The Hunt for Manticore

The Outline

A short game about a group of gentleorcs coming to one of Hegemony of Ur's newest colonial development areas, called in by the Governor-General to undertake the most perilous task of hunting down an almost mythical beast by the name of Manticore, which is preying upon the workers employed in the exploration of the ruins of the Directorate of Biological Sciences and the retrieval of the relics of the draconic civilisation contained within, and which has so far eluded all attempts at its life by lesser hunters and the Governor's soldiers, vanishing back into the deep jungles of the colony after each attack.

The World

In the beginning, the world was ruled by dragons, the most ancient, intelligent and mighty of all the species. Their rule was not kind.

Called forth by the prayers of their subjects, who were being used as little more than slaves, experimental subjects and livestock, the First of Demons descended from beyond the stars on the wings of fire and created a great desert where It landed. The dragons did war upon it, but it was for naught, and the First Civilisation ended in a single, terrible night. The planet was left without its masters.

It came to the former slaves to fill in that gap.

Eventually, after many trials and disasters, the great nations of today emerged - barely a shadow of the power and wisdom of the dragons, even of their last refuge where the few of them inexplicably spared by the First have started to rebuild, but now at last able to decide their own fates. The one exception is the Free Golem Nation, created in process of a civil war that nearly ripped apart what little the survivors of the Night of Endings have managed to build, and which managed to hold onto many of the secrets of the past, frozen in unaging cognitive crystals.

The Hegemony of Ur is one of such nations, the most advanced and - as its citizens claim, at least - the most civilised and cultured. Created by orc refugees around a network vast, ancient draconic industrial complexes, it is the first of the survivor nations to rediscover the production of gunpowder, and the greatest one in terms of territory and economy.

Over the time of the last century, it had been expanding its influence, bringing various weaker nations under its control as colonies and puppet states. The idea that the Hegemony - as the most advanced and cultured nation in the world - has the responsibility to take a role of a leader and help lift other, less fortunate and civilised nations up to a proper level is currently dominant in its society.

The fact that it often uses those it is claiming to "help" to gain an advantageous position against the necromancers of the Black King, whose armies had been spilling from the far north for the last three decades and who threatens their dominance, is usually left unsaid.

The Magic

Everything in the world has a spirit - from the living beings to the waterfalls to the stones. The one exception are the First and Its creations, who are nothing but void. The craft of a magician is fundamentally based on communing with those spirits, bargaining for their services and borrowing their power to affect the material world.

That connection can be strengthened with time and effort, and it is not uncommon to see centuries-old suits of ancestral armour or weapons be far superior to ones freshly made, their spirits carefully cultivated, shaped and even sometimes befriended by their owners and their families. While mages specialise in this, a certain degree of communion with spirits is common in most of the survivor nations, and forms the core of religion and spiritualism within them.

Even the spirits of living beings can be managed and reshaped in such a way, with many great wizards greatly prolonging their lives and increasing personal ability by perfecting their selves. Similiar methods are used by trained doctors and healers, but reshaping the spirit of others is a controversial area - it is, along with genetic experimentation, how the dragons created or altered many of their slave species, and the scars of that time are yet to heal, despite the passage of time.

The spirits are respected, the spirits are, in many ways, revered - however, there are also mages strong and amoral enough to force them, chaining them to their wills. It is how the black art of necromancy was created - by binding the spirits to the bodies of the dead or specially prepared vessels, in order to use them as servants or to further one's own knowledge. Necromancers are most often also those most skilled in reshaping their own spirits, that being the easiest way of attaining power to perform their craft. The greatest of necromancers in history, rivaling even the great dragons of the past, is the Black King, who stands in opposition to the Hegemony.

The Manticore

A beast fierce and savage unlike any other, it rarely leaves survivors during its attacks, and strikes with such a speed that in truth there is little known about its true nature. It is known that it is large, greater than any of the more common predators one might find in the jungle, and that it prefers the flesh of men and elves above any other food, attacking workers in the colony time and time again. It has a long, striking, barbed tail and can launch poisonous spines as if they were arrows at its quarry and pursuers; one survivor also claimed that the beast has wings, but that account had not been corroborated by any others who have encountered the beast. It has several rows of sharp teeth, capable of biting even through the metal breastplates and helmets of Governor's soldiers.

It features prominently in the legeds of the elven tribes living within the jungle as an unstoppable monster, a spirit of death itself, which takes who it pleases and punishes the careless and haughty; the new lord of the jungle, who claimed the tomb of its former masters as its palace and accepts no intrusion. While those accounts are undoubtedly far exaggerated, myths created by bored savages that no enlightened Hegemony gentleman should believe, it does suggest that the creature is either an entire species, or possesess most unusual longevity. Resolving that mystery, however, can wait until its dead carcass had been dragged out of the jungle and retribution for the lives it took was handed out.

The Characters

A group of hunters called forth by the Governor-General to hunt down the monster that has been plaguing his operations in the region for no less than three months by now, claiming the lives of over one hundred workers and a dozen soldiers, reflecting very poorly on him in the eyes of the government. As such, his latest attempt to put the issue to rest involves bringing in a group of exceptional individuals who are willing, for one reason or another, to accept going on such a perilous foreign adventure.

"Exceptional" in this case being orcish gentlemen - and ladies, as the case might be - of fine standing within the Hegemony and considerable experience in relevant fields, though the Governor is desperate enough that he has also brought a variety of less reputable individuals to the area.

There are three stats: Physical, Mental and Social. During character generation, the players assign priority to them. First priority gives 5 dices to roll, second 4, and third 3. In addition, the players can pick one speciality that lowers the difficulty on relevant rolls by one. They should be rather specific, though - "firearms" speciality is not really going to fly, for instance. Magic is generally handled as a combination of mental and social stats, though certain situations might only use one of them.

A wide variety of weapons is accessible, though the standard modern weapons are firearms of various kinds, mostly flintlock muskets and hunting rifles.