About 9 Rings

9 Rings is a pen‐and‐paper role‐playing game in which players take on the roles of half demon, half mortal warriors in a land with peril, adventure, and inter‐dimensional rifts. The game gets its name because the inter‐dimensional rifts consist of nine rings of parallel planes of existence, where players will fight mortals, demons, sprits, dragons, giants, and gods for control of the mortal realm, all fueled by the newly released will of Amatavalu, The Dark One.

The Game is run by a Realm Master (RM) who unfolds the adventure for the players. The RM has final say in all rule‐based arguments. If following an adventure guide, the RM may add in whatever new content they like or create an entire story of their own. However, the RM is always tasked with the responsibility of challenging the players appropriately and maintaining balance within the game.

9 RINGS BACKGROUND STORY

It began with the Ancestral Gods. The Ancestral Gods were the originals, all formed out of the will of the very energy of the universe. The first was Tao, the bringer of all life, a creator of the earthly realm, who in his act to make himself and his creations perfect, extracted all traces of darkness and evil from them. But his action had unforeseen consequences, for all that extracted evil merged together and created the supreme entity of darkness known as Amatavalu, or The Dark One, who revolted and absorbed the power of Tao by turning his love to hate. Tao, in one last effort to save his creations, endowed seven mortals with his knowledge and divine power. These mortals became the Seven Sages, each one a high priest of Miran, the Order of Peace.

After his victory, Amatavalu’s will was so powerful that a trace of his darkness was sewn into the soul of every living thing in the world. Those that succumb to the dark become his slave. Some were born with a greater sliver of The Dark One in their souls than others, causing these unfortunate beings to be under the influence of this terrible power to the extent that physical transformations could occur, altering not just their consciousness, but their very bodies. As such, horrible mutations would occur and these unfortunate beings became known as the Wretched.

Now The Dark One was a supreme force that existed not as a solid physical being in the earthly realm, but as the manifestation of hate itself, whose cumulative mass and sum existed as an exact replica of the amount of hate, malice, and ill will throughout the world. Amatavalu’s first act was to begin the Great Wars in forgotten history, where nearly all life was wiped out. This time was known as the Great Flood – a flood of evil, not water, which caused man to go mad with blood lust and tear all life asunder. It was at that point that The Dark One finally became strong enough to exact his will upon reality in the form of the Demon Gods, or the Tan ku.

The Demon Gods were created by The Dark One in the beginnings of recorded history. As the harbingers of doom and his emissaries to the abyss, the demonic lords would ensure his rule over the corporeal realm of man and at last give him dominion over all existence. The first of these Demon Gods was Shandarus, the Demon God of Hate, Malice, and War.

Outside in the dusty plans of the torn and blood-spattered lands of the Great Wars, the old ones and elder demons rose from sleep. The commotion even brought back races long thought to be extinct, like the Tonku, great horned beasts forty feet in size and covered in spikes, and the lrolath, shadows that can gain corporeal form and tear flesh from bone in a single strike. Man transformed and, in those horned mutations, thousands of new demons were born and died. The war went on with every one for themselves and everyone out for blood. Finally, after forty years, the last of them was dead – all man and beast was reduced to smoldering ash.

Sensing something was wrong, The Dark One turned his gaze to the gates of Miran and he saw the lone survivors, the Seven Sages, return from their deep sleep unscathed by the horrors and preserved from even time itself. Even with all the death and hatred that had just occurred, The Dark One still did not have the power to enter the physical world in his pure from as long as these Seven Sages remained.

However, The Dark One would not be stopped. With all his might and from the echoing souls of those slain in battle, he summoned two more Demon Gods: Gortaiath, the Demon God of Hunger, Lust, and Gluttony, and Vakrath, the Demon God of Visions, Lies, and Madness. Their first task was to eradicate the sages of Miran. As they licked their razor-bladed lips, a shiver went down the spine of every living thing left in the stone-covered sanctuary, as they knew the fight of their lives was about to begin.

It was a battle of the three Demon Gods against the gates of Miran. The magically honed and guarded fortress, said to have been carved from the very stones of creation itself, would now have to suffer the full force of these Demon Gods. But as the influence of The Dark One was still ripe throughout the land, if the sages raised so much as a finger in anger or revenge, they risked falling under his spell and turning into the very horrors they were fighting. For now, only defense was possible.

That was, until one day, when the Seven Sages combined their mental powers and the vested power of the Created to form new dimensional planes of existence, free from the ties of mankind and locked tight between the very folds of time. With all their power, they summoned nine grand dimensional planes – nine holes leading to new realms. These holes spun before the Demon Gods, siphoning the air into an all-powerful whirlwind that lifted the great beasts of their feet.

Then, powering more and more energy into the storm, the sages made the winds so strong as to tear the Demon Gods apart, splitting them off into three pieces each, with each piece being absorbed by one of the nine dimensional holes. However, the sages did not stop there. Using the last of the God energy of Tao himself, the sages strengthened the trans-dimensional storm and shot the winds into the heavens, right into the Broken Kingdom of Tao and straight into the heart of Amatavalu. The winds tore at him, spinning and ripping until he was torn into nine pieces and absorbed by each dimension.

The dimensions were then sealed and each sage crafted a ring to hold the power of each dimension, with the Grand Sage getting three of them. The gates of Miran were opened and humanity was once again safe, for now. The Seven Sages parted ways, traveling to the farthest corners of the earth to seek out ways of restoring their power should the world ever need it again.