Early LoO Day: The Promethean Road

I usually try to post about Lords of Olympus on Friday; but I’m about to enter a very busy period of work which might keep me away from my regular computer stuff. 

As such, I thought I’d post a day early, talking about one of my favorite powers: the Promethean road.

This is a power mainly for mortals, but also for those scions of olympus (or titans) who are really on the margins, someone who can’t dare to get the boon of World-walking from a legitimate source. In the Lords of Olympus setting, fire wasn’t the only gift Prometheus gave to mankind.  To the initiates of the most secret mysteries, he uncovered (in his egalitarian zeal) the secrets of crossing between the worlds.  In most worlds where magic is known of at all, it would be seen as one of the greatest powers any mortal can attain to.

Its hugely difficult to do, it takes 12 hours of intense ritual, with trance work and mind-altering drugs. In its basic form, it doesn’t allow you to even sense where portals can be found, meaning that you have to discover these by other means (research, or more often known locations passed down through mortal secret-societies as fiercely guarded mysteries).  There is an advanced form, which lets you operate on all three roads, and allows you to use a scrying device to seek out openings.
And once you’re on the road, its as though the divine power of the road itself knows you shouldn’t be there.  So its hugely difficult to obtain, requires that you find an opening, and then you enter onto this interdimensional pathway stoned out of your mind and with everything around you trying to kill you.  Clearly, its a means for the desperate.  It would be something that would be open (among heroic mortals) only to the highest initiates, people who have trained and disciplined themselves to be able to survive in these conditions, and have the means to protect themselves as they travel along the pathways to other worlds.

As a power, its clearly what you might call a “sub-optimal” choice; but in terms of roleplaying potential, its awesome.

RPGPundit

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(originally posted April 25, 2013; on the old blog)