Welcome back to my read-through of Dark Inheritance, a mostly forgotten child of the D20 boom! Find all the entries in the series here.
The first chapter after the introduction is a big old lore dump. This matches general expectations at the time, although you know there’s gonna be more lore integrated into the mechanics, and it’s also probably smart for the modern world but occult setting. It’s only 20 pages long, which probably helps explain why it was an impulse purchase for me way back when — I skimmed this quickly in the dealer’s hall.
So the big divergence point is that there’s a metagene that a few people have in sufficient quantity (not sure that’s how genes work) to become Titans. It’s called the Godgene. Titans have the ability to manifest birthrights, which are supernatural abilities. The examples read like superpowers. The cost of using these abilities is physical change; Titans will slowly turn into actual mythic beasts and lose their humanity.
I’m gonna try and avoid saying this every time I mention Titans, but man I hate this. The “good genes” theory is the slippery slope to eugenics, and too many vile people believe in it. In 2003, this was not obvious, and I could hack around it really easily if I was running this, but I gotta point out the sneaky issue here.
The Godgene is much more common now than it was a century ago because different ethnicities tend to have different Godgene segments, so as the world’s population becomes more ethnically mixed you get more people with the complete Godgene. This is not actually making things any better. I think this is intended as a positive aspect of diversity but man. And then the text even mentions that one of those Allegiances (factions) is into eugenics, so the problematic topic was on their minds.
Well, at some point in my life I’m going to reread my Kindred of the East freelance work and I’m willing to bet I’ll need to post a public apology. The authors fouled up this aspect of the world; I have no reason to think it was intentional.
OK. So Titans are not as rare as they were. Most of them don’t know they can do anything special. Awakening powers usually occurs because of a traumatic event, because we’re making PCs here and players love a traumatized PC. Allegiances are always keeping an eye out for new Titans — duh, who wouldn’t love to recruit a new superhuman?
Next, we meet the Legacies. Think Vampire clans here, except genetic instead of blood-determined. There are five left:
- Crimson Lords, the charismatic aristocracy
- Hidden Suns, the scholars/occultists
- Storm Crows, the shamanistic warlords
- Void Phoenixes, the chaotic destroyers/creators
- Wild Bloods, the shapechanging hunters
That’s a decent range. Room for infinite additional Legacies if this had succeeded wildly, but there’s enough there to build a campaign on.
From there we go way back into history. There was an empire of Titans once, which we remember as Atlantis or Thule or whatever. They got debauched, as empires do, which created a passage between our world and another one, and if you remember the intro you know where this is going.
We skip to a brief section on artifacts and relics — they’re out there, you can raid for them in tombs, you know the drill. Then it’s back to the Otherworld. This is the origin of all those stories about Faerie, and it had its own lifeforms, including sentient non-humans. The Ascendency got really cocky and bilocated their capital in both worlds, for easy access.
But there were also gods and monsters in those days, who were the parents of the Titans. For unknown reasons, they grew angry at the Ascendency and went to war. Skipping the blow by blow… the Ascendancy fell, the link between worlds was broken, and history proceeded apace with only legends left. Over time, the Allegiances arose; these are now defined as groups which figured out that Titans exist. Some are newer than others.
Then we get to the present day. Some of this sets up lore for a couple of the Allegiances. Mostly it’s focused on the state of the world after the big Jerusalem disaster. This is not as horrible as I feared? There’s a bit of a handwave which explains that Israel didn’t launch retaliatory strikes against Arabic states because most of the hardline religious leaders died in the disaster, which also rather presciently notes that “The United States had provided additional military aid, and its men were ready to attack anyone the Israelis selected.” Accurate.
Also the overlap between our Jerusalem and some weird alien ruins helped focus attention.
Other than that, we learn that the world is both freaking out and trying to figure out how to take advantage of what’s been named the Otherworld. You can go back and forth between worlds by way of Jerusalem. Access is limited but come on, people are gonna figure out how to get there.
As I recall, the rest of the book doesn’t get deep into what the Otherworld is like, which is either a missed opportunity or a wise decision to maintain focus.
Finally, there are lots of demons, which has also woken up just a slew of demonic cults who are newly reminded of their origins.
In the end, it’s not an insane amount of lore although as usual it could do with a bit of thought on how to introduce it to players. It sets up plenty of conflicts. I think the desire to make this game support a lot of different tones means that some of the lore is bland; we’ll see if the Allegiance chapter helps add flavor back in. And that’s next, which is nice, since I remember that being one of the cooler parts of the game.
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