For Cathy, Who fanned my dreams back to life.

Written by

Dariel R. A. Quiogue

VIVID RPG System by Dariel R. A. Quiogue

With great thanks to:

Cathy L. Quiogue, Marc Reyes, Victor Cabazor, Gelo Bautista, Bots Velez, Derek Tan, Joey Alvero, Meloy Taa, Augs Cabazor, Barry Billano, JJ Mijares, Josh Sazon, Alex Osias, Dennis

Ching, Daniel H. Boggs, Fredrik Ekman, Trey, anarchist, Dangerous Brian, Howard Fielding, Keith Davies, Sir Timothy of Kent, Johnn Four, S. John Ross for his excellent Risus system,

Daniel Pond for Wushu, Clinton R. Nixon for The Shadow of Yesterday, and Steffan O’Sullivan for FUDGE.

Thanks also to Rob Lang for his enthusiastic review of Gondwane’s spiritual predecessor,

Lost in Smaragdis, and his encouraging me to expand on the idea.

VIVID Core Rules by Dariel R. A. Quiogue GODS OF GONDWANE by Dariel R. A. Quiogue

VIVID Core Rules and GODS OF GONDWANE are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900,

Mountain View, California, 94041, USA

All images used from the Wikimedia Commons or public-domain works, and/or digitally modified by Dariel R. A. Quiogue. Various dinosaur illustrations by Nobu Tamura, Arthur Weasley, Steve oc86, and Tim Bekaert, all from Wikimedia Commons and used under the

GNU Free Documentation License v 1.2.

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Gods of GondwaneLegends of the lost land

IntroductionOver a hundred million years ago, the wisest of an ancient and incredibly advanced race looked into their future – and discovered their people were extinct. Vanished, without a trace. Their proud place had been taken over by the descendants of apes. And so they who would be called the Shapers began their Great Experiment.

Casting their nets through space and time, the Shapers captured primitive hominids and accelerated their evolution, to find out how and why Man had supplanted them. When they failed to find the answer, they destroyed the cities their subjects had built, wiped them out, and tried again. Still the answer eluded them.

And so the Shapers cast their nets further up the time stream … into that place that we call the Bermuda Triangle, in that time we call the 20th century. The Eighteenth Cycle of the Great Experiment has begun … and you have been summoned to be part of it.

Welcome to Gods of Gondwane, a science-fantasy role playing game of swords, sorcery and super-science, lost civilizations and dinosaurs!

Gods of Gondwane is set on a fantastic, alternate-history version of Jurassic Earth, some 180 million years in the past. Mankind occupies the supercontinent of Gondwana, which they have come to call Gondwane, sharing it with dinosaurs, the remnants of civilizations destroyed by past Shaper experiments, and the secretive alien Shapers. There are many tribes and

petty kingdoms scattered across the continent, each with a culture secretly engineered by the Shapers for some experimental purpose of which the people are totally unaware.

Among these experiments are the many ‘living gods,’ monstrous alien or mutated creatures, sometimes machines, which the Shapers set up for their subjects to worship and drive them into constant strife with each other. Deliberately made to sow chaos, the living gods are best collectively described as insane. As a result armed conflicts, witch hunts, and deadly intrigue are commonplace on Gondwane.

In this game you will play a hero, either a native of Gondwane or a modern person snagged in one of the Shapers’ time-nets, exploring this dangerous primeval world and leading the fight to liberate Man from the oppression of the Shapers. Think Spartacus meets Flash Gordon in The Land That Time Forgot, and you’re rolling! For those of you who’ve seen my Lost in Smaragdis setting, consider this the bigger, badder, bastard child of Smaragdis.

What is a Role Playing GameRemember those “Let’s Pretend” games you used to play as a kid, where you and your friends would act out the parts of your childhood heroes doing daring deeds? That’s basically what roleplaying game is, in a more developed form.

Roleplaying games, or RPGs for short, are storytelling games where two or more players build a story together

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by taking turns narrating what happens to their imaginary characters and their imaginary world. The object of the game is to get an ending you like for your character - for example, in an adventure that revolves around a perilous treasure hunt, the best ending is to get home with the treasure. It’s like creating a movie together inside your heads, with you and your friends in the starring roles.

One player takes the lead in making the story and managing the game; this player is called the Game Master. All the other players then create their own characters, and ‘play’ them through the game by taking on the challenges presented by the Game Master.

Much of the game revolves around various challenges given by the Game Master, which you try to solve and so move toward your desired ending by using your wits and your character’s most appropriate abilities.

What is Needed to PlayGods of Gondwane is played using the Vivid 4.0 rules system, which is incorporated into this document. You will need to provide yourself paper, pencils, about a dozen six-sided dice (the standard cubical die you

find with many family board games), and any kind of handy counting token such as poker chips, plastic stones, or even small coins. You can play using only 3 or so dice, but it’s much more convenient to have plenty.

How to Use This BookPlayers should at least skim over the next section, the World Overview, before diving into Character Creation. Game Masters should read everything.

BibliographyTo acknowledge my inspirations for this game, and to help give you some idea seeds for playing this game, let me point you to the following:

Cinema & TV• The Land That Time Forgot, Kevin Connor, 1975• At the Earth’s Core, Kevin Connor, 1976• The People That Time Forgot, Kevin Connor, 1977• Warlords of Atlantis, Kevin Connor, 1978• Flash Gordon, Mike Hodges, 1980• The Lost World, Stuart Orme, 2001• 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich, 2008

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• Land of the Lost, Sid and Marty Krofft, 1974• The Scorpion King, Chuck Russell, 2002

Short Stories & Novels• Pellucidar series, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914• Tarzan series, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912• Barsoom series, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1911• The Land That Time Forgot, Edgar Rice

Burroughs, 1918• Saga of the Pliocene Exile series, Julian May, 1981• The Face in the Abyss, Abraham Merritt, 1923• The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912• Almuric, Robert E. Howard, 1939• Conan stories, Robert E. Howard, c. 1930• Thongor series, Lin Carter, c. 1970• Tschai aka Planet of Adventure series, Jack Vance,

1968

Comic Books• The Warlord, Mike Grell, DC Comics, 1975• Killraven, Roy Thomas/Neal Adams, Marvel

Comics, 1973• Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond et al, 1934- 2003• Turok, Rex Maxon, Western Publishing/Gold

Key Comics/Valiant Comics, 1954• Arn, Jean Pierre Dionnet & Jean-Claude Gal,

Metal Hurlant, 1980

Nonfiction• Chariots of the Gods, Erich von Daniken, 1968• The Bermuda Triangle, Charles Berlitz, 1974

Of these, I would probably have to point to Mike Grell’s classic creation, The Warlord, as my main creative seed.

World Overview

First ImpressionsWhat’s it like to be in the world of Gondwane? Read on, and let your mind’s eye play out these scenes:

The heat of the jungle is oppressive. You are in a jungle the likes of which you have never seen before, for there are no trees here, only giant ferns and cycads, and some of the humming insects are as big as crows. Somewhere behind you, you can hear the scrunch of something big stalking through the undergrowth. Something is hunting you. Then, through a break in the ferns, you catch a glimpse of teeth the size of steak knives, and a mad yellow eye …

A herd of enormous sauropods strides across a hot and dusty plain, their heads held high on towering necks and swaying from side to side, their booming calls shaking the sky. Smaller creatures scatter from their path like the bow waves from a great ship’s prow. Only when the sauropods get closer do you notice the colorful pennons fluttering atop large howdahs on their backs, and in each howdah, the glint of sunlight on helmets and spearheads of bronze …

A hurled stone axe flashes past your ear. The air is filled with inhuman hoots and yowls as the Golgar hunting party moves in for the kill. Though they are squat and misshapen by the standards of modern man, though their low brows and heavy jaws give them the appearance of dumb beasts, you can still recognize their kinship to you. But as they bare their big yellow teeth at you, you come to the sick realization that the Golgars are man-eaters …

You have begun to realize that this cave you entered was never formed by nature. Beneath the encrusting minerals laid on by the eons is cut stone and metal, and when you hold your torch higher you realize the cobwebbed walls on either side of you are pitted with vertical niches. Each is taller than a man and covered

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with a pane of what seems to be the purest quartz. Suddenly the cover of the one you are looking into slides away, and a gaunt, strangely elongated hand extends from the darkness and gestures at you, sending a chill numbness through your spine …

You are taken to a sprawling temple-city, thick with the smells of smoke and incense and burning flesh, ringing with the music of brass gongs and the chanting of the crowds. At the very center of the city, guarded by cyclopean statues of armored warriors and snarling dragons, is a low, wide ziggurat where masked and hooded priests are offering the sacrifices. And at the top of the ziggurat, chained with massive bronze links to a basalt throne, is a creature that could never have been born on this Earth …

Man on GondwaneMan on Gondwane did not evolve naturally, but was bred by the Shapers in a continuing experiment to find out why human civilization survived and the Shapers did not. This experiment has been repeated many times, each time allowing mankind to reach a height of technology equal or greater than Modern Earth, then wiped out as the experiment was ‘reset.’ This means the human population of Gondwane consists of both the ‘current batch’ and the scattered, often secret, Remnants of previous experiments.

Differences from Modern ManBecause of the artificial origin of man on Gondwane, and the many ‘batches’ so created, there are some interesting differences between them and Modern Earth humans. First, the coloration: while all the skin and hair colors of modern man are known on Gondwane, there are additional variants and unusual combinations, such as green or blue hair, or green eyes and dark skin. Second, a small yet significant percentage of Gondwane humans are also born with psychic talents.

The third difference is psychological; the Gondwaneans

have always lived with the notion of immanent, active and demanding gods, and are conditioned to accept their commands whatever the consequences. However, there are those few who do question the status quo and the motives of their supposed deities, those who have made contact with Remnants and discovered their fates – and thus have begun to rebel.

CivilizationsThe civilized Gondwaneans are scattered thinly across the supercontinent, in small city-states. There are a few empires comprising more than one city. Between these pockets of civilization are the barbarian tribes, comprising both those races that had never been civilized and some remnants from previous cycles.

Visually, many Gondwanean civilizations are reminiscent of Ancient Greek, Babylonian, Phoenician and Persian culture – they have chariots, crested bronze helms, tall spears, corselets of scale or leather, all the trappings of a Hollywood sword-and-sandal movie, but with dinosaurs! Most city states are ruled by kings and secretive cabals of priests, and some are ruled directly by their ‘gods.’

This flavor is carried throughout in the visuals – walled cities, great square, blocky palaces and broad, towering ziggurats – and in the names, which I’ve made pseudo-Greek sounding, along with a mix of pseudo-Latin and pseudo-Babylonian and Phoenician.

Technology The majority of Gondwane’s peoples have a High Bronze Age technology. Many barbarians are even lower on the scale, having only Stone Age technology. From time to time, however, fantastic technologies from Remnant civilizations show up, are fought over for their power, and then mysteriously disappear again …

ThemesGods of Gondwane is about:

• The discovery of a lost world. Gondwane is removed from our modern world in time, and by all we know it shouldn’t exist. This sets up the mystery of why man exists in the age of the dinosaurs, apparently for a very long time

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already, and why traces of an ancient super-science are all over the place.

• The fight for freedom; the civilized races oppress the barbarians, the rich oppress the slaves, and the Shapers oppress and conspire against all mankind. Your character is caught in the middle of all this -- what are you going to do about it?

• Survival in a primeval, dangerous world; with dinosaurs and other large, ferocious beasts on land, water and air, and every Gondwanean nation against all the others, it takes extraordinary ability to travel the wilds of Gondwane.

• False religions; in classic pulp tradition, the Gods of Gondwane are not deities at all but monsters, their priesthoods either fanatically violent or cynically murderous, with agendas hostile to freedom and peace.

• Exploration of the strange and wonderful; Gondwane hides many strange and wondrous secrets for the brave adventurer to find, what with thousands of years of civilizations cast into ruins with every Shaper experiment.

• The wonder and terror of magic; against all known laws of science, magic is a real force on in Gondwane. Though practitioners are rare, they are known and feared, for their powers have a very real impact on the world’s stage. Worse yet, practitioners of magic seem to have attracted the attention of inimical visitors from other planes …

• The degeneration of people and civilizations after a cataclysm. Gondwane abounds with isolated, secretive and deranged remnants of past civilizations, each warped in a different way by their fall and desperate circumstances.

Character CreationGods of Gondwane lets you make characters from any of three very different worlds – Modern Earth, Gondwane of the 18th Cycle, and the Remnants of the previous cycles.

Adventuresome pulp archetypes such as explorers, hunters, archaeologists, bush pilots, journalists, soldiers, seamen, scientists, travelling dilettantes, and the like make for good Modern Earth characters.

If you want a Gondwanean character, you can’t go wrong with a gladiator, escaped slave, soldier, tribal warrior or hunter, noble, or thief. If you want a character with weird powers, you could make a mind-controlling mystic, an energy-manipulating wizard, or a demon-summoning sorcerer, very possibly from one of the Remnant peoples.

Character Creation ProcedureCreating a character is a simple 7-step procedure.

1. GM Briefing2. Concept3. Assign Roles4. Purchase Assets5. Assign Hooks6. List Outfit 7. GM Review

Step 1: GM BriefingThe first step in any game is for the GM to brief everyone on the game. You want to know what the game will be about, the desired tone – serious, light-hearted, dark and gritty, wacky, etc. etc. – and what kinds of characters are appropriate. Feel free to ask the GM any questions you want about the game and for help in making your character.

Gods of Gondwane is written to be a cinematic, pulp-style action-adventure game. The game favors Hollywood action movie over strict physics in its take on realism, and violence is frequent but the messier details are glossed over in favor of highlighting the heroic aspects of conflict. If you want to run your game differently, let your players know. Better yet, talk about it with everybody and get a consensus.

Step 2: ConceptYour concept should consist of a name, a role or

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