Servitor Lore

In the primordial world, in a time that has left little remnant, neither essence or mana existed. It is unknown how such a world sustained itself or supported life, if it in fact did. However, the elder Gods claim that such a world did exist, and was their origin.

This time ended when the primordial entity that would come to be known as the Unborn God attempted to enter reality. As it drew closer to existing, its power bled into the world. This power was essence, the primal substance that rampaged across the primordial world.

By its nature, essence empowers all it touches, fulfilling the innate needs of living creatures even against their own will. The world was distorted, growing ever more unstable as the Unborn God drew ever closer to manifesting.

The world would have been lost to the Unborn God’s power, if the first Gods had not found a way to tame essence into a stable form that could be harnessed by the divine and turned against the Unborn God itself. Refining the essence that had polluted the world, the first Gods created and mastered mana.

With the power of mana, the Gods destroyed the Unborn Gods forming body, driving it back into the beyond and staunching the advance of essence. However, from the scattered remains of what would have been the Unborn God, something was born.

Where it’s blood and flesh fell, the Servitors came to be. Even as the Gods spread mana to the mortal clans, the Servitors of the Unborn God disappeared into the new world, hiding beyond the sight of the Gods and their agents.

Creature’s of the Unborn God, all Servitors are innately essence users, having no need to war with the essence within them. While the clans created by the Gods work to master mana, Servitors all use the primal and untamed essence from which mana came.

Unlike natural creatures, Servitors are the children of the Unborn God and beloved of essence. They cannot become Essence Mutants an have no need to conquer essence in order to cultivate it. This gives them the ability to alter themselves and gain new Features by cultivating their control over essence.

This makes Servitors often distrusted by other species, as are all essence users in many regions. Beyond the blasphemous nature of essence users in the eyes of the Gods, Servitors are often persecuted or even hunted for their ability to permeate their environment with essence.

Since they can reproduce or assimilate rapidly, Servitors can quickly expand into a population and raise the ambient essence levels enough to form essence mutants. As a result, Servitors are rarely allowed to live openly in nations that follow the Gods.

However, amongst followers of the Unborn God, Servitors find themselves agents of their progenitors will. While not all Servitors follow the Unborn God, their ability to easily become Chosen Ones or Avatars of their progenitor and innate use of essence makes them prime candidates to lead the faith.

Society: The position of a Servitor within society is highly dependent on which continent they live on. In Apophis and Malthus, the rule of the Gods and faith in their teachings leads Servitors to be viewed as the greatest enemies of the Gods and the world itself.

In folklore, Servitors are the greatest and most terrible of essence creatures, the lords of corruption that stand above Essence Users and Essence Mutants alike. They are said to plot in the shadows, devising schemes to overthrow the Gods. In such myths, they are powers of corruption truly evil and equally formidable, beyond the scope of all but the greatest heroes.

In truth, there is grounds to such tales. The most powerful of the Unborn God’s followers are Servitors, the innate affinity with essence their unworldly nature provides letting them advance faster and with greater safety. Similarly, the strongest Servitors can rival or even surpass many of the Gods in strength, leading to them hunting Gods that venture into the Mortal Realm on the Unborn God’s behalf.

However, despite many Servitors being exactly as powerful forces for essence as the myths say, it is far from true that all Servitors have such strength. Upon hatching, a Servitor has no more power than any of the mortal clans, and may never gain greater power.

In the same way, a Servitor converted from another species does not become significantly more formidable, and may even have their lifespan shortened if they are a low level.

Despite this, the fear of Servitors and view of their potential danger leads to them being hunted and slain as monsters in all nations under the rule of the Gods. Servitors who wish to live in such regions, or came to be stranded within them, must carefully hide their nature through illusions or shapeshifting, functionally being a demon in mortal guise.

All this changes in the Dark Continent and other nations under the control of the Church of the Unborn God. Amongst essence creatures and those who align with them, Servitors are considered the highest form of life, the state closest to the Unborn God and best adapted to essence.

On the Dark Continent, much of the population is Servitors, despite their innately short lifespan and the careful restrictions on their reproduction. It is unknown why Servitors can reproduce as quickly as they can, since the Unborn God does not appear to encourage their followers to have many offspring.

Whatever the reason, a Servitor can potentially make hundreds of infant Servitors in a matter of days if they try. Even without attempting to grow their numbers, they will usually produce fertilized eggs on a regular basis.

Lone Servitors will normally destroy these eggs after laying them, preventing them from hatching and hiding their nature. However, in lands dominated by Servitors, the management and disposal of both fertilized and unfertilized eggs is a civic industry, similar to waste management in other nations.

Eggs will be collected by civil servants and taken to processing plants, where they are cracked open and typically dehydrated before being made into food stuffs. These abundant food products are then sold at low prices to neighboring non-Servitor nations or feed to the non-Servitor population.

Since they are a highly abundant waste product to the Servitors and provide regenerative effects to those who consume them, such products replace farming on the Dark Continent. As a byproduct of the population regularly consuming Servitor eggs, any citizen of the Dark Continent rises as a Servitor after death, leading to their high population.

Both within and without the Dark Continent, it is known that the Gods and the Servitors are in a state of conflict. As the Gods worshippers would tell it, the Servitors hide in the dark and uncivilized places, using gorilla tactics to make it impossible to wipe them out completely.

In truth, the reason behind the two clans stalemate is almost the reverse of what the Gods would have their followers believe. While the elder Gods dwarf the power of even the more formidable Servitors, the average God is comparable to an average Servitor, with the strongest Servitors equivalent to greater Gods.

This alone is not enough to stop attempts to exterminate Servitors and all essence creatures. If it was simply a matter of equivalent marshal might, the Gods could rely on their immortal nature to grind down the Servitor forces. While more powerful Servitors are made immortal by the Unborn God, lesser Servitors can die while lesser Gods cannot.

The true issue is the differences between the God’s immortality and that provided by the Unborn God. A Servitor with the True Servitor Feature is not only incapable of death, but immune to mental tampering. Gods, for all their endless vitality, have no such protection.

To Servitors who prove themselves powerful adversaries of the immortal Gods, the Unborn God provides the Gods’ End Feature. Such Servitors can permanently dispose of Gods not by destroying them, but by making them into Servitors themselves.

Those God hunters use the Unborn God’s power to make a defeated God into a Servitor with no memory of their past life, but all the power of a God. As a result, the attempts of the Gods to directly assault the Dark Continent have only led to the loss of their own, the lesser Servitors destroyed more than compensated for by the might of former Gods.

Such an advantage has made fighting the Servitors on the Mortal Realm directly a loosing battle. Of course, the Servitors are not free to push this advantage.

Even though they would benefit from a direct conflict, the Servitors are limited by how many of their number have the power to defeat Gods. Although Servitors can breed incredibly quickly, it takes vast experience, training and luck to grow to a God equivalent power level, making it hard for them to equal the God’s numbers.

This stops the Servitors from openly expanding into areas under the God’s control, instead preferring to gain power on the Dark Continent and work in the shadows of nations under the God’s rule. At the sane time, the God’s try to keep the Servitors limited to the Dark Continent and stamp out their incursions into the outside world.

Ecology: As is fitting for creatures that embody essence itself, Servitors are one of the most rapidly reproducing clans, capable of creating hundreds of offspring if unchecked or easily assimilating others into their kind. To counter balance this, Servitors go to great lengths to limit the spread of their kind.

The simplest of these is limiting the conversion of others into Servitors. A Servitor can rather easily make a creature into a new Servitor by feeding it a part of their body before killing it. However, they will rarely do so unless the creature is of significant strength or an enemy they wish to neutralize. This is because weaker Servitors have very limited lifespans, making converting a larger percentage of the population a quick way to kill off the population.

Similarly, they must prevent the creation of ve, in order to stop frequent unwanted conversion. Since the regeneration provided by consuming Servitor eggs removes all forms of malnutrition and makes them a perfect food for any organism, populations of Servitors often solve this problem by trading their eggs as food products.

Of course, those who regularly eat food derived from Servitor eggs will become a Servitor upon death. This makes becoming a Servitor a form of second life that is expected in the Dark Continent. Citizen see it as an opportunity to reach for greatness after their first life, leading them to wish to gain sufficient strength to have a long second life before death.

Whether born or made a Servitor, a Servitor instinctually sees the form of a Servitor as the most comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. This leads to Servitors with the ability to change their shape often choosing to remain in their natural form if not otherwise motivated.

Of course, this instinct is often outweighed by the necessity to hide their nature when within a nation that persecutes their species. Their discomfort with prolonged alterations to their form makes hiding within a hostile nation particularly distasteful for Servitors.

They also view other Servitors as the ideal sexual partners, although, to a lesser degree, they are attracted to any creature that can produce offspring with them.

In addition, Servitors possess sexual drivers based on their anatomy. Since unfertilized eggs still serve a reproductive role, Servitors feel sexual gratification from producing them. This often leads them to produce many more unfertilized eggs than they otherwise would.

Similarly, producing fertilized eggs is the most drastic sexual gratification a Servitor’s anatomy is capable of providing, making the egg laid after fertilization the primary goal of mating.

This both incentivizes reproduction and makes Servitors reluctant to use birth control. Fertilized eggs can still be destroyed before they hatch, which is used as the main alternative to birth control.

Servitors feel little instinctual connection to their own eggs or the resulting offspring, but feel the need to care for and mentor adolescent Servitors. This applies to all adolescents within a community, but may become personally stronger for those they grow closer too.

Since Servitors are innately capable of becoming immortal, designed to persist for eternity, their instincts account for the strains of an eternal existence. They do not normally develop psychological complications from existing for vast periods.

Appearance: Although more likely to be mistaken for female than male, Servitors are naturally androgynous in appearance. Their frames are more slender than those of the average humanoid, the reduction in physical strength from their clan showing in a willowy build.

Their anatomy is mostly congruent with that of females of other humanoids, all be it lacking the breasts and nipples many Denizen females possess. Only their prehensile tail prevents them from being a pure humanoid, the highly dexterous limb exhibiting a level of flexibility and reach more akin to a tentacle than the tails of mammals.

The skin of a Servitor is always an ashen grey, even if their skin possessed a different color before becoming a Servitor. Similarly, their blood is an inky black, a trait shared by their hair, nails and bones. Even their eyes are wholly dark orbs with an obsidian luster, making it hard to track their gaze.

Do to their unnatural metabolisms, Servitors do not have non-structural body fat, not needing to eat for nourishment or build up reserves if they did. Some Servitors do manage to build up muscle mass, loosing some of their lissom figure. Such a change indicates immense physical strength, since Servitors muscles appear to be far denser than those of mortals.

When compounded with their clans reduced physical ability, it becomes very uncommon to see a Servitor who has trained their body to such a degree. However, when faced with a Servitor that appears truly muscular, it is best to avoid a contest of strength.

Game Play: Playing a Servitor should have a drastic effect on how a player’s character relates to the world. This may very by their backstory, but will always affect how those who discover their nature view them.

To a citizen of nations under the rule of the Gods, they will be seen as a demon lord would be in a different setting, even if they don’t have the power expected of a Servitor. Players playing a Servitor character should understand that they are a monster above monsters, and will need to hide themselves.

In contrast, followers of the Unborn God will see them as a higher being, reacting to them as an angel rather than demon. This will be the common reaction, even if they do not worship the Unborn God.

Like playing an Essence User, playing a Servitor allows a player to choose any Features they want, without needing to have an in world explanation. In addition, they do not risk gaining the Essence Mutant clan, being manifestations of the Unborn God’s influence.

This is not a mechanical advantage, since a player should be able to create whatever sort of character they want. However, most clans have a fairly limited arrangement of Features normal for the clan.

Creatures with more exotic arrangements of Features are usually either chimeras of multiple common clans, or anomalies formed from unique circumstances. If a player wants to play such a creature, they should be able to explain how they came to be an anomaly.

Such backstories can be quite interesting, but may leave a character disconnected from the world as a whole. Without a species to be part of, a character may not feel as connected to the world and the plot lines that focus on the existing clans.

Being a Servitor or Essence User is one method to have unique and specific Features and still have a place in the world and plots. Since both can cultivate to gain any Feature, they can gain the exact mechanics a player wants. At the same time, the Features that make the Servitor clan clearly give the character a place in world politics, helping them feel included in the setting.

While the social repercussions of being discovered to be a Servitor may be a challenge, becoming a Servitor to gain their clans potential should be a legitimate temptation for characters. Even if the player does not benefit, the in world advantages of the Servitor clan may be tempting for the player’s character.

Servitors can gain any Features without risk, and have the potential to grow to a God’s level of power. Even if this gives little benefit to the player, a pragmatic character may wish to become a Servitor to open up the opportunity for future growth.

This may be because they worship the Unborn God, conclude that the Unborn God and their Servitors will eventually defeat the Gods or simply be a matter of pragmatism for pragmatism’s sake.