Where Even are We???

Imagine for a moment, if you will, an ancient land...castles, yes, and dungeons beneath them, dungeons stretching for miles into the darkness. Castles and dungeons, magic and monsters, eldritch horrors and old rich minotaurs...wizards, warriors, wiseacres, wise cracks, cracks of doom, doomed fools AND moon ghouls! In short, a forgotten realm, a land before time, a fantasy world like every single one you've ever seen before....AND NONE! Because...now listen to this, this is the part that's really gonna get ya.... ...that's not where this game takes place at all. That's right, this obscure planet in the S-K system, the mythical "Uu'urth" is not our primary interest. No, we must go deeper... The fantasy realm of Uu'urth is an immeasurably ancient, dystopian-ish magical world. Kind of Conan the Barbarian/Warhammer vibes. We can get some Spelljammer and Ravenloft in there too is fine, and a fat dose of the movie Labyrinth.

A violent and wizardly world, one with learning and fair magery in the great cities, yes, to be sure, but far greater numbers of warlords going about their petty squabbles, slaughtering tribesmen and holding grudges for millenia. It is a land that breeds adventurers and mercenaries, seeking fortune and fame. They may follow a warring prince, or hire out to a questing wizard. Only the bravest among them venture into....THE HIVE OF BEASTS! Remember those dungeons I mentioned? In these parts, civilization was built upon the ruins of the conquered, and each built their cities upon the ruins of the last. And what self-respecting city does not tunnel into the earth, in search of riches, or a place to leave someone and forget about them? Yes, each city burrowed down deep, deep into the stony ground, for thousands and thousands of years....no map exists that shows those twisting shafts and benighted pits, nope, no way.

Many of these tunnels joined up with natural caverns, and occasionally even unnatural ones...These mines and shafts and crypts honeycomb the entire world, a monstrous hollow tomb planet...and from beyond the tomb, monsters! The perfect environment for all manner of nocturnal horrors, creeping slimes and worse, these immeasurable underground galleries are known throughout the land as The Hive of Beasts.

In the year of Santus Domitius 1155, the Order of the Black Hand espied a bright star in the sky...by 1157 it had grown so dazzling as to be unbearable to look upon, and on the feast day of Shuthan Krall, it exploded with a deafening roar. Many hundreds and thousands of heads of cattle were killed and old towers and barns did collapse across the land. Huge pieces of this devil star broke apart and struck the ground like titanic javelins, piercing the rotten hills, lancing the great hollow boils of ruin all throughout the accursed kingdoms of Uu'urth. Had the prophesied endtimes finally arrived?!

Indeed, things got pretty crazy there for a while. From all these gaping wounds did boil a foul blood...yep, MONSTERS! Every meteor shard created what has come to be known as a HELLMOUTH, a portal leading directly from the monstrous world below. And not just any portal! There were plenty of entrances into the Hive before, old tunnels or mines or boarded up trap doors, but they were known and guarded and could accommodate only a few individuals at a time, typically....now, great yawning gulfs are open across the land, rifts that cut hundreds or thousands of feet deep, exposing dozens of horizontal strata, an anthill cut open, each a chamber of horrors churning with activity.

Perhaps you were unaware that literally thousands of types of monsters are making their home underground right at this moment? Hooked horrors, beholders, courts of undead lich lords, whole societies of fungoid cannibals, real actual dinosaurs, goblins out the wazoo of course, all kinds of bats and bugs and snakes, big ones, little ones, bony ones, psychic ones, there's those stalactites that drop on ya, and I'm only into the first five or six hundred feet down! The further you plumb those depths, the older and darker and more alien those beasts become. Demons, definitely, but what are DEMONS afraid of? Hmmmm...and those depths now have direct access to the above for the first time....maybe it IS the endtimes!

Into this heady milieu shall we plunge headlong, for you, my friend, shall be a monster! For the first time, all strata of monster society are thrown into potential contact with each other, and are offered a possible path to....something else? A feast? A new life? Riches beyond a monster's wildest nightmares? But danger, too, is on offer. These Hellmouths draw streams of fortuneseekers, zealots, slavers for the arenas...indeed, all manner of the filth known as "man" can be found these days lurking about, searching and prying, sealing their fates one step at a time....but I digress! You're a monster! What kind? What do you want to do? I think figuring that out is the next step and we will go from there. I want this to be a very visual and multimedia type game if i can pull it off, so definitely share pictures and videos and ideas as we go and build up this monster squad. I'm in no hurry to start the game honestly, but the longer we can kind of softly establish some backstory and ideas I think the better it might be! And also in tone I'd like this game to be sort of dark, but hopefully real funny too, like, I feel playing monsters should make that possible! Like, everyone should feel free to be monstrous, and pursue the best life for your monster, and not be bound by human ideas or ideals. You have been driven into sunless caverns for millenia but no longer shall ye forego your birthright! Semper Monster! And also feel free to make jokes and puns and have monsters be funny and do funny things, like eat guts for fun or whatever!