From Beyond Iskander's Gate-
Golden Horde - Nails From the True Cross: Three nails, one of which they have in the shoe of their Khan's monstrous steed, together capable of destroying the Devil Emperor Tamerlain of the Magog
Gog - God's Error: The only mistake God ever made, a sputtering spark of chaos that they worship at the base of a temple
Magog - The Crown of Thorns: Tamerlaine has divided the 37 thorns among himself and 36 others, marking them with the Dagger of Cain to live forever. This way when Tamerlaine is foiled the permanent harm is redirected among the 36 and they then rise from the dead again, doomed to wander the world unable to feel it's pleasures. The Dagger of Cain was stolen after that, possibly by the Wandering Jew.


So we have the Franj (Grail), Zenobia (Shroud), Nestoria (Ark), Sarakene (Lost Library), Armorhad (Lance of Longinus), Termagant (Divine FIre), Sabaea (St.John's Head), Patriarch Heaven Faction (Sword of David), Patriarch Terrestrial Faction (Solomon's Wall), Patriarch Returner Faction (Rode of Jesse), Golden Horde (Nails From the True Cross), Gog (God's Error), and Magog (Crown of Thorns).

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
Christendom -
Franj are European crusader ghost-men
Zenobia are the Byzantium/East Orthodox empire under Pope Joan and the Blind Emperor Julian
Nestoria is the Kingdom of Prester John, the mythical christian african empire (with all the strange beasts that implies)
Panayims -
Sarakene is a caliphate ummuh of alchemists and scholars
Armorhad is a recalcitrant moorish empire that's many peoples were unified but have become unspooled and tyrannical
Termagant is a persian zoroastrian magician empire
Sabaea are arab gnostics who follow the lesser prophets, rejecting the various messiahs
Patriarch Tribes -
Kingdom of Heavenly Justice is israel
Kingdom of Terrestrial Justice is judaea
Exiles are the lost tribes

BEYOND ISKANDER'S GATE
Golden Horde are the tartars and other hordes descended from King Iskander's army, opposing Tamerlaine's mongols
Gog are the mesoamericans from across the sea
Magog is Devil Sultan Tamerlaine's mongol horde

The Franj, Sarakene, Armorhad, Termagant, and Golden Horde are crusading to the Holy Land to find their legacy artifacts.

Nestoria is crusading to the Holy Land to return the Ark, and Sabaea is crusading to the Holy Land because St.John's head told them so.

Zenobia's Pope Joan and Blind Emperor Julian, convinced by visions from the Shroud of Turin that this crusading will cause the apocalypse, are trying to guard the Holy Land to give the Tribes of the Patriarchs time to investigate for themselves.

For their part the Tribes, having been reinvigorated after a long age of being disunited and asleep so to speak are having a still somewhat civil civil-war between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Terrestrial Kingdom, complicated by all the Exiles from the Babylonian era whose descendants have just returned with foreign ways. They're all hoping to find their legacy artifacts in the Holy Land as well.

And Gog and Magog have their legacy artifacts and are basically coming to ruinate everything.

Anyone knows a term or article I can look up for information on the biblical Earth as it was described being in the earliest age of humanity, with the lower layer of clouds near the ground and so on? I can look up biblical critters like the leviathan and behemoth anywhere, but more specifics on the biblical earth is what I'm seeking.

This sounds pretty cool, and I can lend my hand in digging up the biblical descriptions you wish.

Back in a few...

It's a continuation of a thread from the other day (we only decided on the name half-way through).

Said thread is archived on suptg for reference.

>>1840082

Oh, well if others are working on this, I shall ignore it. I was hoping this was the creation of one person, instead it is a product of groupthink which is not worth my time.

>>1840156

Sorry you think that way.

The way I see it, unless I'm just trolling for comments and thinking out things, anything that actually takes off and incorporates with even one more person other than myself becomes groupthink since it becomes something for the "for fun pile" like for running campaigns and stuff, and can't be put in the "maybe publish someday pile".

But I like fun.

The general plot of course is that these civilization are converging upon the Holy Land from all sides.

The Holy Land itself is a physical place with the tribes of the patriarchs (the israelites) there, but that's not the same. They're all investigating/seeking the over-realm of Paradise/Eden that's supposedly accessible from this point.

Essentially all civilizations were once one and had the Tower of Babel and they basically created god by accident with a large hadron collider (not literally, but you get the point). However god was such a large powerful program that everything began to lag and their civilization fell apart and they began speaking different languages and a huge catastrophe occured splitting the peoples of the earth, who have then gone through thousands and thousands of years and many empires and civilizations.

And now old things are awakening, Gog and Magog are riding, and the gateway to Paradise is going to open again.

It's mashed together history periods then shrouded in the myth of them rather than just the fact (the medieval myth version of places usually) and with a plot that incorporates scifi with the bible.

But we're not talking scifi tropes here. No rayguns and akadian steampunk.

Scifi in the conceptual form of the answer or metaplot or whatever you want to call it.

The hazy return to babel/eden thing we have decided on so far, as an organic development of a mythologizing of the crusades for the holy land.

Fmrfmmmf?

Oh this again. I was always meaning to detail the Nestorians more.

>>1839674
Uh.

Ahura Mazda is the Zoroastrian God, not a demon.

>>1840492

Right right. Changing to Angraiya Maiyu.

>>1840492
The name you are looking for is Ahriman.

>>1840156
Oh man, don't be that way.

In retrospect, wanting to do a mythic crusader idea might have been influenced unexpectedly by reading Snow Crash right now as well.

>>1840507
The name Ahriman has been used to death. Angraiya Maiyu also sounds kind of more fiendish, and lyrical.

Also, Iskander? As in Alexander the Great Iskander?

>>1840535

Yes. In Medeival times the peasants of Europe supposedly had the legend of "King Iskander" in their minds.

>>1840535
Angra Maiynu is better than Ahriman, yeah.

>>1840586
Alternatively, the arabs called him Al-Sikandar which is also awesome.

How about the Peacock Angel and the Yazid?

The people of Termagant are probably squished between the Sarakene and Magog- if not already conquered, and practicing their religion in secret mountains and temple complexes far across the region. Their magic is not without danger; for like Lot's Wife, if they gaze at the Sacred Fires they draw down, they are in danger of being turned to the base materials from which all are sprung, and having their names erased from memory- whether or not the name erasure is due to the proper Faithful refusing to speak the name of one so capricious with divine might from the heavens, or intercession of the Ahura Mazda himself, is uncertain. Panayim consider the Termagant People of the Book, and so do not condemn them as infidels; followers of the Lamb however, might well see things differently, if they were to bear witness to the near blasphemy that the Termagant magicians engage in.

For the most part, the Termagant were content to probe the mysteries of the universe, and act righteously within their own communities, until the Divine Fire at Yazd started to gutter. Afraid and uncertain, they set to a fever pace of prayer and preparation for the Final Judgement, until, miraculously, the Holy Land reappeared.

Now, those most courageous of their magicians must set forth through lands strange and terrible, braving all manner of horror and terror to set up to the Holy Land, and beg Ahura Mazda for another spark to spare their worthless world for just a time longer. More must know of the Righteous Way first.

>>1840616

By Yazid do you mean those god/angel things...the Righteous Yadzis or whatever?

Also, Peacock Angel? I'm fascinated. Tell me moar.

Uh. 4th edition shitstorm is currently kicking this off the front page at something just under the speed of light, sooooo... Let's wait until later tonight to work it, huh?

>>1840818
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melek_Taus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidi#Religious_beliefs

This will tell you everything you need to know.

It's not realy Holy-Land related but Yezidi live in the Iran-Iraq area so they could have a role.

>>1839674
am i the only one who see "wee-a-boo! wee-a-boo!" in that pic?

>>1840917
Yes. Yes you are the only one.

>>1840905
Been going since yesterday. Not much chance.

>>1840913

You know, I think we have enough civilizations, but I'm gonna have to figure a way to work in cool stuff like this and St.Christopher and the Dog-Headed Men and so on.

>>1840963
Honestly, I'd say we have too many civilisations. But there could be more faction per civilisation or something. Or just special monastic orders and shit.

This Peacock Angel stuff is very fascinating. A benevolent Demiurge (take that Gnosticism), a heroic Lucifer (whoopah!), and essentially the God in charge of Earth and humanity, with God God being the being he answers to not the one we answer to (and suggestion of other beings, other gods besides god, as when there was just god and the Peacock God told the Peacock guy not to bow to other beings).

>>1840971
I agree with that. The Sabaeans I don't think have enough force to be their own civilization. Faction/conspiracy however...

>>1841010

As they say in weabooland, YO-KAY!

>>1841020
...What?

We're going to need to figure out the geography. Also, will Egypt exist, or will that be reduced to desert to make it so each faction has a roughly equal hard time to get to the Holy Land?

>>1841308

Egypt and the Arabian Pennensuila are Sarakene, the rest of North Africa and some of the Iberian Pennensuila are Armorhad, the rest of East Africa is the Kingdom of Prester John.

Franj is Europe, Zenobia is basically the Byzantium city-state ("Polis") and the rest of Asia Minor (Turkey).

Termagant is Persia.

The Golden Horde have India and some of Eurasia, Magog has China and the rest of the Eurasia presumably.

Regarding religion, do they believe in the real-world versions (so God, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Mohammed, crossees, Mecca, etc.) or fantasy equivalents a la Dragon Warriors?

>>1841709
*Crosses, even.

>>1841678

>>1841709
Following original Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Judaism as close as we can. Wacky weird shit included, and often emphasized.

>>1841747
MOTHEFUCKING PRESTER JOHN

lol Russia's a whore.

I imagine Iran/Afghanistan being a war torn region, wherein the Golden Horde and Magog fight it out, with some Sarakene and Termagant settlements caught in the middle. Also, Termagant HQ at Yazd in Iran. Is Yazd in Iran? Whatever.

But due to the regional instability, there's no real owner of that area. Also, amusingly enough, when I first imagined the Tribes of the Horse and Magog, I imagined their places reversed, well, with maybe Magog taking the lower half of China and all that area, and having more concrete footholds in Afghanistan and Iran...

But Indo-Mongolian horde is fine too.

>>1841747
Man, Gog's got a leg up.

>>1841747
Also, Sarakene territory might want to cover Iraq too. Baghdad was a big deal in the olden days.

>>1841757

Yeah that's the point, but I think we should avoid actually saying as such.

Sure there's Christendom and the Panayim, but that's like saying that one group of aliens call the other "aliens" in one language and the other does the same in another language.

That is, we're following lines of civilizations and peoples rather than of organized religions. So the People of the Book is more of an ancient alliance that isn't always followed these days, and so on.

The symbols exist; crosses, crescents, etc. (though their is much confusion even in reality. For instance the symbol of the byzantine christians at one point was a crescent with a christian star next to it, no cross in sight).

The symbols, in the case of this setting as in the scifi request in the last thread, are surviving symbols from Babel- images or patterns that were carried by the peoples as they fractured and migrated across the world.

>>1841811
I like it. I was also considering obscuring Christ by having him be equally referred to as "The Lamb" and often appending "The" to Christ. Making it THE Christ, as if somehow this was the foremost Christ...

But again, you're OP (I think?) of the original idea, and it's been swell how much of my work you've accepted into your creation, so, I'll leave final decisions to you.

Took the suggestions to heart.

However, looking at this...

Iran is going to be like the plains of armaggedon when all these forces converge, spilling over each other by taking sea routes or going through Russia when they have to, in order to create a backdoor front towards the Holy Land.

I'm just posting to tell you guys that this is awesome!

>>1841888
Oh yes, I imagine Sultan Tamerlaine will get sick of having to deal with the Golden Horde, and decide to head north, driving a wedge through Eastern Europe, trying to get to the ports of Ancient Greece (Or whatever we'll call Greece- Myrmidon?). He might try to seize the Polis for its Shroud, inciting Pope Joan to call upon her Franjish allies for a Great Crusade- maybe something to do with the ghost men nature-

Also, Gog and Magog can come into contact and an uneasy truce with one another, they break the Granadan strait to allow them both to attack the Holy Land by sea, and everything comes a bit closer to Armageddon.

Completely spaced for a while there.

Termagants now have Persian ethno-land.

Now WHY would I be livin' in a place like DAT, yutz?

What's in Antarctica?

>>1842023
"The Motherfucking Thing.

Motherfucker."

By the by, I'm ashamed I thought of Fantastic Four's Thing before thinking of John Carpenter's Thing.

>>1841792

Keep in mind the Gogs are Mesoamericans in rickety boats and that the whole civilized world has nothing to do with the Americas at this point in time.

>>1842078
I thought they had mysterious stone ships with molten gold geysers?

>>1842094

Well yeah, but you get my point.


Also, thinking about the implications of the setting's overlay, while Jesus and Mohammad were almost assuredly individuals living at certain points, it's likely the myths surrounding them could just be surviving mutating legends from the original Babel super-civilization.

>>1842094
Those ships are rare, available to only those who have been exposed to God's Mistake and have managed to tap into it to power their boats. I imagine the Gog will have their hands full utilizing, securing and pacifying the Amerigos before they can pay full attention to the Holy Land.

Occasionally though, some captains on insane whims, they'll go off to raid, pillage, and kill.

Technically thinking, to squeeze the history of the world together a bit for the sake mythology, after the collapse of Babel, some tribes of people went over the land-bridge to the Americas, which was later destroyed in the Deluge that was presumably part of the series/chain/era of disasters caused by the fall of Babel as the world lagged and it caused the system to grind it's teeth.

We should stick this on to an established system.

I hate to say it, but this could work with d20. I don't like the system, but it's simple and it'll take care of the biggest hang up any /tg/ original projects face: the system.

YAY OR NAY?

>>1842587
Maybe the Tower of Babel fell from a great, great height, destroying nearly all that surrounded it, the great stones driving dirt high into the sky, blotting out the sun for forty thousand years. Would it be so amazing that man would forget so easily their time near God, and would require the Christ, Moses, and Mohammed to remind them of what their true faith should be?

>>1842692

My feelings are that something like that would restrict the setting beyond a play focus.

I'm all for focus in making a setting. Here we have it on a pretty much wargame fluff inspired factional big war free-for-all basis, but still. Whether designing a campaign or an idea for a book/tv-show/movie you need narrative focus on what kinds of stuff the adventurers are gonna be doing, where they'll be going, etc.

That said, as long as you keep that in mind, I think projects such as this do best as systemless netbooks that people can adapt to their system of choice.

4th edition, come and get 'em.

http://rapidshare.com/files/118400588/PlayersHandbook4ed.zip

http://rapidshare.com/files/118394368/DungeonMastersGuide4ed.zip

http://rapidshare.com/files/118408880/MonsterManual4ed.zip

It really does suck, though. But that's just my opinion.

>>1843001
>I haven't actually played the game yet, so I'm gonna lie and say I think it sucks even though I have no idea if the game is good or not.

>>1843018
>>I haven't actually played the game yet, so I'm troll people who say it's crap

Mordhiem based squad-combat in the holy cities!

>>1842975
Mmkay, I'm all for vomiting fluff for this often. But now I gotta go.

>>1842719

So Babel was a floating construct and bits of it crashed all over the world (it was fuckhuge). However the core is buried in the Holy Land. And that core is basically the sky-island that contains all the whacky shit mentioned in the bible. The only way to get to it however will be to reunite missing components so you can reactivate that core piece. Thus the only way to get onto it is by putting it back into the sky, and then you have to figure out how to get there, though I guess if you were able to turn it out you probably have the magic elevator working again too.

So this could be a war of macguffins as they try to bring together the fragments needed to reactivate the Babel Core, or as they concieve it, open the Gates to Earthly Paradise.

>>1843030
>>>I haven't actually played the game yet, but any opinion other than mine is obviously a troll.

Or maybe that's thinking about it too literally.

The natural disasters all could of been caused by the world "lagging" so to speak, in the analogy I had been using earlier.

I mean Babel was the meeting of the super-advanced civilization, and they accidentally created God, and with it came the disunification and an age of great disaster from the transition.

What if the real Holy Land, not the patch of desert and old buildings the Patriarch Tribes are fighting over, isn't a physical construct but the world of the mind that the one-world-people created their things in, the design realm, the ideaspace. Ancient Babel-onian cyberspace, but more solid.

Like if you threw Blame! and the Old Testament in a blender.

>>1842124
You know, this would be a great way of explaining ALL the myth motives that pop up in unrelated places. If a story like the deluge is universal it actually happened in Babel and that's why all people know of it.

>>1843136
>Like if you threw Blame! and the Old Testament in a blender.
You have my attention.

>>1843271
Even South American tribes (we're talking Tierra del Fuego south here) have deluge myths.

Maybe God's Mistake shows the Gog people, in ways they cannot comprehend, the whole story of the world?

The KoHJ and KoTJ are currently disputing in the Holy Land and have placed the mass of returned Exiles (whose descendants were exiled to Assyria ages ago and who then scattered over the world like a second Babel) somewhere disfavorable, creating a Palestinian sort of situation.

It's a lot of armed angry jews defending the Holy Land, with the remains of the once glorious Zenobian Empire sticking their neck out for the place as well (and Sarakene and Termagant are fairly enlightened People of the Book; Armorhad and the Franj however represent less reasonable aspects of the Panayims and Christendom respectively. And the non-Bookites, the hordes, forget about it.)

Morever it's not just a straight run to the holy land. Even beyond the complex war going on between all these nations, there's the issue of finding your artifact if you don't have it and getting the others while making a foothold in the Holy Land. We're talking long drawn out military campaigns complimented by espionage and retrieval missions all over the map here.

>>1844275
Not to mention plunging the ruins of Shards of Babel and the old Reman Empire (Get it? Rem! AS IN REMULUah forget about it), hashishin, Cults of God's Error, and all the other shenanigans that can distract adventurers.

>>1839674

Babel itself was the city of the high-programmers. They encoded the instructions that every group took with them when they fled during the schism- Me's on how to have sex, rule a kingdom, the nature of a certain phenomena or type of object (such as a certain musical instrument), and so on. Obviously these were plentiful but still not every group had a copy of each instruction and many of these mutated or fell into disrepair once the cultures divided and set up in their respective area. Hence no civilization is really behaving "properly" according to the original standards.

The most disturbing thing is that the meta-realm, the Paradise network where the Babel programmed God and brought it into accidental existence one day, is presumably still running, and still running his program. The world is the computer, the nature of things designed by the Babel programmers is the OS, and God is a runaway application that's been left on causing all sorts of lag and memory shortages and is the sort of program that messes with your other programs and generally tries to run your computer for you.

If you could ascend to this Paradise you could presumably not only meet god, but reprogram it or shut it off.

Anyways, the Paradise realm is part virtual world part giant transhuman hardware veldt. Consider the rocs and behemoths and leviathans to be silicon life rather than informational entities, at least informational entities without body. Information only conveys the matter, it's not information for information's sake. It's information in the sense we are walking information being organized by our DNA for a material purpose.

I suppose that all the Babel remenants, like the external pylons that fell all over the world, have to be reactivated. But once you activate one it works for anyone else too and it can't be deactivated. So that will happen eventually.

And then there's the assembly of some sort of key to activate the central node to raise Paradise itself.

>>1844527
>>1844823
>>1844562
So...If any PC were to actually get to Eden, their mind would snap.

bump

>>1845646

Player's mind might, probably not the PC. I mean sure put in a few "DON'T LOOK AT THE ARK!" moments, but in general, it's part of their universal human heritage. All their religious symbols and myths are vestiges dragged from crashed (both literally and in the computer sense) Babel, and their unique attributes (Franj semi-partially-deadness, Termagant magic) are like code mutations or something.

>>1845646

"The Rabbis taught: Four [Sages] entered the Pardes [literally "the orchard." Rashi explains that they ascended to heaven by utilizing the [Divine] Name, i.e., they achieved a spiritual elevation (Tosafot, ad loc) through intense meditation on G-d's Name]. They were Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher [Elisha ben Avuya, called Acher - the other one - because of what happened to him after he entered the Pardes] and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva said to them [prior to their ascension]: "When you come to the place of pure marble stones, do not say, 'Water! Water!' for it is said, 'He who speaks untruths shall not stand before My eyes' (Psalms 101:7)." Ben Azzai gazed [at the Divine Presence - Rashi] and died. Regarding him the verse states, "Precious in the eyes of G-d is the death of His pious ones" (Psalms 116:15). Ben Zoma gazed and was harmed [he lost his sanity - Rashi]. Regarding him the verse states, "Did you find honey? Eat as only much as you need, lest you be overfilled and vomit it up" (Proverbs 25:16). Acher cut down the plantings [he became a heretic]. Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and left in peace."

Talmud, with commentary. Seems like it's relevant to this thread.

>>1843032
hmmm...!

>>1848609

Interesting.

Sounds like a lot of stuff in Paradise is memetic or software of some kind. Looking at one thing can kill you or drive you mad, eating a certain thing can have an affect where it'll be very hard to stop eating it, and other things can even alter your own software where you are no longer compatible with Babel memes - you become a heretic.

>>1848651

Exactly. There are still instructions for proper conduct and operation of the Orchard available to those who study the ancient words and memetic structures encoded in the holy books or stories. But they are vague and corrupted by human misunderstanding. It's very easy to get lost, die, go insane or corrupted.

Now I'm seeing a party of sages assembling to connect to Paradise as if into cyberspace (the Matrix?), and readying countermeasures and incantations to fight off the antivirus and security measures (Cherubim and Seraphim).

So the Babel Core is somewhere under the Medditeranean Sea off the coast of Israel...So basically once the MacGuffin Quest is complete Tarshish (Babel Core) will become a floating island again and the Jerusalem space-elevator/teleporter to get there will reactivate and once ascended there you'll be immersed inside of active Paradise-space, the hardware world of the mind (as opposed to a digital world) where the Babel high programmers designed things, their last such application being God who is still an active runtime desktop ontop of the natural world.

Map now shows approximate locations of Babel Core and the exterior Pylons.

>>1849189
You must construct additional Pylons

So something like

Tarshish (Babel Core): Off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean Sea
(Algerian Pillar)- Armorhad
(Chad Pillar)- Nestoria
(Sudan Pillar)- Nestoria
(Yemen Pillar)- Sarakene
(Afganistan Pillar)- Golden Horde
(Uzbekistan Pillar)- Magog
(Ukraine Pillar)- Franj
(Serbia Pillar)- Franj

Hmm...though maybe Ukraine and eastern europe territory, being Eastern Orthodox land and whatnot, should be under the aegis of the Zenobian empire..

Bumped

Wiki it, and Drawfaggotry will follow.

Viking Crusaders beating up Finnish Pagans tiem?

This archived? Campaign work drains the brain, so I can't really add anything now.

the original thread is on suptg, let me check as to this one...nope. But I am collating the data.

I've got the maps and the images and the critical text and when it's become all played out and musty I'll release it all zipped up in a rapidshit.

>>1849837
Danke.
>>1849473
The real Byzantine Empire held the Greece area as well- might as well expand those borders, so that each side has at least one pillar in their hands.

Except for Gog, though it fits with them being the alien and freaky people.

>>1849851

Actually that works perfectly.

The Core in Patriarch territory, and then a node in everyone elses except for Gog.

This has to be the sexiest homebrew ever. Archived.

Okay.

China can be rolled into the Golden Horde/Magog, we've got Africa covered, Russia can be a battle ground of believers in Pope Joan and the followers of the Sultan God Tamerlin, Europe is a strange place of wind and ghosts called the Franj (HAHA, FRINGE+FRANKS)- actually, I'm going to have to work on that, get the Franj and their stuff set in stone- Zenobian Byzantines, Persian Zoroastrians, Sarakene Caliphate, Iberian Caliphate Almohad (In two flavors- fanatic intolerants, and desperate cosmopolitan rebels), Gnostic Conspiracy, Timurid world spanning empire, desperate angry mongols, the Jewish tribes...

Are we missing anything?

>>1848609
God's name is the route to the Holy Land?

Map flixed.

>>1849473
It fits that Nestoria is the closest to Babel, with how weird their lands are. Maybe also, if Gog manages to get to a node they'll spread God's Error into the Babel System, leading to a worldwide crash.

>>1850009
NOOOO WHAT HAPPENED TO THE THING IN ANTARCTICA?

Can we move a pylon to Italy? That could be the core of what was once the Roman Empire in this knock off.

>>1850061
...I'm not entirely sure what I said there. Lemme try again:

Let's place a pylon in Italy. If this homebrew has a parallel to the Roman Empire, its once capital could have been set there. Herf derf, I can't brain.

>>1849967

Franj- craploads of kingdoms without unified authority, their lands and peoples are mysterious and they themselves show up in the form of ghastly pale crusaders (really, trekking all that way would make even an Italian pale, lol) with countless flags, emblems, and banners.

Armorhad was once a unified and successful islamic empire but disunity between it's various peoples has caused the "great state" to become a belligerent and oppressive place in order to keep order, with nationalist extremists at the helm.

Sarakene is the enlightened caliphate living under shariah law of alchemists and scholars who want to restore the world to a golden age. They also consider everyone else barbarians. Sure they aren't xenophobic Armorhadji who think the Franj are aliens or ghosts...but they did once crusade through Franj lands for vaugely concieved reasons without really respecting them at all. Sort of like a Panayim version of Zenobia in a way, an arrogant keeper of a great and glorious ancient legacy.

Nestoria is the island of Christendom behind Panayim lines, the kingdoms under the rule of Prester John, the Presbyter King who I suppose is either Prester John the Umpteenth or has been kept alive preternaturally by the Ark of the Covenant.

>>1850069
Termagant is the Zoroastrian Persian magician empire. They're magicians. And zoroastrian. And Persian. Not much else decided besides that sort of thing.

Zenobia is the Byzantine empire with a bit of Eastern Orthodox nations of Medievality thrown in. They're the last surviving fringe of the Remulan Empire (lol) and have the blood of royals from all the great lands that were conquered by such.

Golden Horde were the Eurasian hordes who got fat and happy ruling India and everything only to have Tamerlaine's central horde shove a foot up it's ass from China.

Magog is the mighty empire of Devil Sultan Tamerlaine, who wants to destroy the world and rule the ashes.

Gog is well, mesoamericans given reality bending powers (such as to create stone ships with supernal fire) by God's Error.

With the new map I decided to not worry about placing the specific locations of the pylons, just that there's one in each territory besides the Holy Land and Gog.

>>1850078
Mmkay. We'll leave that up in the air.

And Termagant will need a little work I think.

>>1850087
Not mapwise just- y'know what, I'm going to go home. Campaign volunteering and writing entries for Deus Volt has tired me. herpderpsleep

>>1850094
>>1850087

Really preciate all the help.

So each territory has one of the Pillars of Heaven which need to be activated to raise Tarshish, the Babel Core, out of the Mediterranean ocean. And when it comes into orbit over the Holy Land, the space elevator temple will activate and people will be able to Ascend.

However entering the Babel Core is the same as entering Paradise, the simulacrum reality (but not virtual) where the High Programmers of Babel designed everything on a conceptual and molecular level. You won't be able to survive unless you follow the Name of God, which can only be decrypted by taking each Name taken by each of the peoples who fled Babel (except for the Gog, who are basically asians who then went to the Americas and were corrupted by God's Error) and distilling them to find the common origin, the true name in the Edenic Language.

The Pillars of Heaven are pylons from Babel that survived the fall (didn't burn up in the atmosphere) being nigh indestructible wireless power nodes and landed around in a perimeter of where the massive Babel structure had once floated over the world when it was one continent and one people.

Whereas the legacy artifacts and names of god were dragged away from Babel during the schism and have been tossed around by many now dead empires, priests, and conquerors.

oh man... I've GOT to start archiving this for myself so i can begin preparing a game.

Any suggestions as to what system i might want to use?

>>1850384
Anyone else getting a (dare I say it?) Xenogears vibe from this?

>>1850435
I dunno.

I'm going to be trying to forge this through with Song of Ice and Fire's tweaked d20 ruleset though. Regrettably, they never got to magic, so I'm uncertain what I'll do when they get to biblical scale power.

OR MAYBE I SHOULD USE THE +MMORTALS HANDBOOK HUH?

>>1850435

Testament D20

Savage Worlds is a good universal system for squad-level wargame style roleplaying if you take the "Mordenheim but with crusaders" suggestions.

Wushu if you just want crazy crusading action without having to mod a system's inherent powers/setting to this.

HAY GUIZE does this make up for writing LCB?

>>1850615
...I was just about to bring up Mordheim.

The only thing that could make this better is if someone modded Empires Total War with this.

>>1850912

That actually has been mentioned.

The Grail is basically equivalent to a worldbuster or something, the Shroud of Turin gives clairovoyant visions, the Ark produces an unstoppable force that would make physicists shit themselves, the Lost Library contains instructions on how to make more things through Babel-tech, the Lance programs those in proximity (like say the kingdom) to obey the wielder, the Divine Fire will debug the Sacred Flame program keeping Angraiya Maiyu sealed, the Sword of David is basically a backdoor retrieval method to get the Ark (and thus can be used to evade the unopposable force), Solomon's Wall is like an astrological version of Google Earth, the Rod of Jesse is like a GECK but for establishing bloodlines too, the Nails are...basically bad news in physical form. I mean the one the Golden Horde have is in the shoe of their khan's horse, making it a monstrous steed, and if they could get all three it could kill Tamerlaine even with his...Crown of Thorns, which is a pretty standard sympathetic dispersal mechanism (damage transmits to the 32 others with the thorns, instead of to him).

>>1851441
Sorry to sound like an idiot, but what's a GECK?

>>1852672

Garden of Eden Creation Kit

Basically a genesis machine for a town or civilization, from the game Fallout 2.

>>1852672
>>1853156

It's enough to establish a healthy ecosystem and agriculture for an entire Vault's worth of people.

>>1851441
The Error is self explanatory. As is St. John's head.

>>1849967
The Illuminati.

>>1850447
Nope.

More of Xenogears meets Assassin's Creed though.

>>1854240
So Star Wars meets Assassin's Creed then.

bumped

You know, the story about the Four Sages in Paradise...

it's sounds like the two main type of mechanisms besides actual silicate lifeforms in Babeltech would be Me(mes), which are like instructions that can repeat in loops forever (the honey for instance) and namshubs, which do a process that is a one-time action (though it could be repeated, but its like pressing a button and something happening, whereas the Me is basically a behavioral loop)- such as the process that kills one guy, drives another mad, and makes another a heretic.

Me: Memetic program. Ex: Honey that compels you to eat it, and then does so again and again until you break yourself out of the loop. Me's can be instructional processes, such as the compulsion and encoded knowledge to bake a loaf of bread (a process that will not repeat unless you go back to the trigger) or they can continuous loops like the honey, or they can even be viral (processes that infect the people around you who see you engaging in the process).

Namshubs: Processes. Ex: Looking upon a specific pattern, image, or text that reprograms your thoughts (possibly with fatal or sanity shattering effects). Used to describe processes that run once triggered but do entail memetic instructions, just a triggered encoding of new information. Think of it as downloading a video instead of streaming it (a Me). A Me is a program which can program a process, a Namshub is a process, which can be the process to program something. Literally, a Namshub is in invocation or a triggered occurence whereas a Me is a program that runs once triggered. A Namshub does something, a Me has something done. Namshubs can contain their own Me infections which trigger the Namshub into new infectees. Hence the two often blend into each other. Me are instructions that run (a program) while Namshubs are data that is transfered.

The difference between the two is largely academic and you shouldn't overly concern yourself with it.

All of the constructs in Babel are essentially Me's/Namshubs. The gigantic ziz bird with a shamir worm (which can split through metal and stone), the kerubim with the flaming sword, the leviathan, the behemoth, demons and dragons - all are essentially processes with innate programs (or is it programs with processes?) that are triggered be various behaviors and events. They carry out specific tasks, some appearing when triggered others doing some at some pre-ordained routine, and some doing so continuously forever. Thus, as they are basically constructs made out of cubes of logic, their behavior to the human mindset can appear very illogical. Complimented with the fact their physical forms (the husks around the data) are representations created by Babel actively within it's environment and you have the makings of an unfathomable realm with alien inhabitants. Are they data, matter, or energy? Is there a difference? Not in Babel.

In Babel energy and information can both be transmitted wirelessly and matter is merely a transient medium- the omnipresent clouds that persist throughout the Babel environment consist of gases that act as an injection medium for the molecular machinery (to be drolly referred to as nanites) that gives the data/energy constructs their glossy physical sheen, their flesh.

The material world is it's comprehensive run-time environment, maintained by the Peacock Angel, which is, to be equally droll as the term nanites, an artificial intelligence. THE artificial intelligence.

However God, which has been monopolizing the resources of the Babel Core since it's accidental invention, has not only caused the rest of Babel to crash but strains the material world outside of Babel by injecting Me's and Namshubs with their own limited lifetime nanite clouds out into the world. Hence the irrational and impossible disasters and occurences that sometimes occur out in the world.

The artifacts dragged away from Babel weren't constructs created within it (which can only self-sustain infinitely while inside of the Babel environment, not while in the Demiurge material environment of our world as maintained by the Peacock Angel)- they were actually cornerstones dragged away from crashed (literally and technologically speaking) Babel.

Hardblocks of information with their own internal transmutation mechanisms that allow them to function like their own self-contained Babel environment ad-infinitum.

In effect these are physical Me and Namshubs that can last forever out in the world, our world, the world of the Demiurge- while even God's miracles have a very short half-life out here.

For instance the Lance allows the wielder to transmit Me instructions to his populace or army, while the Ark is by all accounts a Namshub that can have varied effects on those that trigger it or the objects in it's path when triggered.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TEK35Y14

Uploaded the collated data.

There you go, have fun with it. These two threads are on the suptg archives, you have that data already collected there for you. Enjoy it.

I've gotten what I wanted and this really helped me get in the right frame of mind.

So congratulations all around.

People of the Book-
Christendom:

Protestants - The Statue of Libertah: Believe Harry Potter and Yugioh will take their children's souls
Catholics - The Face of Jesus In A Tortilla: Believe that molesting little boys brings them closer to God
Mormons - The Golden Discs of the Prophet: Have tons of women and have their lolies stolen by the FBI, and don't drink alchohol

I see that Russia is still mostly empty.

Can it be Kazaria Time Nao Peez?

>>1858290
But all three are united in their belief that if you don't GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY, you will be eternally punished. And as by that they mean "we'll torture you to death as soon as we can get the laws turned back to how we liked'em".

Besides, for fictional deities, they're pretty fucking weak. Bahamut would kick 'allah/god/dieu/yaweh' ass without even pulling a breath weapon.