Horizons
A Horizon is what exceeds us: Death, Time, the Divine, the Unknown, the Collective…
A horizon only exists from a point of view: it is always our horizon. We never reach it; it recedes as we advance. And every age has its own: death was not seen the same way in the age of the pyramids, of the danse macabre, or of the intensive care unit.
A Horizon is not a place. One does not travel into Death as into another world: one approaches it, through those who stand between.
Horizon, Powers, Agents
The Horizon is the unit of play. It brings together:
- several Powers, the forms this Horizon has taken across ages and cultures;
- families of Agents, the figures through which each Power becomes present in the world;
- the novelties that appear in the world and that none of these Powers contains yet.
The Powers of a single Horizon may cooperate, ignore each other, or contend for what appears in the world. They never confront each other directly: their Agents do it for them.
A Horizon also specifies what makes up the domain of each of its Powers, what could truly extend it, and what a Power gives back to the Agent who brings it something it did not yet possess.
Why Agents?
A Horizon does not merely supply creatures and powers. It must be able to answer three questions:
- What difference of scale makes its Agents necessary?
- What does their appearance allow each side to experience?
- How can this relationship transform each of them?
Each family of Agents must also be able to say why it is a figure of this Horizon. The vampire does not belong to Death because it is frightening, but because it lets us occupy an impossible position: immortal without being alive.
A figure that answers none of these questions has no place on a Horizon, even if "it would be cool".
Suggestions, not truth
The Powers, their Attributes, and their families of Agents are given as suggestions. They are not the truth of the game or official lore: another table would give Death or the Divine a different voice, and that is as it should be.
On the contrary, the game invites every GM and every table to adapt, remove, or amend them to suit the game they want to play, as long as each Power still answers the three questions above. Tuning the Game explains how.
Choosing your figure
Choosing an Agent also means choosing the figure from which you want to approach what exceeds us. During creation, each player can ask a question — of themselves, not of their character:
What does this figure let me think that I cannot think otherwise?
No one needs to answer out loud. But the answer often says what the player will come to the table looking for.
Those who know
Most humans know nothing of Agents. Not all: some know they exist, know some of them, have crossed paths with them, owe them something, or fear them. Such knowledge is never harmless. It makes them allies, witnesses, prey, or Forces the Agents must reckon with.
The game is not made for playing an ordinary human who has been initiated. A player can still start that way, if their character becomes an Agent very early, as soon as the first session: this is the Revelation starting point. And an Agent who becomes human again remains one of those who know.
Combining
Horizons are played à la carte.
- A single Horizon can be explored in depth, across the ages, with Agents from different families.
- A table can ignore a family of Agents that does not speak to it.
- A campaign can bring together Powers from several Horizons.
What connects very different figures is not a shared cosmology: it is what exceeds them. The Powers do not need to share the same origin, understand one another, or be explained by a single theory.
An Agent of the Passage investigates dead who no longer pass over. They discover that a recent Power, Communication, keeps their voices online, and that an Angel is interested in what those voices say about the soul.
Death, the Collective, and the Divine meet here around a single novelty.
Bringing Agents together
Agents of different Powers, even of different Horizons, can play together. Player characters do not confront one another directly: they may have their differences, but they can also bring each other what their Powers do not give them.
Their coming together still needs a reason in the fiction. Agents are not mixed arbitrarily. A few leads:
- allies of circumstance;
- Agents drawn to the same domain, or to the same novelty;
- a group united by something that exceeds them all;
- Agents who know the same human and are indebted to them.
Tones
A single Horizon can support very different experiences. A campaign may be realistic, epic, dark, dreamlike, satirical, tragic, or use another tone. Tone changes presentation, situations, and consequences without requiring a different core game: a table that came for adventure and a table that came to reflect on what exceeds us are playing the same game.
Each Horizon says which tones it lends itself to.
Timescales
A campaign can stay within one period or cross years, centuries, or millennia. Historical change can become part of play, but this is an option rather than a requirement.
Every age has its own horizon: death, the divine, or the unknown are not seen the same way from one century to the next. A campaign that crosses the ages shows what a Horizon becomes — and what the Agents have made of their Powers.
Each Horizon also says which timescales suit it. For Time, a campaign's timescale becomes the very subject of play.
Crossing the ages
Three paths make long timescales playable.
- Immortality. The Agent endures, like the vampire or the Eminence who advised the pharaohs. They keep their Anchors, but time wears them down: those they love die, their trade disappears, their city changes its name. They must make new ones, or soon be nothing but their Bond.
- Reincarnation. The Agent returns, from one life to the next. Their Bond remains, since their Power finds them again; their Anchors are those of a new life. Sometimes a trait survives, one that remembers.
- Succession. The Power remains, and the players take on its Agents from one age to the next. What one Agent brought to it, those who come after inherit.
Playing with History
A campaign across the ages meets great events: the fall of Rome, the plague, the storming of the Bastille. The game suggests making them a secret history, one with its tragic side: History cannot be overturned. The Agents do not keep the plague out of the city; they decide what happens at the gate of the lazaretto. They act at the margins or in the shadows, and give known events another meaning.
A table may prefer a history that branches. Between the two, it can also keep the event and let its toll shift: the plague enters the city, but what the Agents do changes who dies, how many, and how. It is one of the choices to make before playing (see Tuning the Game).
The Horizons
- Death — what no one can occupy while alive.
- The Divine — what founds, commands, or judges.
- Dreams — what everyone visits every night without being able to inhabit it awake.
- Time — what came before Humanity and will outlive it.
- The Unknown — what resists all our categories.
- The Collective — what we have made together and what now exceeds us.
- Authority — what makes others act, or act together.
- Desire — what moves us without our having chosen it.
- Destruction — what undoes what seemed bound to last.
- Nature — what lives without us, beyond the edge of the woods.
Other Horizons remain possible, provided they answer the three questions of "Why Agents?".
Familiar figures
The figures you already know have their place. They are simply arranged by what exceeds them rather than by genre.
| If you are thinking of… | Look toward… |
|---|---|
| vampires, ghosts, psychopomps, grim reapers | Death |
| angels, demons, ancient gods, demigods, prophets | the Divine |
| sandmen, nightmares, incubi, dream messengers | Dreams |
| immortals, oracles, the reincarnated, the chosen of destiny | Time |
| extraterrestrials, hybrids, contactees, cosmic horror | the Unknown |
| new gods of money, media, and nation, spirits of cities, legendary smiths, golems | the Collective |
| kings' lieutenants, gray eminences, spies, Prometheus, Robin Hood | Authority |
| Cupid, muses, bacchantes, ogres | Desire |
| berserkers, tricksters, horsemen of the Apocalypse, giant monsters | Destruction |
| werewolves, fae, pixies, korrigans, dryads, undines | Nature |
The same figure can belong to several Horizons depending on what you want to do with it: the vampire is a figure of Death, but an immortal vampire crossing the centuries also looks toward Time.