O-RO-BO-RO
An esoteric word that represents the flaw at the heart of humanity.
OROBORO is a dark fantasy setting crafted by Christopher Mahon and the Occult Triangle Lab. You can explore its world and lore through fiction, artwork, music, games, and other, hidden routes.
Summary
The universe of OROBORO is a dark fantasy world built on three pillars: ghosts, physiomancy, and immortality.
GHOSTS do not pass on to an afterlife, leaving them to wander the earth as their fractured memories slowly drive them mad. In this world, killing another person is strictly taboo and entails being haunted by their ghost forever. Many ghosts are enslaved by living family members as servants, teachers, and guardians, while untamed ghosts often hunt and possess the living to remember what it was like to be alive.
PHYSIOMANCY is the art of shaping the human body with surgery and spellcraft. It is seen as a tool to transcend humanity and stave off death. All levels of society seek out physiomancers to augment their body and replace failing organs.
IMMORTALITY is the ultimate goal of humanity, whether it means grafting young flesh to one’s body, undergoing self-mummification, or replacing the flesh with a gilded homunculus. Though all levels of society seek to evade death, few achieve immortality.
Setting Overview
Humanity is faced with a bleak truth: death is not the end. All souls will become wandering ghosts, their minds shattered at the moment of death and their forms twisted into monstrous shapes.
The fear of death once drove arcane scholars to unravel the mystery of resurrection, which provoked a mad, desperate war for eternal life that ended in the ruin of the world. Humanity was driven into the underground Sunless Kingdoms, where they sought to stave off death by mastering physiomancy—the art of perfecting the flesh with surgery and spellcraft.
While in exile, all forms of killing became forbidden, enforced by the knowledge that any murder entailed the eternal enmity of the victim’s ghost. Instead of waging wars, conflicts began to be settled with elegant, brutal duels where combatants eviscerate their opponents’ minds and bodies without killing them.
Now, the sun has been reignited by a mysterious demigod who calls for humanity to slip out of the tyrannical grip of the Sunless Kingdoms to resettle the surface, which has become verdant once more. The ruins of ancient cities are being rebuilt, and new houses are vying for power over shattered regions and sunken continents.
Key Elements
A World Filled with Ghosts
Upon death, the soul does not pass on to an afterlife, leaving it to wander the earth as its fractured memories slowly drive it toward madness. These ghosts haunt the wilderness, linger in city alleyways, and lurk unseen in houses and estates. Their appearances can be bizarre and surreal, ranging from a tall, lanky woman with a broken mirror for a head to a floating rhizome of eyes and muscle fiber.
Many ghosts are magically bound by living family members as servants, teachers, and guardians—in fact, menial labor in this world is mostly carried out by ghosts. Family dynasties are built on binding the spirits of their past generations, and necromancers sell wandering ghosts for high prices.
On the other hand, untamed ghosts often hunt and possess the living to remember what it was like to be alive. Each ghost has terrible latent power, and their madness provides an insight into magic that all spellcraft is based on. Most ghosts are intelligent, but few are lucid—their minds are usually fragmented and twisted at the moment of death.
Physiomancy Dominates Society
The prospect of becoming a half-mad ghost bound to eternal servitude is a grim one, making the fear of death almost all-consuming in this world. To this end, the pursuit of immortality and the art of physiomancy have become valued above all others.
Immortality is the ultimate goal of humanity, whether it means perfecting the flesh to become immune to decay, replacing one’s mortal form with a gilded homunculus, or building a miniature world outside the flow of time. The Grand Schools of Immortality jealously guard these esoteric arts, and the price of initiation is eternal loyalty to these secretive institutions.
Physiomancy is the art of shaping the human body with surgery and spellcraft. Physiomancers can grow replacement organs, excise cancers with magic, and even graft a bull’s muscles onto a client, along with a second heart to nourish those muscles. However, all of this usually means incurring a staggering debt that will likely take more than one natural lifespan to repay.
Cannibalism & Mortal Gods
By a twist of nature, the act of cannibalism grants a cannibal longer life, greater vitality, and even a portion of their victim’s soul. However, it also gradually transforms the cannibal into a monstrous, flesh-hungry being called a carcozi. Because of this, cannibalism is the oldest and darkest taboo.
However, the trio of gods who watched over the world only ascended to godhood by killing and consuming the previous pantheon—an act that conferred the old gods’ knowledge, power, and vitality.
Despite their immense power, the gods are still mortal, and have bodies that age and decay. In the last age, the gods’ dreams of transforming the world into a carefully crafted paradise has unraveled into chaos, leaving a few ambitious mortals to ponder stealing the mantle of godhood for themselves.
Magic & Mathematics
Magic is intimately connected to mathematical patterns, which can be expressed in the mandala-like geometry of written spells, the hidden symmetries of music, or the intricate movements of a martial arts form.
The greatest knowledge of magic comes from ghosts, whose madness grants them glimpses into the hidden workings of cosmos itself. Because extracting this knowledge from ghosts is a difficult and dangerous endeavor, all living knowledge of magic is still fragmented and incomplete.
Necromancy
Necromancy, the art of communing with ghosts, is considered a cornerstone of society. Necromancers usually undergo rigorous training and are expected to not only communicate with and command ghosts, but understand how to calm them and keep them obedient.
After the exodus from the Sunless Kingdoms, the importance of necromancers grew significantly: not only were they needed to care for and appease a family’s ancestral ghosts, they were now needed to protect people from ‘wild’ ghosts and capture them so they could be bound to the service of the living.
Body Modification
Body modification, also known as flesh-stitching or sculpting, is widespread throughout the world of OROBORO, both as a means to enhance the workings of the body and as a form of fashion. The art of physiomancy makes body modification possible, and has even led some to transcend the limits of the body entirely.
Flayed Style
Flayed Style removes portions of the skin to expose the underlying muscles or even organs. Often accompanied with decorations embedded in flesh and bone, this style is linked to the practice of regularly replacing one’s skin and muscle with grafts.
According to ancient traditions, being able to strip out old, disease-ridden, or cancerous parts of the body reflects a mastery of the body, while more recent fashions treat the skin as another layer of clothing and the underlying flesh as the ‘true’ self, which is only revealed to close friends.
Shell Style
Shell Style removes portions (or all) of the skin and replaces it with artificial plates made of lacquered wood, porcelain, metal, or other materials. These plates are usually highly decorated and may incorporate the wearer’s family crest or house emblem.
Shell Style was originally developed as a form of armor for warriors and duelists, but soon became adopted by artists and aristocrats who wished to turn themselves into living works of art. Wearing a piece of another’s ‘shell’ (such as a finger or shoulder joint) is considered a sign of an intimate relationship