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First off, a big thank you to Swords and Stitchery. This blog has consistently been putting out great content for a Godbound game, and they gave me a little shout out, so I want to return the favor. Every bit of signal boosting helps, and if any of my barely coherent ramblings can reach someone who finds it useful, then I have done my job.

Part 1

Part 2

Inspirations– as far as inspirations go, any kind of hardcore science fantasy or esoteric cyberpunk is what I drew from. I’ll let you check them out on your own

Rpg’s: Eclipse Phase, Baroque Space Opera, a splash of Numenera, and a dash of Shadowrun

Comics:Jodorosky’s Incal and it’s associated works, DC’s New Gods, Saga

Music: motha-fuckin’ Gloryhammer

Videogames: Asura’s Wrath, Destiny I & II

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The Tower– Unlike the rest of the urban decay that is the City, the Tower is a vast, baroque spire that remains a testament to the technological prowess of the old Din Empire. A massive tower like a spike of obsidian that pierces the skyline, the many levels of the high rise house the sorcerers of the Directives of Ivo. Contains one of the main entrances to the rest of the buried megastructure body of the Ikarus. The rest of the structure contains hundreds of laboratories and technological marvels, though many are malfunctioning or their original purpose has been forgotten.

Unbeknownst to these powerful sorcerers, the Tower was not meant to be a home or research station, but a battle station meant to focus the power of the divine abortion into a weapon. Perhaps that is why they have survived though, for the Tower is filled with armories and hardened vaults containing knowledge the Initiates wished to preserve, many still untouched by the new occupants, for the spark of curiosity has dimmed among the Directives, and if a piece of lore does not serve their current whims, then it is deemed unimportant.

The Dreaming is even stronger in this place, permeating every nook and cranny, though the Directives call it “The Network.” The source of their power, the Network is what allows the Directives to use magic and theurgy, creating things directly from the mind of a Directive Sorcerer. While ordinarily this would grant almost limitless power, the Directives of Ivo lack a critical piece to properly utilize the Network to its fullest potential. Their use of psycho-spiritual body modifications and cyber-magical augmentations has left them with a keen lack of imagination, and with that barring them from the creation of the greater hologram spirits seen in the City below, though they often summon Theotechnical Iconodules to serve them, along with lobotomized Altered humans they have captured from the City.

The Directives of Ivo

Goal: Consume God to gain immortality and apotheosis

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While the Initiates of Ivo disappeared in the aftermath of the Divine Abortion, their teachings lived on. Seeking the lost knowledge from before the shattering, a number of pilgrims gathered within the Tower, a massive spire within the city that contained the Terminal, a repository for all the knowledge gained by Ivo and his followers in their tenure. While they had access to all of the knowledge from the previous generation, much of the data has been corrupted and the means to access and understand it has been lost, leading to a number of variations within the uncovered lessons. The objective has become subjective. Despite this, the Directives maintain a modicum of civilization within the Spire, and attempt to delve into the lower levels deep underground in an attempt to discover the lost projects of the old regime. The Directives have had some success with this, but must still contend with the Hunter-Killers that haunt the lower levels as well as the more zealous of the Altered Human tribes. While the Hunter-Killers are certainly a threat, many of the Altered are seen as sources of food and raw materials. One of their initial discoveries was of the divine Machine-Spirit Ikarus and the enormous automaton body built to house it. While they disagreed on how to do it, the leaders of the Directives planned to create a collective consciousness from all the remaining lives within the Spire and transfer it to the massive God Machine, attaining an apotheosis of their collective society. While the lower echelons of the Directives are unaware of this plan, the leaders have been making increasingly aggressive overtures into the lower levels, bypassing the Hunter-Killer patrols but have been repulsed by the initial Aegis Machina defenses.

Like the Initiates of Ivo before them, the Directives hold to the tenets of knowledge, immortality, and domination, though the Directives take a different path than their forebears. Immortality has taken the forefront of their focus, with the tenets of knowledge and domination considered merely means to the end. Where once, partial knowledge would have been discarded and domination gained only tenuously would have been ignored, these new breeds play fast and loose, concerning themselves only with the end goal, hence their plain to chain their minds and merge with the slumbering divinity below. Unbeknownst to them, their plan will fail, as powerful as they are, they lack the necessary pieces of divinity required to merge themselves with the power of a God, but the leadership is convinced of this course of action. In all actuality, it will merely cause the Safeguard synthetic life below to notice them, causing a mass exodus as warriors from the deep to boil out from below like an anti-virus to exterminate the insects above, possibly even spreading to the rest of the Reach.

The Directives of Ivo are skilled sorcerers and artificers, despite their lack of understanding of the deeper teachings of Ivo. Heavily transhumanist, cybernetic augmentation is common and in fact necessary among the Directives, as even their youngest member is several hundred years old. The heads of the Directives are even thought to predate the Shattering. While cordial at first, the Directives are consummate schemers, always looking for an edge, and while they consider themselves civilized, they will be happy to use and abuse those they consider their “lessers,” which is to say, everyone else. The Directives view the lives of others as merely a means to an end, and have an almost casual disregard for other living beings. For a great many of them, they believe the world has ended, and they are the only remaining humans alive.

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For using the sorcerers, most of them would be stated up as mages, while only the mightiest would be an eldritch of any power. Obviously you can portray these guys however you please, but personally I always think of these guys as transhumanists with a “blue and orange” morality. They consider themselves, and with all the modifications may actually be, so far beyond the other denizens that they only superficially resemble them. Other people are not quite “people” to them because they lack the empathy that someone else’s wellbeing is as important as their own. For all their raw knowledge, the Directives of Ivo are meant to be fundamentally flawed, a group with plenty of potential that is to consumed with their own decadent navel gazing

Techno-Shaman– perhaps the one sane person left in the Tower, and not by much, the Techno-Shaman is perhaps the only one who understands something of what is going below the Tower. It is unknown, perhaps even by the Shaman, where they came from, whether one of the original Initiates of Ivo, a sorcerer of the Directive, a powerful Hologram Spirit, or an up jumped Altered, but what it does know is that something is awake in the deep places below. Able to commune directly with the Network, the Techno-Shaman is aware that something is reaching out, and now it seeks to find that thing and free it, but it cannot do it alone. Powerful as it is with its connection to the Dreaming/ Network of the City/ Tower, the sorcerers are many, and the dark machine creatures below to powerful. It knows it needs allies, and those with the spark of divinity within themselves are perhaps the only ones who can awaken what it believes to be a God of Old from the ancient Shut Down. Enigmatic and mercurial, these traits come not from being obtuse, but rather an overlay of the God-Machine A.I’s thoughts over its own puny mortal ones that cause a sort of mental disconnect that the Techno-Shaman is aware of, but unable to quite understand. In opposition to the plans of the Tower by dint of being an agent of what it believes is the City’s spirit, the Techno-Shaman is aware that the Directives are planning something, but not quite what. Having observed them for a time, the Techno-Shaman rightly believes that their plans are a threat to the City and its inhabitants, but not in the way the Techno-Shaman believes. Wearing a large tiki mask made of copper, sheet metal, circuitry, and discarded motherboards, it is almost impossible to tell if the Shaman is a man or a woman, as its skinny form is covered in odds and ends of loose wires, machine parts, and cables all formed into shamanistic fetishes and techno-magical regalia. Uses stats for a Greater Eldritch with Words of Networking and Engineering

The Triumvirate Mind– the defacto leader of the Directives of Ivo, the three most powerful sorcerer’s of their number fused themselves into one powerful being in ages past, attempting to pool their power in an attempt to ascend to Godhood. Lacking the necessary spark of divinity and cohesive goals, the Triumvirate Mind now exists as a horrid flesh abomination of three people fused together that now exists in a state of perpetual agony, kept alive by a steady stream of psycho-sorcerous pharmaceuticals pumped directly into their system as they encase themselves in a floating sarcophagus that resembles three faces fused together at the back of the head, covered in arcane regalia. Still potent, the Triumvirate Mind continued their theo-technological sorcerous studies in an attempt to gain true apotheosis. Agreeing upon a theory that to become divine, they must consume a piece of the Godflesh to attain their apotheosis. Searching through the archive, they Triumvirate Mind came across records of the abortion of the Machine-Spirit and the titanic energies released. Believing that fragments and echoes of the power unleashed lived on in the divine corpse supposedly sequestered below, they would plumb the depths of the ever growing labyrinth of cadaver-metal and take the pieces they need. In order to not be consumed by the resonance of the unleashed potency, the Triumvirate Mind managed to bring the rest of the fractured Directives together, promising the rest would share in Godhood should they link their minds, becoming a gestalt intelligence strong enough to handle the strain of the divine. This was of course a lie, as the Triumvirate Mind reasoned that the lesser spirits of their brethren would merely be consumed as they used them as a sort of psychic shield, and should they survive they would easily be consumed by the threefold mind of the greatest sorcerers of the Directive. Of course, each of the minds within believes it is strongest as well, hopefully to turn on their brethren as well. Regardless, the Triumvirate Mind now pushes the Directives as hard as it can, urging them on to plumb the depths, but with the arrival of a pantheon of Godbound, there is a possibility that the Triumvirate Mind may disregard its quest in favor of closer targets, unless they can convince it of their greater usefulness as living divinites.

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Roll a D8 four times to generate a sorcerer

D8 Level of Power Field of Study Personality trait Appearance 1 Minor Mage with 1 gift. Adept of the Gate Conceptual Narcotics Convinced of their own greatness Black robes covering most of body. Flesh on the face is made of plastic. Bio-mechanical tentacles peak out from under robes 2 Minor Mage with 1 gift. Adept of the Gate 4th dimensional surrealist pornography Pseudo-intellectual Lower body replaced with hovercraft. Clothes are hard light projections covered in kabbalistic symbols. 3 eyes are glowing gemstones 3 Minor Mage with 3 gifts. Adept of the Gate Vivisective gene-modding Obsessive Knees bend backward with feet ending in steel bird talons. Superfluous wings with feathers of broken glass. Spider-like limbs extend from chest 4 Minor Mage with 3 gifts. Adept of the Gate Bio-mechanical augmentations Confident. Overly so Insect chitin armor. Second head on stalk coming out of shoulder. Stomach shows tiny nuclear reactor inside 5 Minor Mage with 3 gifts. Adept of the Gate Psycho-tech theurgy Inscrutable. Speaks in allegory and parable Bondage gear covered in circuitry. Mask covering whole face that shows LED emoticons. Followed by swarm of small mechanical flying eyeballs 6 Middle Manager- Lesser Eldritch Transformative soul-hacking Aesthetic Dreadlocks made of cables. Bulky diesel cybernetic limb replacements belching green smoke. Attended by lobotomized Altered servitors 7 Middle Manager- Lesser Eldritch Ultra-telluric cryptography Decadent Naked but body is replaced by sparkling chrome. Mouth opens to reveal mechanical eel that speaks. Hands crackle with purple lightning 8 Upper Management- Greater Eldritch Spiritual Physics Impulsive Head floating on repulsors. Communicates by forming holographic images. Features stuck in permanent grimace as mouth leaks blue fluid

Possible encounters

A small group of Directives researchers sent as a welcoming committee for powerful visitors. Arrogant but sycophantic, they clumsily attempt to manipulate or ally with the party

An engineering bay filled with half made, discarded automatons. A spy possibly lurks in here among the half-finished robots, keeping an eye on the sorcerer. Periodically one of the sorcerer’s will come down to lord over the robots, playing out a petty power fantasy or pretending to be a giant monster before getting bored

A lab with multiple Altered strapped to operating tables, being experimented on by junior members of the Directives who are attempting to twist the Altered into new forms. A stack of chairs made from mutated bodies stands nearby

An enormous baroque library in disarray, with volumes of forgotten lore strewn about, crude drawings and graffiti in a number of them. Searching here reveals an actual lost piece of actual theurgy, discarded by a sorcerer who didn’t quite understand it

Bunch of lower ranked sorcerers sitting around a table doing lines of multi-fractal cocaine cut with metal shavings. They’ve got ideas, man. They’ve got ideas on how to fix all this shit and ascend beyond the petty need for bodies, but they’re always looking for new ideas on how to improve things. No bad ideas, no bad ideas at all. Except yours. That’s a bad idea

Several Directive members examining a strange piece of machinery pulled up from the depths. The machine is seemingly an engine covered in strange robotic eyes that frantically looks about the room. The Directive members only pretend to know what they are doing, saying things like “Mn’yes, shallow and pedantic,” or “indubitably.” Make up some pseudo-science bullshit

Sorcerers undergoing cybernetic augmentation using parts harvested and repurposed from captured Altered humans. Several other sorcerers sit nearby going through a catalog of augmentations. Apparently bio-mechanical tentacles are becoming en vogue, while robot spider legs are so last season

A band of sorcerer’s who just recently came back from below the Tower, raving about infinite hallways and endless spires haunted by horribly creatures of steel, plastic, and malice. Possible chance of being followed by a swarm of Hunter-Killer or an aggressive ICE of the Aegis-Machina protocols

Room stuck cycling through environments because someone set the Network overlay to “random”