Gaming has always been a big part of my life. I grew up with a Nintendo, and then a Sega Genesis, and then a Sony Playstation. When I was a little older I graduated to PC gaming, and then to multiplayer. This was still in the 56K, AOL chat room days of the internet mind you, so multiplayer back then was roleplaying chat rooms or MAYBE a Multi-User Dungeon. But these were the arenas where my role-playing teeth were cut. I spent a large part of my formative years playing a text based MUD called DragonRealms. As there were no pretty graphics or epic soundtracks to add to the experience, the game world and role-playing had to make up for it.
So after years of online role-playing it was very easy for me to pick up D&D, Vampire, and other tabletop role-playing games when I was in high school. After graduating from school, my friends and I continued our weekly games as best we could, sometimes gathering campaigns with upwards of thirteen players. I was always the DM.
After DMing so many campaigns and creating story lines, creatures, and items for all of those games, it became a goal of mine to create a game of my own at some point. Many years and a few attempts later, I had finally come up with a design I was truly happy with – Wounds of Earth.
Wounds of Earth is an alternate reality tabletop role-playing game that is set on Earth in a possibly not-so-distant future. After centuries of rampant pollution and abuse of the planet, the planet has finally begun to fight back. Toxic fogs and mists have blanketed the Earth and nothing has been spared. Flora and fauna both have evolved, or perhaps mutated would be more accurate, and Humankind has been forced into domed-off cities and air-scrubbed tenements in order to survive. Generations later, technology has kept evolving, but the Earth is still plagued and the Human inhabitants of the Earth are still targeted by the environment they once sought to exploit.
- Choose from a diverse class list that blends seamlessly into this new world, while still delivering play styles similar to classes in traditional tabletop role-playing games.
- Explore an alternate United States where grim and bleak dome-cities have replaced once thriving metropolises.
- Augment your physical attributes and mental acuity with bio-mechanical implants and prosthesis.
- Battle mutated animals, zombified people, and twisted occult monsters as you traverse abandoned cities and communities in search of fortune or glory.
- Avoid becoming a walking nightmare by limiting your exposure to the toxic gasses covering the Earth. Make sure you have a respiratory handy at all times, or remain within air-scrubbed enclosures at all costs.
- Interact with the citizens and factions that call the Domes their home through a rich backstory and carefully crafted game world.
- Investigate a secretive shadow government that reigns over the Domes and decide whether to support it, or try to bring it down.
Wounds of Earth will encompass several several major cities and geographical areas around the United States. The first city that will be available with a full backstory, faction list, and outskirt zones will be my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. Various landmarks and popular areas of the city will be made into outskirt zones or faction headquarters that will serve as dungeon crawling expeditions for player groups. The St. Louis Dome will be situated on the banks of the Mississippi river underneath (and around) the Gateway Arch. A shanty town has been erected around the Dome by people desperate to escape the fumes and gasses slowly turning them mad and rotting their flesh.
Additional cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, and Detroit are in the works.
The time of hiding is over. Those with gifts and abilities are no longer content to sit quietly on the fringes of society. Instead, they have begun to take over.
In this modern day mage-rush, people have begun to search in earnest for any kind of latent magical ability that may be hiding within them. Schools and institutions of magical learning spring up out of nowhere like fast food restaurants. But underneath the surface of the new magical mother lode is a fight for position and power within the hierarchy of arcane masters. Witches, wizards, and sorcerers all vie with each other in great contests of power and skill, putting their lives on the line to prove their dominance and claim their domain within the world. Unlock your hidden power, develop your skills in a range of magical schools and talents, and obliterate your foes in epic, visceral arcane combat!
As a newly initiated acolyte, you’ll pick your first school of magic and begin learning how to cast both offensive and defensive spells. Almost immediately you will be thrown into intense magical duels, forcing you to learn quickly and adapt to the skills and abilities of rival witches and wizards. Over time and countless battles you will hone your magical craft and become more and more powerful, eventually capable of starting your own magical order or coven!
- Choose your magical path from several major practices such as Traditional Witchcraft, Chaos Magic, Demonolatry, Thelema, and more!
- Collect spell scrolls to fill your book of shadows. Create as many books as you’d like!
- Learn alchemy and craft potions to savage your rival’s abilities and boost your own!
- Battle your way through an epic campaign of menacing foes to assert your magical superiority across the globe.
- Compete with rival witches and wizards in online contests of skill until you are crowned supreme champion, or die trying.
Just as we made ourselves enemies of the Earth, the Earth made us enemies of ourselves. The effects of exposure to the Earth’s toxic atmosphere started off very minor. Skin irritation was the first symptom, and then people began to develop ticks and odd behaviors that they normally wouldn’t exhibit. Eventually, as the levels of toxicity rose and people were unable to find shelter from the noxious fogs and rains, madness started to slowly manifest. Nervousness, paranoia, belligerence, and then full-blown murderous aggression towards other Humans. Cravings for blood and raw flesh were common, to the point where sufferers would begin to pick at their own skin, ripping away chunks of flesh and eating them like gas station jerky. Scabby maniacs were soon running rampant through town after town, ravenously attacking people, and each other, on sight.
In the beginning, the Scabs were mindless and aggressive to any and everything, including other scabs. But as time went by and they learned that the freshest, tastiest meat was found on healthy Humans, they began to stop attacking each other, and started banding together to form packs of roaming cannibals, haunting the streets of every major city on Earth. And as the Scabs evolved and their behaviors were learned, people also began to track the sickness itself. Symptoms and conditions were cataloged, phases of the sickness were identified, and doctors began working on treatments. Unfortunately no real cure was ever discovered, but one thing was learned: the exposure could be reversed, as long as it was done before a certain phase of the condition. Essentially this meant that sporadic, temporary exposure to the atmosphere was manageable, so long as the subject wasn’t exposed for too long.
If a person did stay exposed to the atmosphere for too long, they would become what was called a Fresh Scab. Someone who was lost to the madness, but still looked relatively Human. While still viscous and cannibalistic, Fresh Scabs don’t exhibit the same abilities and strengths older Scabs have shown. But Scabs weren’t the only things lurking in the shadows. While most people sought refuge inside the Domes and behind the security forces housed within them, others formed their own communities and factions in city ruins and suburban ghost towns. The atmosphere even took its toll on plants and animals across the globe. Savage creatures began to surface soon after the gasses rolled in, and anyone venturing forth into the wilderness would be wise to keep an eye out for these mutations of nature.
- Navigate a dangerous world of politics and faction tension as you explore the societies of the new world.
- Fight your way through hordes of Scabs that inhabit every major ruin and city.
- Discover and combat horrifying mutant creatures and animals throughout the wilderness.
- Avoid treacherous gangs who prey upon any and all that they come across in their respective territories.
- Keep out of the toxic miasma at all costs and avoid developing debilitating ticks and symptoms, or even full blown madness.
The world of Wounds of Earth is bleak one with few opportunities for comfort or respite. Inside the Domes are nests of violent, power-hungry factions who want nothing more than to control the Dome and all who inhabit it. Outside, in the ruins of civilization, gangs and bands of criminals roam the streets looking for unfortunate souls to prey upon. In the wilderness, macabre horrors can be found that will test the resolve of even the bravest warriors and adventurers. Eldritch scabs armed with the occult powers known to them in life haunt the nights of their undeath, and woe be to anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon them in the darkness.
Outdoorsmen are the descendants of the hunters and fishermen of the Midwest. Tracing their skills back generations to times when they used their abilities for sport and recreation, now they must be employed for sheer survival. These masters of the outdoors spend more time than any other profession out in the wilderness and fog, and thus, have developed many remedies and treatments to help themselves withstand the effects of the toxic environment. Unfortunately many Outdoorsmen walk a fine line between sanity and madness due to their exposure though, and often times they will exhibit far more ticks and triggers than the average person. Old school skills like tracking are invaluable to the Outdoorsmen, as well as learning the behaviors of mutant animals and how to hunt them. (Or avoid being hunted BY them.)
Cagefighters are the evolution of mixed martial arts fighters from days gone by. Because recreation and entertainment is so rare and hard to come by in the new world, cagefighters enjoy a kind of celebrity within the Domes and their outskirts that very few others can enjoy. But the arenas and stadiums that they once called home are a far cry from the reality of their existence in Wounds of Earth. Fights are more often than not to the death, and the crowds that surround their makeshift cages are made up of scoundrels, rejects, and criminals. Fortunes are made and lost ringside, but the fighters themselves make scarcely more than a pittance when weighed against the risk to their lives. Often times fighters are filled with bio-mechanical augments and it isn’t unheard of for fighters to be literally ripped limb from limb by an opponent.
Possessed are few in number, for good reason. The power these souls are able to conjure within themselves can be awe inspiring, but also incredibly taxing on both mind and body. Possessed are capable of becoming exactly that – completely possessed by a belief, or emotion, or even an outside spirit or Deity. These citizens can call up their possession at will, but often times cannot fully control when it ends. This results in an unpredictable wake of chaos that follows the possessed throughout their lives as their possessions take them to places that they didn’t fully intend. Pushed well beyond the limits of what normal Humans can do, Possessed regularly display feats of strength and skill that should be utterly impossible. But when the possession wears off and the body is left to contend with the consequences, it is often a very ugly sight indeed. Beyond the damage done to their bodies and minds, Possessed are also often ostricized by the rest of society due to their unpredictable nature and sometimes rightfully earned reputation for Satanism and Demon Worship.
Hackers are one of the most important professions in what remains of society. Not only do they install augments and bio-mechanical prosthesis, but they also repair and maintain them. Without a visit to a Hacker, even the best augment will eventually malfunction and become a liability to its owner. A malfunctioning augment could simply shut down, misfire in a random way that causes injury to the owner, or possibly even explode. Beyond augments, Hackers are also able to gain access to the digital systems that control daily life such as locking mechanisms, item dispensers, and personal information databases. The best of the best can even hack their way into the interlink between Dome communities in what is left of the internet – a 3D representation of file systems that users navigate through in virtual reality uplinks. Without a hacker in a party, some parts of the world and some types of information will be practically impossible to access.
Street Soldiers are the front line in the war against the Scabs and outskirt gangs plaguing cities everywhere. When the fog and toxic rains came in the cops and the gangsters, the bounty hunters and the drug dealers, they all found themselves side by side fighting an enemy far worse than they were used to. Literal wars raged within the major cities for generations as wave after wave of Scabs crashed against the unyielding ranks of the Street Soldiers year after year. Scores of people who once looked upon each other as enemies were made into compatriots and allies through a crucible of suffering and pain, forging alliances that have shaped the very fabric of life in the Domes. A seasoned Street Soldier can be an army unto themselves, able to obliterate scores of Scabs with an arsenal of weapons. All of that training and equipment comes at a cost however, as most Street Soldiers are obligated to serve their Dome and protect the territory surrounding it regardless of the risks, often times costing them their lives.
It didn’t take long for Humanity to discover that purifying the air would remove the toxins in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, that meant that open-air cities and communities were doomed. In their place sprang up underground bunkers, industrial buildings and complexes, and massive Dome cities – all of which housed sophisticated air filtration and purification systems. Moreover, most individuals would never leave home without their own personal respirators. But there had never been enough respirators for every single person, and there had never been enough room within the bunkers, and complexes, and Domes, for everyone. This lead to large scale riots and skirmishes at the entrances of these areas, as those unfortunate enough to get trapped out in the gasses fought tooth and nail to get inside of them.
In an effort to quell the uprisings, and keep the masses at their doorsteps from turning into hordes of ravenous Scabs, many settlements came up with a system to cycle transients and outsiders into their Domes and bunkers for a set amount of time. This allowed the masses to avoid succumbing to the toxic fogs, and placated them enough to keep them from rioting and destroying the very safe havens they were trying to enter. Enforcing those systems and keeping the cycle moving was a challenge however, as many people simply didn’t want to leave the sanctuaries once they had entered them. And that is when most of the security forces became ruthless in their tactics. Overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of their charge, as well as the desperation of the people they came into contact with every single day, the security forces quickly turned into savage judicators who preyed upon the transient populace without guilt or remorse.
Shanty towns and tent cities sprang up outside most major settlements as the displaced and homeless lined up in ques to enter the Domes for their allotted time. Inside these makeshift camps festered all manner of degenerate industries and machinations. Criminal gangs and black market merchants offering drugs, weapons, and augments. Terrorist cells and budding outsider factions. Throngs of dejected people on the doorstep of madness and becoming Scabs. The outskirt communities were not good places to be, if they could be avoided whatsoever.
This is the way life had gone on in the new world for generations. People shuffled to and fro under the watchful gaze of security forces, and got punished swiftly for the slightest indiscretion. Criminal factions vied for position within the tent cities and Domes, hoping to secure more space, more clean air, and more power for themselves. Dome and settlement rulers strained to keep everything under control and the city functioning with almost no resources and no outside help to speak of. A secret government lurked in the shadows behind it all, leaving precious few clues as to their identity or true purpose. Scabs roamed the ruins and countryside alike, setting upon any fresh meat that happened upon their path. And so it will continue until a group of strong, brave heroes finds a way to finally heal, The Wounds of Earth.
