History

Kelpi are an old scottish/celtic water monster that looks like a horse, the stories tell of a fine horse which appears from the water in Scotland. It tempts people to ride it and once they are on it becomes uncontrollable, carrying them back into the water to drown. There are ways to survive this encounter, one tale tells of a boy who cut of his own fingers to escape its gripping fur once he touched it, another said that if you can get the bridle away from a kelpie you can escape and maybe even control it.

Like many water basic monster stories, these exist to keep children away from water, but they also serve to stop young maidens from talking to strangers since kelpie can take on human form – usually male, though some later art shows them as siren-esque women.

One theory for their origin is that they’re linked to a misunderstood weather effect known as waterspouts – which are columns of water that can appear over body of water, these can sometimes make unusual shapes on the water.

These monster are not seem much in books or films today, except when they are linked to the Loch Ness monster.

Physiology

• They have the head of horse with glowing green or red eyes.
• They have the front body of a horse.
• They usually have the back end of a horse,
  • But sometimes they are depicted with a fishtail as there back half, like a hippocampus.
• Their tail is sometime horse hair tail, but made from matted seaweed.
  • Sometimes it is a fishtail instead
• They’re usually covered in fur made from matted seaweed.
• Some story tell of them having inverted hooves.
• They can also change form into human, but their feet sometimes stay as hooves.

Ideas

• You could have someone who keeps horse and have some of them be kelpie that they tamed.

• You could have a kelpie that lives in the human world as human, where they are a swimmer and a real lady’s man.
• The heroes could find a set of horses abandoned on their journey, that reveal their true nature in the middle of the heroes’ journey

References

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Kelpie/

https://www.pottermore.com/explore-the-story/kelpies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kv3m_ACEmE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelpie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterspout

Please follow and like us:

The sons of God saw the Daughters of Men that they were fair by Maurice Greiffenhagen

Nephilim

The children of women and angel are not always good and are stronger than any man. Sometimes they are monsters, and other times they are not.

History

A nephilim is a creature mentioned in the Bible but no no one seem to be sure what it is, the word itself is said to mean giants and is written as such in some versions, so some think that they are or were just giants – nut parts of the word mean ground, or fall, or earth. Since this word is found in the same paragraph as sons of God, which could mean angels, lying with daughters of man many think that a nephilim is what happens when an angel, or a fallen angel, lies with a woman, and its nature tends to depend on if the angel was fallen or not – but it also depends on their actions since they are also part mortal and we choose our own fate.

There are no stories of them in the bible, only a few mentions of them and all are before the story of the great flood, so many believe that the nephilim were killed off in the flood, which is why we do not see giants or nephilim or whatever they may be.

But modern media has cemented the idea that nephilim means the child of an angel and a human woman, since most stories are set in the modern day and if that is the case nephilim can still be present as an angel can sleep with a human whenever.

They are usually the love interest in many films and books, like the Hush Hush series; and there are usually both good and bad nephilim – the bad sometimes have black feathers on their wings. So even though we are not sure what they are or should look like this is what they have become to most of us and few of us know anything else about them.

Physiology

From head to toe

• They’re usually male
  • Often a handsome human male with blonde hair – akin to standard european depictions of angels.
  • In books and comics they’re often somewhat androgynous – again reflecting the standard depictions of angels in artwork.
• Well toned human arms and chest.
• They often have a large set of wings that can come out of their back, these usually allow them to fly.
  • Most Nephilim are capable of hiding these wings, making it harder to see their nature.
• Well toned human legs and feet.
• Can be larger than a normal man in height and size but a lot of books and films only have seem that way when their wings are out.
• They often use swords as these are seen as the favourite weapon for angels.

Many story tell of them having all kinds on powers, some of the most common are: being able to talk to animals, talk and understand anyone, superstrength and of course flight.

They can be good or bad it all depends on the story they’re in, their nature and the nature of their angelic parent.

Ideas

• Do a story where the only nephilim in the story is female, changing the sex of an character can make things play out differently.
• A story or adventure where a nephilim is going around make people think he’s a god and is trying to recruit followers, paladin’s and the like. This would work well in 13th age where the big powers can change from age to age.
• In the common polytheistic fantasy setting a nephilim rejected by their god, because their god disapproves of such mating, might choose to follow another god – their native god will send them to hell, but if they can become a saint perhaps that can be avoided?

Please follow and like us:

We’ve each talked a bit about how we got started on gaming – but there are four of us, and this month has five mondays, so we decided to leave the best for last: The prologue of Artemis Games – the story of our first games together.

We met at Vague – The MMU ¹⁾Manchester Metropolitan University tabletop gaming society – despite the fact that none of us had ever attended MMU, nor had any intention of doing so. I was, at the time, studying Physics at University of Manchester, while Amy was studying Biology at Salford University, and both Loz and Ali had finished their university careers already.

We were largely brought together by a friend who (though not part of the business) remains part of our gaming group – Iain Fortune, who appears in our Concept Cards as “Iain The Fortunate – creator of the Pot of Endless Tea”. Me, Loz and Iain played a brief D&D 4th Edition campaign at Vague, and then Loz mentioned that their gaming group was down a player – and as it happened we lived just down the street from them, so me and Amy ended up joining Loz, Ali, Iain and their friend Shiny ²⁾actually named Amy – the Amys had to be distinguished so one became Shiny and the other Purple for their respective obsessions in a new campaign at their house.

After the first two stories in this campaign we decided to sit down together and build a world for it – Twissen, a cylindrical world orbited by two suns (one northern, the other southern) and a single moon – and one where the gods themselves were all mad.

This campaign lasted for several years but as we’re talking origins, I might as well finish this up by explaining the its origin story:

The Beginning

The world was created when the Elemental Chaos, substance without form or order, collided with the Divine Prism, form and order without substance. The center of this collision became the mortal world, but the impact was felt throughout both realms – suddenly the Elemental Chaos had minds capable of shaping their surroundings, and the infinite minds of the Divine Prism had matter on which they could act. The northern end of the cylindrical world fell off into the Divine Prism, while the southern end sank into the Elemental Chaos.

This new-formed world had a sun, Shamedan, born of the elemental fire which burnt the southern lands, and a moon, Procan, born of elemental water which brought rain and tides to the southern lands.

Shortly thereafter gods, elementals and nature spirits formed – each within their own realm. The elementals cared little for the oddity that was the mortal world, while the nature spirits were born of it and could not leave, but the gods saw it as a toy with which to play – matter to shape to their whim.

It is at this point that the world gained its northern sun, Pelor, and its northern moon, Sehanine, as gods reached into the world. The sun was born of pure radiance, and the moon of condensed thought.

Intelligent mortal life appeared from nature – the dwarves from the soil, the dryads from the trees, and the merrow from the sea itself. Each lived in harmony with their element, drawing from it just as any other animal would, and returning to it with their death.

Three gods, seeing these new forms of life, decided to create their own immortal races: Amat created the dragons to rule over all; Corellon created the fey to experience the world; Io created the deva to explore and learn.

The dragons started the war of worlds by attempting to conquer the Elemental Chaos – leading to that chaos striking back against the gods, with the mortal world stuck in the crossfire. Amat was slain – split in twain to become Tiamat and Bahamat, the two dragon gods – but the war raged on.

Unable to endure this war the spirits of nature waited for an opportunity – the Grand Conjunction when the elemental and divine realms were closest to mortality – and struck against the gods, using two great weapons:

The first was born of Mawra, spirit of predators, and was a great beast of indestructible power – known as the Tarrasque – which sought to consume all beings of divinity.

The second and greater of the two was born of Nurgle, a spirit of pestilence, and became known as The God’s Plague. This pestilence was carried to the Elementals by Nurgle, and to the gods by Mawra.

The God’s Plague spread through both sides of the war, infecting their essence and driving them to peculiar insanities. The southern sun and moon were first to show the effects – Shamedan’s heat grew, burning the southlands ever more intensely, while Procan first reached upwards, then threw himself into the ocean while ranting about the powers beyond the stars.

Eventually all the gods, and all their immortal children, would grow equally insane, and so Corellon and Io sought to save their people by pulling from them their sparks of divinity.

The Fey

Corellon first attempted to save his people by isolating them – pulling them into their own dreams so that their divine sparks could be safe. In doing so he created a whole new realm of reality, the land of Fairy, a dreamlike mirror of the mortal realm. But while he succeeded in creating a new world he realised that he himself was infected – and that this infection would spread regardless of his actions. Thus he changed his plans – pulling the divine sparks from almost all the fey, concentrating it into the lords of the fey courts whose job it became to dream Fairyland into existence.

The fey he had pulled into Fairyland became split among the “high elves”, or eladrin, who maintained their separation from the dream and held themselves tall through pride, and the gnomes who became part of the dream, made of illusions and fragments of the nature around them.

The fey left in the mortal realm had many different fates. Some lived in the forests of the central lands, and those became the “wood elves”, living in concert with and as part of nature; but most lived in the southlands and were faced with death beneath the burning sun. More than half died within the first few weeks of becoming mortal, but the rest found themselves forced to choose a path. Some changed themselves to be as harsh as the desert, becoming the desert hags, a race known for their worship of fire; others copied the snakes and crawled beneath the sands to live, becoming known as the “dark elves” or drow; a third group chose to dive into the oceans, becoming the first merfolk; and a fourth chose a darker path – they sought to follow the souls of their dead friends, and found themselves in a new mirror of the world, the Shadowfell, created as a place for immortal souls to go after death – these became the “shadow elves” or shadar-kai.

The Deva

Io reacted more slowly to the threat, having first to study its nature, but once she did she began systematically extracting the divinity from her children. The majority of deva became humans, a simple race that possessed a thirst for knowledge beyond most others.

Some of the deva however had been in different forms when their sparks were removed – and those found themselves stuck with their transformation. Those in mammal forms became the bestials, capable of changing from animal form to beastmen though not fully back into a “civilized” form, but those who had taken non-mammal forms were permanently stuck in a hybrid form, losing most of their intellect in the process as they became Harpies, Lizardmen and other such monstrous humanoids.

Io’s delayed action meant that a whole city of his people kept their spark too long, and became infected with the plague. These became the rakshasa, a dangerously amoral immortal race that would do anything for knowledge – no matter who might be hurt – and experimented on every other race.

The Dragons

With Amat dead, and Tiamat and Bahamat still reeling, there was no-one to pull the spark from the dragons – leading to them all becoming crazed with their megalomania, and most of them dying in battle with one another. Their children, the dragonborn who had been created for them to rule, became their successors, running the dragon-cities as they always had just without the dragons lording over them.

The Greenskins

When Procan entered the ocean, he brought with him change and monstrous entities, serving as a portal to a realm that should not be. Many of the merrow sought to flee the corrupted ocean – and so they did. Most fled on to land and islands, becoming the orcs – a race of pirates and sailors known for raiding the coastal lands – but some found themselves pulled through the portal, and became known as the gith, green skinned warriors that could swim through the void as though it were water, with minds attuned to the impossible.

And with that, the second age of the world began – a world where immortal and mortal races collided, and crazed gods begat even more crazed devils.

Please follow and like us:

I didn’t get into gaming until I moved to Manchester at age 18. The people I was hanging out with were into Magic: the Gathering and they got me into it too, serving as my gateway drug for gaming. I bought my first deck but a lot of my cards at the time were given to me by my then-boyfriend Stuart, who gave me a shoebox full from his collection; it slowly grew bigger and stayed with me even after the relationship ended.

At that time I would spend most of my day, after looking for work, at Fanboy 3 playing Magic and watching all kinds of games – not just MtG but RPG’s too.

It wasn’t until a couple years later that I played in my first RPG, a Buffy game which was fun but didn’t go too well. We were playing the pre-made characters from the book, which I think was the first thing that was wrong for me, as I like to make a character with a story and explore the world and the stories in that world through their eyes. I started out playing one kind of witch and switched to one that had more story, that was still from the book (because I had joined the group late and the GM liked players to use premade characters) by the beginning of the next scene. I did have some fun with it, and I played to the end of the story… I think. I don’t remember anything about the other people or their characters – I was playing with people I didn’t know which may have been one of the reason it didn’t work for me

I started playing RPGs with a regular group soon after that – with my best friend and Dan, my new boyfriend of the time, we met once a week for a game. We played modern d20 which was my first meeting with the d20 system – I was playing a techie who was a mutant dolphin person, I had metal armour before the rest of the party, which was needed because my dexterity was terrible [turns out, Dolphins are not agile on land], because I made it myself.

That campaign and Character taught me few things, like it was more fun to make my own character and how much fun it was to be something i’m not – having created my own character let me feel very proud of her achievements.

Having found both a new job and a new hobby, I gave the magic cards to Dan, put Spycraft and other card games to one side, and focused on the roleplaying which I enjoyed more.

I played in the same group for a few years and we played a few different systems and settings like Werewolf the Apocalypse, and BESM [Big Eyes, Small Mouth], though not all went as well as my first game with that group, such as our In Nomine campaign which never fully got off the ground.

With Werewolf I liked the world and story but hated the system – especially trying to get honour to level up which you mostly got from killing things; I was playing a smart schoolgirl who didn’t get much chance to kill. This lead to people leveling up at different times even though we had all contributed – something I’ve tried to avoid in games since.

I game for same reason I write, or read, to get away from me and the real world. To be someone else for a bit, to be able to do the things I can’t do like be able to move like a gymnast or a monk or a cat, or to able to play with tech in ways I can never understand, and make magic.

I like to make a character with a story and explore the world and the stories in that world through their eyes – so when the mechanics get in the way I tend to either ignore them or as for help in working around them.

The BESM game was the first time I GMed – it was ok for my first campaign, though a bit clunky, as I didn’t own the book and hadn’t read the whole thing – and I hadn’t played in a game with that system which is how I generally run games now since my dyslexia makes it hard to fully read a rulebook, I learn by playing and have Ste help with the more mechanical parts of running.

Sadly I had to leave the group not long after I met Ste but the Magic cards came with, not just my shoebox but pretty much the whole collection as my ex, Dan, passed them on to Ste [Ste Note: I’ve now declared that these cards don’t belong to me, they belong to whoever Amy is with – but hopefully the difference will remain irrelevant :-)].

Once we left, we started up own game with him running and I’m able to make better character now, making them a bit more well rounded.

Please follow and like us:

Ste suggested we talk about ‘our first game’ That’s tricky. First played, first rpg, first time GMing?

As a kid, I remember two gaming moments distinctly. One was my sister deciding the way to win at Monopoly was to be the banker. The other was the summer I decided to ‘solve’ the Choose Your Own Adventure book I’d been given, by going full on decision tree. Two months and lots of computer paper later, I discovered there wasn’t actually a path from start to win. Several endings where you died or failed or some such. But the win didn’t track from the start. Moral: plan your games. I still don’t entirely, but i generally have a shape to how I expect things to pan out.

Fast forward to Uni, and I joined the RPG society. Sucked in by the ‘Have a Go’ LRP (technically LRP was a sport since you needed insurance) I turned up to a roomful of fellow nerds – some of which were even girls! No longer the Only Nerd In the Village!

My first proper rpg was Whoops King Arthur there goes the Round Table! I played Sir Bruce Sans Pitie, pretending to be Lancelot, and later pretending to be several other knights. The line I remember was the closing one. Most of the PCs crashed through the ceiling from Guinevere’s room into the Great Hall, where Mordred was looking forlornly at a lone cupcake. Arthur extracted himself from the pile and said “Happy birthday, son, we got you a sex-scandal-o-gram!”

The following week we had Whoops Sauron there goes the One True Ring. Totally sensible starting point. Moral: have fun. Now I work in gaming, some things I play are not necessarily what I would choose to. But there’s a joy in sharing time with my mates, in taking turns to play different people’s ‘most fun’  If I didn’t enjoy making game for other people, I’m in the wrong career!

Then I settled down to a Discworld campaign – playing an Ex-Sacrificial Virgin, and a Shadowrun campaign, playing something magical I think, but that didn’t last all that long, because we ran into a problem. Mike wouldn’t play in Alvar’s game, Alvar wouldn’t play in Mike’s game, Ian didn’t want to run two games in a week. So the group suggested I could GM. Mike had a load of the adventure modules, and I stumbled through most of them over the next couple of years – including one summer where we played five times a week. Oh the halcyon days of youth. Moral: try to maintain a work /game balance

Since then I’ve played several Vampire games; a long running Werewolf campaign set in Canada, full of epic poetry and snow; and a lot of DnD 4th. I’ve dipped my toe into most of the big systems, and had more indie and oneshots than would be feasible to namedrop. – last Nationals it was easier to tell them the categories I couldn’t run for! Long campaigns I’ve run include a lot of WOD – often crossover. All of those are firmly in the “action and antihero with horror elements” category – I don’t do well with true horror.  Moral: find what you like, and explore that. Until it gets old, then find something else.

After a long time of playing the local linear LRP,  a bunch of us went to try this new fest called Maelstrom. I had five characters over a decade of play, and loved each one. The perfidy of betrayal, real tears at loss, the joy as schemes came to fruition, the anger at invasion of our lands, and finally being on ‘the winning (surviving) side, leading a procession of converts into the sunset Moral : throw yourself at games hard, and they will reward you with experiences. I still play the next game from the same company , Empire. After six years,Sofia i Del’Toro i Riqueza has quite some depth, but I haven’t finished her story yet. The clan is growing, and we’re starting to be a political powerhouse.

I’m currently in a 13th age campaign, although this year I’ve dipped in and out of other short games as work and health dictate. I’ve been doing a lot more boardgaming, and recently dug out the cardboard crack which is MTG – and discovered that some of my cards are valuable, but most of my decks can’t play in anything other than casual. Moral: variety is the spice of gaming

So there you go. A whistle stop down Memory Lane. Why not share your weirdest gamer story with us? If we get enough, we might even publish some of them!

Please follow and like us: