Horizon: City of Traitors

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HORIZON IS OVER!

The webpage remains up as a permanent archive of game material, mainly for the benefit of nostalgic players - although if you'd like to run a Horizon-inspired game for your friends, that's wonderful too. Horizon will be succeeded by Legacyin Trinity term of 2006.

If you like you can look at the (sketchy, incomplete) GM notes as well.

Are you new to Horizon? Check out the Quickstart Guide. (Experienced players! Check out the Guide anyway! It contains important comments about game style.)

Were you to travel on one of the great steam hulks carrying trade goods up the Wallspring River to Horizon, here is what you would see...

The city sits astride the river, its wall stained with the ash of war and the smoke of factories. The Hive at the centre hangs above it all, and the halls of government and the manses of the nobilty cluster around it like rats feasting on a hunk of cheese. And below them sprawls the factories and the docks, the slums and the tenements, the garrets and the gables of the lower city, vast even seen outside.

And when the ship approaches the city it's a curious thing, because the passengers and crewmen all become conscious of a direction that has always been present but never felt, the direction that runs from Wallwards to Truewards, and as one's sense of geometry shifts so does one's perception. The Hive is, quite clearly and plainly, built into the Great Wall of Horizon, the grand edifice built by human slaves under the directions of the gods to keep the True Lands safe from the Treacherous Lands beyond. The Gods are gone now, away from the world in their flying barges which sail beneath the stars, but the Wall endures, as does its city. And you're conscious now - it seems the most obvious thing in the world - that the Sun does not travel straight across the sky at all, but moves overhead in a circle, and "night" is merely what happens when the Sun moves out of sight beyond the Wall.

And the City, now obviously much larger even than it seemed, seems like a great tidal wave frozen in stone in the act of smashing itself against the Wall. And through the wall and under the Hive winds the Wallspring River, up which the ship moves deeper into Horizon, and soon the ship comes to the great bridge which links the factory district of noise and fire and steam to the sprawling docks where ships from all nations dock. The bridge bears proudly the crest of the Mayor of Horizon, David Wright, the recently-elected demagogue whose proposals for democratic reform are the talk of the city.

And on the bridge is the Riverview Inn, a neutral ground where the criminal mob-lords, the master thieves, the hedge-wizards and the bohemian artists and the government spies and the foreign agents and the sleazy guardsmen and all the little lords of the backstreets and the alleyways meet on neutral ground, to have a brew and a chat and plan their next crimes, schemes, gambits and masterstrokes.

Horizon: City of Traitors is the 2005/2006 Oxford University RPGSoc society game. The Horizon game will begin at 7:30pm on the 11th of October; the first session will happen at the Lady Brodie Room in St. Hilda's college, and all further sessions for the first term will happen at the Lower Lecture Room in Lincoln.

The GM team consists (alphabetically by surname) of Arthur Boff, Matthew Habgood, Victoria Harris, Andrew Pickering, Eleanor Smith, and James Wyatt. The GM team contact address is team_of_traitors at yahoogroups dot com - replace "at" and "dot" with the relevant symbols to send messages.