RACES: THE ALDUIN
Beneath Our Feats
As a kid, dinosaurs were my first love. They gave the world a sense of fundamental magic.
From as early as Kindergarten, I remember immersing myself in the lost histories of thunder lizards. Consuming all that the library had to offer.
Outside of school, I frequented museums like the Smithsonian. Often spending long hours staring at the bleached bones of could-be dragons in wide-eyed wonder.
Without even knowing it, a part of me reverted to that early awe, by building the world of Achades on the bones of the Alduin’s long-dead civilization. Seeding the world with millennia-old caches of otherworldly tech gave every adventurer a reason to delve into the deep, and I followed.
DO YOU READ SUTTER CANE?
It wasn’t enough to fossilize the Alduin. I needed them to represent the unknown. Fear for some, discovery for others, maybe death for both. That’s when I turned to the works of H.P. Lovecraft for inspiration. You can’t throw a stone in fiction without hitting something he influenced. I see that now. But, for a long time, I didn’t. Blissfully unaware, I merely stepped over the bones of his elder gods as they slumbered,
I’m sure that’s how he would’ve wanted it.
The Alduin became devourers of the infinite; unknowable.
Lovecraft made knowledge dangerous. He was the first to insinuate that the unknown would gladly exchange its secrets for the provenance of flesh.
I don’t remember seeing that anywhere else in the compacts of fiction. As a result, Alduin tech awaits beneath giant burial mounds of soil and stone, hungry to exact a similar price.
Saved by the Dead
On the distant and forgotten world of Achades, warring refugees struggle to survive in the antagonistic wilds. Their only hope, ancient caches of technology left behind by the planet’s former inhabitants, the strange and long-dead gestalt race known as the Alduin.
The Hook: The world around you hungers; it’s a place where even fools and monsters fear to travel alone.
A Railgun Revolution
The Alduin became devourers of the infinite — unknowable — an extinct race that obliterated itself in nuclear fire. They consumed their star gods, merging their fathomless flesh with technology until the two became indistinguishable. It’s in this that they live on, grafted between science and death.
Knowing that made the rest easy.
In secret, the first excavators plunged deeper and deeper into the darkest corridors of the Alduin’s legacy. Disassembling all they found, piece by piece, to reassemble again far from prying eyes. The process was slow, but in the end, they were able to reverse engineer the first generation of firearms on Achades.
Large, bulky things that let the user hip-fire up to six heavy caliber shells. Something precious passed down from generation to generation, unfired. A lasting reminder that even the powerful had something to fear from the powerless.