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The game of TORG starts three months into the storyline of the Possibility Wars. The borders of the invading realities have stabilized into a slow expansion phase, and the Gaunt Man has disappeared from his realm of Orrorsh in Indonesia. Kanawa Corporation controls nearly all of Japan and parts of Korea, still hiding the fact that Nippon has been invaded at all; Pharoah Mobius is expanding the borders of the Nile Empire beyond Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean; His Cybernetic Holiness Malraux I seeks to bring Paris under the control of the Cyberpapacy; and Baruk Kaah's primitive spirituality still covers much of Canada and the northern U.S. In Britain, however, there is a shred of hope as Lord Uthorion no longer stands as High Lord of Aysle; but it remains to be seen what Pella Ardinay will do with Uthorion's Darkness Device.
What follows is an explanation of the nature of the Possibility Raiders, events leading up to the present point of the Possibility Wars, and a brief description of the state of the world and the realms.
The raiders are creatures from one reality or another who have discovered the ultimate power; the ability to steal choices, options and likelihoods - that is, possibiilties, from others. The ability to manipulate this possibility energy gives those who can use it incontestable power.
It was pretty much inevitable, then, that Possibility Raiders would eventually discover the existence of other realities, or cosms, since possibility energy is what makes one reality different from another, separating a world where an event happened one way from another world where that same event happened differently. Since an event cannot happen in more than one way at the same time, possibility energy is created to separate the two.
However, when Possibility Raiders first attempted to breach another cosm for its possibilities, they faced the problem that their natures and abilities were radically different from the general trend of possibility in the realities they invaded. Being severely "outnumbered" by the weight of an entire cosm, they were either killed or recreated in the image of the cosms they were struggling to conquer.
Attempts to "pour" some of their own reality into the invaded cosm over a link called a Maelstrom Bridge failed spectacularly at first. Again, the nvading reality was so "small" compared to the remainder of the target cosm that possibility pressures would force the invading reality back over the bridge to its own cosm in a tremendous "reality storm", or transform it into a part of the invaded cosm. Only those raiders who discovered one of the mysterious Darkness Devices, creations of the Nameless One, gained the means to establish their reality on an invaded cosm and slowly drain the possibilities from it.
The invasion of Earth begins unknown millenia ago with a Possibility Raider now known as the Gaunt Man. It is believed that the Gaunt Man did not originally have the focus he now has on sustainability, and that he consumed one cosm after another for their possibilities. Early in this career, he discovered Kantovia, a cosm ruled by another High Lord, Kurst. The Gaunt Man pitted his reality of Orrorsh against Kantovia and defeated Kurst with the aid of Heketon, his Darkness Device. Kurst's Darkness Device fled the battle in defeat, seeking out another cosm and transferring itself there. Heketon examined the traces of the device's departure and discovered the cosm to which it had fled.
Earth was an incredible bounty of possibility energy the like of which Heketon had never seen before. It gave thanks to the Nameless One that The Great Horn was too crippled by the battle to take proper advantage of this rich reality and shared its find with its master. The Gaunt Man agreed that Earth must be theirs - here was the bounty he needed to become TORG with a cosm and approach the Nameless One. The overwhelming possibilities of Earth would not be easily tamed, however; they would force out any invading reality like a pathetically weak infection. The Gaunt Man and Heketon began to plan.
The next time they discovered a cosm containing a Darkness Device, they did not seek to obliterate it as a rival. Instead, they recruited one of the inhabitants, Kranod, as a lieutenant to serve them in other invasions before returning it to its cosm to seek out Malgest and become High Lord of Tharkold. Later, they established Angar Uthorion of Kantovia as High Lord of Aysle. Heketon and the Gaunt Man also began to refine their horrific reality into something that could continue to yield a rich harvest of fear for an indefinite length of time, the Ecology of Horror.
Finally, the Gaunt Man made contact with other established High Lords, including his two former lieutenants, and offered an alliance to plunder the bounty of Earth. The High Lords began to send agents down the dimthreads with their stelae, planting the seeds of their new domains on Earth. And finally, they loosed their maelstrom bridges onto Earth, pouring the laws of their realities into the waiting networks of stelae. By attacking Earth on several fronts simultaneously, Earth's backlash of possibility could be spread out and resisted.
With the unwitting help of Victorian colonialists, the Gaunt Man began to establish his Ecology of Horror on the archipelagoes of the southwest Pacific, and Indonesia became a jungle of night terrors.
The lizard man Baruk Kaah brought dinosaurs to Shea Stadium on baseball's opening day, and plunged Earth's most advanced nation into a war fought with spears and rocks.
A Soviet psychic predicted the attack, the Russian military found and uprooted a stela, and Tharkold's invasion was repelled when it lacked the neccesary cornerstones to resist Earth's possibility backlash.
Uthorion was intercepted by a party of heroes on the way to Earth, who expelled him from the possessed body of Lady Pella Ardinay. This did not stop his realm from taking over Britain and Scandinavia, but it is now up for grabs whether Darkness or Light will rule in Aysle.
Jean Malraux was travelling to Earth with Uthorion, and was transformed from from a fanatic of Dark Ages ignorance into a cybernetic zealot. Rather than plunging France into a medieval inquisition, he has created the Cyberpapacy.
Pharoah Mobius has fled his original reality to establish the Tenth Empire of the Nile in Egypt, pursued by superheroes who will stop at nothing to end his evil.
The High Lord 3327, under the guise of Ryuuichi Kanawa, has staged a corporate takeover of Japan so insidious that most people have not even noticed the rise of backstabbing treachery and flagrant exploitation.
The areas as yet unconquered are collectively referred to as Core Earth. They remain fractured into diverse nations with varying levels of awareness and interest in the Possibility Wars. However, it is impossible to deny the threat that presently faces Earth, and most areas have begun to take, or attempt, some sort of action against the Raiders.
So far, the most effective actions against the High Lords have been taken by small groups of people called Storm Knights. These are people who have overcome profound moments of personal crisis by developing an understanding of possibility energy and how to use it. These powers allow them to overcome the barriers of differing reality and make their own rules. While the High Lords are aware of the threat posed to any reality invasion by the creation of "stormers" (so called because they often appear in the wake of the reality storms that accompany an invasion), they were not prepared to the sheer number of them created by Earth's boundless possibilities. A group of Storm Knights has now banished the Gaunt Man into the heart of a reality storm, and while the battle has just begun, victory may be within reach.
Some of these Storm Knights are your player characters. Whether they will play a large, or a small part in the Possibility Wars, whether they will triumph over evil or die ignominiously, whether they will preserve the Earth or watch it consumed, is up to you.
