Introduction
Since the dimly remembered past, the great kings of Usiren have dominated the civilized world of the Second Shunhaurat, their dynasty seeming as much a part of the natural order as the turning of the seasons. The last of these august monarchs, Ehetusir, united Usiren with its ancient rivals in the North. For this he was rewarded by the Serene Goddess with a precious amulet granting its wearer everlasting life, the Royal Numen. With time, he came to be seen as a god himself, the power of the hallowed immortals immanent in flesh and blood. But worship is too much for any man to bear for long; Ehetusir grew detached from his people, and blind to the clouds of war on the horizon.
Three years ago, the hill tribes of the shadhavar, unicorn worshipers of the Wild God, came down from the untamed mountain wilderness. They were united as never before under the banner of a new warlord, Shezeqan the Scourge. Shezeqan commanded all the peoples of the world to abandon the great cities and repent of their decadence, subjecting themselves to the vicissitudes of untamed Nature. All who refused this divine call to penitence would be put to death. The army of Usiren crumpled before the unconventional tactics and fanaticism of the unicorn horde. One city after another was broken by Shezeqan and destroyed, its inhabitants scattered or dead.
At last, the unicorns laid siege to Usiren itself, the ancient capital, seemingly impregnable behind its mighty walls. Its fortifications were imbued with the divine power of the city gods gathered there from the far reaches of its crumbling empire. The king projected an image of security. Counselors advised him to move the royal court to its peninsular stronghold in advance of the siege, but he would hear none of it, placing his faith in the hallowed immortals and his own manifest divinity. It was not enough. Some said that a traitor within Usiren had desecrated the inner sanctuary of the Mother Temple, breaking the bond between the holy gods and their besieged city. Whatever the cause, the walls were breached, and the city burned. Usiren and its empire had fallen. The king seemed to realize the gravity of his situation all at once. Taking off the Royal Numen from around his neck, he tossed it at the feet of the crown prince Nanusir, and without a word he threw himself from his citadel to his death.
Expecting to meet your end defending the walls of the riverfront palace of the crown prince, it came as a shock to you when your lord informed his court that the king had given him the Royal Numen, and with it, the scepter of Usiren. But there would be no time to mourn the passing of the god-king or his great city. Nanusir and his most capable fighters led the court in a daring night-time escape down the river, evading the victorious besiegers to arrive at the old royal stronghold city on the seacoast.
Shezeqan did not pursue the crown prince then. When Usiren fell, winter was near, and the canny unicorn knew that overwintering there, cut off from his people's mountain heartland, could provide his enemies with the opportunity for a counterattack. His triumphant forces followed him back into the mountains, leaving behind them the smouldering ruins of the city that had so long held the throne of the known world. Meanwhile, stories arrived in the court of a people in the North who had successfully repelled the unicorns. This seemed incredible - these were simple rustics on the far fringes of the civilized world; how could they hold back the horde of Shezeqan when the army of Usiren could not? Some said that they had received a new ME, the divine embodiment of a foundational idea, unknown in Usiren. There were darker rumors, too - that these people were led by a heretical giant priest banished from Usiren a century ago. But if there is any truth to the matter, it seems that these people might have discovered a way to save what is left of civilization.
Nanusir has called you and some of your companions before him today to officially receive your orders, but this is a formality. You know why he is summoning you: your group is to seek out these people and find the secret of their success in driving back the horde. It will be a difficult journey - long even in peaceful times, but now fraught with danger, from unicorn stragglers and scouting parties, from bandits, and from local potentates eager to reassert themselves in the momentary power vacuum formed by the destruction of the royal palace and the withdrawal of Shezeqan. Time, too, is running out; it is already weeks past the solstice. With the spring thaw, Shezeqan and his horde will surely return to finish off Usiren. If you delay too long in your mission, there may not be anything left to defend when you return....
Outline of Usiren
This section provides a brief outline of background information for the HICU-RPG campaign Usiren, and is a good thing to read after looking over the Teaser above. Most of this section of the wiki is written from an in-universe point of view, but this page is not.
For some time, I've been thinking of doing a fantasy role playing game, based, not on medieval Europe, but on the historical and mythological themes of the ancient Near and Middle East. However, it would not be using Earth or the actual civilizations that existed in that area, any more than your generic fantasy setting uses real European countries - rather that the setting would be an original world inspired by the history and the myths of those cultures, instead of the European culture-world Tolkien and Gygax dominantly drew from. The setting of this RPG is broadly inspired by the civilizations of the Near East and Mediterranean regions of Earth. It takes place on an Earthlike planet, rather than Earth itself, with recognizable but not necessarily identical lifeforms. The technological capabilities of the civilized world correspond very roughly to that of late antiquity on Earth. On this world, gods and magic have profound influences on the mortal world, with overt game-mechanical effects. It is not a world with gods of abstract principle; they are individuals, often capricious, with personalities and preferences that must be accommodated by the successful priest.
Broadly speaking, it's a world of heroes and prophets, scorpion-men and leopards with serpents growing from their necks, conquering hordes of carnivorous musical unicorns, and other stuff I've dug out of dusty tomes of forgotten lore (well, forgotten by people who are not Assyriologists, anyway). There's things similar to the parts of the Hebrew Bible that you probably thought were really cool when you were seven (e.g. any part that has fire from heaven devouring people), and it's a world where the gods are very accessible and invested in mortal affairs, although you may have to take a number if you're one of a hundred priests trying to get their attention during a major battle in which they're all interested...
The setting is much broader than the premise of the campaign, and has room for future expansion. However, I must constrain my world-building efforts as my time to prepare for this campaign is limited. Accordingly, I would prefer characters with backgrounds rooted in the already-made cultures described here.
The Known World
The beginning of the campaign finds the party in the court of a prince of the empire of Usiren, the late hegemon of its age. Though many distant civilizations and peoples exist in the world, the ones who interact with Usiren together constitute the known world of the campaign. In the common language, this region is called the Shunhaurat, meaning "that which is around the Shun." The Shun is an inland sea geopolitically analogous to the Mediterranean. Mountain ranges separate the major nations of the Shunhaurat, and though they are permeable in favorable weather, the mountains make coastal trade with ships much more convenient.
In recent times, the Shunhaurat has been dominated by Usiren, to the extent of subjugating its ancient rival to the North, Eloiden. Eloiden and Usiren have each had periods of hegemony over the centuries since the last dark age, making various other nations of the Shunhaurat their vassals or conquering them outright. Apart from Eloiden and Usiren, the Sea Peoples and Mountain People are other important cultural groups.
People
There are many species of people in the Shunhaurat, of which four are generally suitable as player characters: humans, giants, scorpion men, and unicorns (of which Shadhavar are a type.) You'll need to pick one for your character. (It is also possible to be a half-giant. Half-unicorns are not a biological possibility.)
Unicorns resemble the mythological shadhavar, more than anything in Western legends. They are roughly goat-like in their exterior form, but are predatory omnivores rather than ruminants. The name comes from their single horn, which contains an air-filled resonant space that can make sounds important to their speech and singing. The horn-song of unicorns can powerfully affect the emotions of other creatures. Unicorns can grasp objects between their hooves and a modified dew-claw like structure on their lower leg, but lack the manual dexterity of humanoids. They mostly live as herders and hunters in the mountains. Notoriously free-spirited, unicorns historically have only banded together into loose tribal confederations. They mostly worship the Wild God and his divine family, the Manifold Spirits. Unicorns have a variety of coat colors, mostly golden-yellows, whites and browns. Unicorns reaching adulthood have a life expectancy of about 50-70 years.
Giants are large humanoids, about 3 meters tall. They claim to have been created by the Serene Goddess to guide humans and show them how to live rightly; most Giants continue to revere the Serene Goddess or her Hallowed Immortals exclusively. True to this supposed divine plan, Giants are common in the religious, military, and civil administrations of human-dominated nations. They tend to live in cities. Giants are unmatched in physical strength, and correspondingly fearsome in war, though their lack of agility is a handicap. Giants in the Shunhaurat have reddish-brown skin. They can interbreed with humans, resulting in an intermediate phenotype, though half-Giants themselves are sterile. Social attitudes about this kind of reproduction, and acceptance of half-giants, vary with time and place. A giant surviving to adulthood lives a long time, around 160-200 years.
Humans are similar to the familiar species on Earth, so much so that I don't think twice about describing these prolific bipeds simply as "humans." On this world, they are distinguished from unicorns by their mastery of agriculture and their versatile manipulating appendages, and from giants by their size, rapid reproduction, and superior agility. Humans tend to prefer living in the riparian plains, but some live in the desert or in mountains. Though Giants might be more specifically urban, humans also often concentrate themselves in cities. Humans in the Shunhaurat come in a variety of shades of light to medium brown; those from farther afield have a greater variety of pigmentation. They can interbreed with Giants, as noted above, although it is relatively uncommon. Humans reaching adulthood have a life expectancy about 65-75 years.
History
Your characters are living in the Second Shunhaurat. Besides meaning literally "what is around the Shun", the word has also come to mean "the civilized world, interlinked by coastal trade using the Shun." Though it was quite a number of centuries ago, history remembers a time before this, when trade markedly decreased because the Shun was obstructed by the proliferation of an invasive and pernicious water-weed. Before this ecological catastrophe was the First Shunhaurat. The First Shunhaurat is not quite the times of myth and legend, but historical records are not extensive and are often written explicitly to inform the politics of the Second Shunhaurat, with all the distortion that implies. One must imagine that there were other causes of the collapse of the First Shunhaurat besides the arrival of this weed, but the very banality of the cause, agreed upon in all the old histories, militates against anything else as the principle disaster.
The Second Shunhaurat began as the raising of large semiaquatic herbivores, teopoi, spread to the Shun. Coordinated grazing of these animals by the Sea People who accompanied them reopened the way (literally) for trade and engagement between the then-isolated regions surrounding the Shun.
Religion
Much less is left to faith in this world, because the activity of the gods is patently obvious, and they often communicate with mortals - though their communications and wishes are often open to wide interpretation. Gods have no trouble being in quid pro quo relationships with their worshipers, and literally gain power when sacrifices are made to them. They appreciate piety, adoration, and donations to their organized religions, but it is sacrifices alone that give them power; the life energy of the sacrificial victim is transmitted to the god in whose name it is sacrificed. The gods have a hierarchical relationship, for example, the god of metalworking has a superior, the goddess of crafting, whose own superior is The Serene Goddess. This hierarchy goes far down in the other direction, too; the family god of a clan of smiths might be an inferior of the god of metalworking, and the individual guardian spirits of family members are the inferiors of the family god.
In return for sacrifices, the gods grant miracles to advance the interests of mortals, provided their aims are not too much at cross purposes with those of the deity in question.
Magic
On a continuum of spiritual matters with religion is magic. Whereas religion may be construed as concerning the relationship of mortals to powerful spirit persons, e.g. the gods, magic deals with less powerful, and often non-sophont, spiritual beings and inanimate phenomena transcending Earthly physics. Much of the work of professional magicians consists of exorcising spiritual "vermin" of various sorts, or taking precautions to prevent the diseases and economic damage they can cause. Though not all cases of disease have a spiritual cause, many do - and in this world, most physicians in the Usirenic tradition believe that this is the dominant cause of non-traumatic illness.
Besides the intervention of living exorcists performing rituals, magic also consists of the making of charms, amulets, and so forth, and various forms of trivial divination that in general do not work as well as priestly rituals, but are widely relied upon by the lower classes not able to, say, afford to sacrifice a goat to learn what an auspicious date for their child's wedding is.
Magic in this game does not include much in the way of flashy direct-damaging effects. Those would fall into the category of "miracles", and be the province of the priest, not the magician. It must be noted, though, that the magician's work is less affected by divine caprice, and is not as dependent on elaborate ritual facilities to achieve optimal results.
Fighting
In a world where medicine is primitive and supernatural healing depends on the relatively expensive intervention of the gods, fighting is dangerous and should be approached cautiously. A variety of weapons and armor are available. Some species, particularly shadhavar and scorpion-men, have potent natural weapons; humans and giants can also use unarmed combat.