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.

Lacrymosa

She is the goddess of despair and loss.

Her following is small and select – you don't choose to become her worshipper, but find yourself driven to it when all else is lost and you have nowhere else to turn. When all else is lost and no chance remains she beckons to you and welcomes you in.

For those who follow her there is power to be had, but it is the power that comes from pain and takes its toll on those who wield it. It is used when no other will do, when the cause is hopeless and last chances have passed. Perhaps you may achieve what you thought you wanted, but you may find it wasn't what you wanted at all. Some worship her knowing that she understands what they are going through, they gain some comfort from that perhaps, but most find themselves consumed by the same obsession that fills her and will never find true solace.

In tales her barge is depicted as a maze of endless corridors with mirrors on every wall. You turn round every corner looking for help, for comfort but it's never there – you see figures and cry out for help but the words fall silent on your lips and you see that the one you would turn to for help is just a reflection of yourself and cannot aid you.

Maybe you might meet another wandering those halls, maybe you would meet the lady herself but twists and turns confuse those who would enter and the spiral down to isolation, the feeling of being utterly alone, continues forever.

Rumoured Avatars

The Maid: She is the essence embodied of all who are sorrowful for that which will never happen. The love that will never be. The family that she'll never have. The lost hope of the future with nothing to offer within it. She appears to those who have lost something before they ever gained it – the woman who loses her betrothed or the despised who will never be offered a chance at something better.

The Mother: Here was one who had known joy but had it taken from them. The widow, the parent who lived to bury their child. The betrayed and the disgraced who knew happiness for a time. As a gaunt, greying lady she walked the world – you'd find her with those who had seen their happiness destroyed by war, death and disease. Those who were ill with no hope of recovery were often visited by her for in them there was the strongest sense of bitterness and despair; they had known the heights of joy and could fully appreciate the depths to which they have fallen. It was for this reason that the Mother visited Penelope "Bob" Weiss and her parents in Horizon, for Penelope's parents had been bedridden since the Irgarim Flu swept the Docks. Mia Delan, a sorceress as powerful as she was beautiful, soon saw through the Mother's guise, and with her brother Frost led the Arcanum Guard against her, ridding the earth of that horror forever. In the next few years, however, a new avatar of Lacrymosa would come to replace the Mother - the Whore.

The Whore: Hers is the misery of the good life turned sour by misfortune. Of budding promise lost to the harsh necessities of reality. She comes to those who still hold to impossible hopes of a better life and bids them surrender to cold acceptance of what they have.

She appears as a young woman bearing the cruel marks of a noose about her neck, she would be beautiful were it not for her eyes which are dull and lifeless. Her message is simple: "cast aside the false hopes of your spirit, only through appreciating the true ugliness of existence may you survive and perhaps prosper."

The Crone: She is the woman of regret for things past and that which is too late. The missed opportunity or chance not taken. The possibility that could once have been but which was passed over. She is the one with hindsight to see what could have been and now never will. The old often turn to her and she to them, close to the end of their lives and reminiscing of all they could have achieved but didn't, and now never will.