Horizon: City of Traitors

This site is for the trial run of Horizon, which has finished! If you want information on the full game, commencing October 2005, you should go here.

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The Powers are vast, impersonal forces. First there was the Fire and the Stars; later, the Gods made the Ocean, the Sky and the Land. They are not quite sentient, not quite awake, but they nonetheless each have a strange, instinctive agenda. In the stories that come down to us from the distant past, during the youth of the world, they were far more active than they are now, much more awake, but time has won its victory over them and now they are slothful and languid.

The glacial thoughts and moods of the Powers are interpreted by their daimons. Mystics furiously debate whether these are entities which have become particularly attuned to a particular Power, or fragments of the Powers themselves granted sentience and a certain degree of freedom, but they range from the almost-human to the utterly alien.

The Gods represent the sixth esoteric force. Some mystics claim that at the dawn of time they were a sixth Power, the Divine, a pure creative force which fragmented into a thousand shards after creating the world. Certainly, the Gods seem far more united than usual in most stories of the world's creation, and even in the late Mythic Dreamtime, when quarrels amongst them were more frequent, they would often band together to oppose an outrage of one of the Powers. Certainly, their withdrawal from the world at the behest of the Intercessor was a unanimous one, despite many Gods opposing the idea.

They fly now, as they did at the beginning of things, halfway between the Stars and the Fire, a long way above the Sky, in their marvellous flying barges. Many are believed to be dead or sleeping. Occasionally, an avatar of a God will arise. It is unclear whether these are fragments of the Gods sent down from their barges, or worshippers to whom the Gods have given a great deal of authority over their affairs in the world, or something entirely different. Avatars tend to be more human than the daimons of the Powers, possibly because the Gods themselves are far more like mankind than the Powers are.

Most magics involve gaining power from the Gods or the Powers, either through willing service or through conducting strange rituals to usurp them. It is said by those who practice the latter art that the Powers and Gods would make tools of mankind, warping us all until we are no longer like ourselves but are fashioned in their image, and that by usurping their powers the magician wins a victory for mankind. Those cultists and shamen who follow the Gods and Powers say that man is not meant to wield such powers without direction, and that our only role in life is to play our part in the battles of Gods and Powers.

A related art is alchemy, which consists of distilling the pure essences of the Powers in order to exploit their miraculous properties.