddled with dangers. The caves are silent, but not uninhabited. Many hunters silently stalk these dark halls. Strange plants eek out a living in the dark. Poisons and toxins are common place, disease and miasma equally so. This is a truly inhospitable world, yet your tribe has scraped by for generations.
You and your 12 fellows have been selected to start a new tribe. Disease and famine have plagued your parents, elders, and friends and you are being sent out to find a less hostile location. The Nynzalore tribe from which you came is the first, last, and only practitioner of the ancient art of fleshmancy. Using the magic of your tribe you are able to sculpt the flesh of still living creatures. It is a slow and painstaking endeavor. One mistake and the creature is likely to die, melt, or otherwise deform. You have spent the last year learning all you can from the elder fleshmasters, but the art takes decades to truly master. Hopefully it will be enough to help you in this uncertain endeavor.
Your party has but one task: survive. You are to travel out into the caverns, pick a location to start a new tribe, and then survive there. You have never been outside of tribal ancestral cave. As a result, the world beyond is nothing more than a mix of rumor and imagination gone awry. You know not of the dangers in the main caves. You know not if survival is possible. The only thing that you know for sure is that you must leave or die with the diseased.
You have been given the only supplies your village can sparer. You have enough food for a week, but you will need to travel more than that. You’ve been given some rudimentary tools and weapons. You’ve been given enough water for three days. Most importantly you’ve been given one of your tribe's fleshlings. It appears to be a ball of flesh a little larger than a soccer ball. It is basically solid fat and muscle, a flesh ball. It is constantly growing in size and serves as a source of flesh for your fleshmancy. Its growth is slow, but constant, and can be sped up to some degree by feeding it dead flesh. With this you will build the tribe anew. Short version: You’re a bunch of tribal people with flesh magic living deep underground. You have to find a new home. You have few supplies and a basketball made of flesh. Good luck.
Game mechanics:The start: players will start at their village. You will have to find a new place to live. The journey there will be largely based on what the players want. You will have to vote on directions to take and other events and whatnot.
The game itself: Each turn you will get a certain amount of flesh from your fleshling (and other sources) you will use this to make other creatures or items. See the fleshmancy section for more details. You will then have to decide what to do with that flesh and yourselves for that turn. The amount of flesh won’t be an exact number, but may be measured in very rudimentary ways (the ways your tribe would describe).
Turns: The game will be arranged in turns. There will be personal turns and group turns. Group turns will happen as needed. Turns are for an indeterminate length.
Time is hard to track when there is no day and night. If asked how long it has been since X or how long until X, I will likely respond with something like “A while.” Or “A little while.” Or “A long while.” If you expecting to get numbers on everything, this is not the game for you.
Resources: I will keep track of your resources. Mostly it will be food and fleshmancy stuff. Neither of these will be hard numbers. You will have “some flesh” and “some food” and so on. That’s about it.
Actions: Players will get actions on their turns. Your action should be as detailed as possible and include your character name either in the action itself or as a label at the beginning of the action. Or both. Both is good. Your action can be anything you want to do and are capable of doing.
Fleshmancy:
You have the power to sculpt flesh. This power comes with rules. Breaking them will likely cause the creature to explode all over your face or melt all over your feet. Here are the rules:
(1)You can move and rearrange, but you cannot change flesh. What I mean by this is you cannot easily change one type of flesh to another. You cannot take a leg and make an eye. That’s just not how it works. Muscle is muscle, organs are organs, brains are brains, bones are bones. You get the point. (Its possible but not easy or cheap)
(2) You cannot use dead parts. Once something is dead, its dead for good. You are
NOT a necromancer.
(3) Fleshmancy can be used on yourself and friends to improve yourselves. This is risky and may have adverse effects.
(4) The process of fleshmancy (referred to as fleshing) is slow and detailed. I expect intricate explanations of your magic. You’re not waving a wand here, you’re reconstructing a living creature. If your explanation is lacking, your creature will be lacking.
Examples:
Good Example: Player 1 takes a large section from the fleshling. The flesh section is the size of a man. He slowly shapes it into a slug shape. He takes a crab he caught the day before. He takes the eyes, stalks and all, off of a captured cave crab and attaches them to the top of the creature near the front. He takes the crab’s mouth and transfers it to the bottom of the new creature. He spends another decently sized chuck of flesh to construct a mucus producing skin by infusing it with a nose and stretching it out. He lays out the veins, arteries, and heart from the crab and infuse them into the slug. He uses extra flesh to increase the size of each of these before he sinks them into the slug. He steps back and lets his creation come to life.
Okish example: Player 2 takes a bit of flesh and makes it slug shaped. He takes eyes off a crab and puts them on. He takes the organs and mouth too. Crabslug.
Bad example: make crabslug.
Final Notes:
This is not some wacky RtD, as much as I love them, this is not the place for that. Please be respectful of the game atmosphere. It’s supposed to be a dark game of exploration and strange magics.
This game will not really start for at least a few days.
It is not first come first serve.
Character Sheet:
Name:
Gender:
Physical description:
Personality description:
Describe your ideal cavern section: (For purposes of settling)
Backstory: (Optional. Has to concern what you did before the disease struck).
Extra bits: (Optional. Likely caused by fleshmancy gone wrong)
Author
Topic: Fleshmancy: A Dark Magic Exploration Game (Read 17743 times)