Of Hunters, Anomalies and Aberrations

Of Hunters, Anomalies and Aberrations

Pelaraam is a beautiful place - rife with amazing landscapes, sprawling cities, magical locations that can take your breath away the first time and the 300th time you see them, animals and beasts of all shapes, sizes and colors, mages who do the impossible and many, many more breathtaking and wonderful things.

But it is also home to unspeakable horrors. Twisted creatures of darkness who haunt the night, and leave deep gashes in the flesh of the innocent with their razor-sharp claws, taking away children as their food and endangering the safety and peace of the people.

Haunted Castles, once glorious and mighty - now abandoned, and their halls filled with illusions that will play with and break even the strongest of minds.

For decades - centuries, ghost stories, paranormal events and various tales of monsters in the night have been circling around, told by soldiers who returned home from a campaign, told by bards in taverns, told as bedtime stories by mothers to their children - various stories were told. Some were comical, the others blood-curdling. But most importantly - these stories were unbelievable. Impossible. Yes, in a world where Mages of awesome power can bend the forces of creation to their will and control matter around them with their minds - these stories seemed unfathomable and imaginary.

Until one man decided that he wanted to investigate the fidelity of a paranormal story he had heard as a child.

This man was Jurgen Asbotha. For around 30 years of his life, he had been a Jagkommando, which is the name for a member of the Siewersk-based special police, specializing in Mage hunting. Before Siewersk became a federation, before Chancellor Otto von Kriegisch became Emperor, the royal families of Siewersk had practiced a long tradition of mage hating and magic prohibition. One of their ancestors had proclaimed the use of magic as forbidden and unnatural, resulting in increasing witch hunts all across Siewersk - eventually leading up to a complete segregation of mages and treating magic as a heavy crime. 

Jurgen was a Jagkommando, and he was a Captain to boot. His raids on secret mage hideouts and the arrests he had made throughout his career are a thing of legend. Not many Jagkommandos came close to the achievements that he had made. But, Captain Jurgen was unique - he did not fit the Jagkommando stereotype of character. He did not hate mages with a burning passion, like many of them do - he simply believed that detaining them was the better thing to do in order to keep the citizens of Siewersk safe from the dangers that magic poses. He had seen what happens when a mage goes rogue, and he couldn't blame mages for being corrupted by the dark powers. His job was to simply remove them from the public eye, making everyone feel a little safer.

Nearing the end of his carreer, he would often converse with the mages he'd arrest - at least with the ones who'd be willing to talk with their captor - and throughout his years, he had come to understand that these men and women (and even children) were not corrupted by darkness, nor were they evil. They were simply humans with a special power granted to them, and they were afraid. Jurgen knew that fear makes you do things that you wouldn't normally do.

After a few months of those conversations, Jurgen took interest in what was happening with the mages he and the rest of his Jagkommandos would bring in for processing. Especially after his last official arrest, when one old man told him in confidence: "They're killing us.". He did not believe this at first, but still decided to check it out. His appeals to be let in on the process were denied many times, which left him wondering - why would they be hiding what they were doing? Which made him do something that would end up making him a hero - for the mages, and a traitorous dog - for the Empire.

Jurgen had gone undercover, and infiltrated one of the processing facilities where he knew they took the old man. After skulking around, knocking out guards and navigating his way around as silently as possible, Jurgen managed to find his way in. And he was horrified at the revelation.

The processing facilities were known as buildings where arrested mages were processed and then transferred to a maximum security prison for mages where the Siewersk Mage Experts would try to rehabilitate them, and if that failed - it was a place where they were kept locked away from the people.

The reality was vastly different. The processing facilities were slaughterhouses. Inside he had found Jagkommandos who were known as the most passionate in their mage hatred, working diligently on torturing and beating the poor mages who had been arrested - not caring for them being young or old, male of female. After the mages have been pummeled long enough, after they lost all will to fight back and to resist - then they would be thrown into a special container that was sealed off and loaded into a transport that was headed for the Maximum Security Prison, where they were subject to a special process with which the mages would be turned into Crystals - Jurgen had found out later. 

But not all mages were shipped to the Mage Prison (which was secretly a Crystal Plant). Those who were lucky were killed in the tortures and beatings, their bodies burned and their ashes buried. 

Jurgen was dumbfounded with this revelation. Seeing this happen in front of his own eyes awakened something deep inside his belly. A fire he did not know existed in there before. As he was watching the old man being dragged to be put on the torture table, Jurgen exploded. From his hands, bolts of murderous energy streaked forth and obliterated the Jagkommandos who were in the room. His eyes were burning with a violent fire, glowing in a pale blue color. Jagkommandos poured in the room from their chambers and Jurgen met each and every one of them with this unknown force he could instinctively command, which he knew immediately what it was. Magic. Jurgen awakened his powers. 

That incident became known as the Great Mage Slaughter, where Siewersk propaganda machines used the murdered Jagkommandos as martyrs to increase measures against mages, giving Jagkommandos authority to now act with lethal force against the ones who resisted arrest. 

Jurgen, on the other hand tried his best to help the ones he had freed that night, leading them away - out of Siewersk. Not many of them were left, and he knew that they all hated him so he got them out and went on his own way. Knowing that he will be proclaimed as Traitor of Siewersk, and that there will be a bounty on his head, he made his way back home where he had quickly burned all of the evidence he had gathered on three separate underground mage groups he was planning to raid, and instead wrote letters to all of them - revealing to them the truth of the processing facilities and the Mage Prison, giving them inside information about the Jagkommandos and pointers on how they could evade them. He also wrote another letter, talking about the horrible treatment of mages and had it sent to Siewersk newspapers.

Quickly, as his time was running out, he found his way out of Siewersk as well. Leaving that country was the best thing that he'd done all his life. Which now left him clueless as to what he could do in life.

Which led him to recall all of the ghost stories from his childhood, and he decided that he would - for the first time in his life - do something he really wanted to do all his life. 

See a ghost.

He found his way to a mountain he knew was talked about in one of his grandmother's stories. It was an ancient Mountain Home, said to be used by ancient Siewersk kings - up until one of them had done the forbidden act of incest, upon which he was cursed by the Spirits of Winter (Guardian Saints of Siewersk Mountains), damning him and his entire family in the Mountain Home to forever lurk those halls, without food or drink - except their own flesh. 

It was a gruesome story, Jurgen knew. Being told about it as a child was even worse but he didn't really judge his grandma - the point of the story was dead clear. Don't sleep with your family members or you'll be cursed to cannibalize them forever.

The climb wasn't very hard for him, since he was at the peak of his physical condition. The Mountain Home looked like every other ruin he'd come across in his short life of 45 years, but it did have an ominous air around it. Something, a gut feeling that was telling him not to go inside. 

He went inside. And - as it had turned out - the ghost stories were true! But not exactly as told. 

Instead of a mad king who was eating his family members in an eternal cycle that was doomed to repeat forever and ever - he had found a twisted monstrosity, vaguely resembling its previous human form - an aberration. But Jurgen knew that he was looking at the King, since the creature clearly had a crown embedded within the flesh of its head. The halls were decked with dusty skeletons and rotting corpses, and among them - the King of his Gruesome Hall stood hunched over, with monstrous claws, elongated limbs, a face resembling a beast - and a hole in the chest which gave out a faint purple glow. 

Being an expert swordsman, Jurgen unleashed a flurry of cuts and stabs at the monster, but the monster proved that it had superhuman reflexes, dodging and parrying each one, forcing Jurgen to take a few steps back in retreat. Which made him remember - he's a Mage now. And as the creature was launching itself in a sprint, Jurgen raised his hand and closed his eyes - summoning forth the fire from his belly. Feeling his fingers swell with explosive power, and as he opened his eyes, streaks of white-hot energy erupted from his outstretched fist, taking the creature who was once a King of Siewersk directly into its chest. 

The creature was sent flying across the room, crashing into a finely carved wooden throne behind it.

The monstrous King, dead on his throne. And as its limp body thrashed one last time, its chest tore open and from them, a purple crystal fell onto the stone floor with a loud clinking sound. As he was wearing armored gauntlets, Jurgen picked the crystal up, and noticed that it had a large crack on its surface - which was something the crystals he had seen in Siewersk never had. Out of curiosity, he went to the monster's corpse and put the crystal near its flesh. It immediately started to react to it, the muscles contracted and the hand started moving. Jurgen immediately backed away, and took off the monster's head with a clean cut. He put the crystal near it again, and this time - there was no reaction.

As he was holding onto it for a few minutes, his hand started feeling numb. He put the crystal down and took off his gauntlet. his entire fist was blackened, and his skin started to appear scaly - but as he looked at it - that quickly subsided. 

The crystal, he understood, had something to do with why the king became the twisted monster he just fought.

He fashioned himself a basket of sorts, something to allow him to carry the crystal without touching it directly and upon exiting the Mountain Hall - he threw it in the deep well that was standing uncovered in the front yard.

Years would go by, and Jurgen would travel the land, looking for stories of monsters, hauntings, ghosts and similar things - investigating, gathering knowledge and most importantly - killing the things which had one unique thing in common: they all had something to do with a cracked crystal. 

As his adventures grew longer, more dangerous and more complicated, Jurgen knew he couldn't do this by himself anymore. So he started gathering a party of eccentrics; people who were willing to go deep into forests, mountains and ruins based on a scary story told by terrified peasants. Time went on, and Jurgen's party grew. They took payment for each job they would do, ridding the village or city of their "ghost", making everyone feel safe again.

They named themselves The Hunters, and their mission was the extermination of aberrations, as they started calling them, and the removal of anomalies. As well as gathering all relevant knowledge about the way these anomalies and aberrations are created, what causes them and how to best stop them.

                 Hunter Uniforms (visual inspiration)

Cracked Crystals

Crystals vary from small to large, and they are power banks of magical energy that can be used in various ways - from powering the heating system of an entire city block to being a source of extra power for a weak mage.

If a Crystal is cracked, however - when enough physical force is applied to the crystal, such as striking it with a hammer and nail, basically forcing its crystal shell open - the magical energy stored within the Crystal goes haywire. It becomes unpredictable and restless. It flails around wildly, affecting everything it touches in unbelievable ways. 

Since there are eight crystal types: Body, Mind, Essence, Void, Air, Earth, Fire and Water, cracking different crystal types will have different effects.

For example, cracking a Body Crystal causes a wide range of mutations, most often. 

Cracking a Mind Crystal can cause Mind Illusions, bubbles of space where your psyche can easily be broken like a thin sheet of glass.

Cracked Essence Crystals are one of the more dangerous ones, since they create reality-bending illusions, which make it very difficult for Hunters to locate the source.

Cracked Elemental Crystals can mutate creatures or create aerial effects, it is completely random.

The Hunter's duty is to locate the Cracked Crystal, isolate it and enclose it within a Crystal Containment Unit (CCU), which has a specially made interior made with Crystallum (a special metal that can resonate with the magic energy in the crystals), thus blocking the radiating wild energies from causing harm to the outside. When a Cracked Crystal is enclosed within a CCU, the anomaly immediately ceases to exist, and the aberration dies completely.

That is the only job of the Hunters. To get rid of these anomalies and aberrations in any way, shape or form possible.

Anomalies: Aerial effects, illusions, haunted castles, etc. The Cracked Crystals that don't have anything to do with physical monsters are called anomalies, and are relatively harder to resolve than aberrations. Hunting anomalies is what claims the most of Hunter lives.

Aberrations: Monsters, mutants, "demons", "ghosts", etc... if it has a physical body, human, humanoid or monstrous - it is an aberration. The only proper way of killing them is the removal of the head, and the removal of the Crystal Heart. 

Completely destroying the aberrations is dangerous because - if the cracked crystal is destroyed, there is no telling how the magic energies that are raging inside could react. It could do nothing, or it could blow an entire mountain to pieces. There were incidents.

Destroying a Crystal Heart is the absolute last and final option for every Hunter, and it is advised that the Hunters rather give their lives than destroy the Heart. 

Who are the Hunters today?

Jurgen died a peaceful death, and was replaced by his longtime friend, Saariel, an ex-Janissary from Selman, who took over as Leader of the Hunt, the Head Hunter. Years passed, and the Hunters changed many of their Head Hunters. For decades, they have been operating as an independent organization, with headquarters and safe houses all across the Continent - including Siewersk - and have established a fortuitous deal with Elderhearth, Selman and Sredinah. In exchange for their services, these three countries were financing them, and supplying them with weapons, armor and the production of the CCU's. The Hunters were a welcome sight in every place, easily recognizable by their signature triangle hats and long trench coats, they brought awesome tales of monster hunting gladly listened to by children and adults alike, and wherever they went - there was always a job waiting for them. 

After Jack Waylander became Archmage of the Librarians, he had decided that it was time to fully utilize the Hunters and their massive amounts of knowledge, so he had initiated the process of Hunters becoming a part of the Librarian Order. 

Now, the Hunters act under Librarian jurisdiction, with a centralized HQ on a secret location, full backing of the greatest Mage Order, access to their resources - the Hunters are a group of elite warriors, heavily trained to fight against the impossible and the monstrous without fear.

"We don't care about your nationality, nor your religion, nor your gender. If you're crazy enough to venture into a deep forest looking for monsters, or if you are thrilled by scary stories - then, you are a Hunter at heart. So come and join us, in the Hunter's Lodge."

- A text from an old Hunter pamphlet, from the days of recruiting volunteers