World History
One of the new sections added is an abridged timeline of the post-apocalypse. In this, I go over how humans and monsters have changed and why over the hundred+ years since the end of human sovereignty. The era is divided into four periods of the new Anno Monstrum (AM) calendar:
The Apocalypse (001-010 AM): Monsters! Monsters everywhere! This is the one that needs the least explanation because it's basically a huge mess from which the five big factions emerge. But one of those five is a little bit different...
The Pandemonium War (011-025 AM): Here's the big 'change' in this section. The Demihuman Empire, which used to be the strongest of the five factions in the game's backstory, is now called The Pandemonium. Pandemonium is the name of not just the capital of hell in Paradise Lost but also my erudite omnilingual sources tell me means "All Them Demons", which I think most will agree is a much better name. Whereas every other faction is about some kind of ideological extremism, Pandemonium was basically demons going "hey, this capitalism thing ain't half bad" and keeping human power structures as they found them, but with them at the top. While everyone else still refused to acknowledge the benefits of human progress, the demons of Pandemonium pioneered orgone research and made everyone else have to catch up to them. This was their golden age.
...At least until humans betrayed the demons, killed them and ate their corpses for power, a civil war erupted and all the other factions teamed up to crush their last remnants. The Magnasapiens would be the living legacy of Pandemonium, but their real heritage to the world at large would be in teaching the angels, fairies and dragons the pragmatism of human politics, commerce and technology.
Emergence of the Hellscape (026-093 AM): The first of many Psychic Storms begins in this era and the world slowly but surely transforms into a wasteland everywhere that is close to a ley line. The monster factions lose huge swaths of territory and suffer the scarcity that comes with it. Angels, fairies and dragons finally comprehend the benefits of setting their ideals aside to conserve their power, switching to defensive and long-term strategies.
The Pactmaking Revolution (094-112 AM): Gaians start to encourage their people to make pacts and, when this works out much better than anyone would've expected, the other factions follow. Arcadians come up with the idea of using pactmakers and other powered humans as the offensive end of their forces, creating the first Strike Teams. As before, the rest of the factions adapt this idea to their own ends.
The lines separating humans and monsters blur more than ever before, with genuine hybrids (the Gestalts) becoming a known, if rare, quantity all over the world. Things are slowly becoming better for humans, but they shouldn't forget that the oldest monsters still see them as servants or food and they are the ones making the rules.
Terminology Changes
Orgonetech is now Magitech. The shortened form of Orgone Technology could be confused for Orgone Technique, so that term is no more and a new one is taking its place. Easy.
Orgonium coins are now Biomarks. Also called Bios for short. Orgonium is still the name for the physical form of orgone, it's just that the coins have a name of their own now.
Fairy Circles are now Fairy Rings, Living Architecture is now the Hermetic Megalith and Weather Control Towers are Midsummer Maypoles. It was inconsistent of the fairies to give one of their big magitech advantages a fantasy-esque name and the other two very functional and agnostic ones. Now they all have evocative ones. They also get slightly more description text to make sure everyone understands what they are and how they work. However, everyone else (including most of the book) refers to those three things as Teleportation Circles. Living Architecture Forts, and Weather Control Towers. Case in point, the glossary now lists them under their agnostic name.
Elemental Lore
Elementals were very vague and alien, lacking in detailed descriptions for the sake of making them weird and mysterious. They felt a bit like horrors where their otherworldliness made them stand out, but unlike Horrors where that is 100% the intent, elementals are a key element to Arcadian dominance and thus should have more information about them available.
Nearly the whole page has been rewritten to make them feel more like they're part of the world. Here's a summary:
Nearly the whole page has been rewritten to make them feel more like they're part of the world. Here's a summary:
Elementals are naturally born from Psychic Storms when chaotic orgone energies give life to a substance, a force or the remnants of psychic energy left behind by something else. Their bodies don't offer much to study - think of them as living balloons held together by an orgone field. When enough pressure is applied to the field, it pops and they deflate, leaving behind trace amounts of energy or inert matter. Arcadians cause controlled storms to create elementals artificially. Gaians also have the knowledge, but it is limited to the creation of Myconians, the recycling fungus elementals featured in one of the lore intermissions.
Elementals are roughly divided into three categories: Those made of energy, those made of solid materials and those that represent abstract concepts. The first two categories look more or less like you'd expect, animals or humanoids made of lightning or diamonds or what have you. The third depend on the psyche of the living being they're made from, so a time elemental will probably look like a living being made of ticking clocks, a growth elemental will be made of flowers that are perpetually blooming and a rage elemental is just a big red-hot angry face.
Personalitywise, most elementals are childlike or animalistic. They're mostly interested in their own needs and easily entertained. Abstract elementals are aloof like the old versions and care primarily about the concept they represent. A song elemental wants to fill the world with music, a sword elemental wants to get in fights and a beauty elemental wants to make things pretty.
Powers are very obvious for the more common types. Fire elementals can set things on fire and ice elementals can freeze things, simple enough. The abstract ones are more unpredictable. Take the sword elemental example from before, you can safely assume it can cut through metal, sure. But if it's powerful enough it might be able to cut through a body of water, parting the seas for safe passage or even puncture through spacetime to create portals. The strongest of elementals will stretch the limits of their concept.
That's all for now
Those are the biggest changes. There's a couple more things here and there but they're pretty minor compared to those. Assuming nothing goes terribly wrong, there'll be a huge post next week with the next version and the plans for monsterpunk in the future.
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