![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cameoflage(Originally posted July 2017)
This game has a lot of jargon and I am here to explain it to you so that both of us can keep it straight. Inspired by the enduring popularity of the Changeling one, which continues to get a slow but steady drip of notes to this day.
This cheat sheet is derived purely from Promethean 1e. I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible to 1e lore and mechanics, but if you’re using it with 2e there will be inaccuracies wherever I reference something that was changed between editions.
Athanor: Similar to a prestige class; an investment of Vitriol allowing a Promethean to gain a pool of special abilities and a unique perk by following a particular ethos, symbolised by a motif that is usually a real or fictional animal. Some of the benefits of an Athanor persist even after becoming human, although in a lessened form.
Individual Athanors are associated with specific Lineages, and to learn one, a Promethean has to have at least three dots of Azoth and the assistance of another Promethean who already has an Athanor. (It doesn’t have to be the same one.) At four dots you can learn another Lineage’s Athanor, and at five you can make up your own. Athanors use Reagent points to power their abilities, which are generated and spent separately from Pyros.
Finally, a Promethean can only ever have one Athanor.
Azoth: Refined, innate Pyros; how much of it you have determines how powerful you are. How much Pyros you can hold, and how much you can spend per turn, is determined by your Azoth. Increasing your Azoth to 5 or more, especially above 8, also makes it easier to become human at the end of the Pilgrimage. Walking around with a high Azoth has detrimental side effects; it awakens Pandorans at a greater distance (by Azoth 7 it wakes up every Pandoran within city limits), and it makes it harder for mortals to resist the onset of Disquiet, even other Prometheans’ Disquiet if there’s another one near you. A lot of miscellaneous Promethean things also have their intensity or duration determined by your Azoth, and as with World of Darkness magicalness stats in general, its potency affects your resistance to supernatural powers.
Azothic radiance: A Promethean’s aura, the size of which is determined by how high your Azoth is. As mentioned previously, it wakes up any Pandorans within its range. Other Prometheans can sense it too.
Bestowment: A medium-potency power granted to you as a product of your Lineage. Each of the five standard Lineages plus the Zeka has a few standard Bestowments available, although only one per Lineage is in the corebook. The Unfleshed can have any other Lineage’s Bestowment, or any two-dot Transmutation as a Bestowment. Custom Bestowments are also an option, especially for oddball Prometheans with strange Lineages (for instance, all Extempore).
Construct: A Promethean made out of inanimate materials such as wood or stone. Can belong to any Lineage, and the five standard Lineages each have a material that works best for creating Constructs.
The material used to build them confers particular advantages and disadvantages, such as a wooden Promethean being even more vulnerable to fire but half as vulnerable to bashing damage. They also completely lack the illusory human form that other Prometheans (even the Unfleshed, who also aren’t made from human corpses) have. Being made of a solid mass of non-biological material means they don’t need to breathe or eat and have none of the vulnerabilities of internal organs, but they also don’t generate as much free Pyros since it’s being used to fuel themselves, and their Disquiet builds faster.
Demiurge: The human (or, on much rarer occasion, other supernatural being such as vampire, werewolf, or changeling) who creates the first Promethean in a Lineage.
For the five primary Lineages this happened anywhere from a couple hundred years to several millennia ago, but for the Zeka at least five people have done it independently during the 20th century and for the Unfleshed it’s actually more common to be created by a demiurge than another Unfleshed.
The Extempore, by nature, do not have them.
Disfigurements: What a Promethean actually looks like, more specifically the features that couldn’t possibly be parts of a living human’s body, such as gashes that leak black ectoplasm or an obviously dead complexion. Usually not visible to anyone except other Prometheans, but they become visible for a brief flash when using transmutations or doing anything else that involves spending Pyros, for a longer time when you tap into electrical power to heal your wounds, and they stay visible when you’re dead. There are a couple other things that reveal them, like one Unfleshed-specific Merit.
Disquiet: A supernatural influence causing mortals and most other gamelines’ supernatural beings to distrust, dislike, and generally be assholes to Prometheans. It starts with troubling dreams and intrusive thoughts, and escalates from there over time into compulsive toxic behavior of various types, a fixation on the Promethean, and eventually the desire to kill them.
Each Lineage has a different kind of detrimental effect on the reactions of others through their Disquiet; the Unfleshed and the Extempore either have their Disquiet take unique, personalized forms, or cause essentially the same Disquiet reactions as one of the other Lineages.
The Divine Fire: The metaphysical transformative force of nature that powers Prometheans and incidentally also Pandorans. Most other things in the world react poorly to it when it’s present in the concentrations necessary to run an entire creature off of it, although it is in fact abundant in nature at greatly lower concentrations.
(”Pyros” is sometimes used as an alternate name for the Divine Fire in general, and “Azoth” is also used this way sometimes for Promethean-specific things.)
Elpis: An aspect of the Divine Fire that grants prophetic visions and spiritual guidance. To use Elpis, you have to purchase it as a Merit, with the number of dots determining how many clues it gives you when you use it.
The term is also sometimes used for the helpful side of the Divine Fire in a more general sense.
Firestorms: Hurricane-like storms with extra fire, caused by Flux and wasted Pyros.
This can happen as a result of multiple dramatic failures on rolls that involve spending Pyros, or just one dramatic failure if you have a high Azoth and were trying to spend a lot of Pyros. They also show up to accompany greater qashmallim, can be summoned on purpose if you don’t care about wrecking the place, and sometimes just appear near the end of a Pilgrimage.
Weird shit can happen in a Firestorm, including temporary mutations or even Prometheans being briefly turned human (on a strictly physical level, not metaphysical).
Flux: The dark side of the Divine Fire; the destructive, entropic counterpart to Azoth. Pandorans run on Flux the way Prometheans run on Azoth, and Flux soaks into the local environment when they’re an active presence in the area. A Flux-tainted location can cause physical and mental degradation to humans, normal animals, and other supernaturals just by being there, although for the most part it’s reversible if you leave and stay away long enough.
Going to the Wastes: Going into the middle of nowhere and isolating yourself from contact or straight-up hibernating, without using any Transmutations there. This pauses the aging process and allows you to scrub the Torment out of your aura; it also causes Azoth to drop, by one dot for the first month and then twice as long for each successive dot. (The discarded Azoth escapes into the world and can potentially be eaten by Pandorans or consumed by Firestorms.) After you come back from the wastes, you get a bonus to resist Torment until you start raising your Azoth again.
Humanity: Your replacement for the Morality meter mortals have; it reflects how connected you are to human morals and your ability to pretend you’re human. It’s also used as a dice pool when resisting Torment, preventing a new Promethean from exploding into Pandorans when you create them, and attempting to turn into a human at the end of your Pilgrimage.
Kryptae: Animals or plants that absorbed a bunch of Flux out of their environment (for animals, this is basically always by eating a dead Pandoran) and turned into Pandoran-like vicious mutants. They seem normal until the first time they encounter a Promethean, which activates the Flux like it does with Pandorans.
Lacunae: Thefts of Vitriol from the body of a Promethean, as performed by a Pandoran or another Promethean.
Because it’s horrible, this causes Prometheans performing it to automatically lose a Humanity point on top of the usual Humanity degeneration roll you make when you do horrible things.
Unsurprisingly, having lacuna’d someone within the last year provides the biggest possible penalty to a roll for a Promethean to become mortal, and having done it more than once - often enough to get desensitized - may well prevent the perpetrator from ever becoming human.
Lineage: What kind of Promethean you are, more or less. Essentially, it has two meanings: which specific Promethean Progenitor you descend from, and more generally what category of Promethean you belong to.
The options are Frankenstein, Galateid, Osiran, Tammuz, Ulgan, Extempore, Unfleshed, and Zeka.
The overwhelming majority of Prometheans from the first five Lineages go back to a common ancestor anywhere from a couple hundred years ago to several millennia in the past, whereas the Zeka have at least five unrelated Progenitors, the Unfleshed are more often created by demiurges than by others of their kind, and the Extempore appear spontaneously after massive natural disasters infused with the Divine Fire.
The Measure: An instinctive assessment of another Promethean based on their Azothic radiance. Past Torment is noticeable here if you haven’t gone to the wastes between then and now and removed the signs. Personality isn’t a factor in the Measure, it’s just a matter of whether your Azoth is compatible at that point in time.
Milestones: Significant life events or achievements that help a Promethean understand what it means to be human. In addition to character development, these also generate Vitriol.
Mockeries: Pandorans’ equivalent of Promethean Lineages, reflecting which type of Promethean spawned them.
Each Lineage has one; the five core lineages produce the Torch-Born (Frankensteins), Ishtari (Tammuz), Renders (Ulgans), Sebek (Osirans), and the Silent (Galateids), as well as Gremlins from the Unfleshed and Carcinomas from the Zeka.
The Extempore and other oddball Prometheans who aren’t part of a larger Lineage generate unique Mockeries patterned after themselves when they try and fail to create progeny.
Pandorans: Monsters that spawn from failed attempts to create a Promethean and try to steal Pyros and Vitriol from any Prometheans they later encounter. (By eating them. Many are smart enough to trap and/or incapacitate a Promethean and just nibble on them intermittently instead of devouring them all at once, too.)
In the absence of nearby Prometheans they are forced into an inanimate state called Dormancy, and even when active, encountering a human can force them back into Dormancy for a short time.
Most are smaller than an adult human, and most are nonsapient creatures possessing only animal-level intelligence,
but there are exceptions to both of these rules.
They’re capable of fusing with other Pandorans if they’ve been eating plenty of Pyros
lately, although the fusion doesn’t last long; the merged Pandorans are called Praecipitati, or a Praecipitatus if there’s just one. They
do have a Vice, but never a Virtue or morality-type meter such as Humanity, because they’re naturally awful creatures that range from amoral and inconveniently hungry to actively sadistic and malicious.
Pilgrimage: A Promethean’s quest for mortality. The end result is known as the New Dawn or Redemption. The Pilgrimage is also known poetically as the Magnum Opus.
Pilgrim marks: Pictographs used to inform other Prometheans who pass through the area about any notable dangers or resources to be found, whether that’s “generous person who gives out food” or “keep out, severe Pandoran infestation”. Kind of like a cross between hobo signs and alchemical symbols. With the use of a particular Transmutation they can be made invisible to non-Prometheans; otherwise they look like weird graffiti.
Progenitor: The first Promethean in a Lineage, in the sense of having being created by a human demiurge instead of another Promethean.
This makes no functional difference to the potency of the powers you get or the Transmutations you can learn -- you have to start at Azoth 1 just like everyone else -- although a unique, never-before-seen Bestowment is a possibility.
Also it might attract both good and bad attention from other Prometheans if the news gets out, since this is a development so rare that many believe it to be impossible. (This is a plot point in one of the pregenerated stories; by default the character is a not-quite-Osiran created by a human, but the option is left open for him to be an actual Osiran created the usual way who just has an atypical Bestowment and a cloud of misinformation surrounding his origins.)
Pyros: The Divine Fire in the form of unrefined, fluid energy that can be collected and expended again as fuel for Promethean powers. (Basically mana, in other words.) All
Prometheans can hold 10 points of Pyros; each dot of Azoth up to 6
allows them the ability to store one more point in total and spend one more point at a time, and at Azoth 7 your Pyros pool starts expanding even more for each level.
Qashmallim: Angel-like beings (just one is a qashmal) made out of pure Pyros, which might be human-looking, or might be a bunch of abstract shapes that are actively on fire or a car-sized pile of melty wax with a brass seal for a face.
They manifest with a specific purpose -- which can be anything, regardless of whether it’s moral or immoral, vast or trivial; even the qashmallim themselves are unaware of why they need to get these things done -- and are very literally single-minded in their dedication to it, popping into existence with exactly the knowledge and abilities that they need for their Mission and absolutely nothing else.
Some of them have to complete their task by a certain time, others can keep trying until they run out of power. (Depending on power level and whether they’re given a way of refilling Pyros this can take anywhere from a week to several weeks, hastened by actively using their powers.)
If one qashmal ultimately fails at its Mission, no other qashmallim will try to repeat it.
They have two factions, one of them distinctly more destructive and chaotic in the goals it promotes than the other, with discernible differences in aesthetic and powers.
They’re both utterly unknowable and inhuman, and thus even the “good” faction can cause a lot of undeserved suffering and death to others in the pursuit of their Principle, but the Elpidos are more likely to be on your side than the Lilithim are if you don’t like entropy and destruction.
The Ramble: A sort of ritualized infodump about oneself and/or any other Prometheans you’ve met or heard of, conducted when two or more Prometheans meet. Serves as the primary vehicle for Promethean oral tradition.
Redeemed: A Promethean who successfully turned themself into a human. They may or may not remember being anything else. They are the same as regular mortals for almost all purposes, and can potentially be turned into some of the other NWoD gamelines’ formerly-human supernatural beings. (Embraced by vampires or kidnapped by the True Fae and turned into a changeling, for instance, but not turned into a werewolf because in this setting lycanthropy is strictly inborn.)
Some of the Redeemed are immune to Disquiet, but you can’t count on that.
Refinement: The philosophy a Promethean chooses to follow.
The main ones are Aurum (Gold), Cuprum (Copper), Ferrum (Iron), Mercurius (Quicksilver/Mercury), and Stannum (Tin); the expansions add Aes (Bronze), Argentum (Silver), Cobalus (Cobalt), and Plumbum (Lead).
The names are mostly for aesthetic rather than informative purposes. For instance, Gold represents studying humans directly and trying to fit in with them, Iron represents trying to perfect your body, and Silver represents studying the other supernatural beings you can cross paths with in the World of Darkness. They also have names for their adherents, such as Furies for practitioners of Stannum or Mimics for practitioners of Aurum.
Finally there’s the Centimani, also known as the Refinement of Flux or the Hundred Handed, the only Refinement where achieving humanity is not a priority and often not on the agenda at all. They focus on embracing their monstrous nature and the power of Flux instead, and often learn to bend Pandorans to their will or use the same gross shapeshifting transmutations.
Sublimatus: A Pandoran who is a sapient being, created either when an attempt to create a Promethean goes especially badly, a Praecipitatus breaks apart just the right way, or a regular Pandoran feeds on Vitriol. They can sometimes learn Promethean Transmutations. They still have no moral compass whatsoever and are basically always huge jerks.
Throng: A party; a group of Promethean bros. Formally joining one (becoming a member of a branded throng through an alchemical pact) can allow access to unique Transmutations and slow the progression of your respective Wastelands.
Torment: A state of overwhelming emotion that leads to unreasonable, largely uncontrollable behaviour, and which all Prometheans are afflicted with at least occasionally. Different Lineages have different kinds, such as the Zeka’s frenzied and gratuitous Pyros-spending (on anything, the more destructive the better) or the Osirans abruptly losing all concern for emotional matters and remaining ruthlessly emotionless until the Torment wears off.
It primarily builds in response to major personal setbacks, seeing friends succumb to Torment, experiencing the many negative aspects of Promethean life such as someone being a jerk to you specifically because of Disquiet or being threatened with fire, or just from just going too many days without food. However, there are also supernatural means of inducing Torment.
Transmutation: The main, open-ended type of powers Prometheans have. It’s called that because it involves altering the Divine Fire within yourself to do your cool supernatural stuff; Pandorans can do it too, but theirs more often involve shapeshifting into something weird.
Vitriol: The physical manifestation of fulfilled Pilgrimage goals, which exists as a fluid inside the Promethean up until either they use it to improve themself, or someone or something rips it out of them. (It’s also essentially a physical manifestation of XP, but XP that can only be spent on Promethean things, not, say, skill dots or general-purpose Merits.)
Wasteland: The deleterious effect of a Promethean’s presence on any place they spend much time in, and the places so afflicted. It starts out as a minor effect over a small area and gradually both expands and gets worse.
This game has a lot of jargon and I am here to explain it to you so that both of us can keep it straight. Inspired by the enduring popularity of the Changeling one, which continues to get a slow but steady drip of notes to this day.
This cheat sheet is derived purely from Promethean 1e. I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible to 1e lore and mechanics, but if you’re using it with 2e there will be inaccuracies wherever I reference something that was changed between editions.
Athanor: Similar to a prestige class; an investment of Vitriol allowing a Promethean to gain a pool of special abilities and a unique perk by following a particular ethos, symbolised by a motif that is usually a real or fictional animal. Some of the benefits of an Athanor persist even after becoming human, although in a lessened form.
Individual Athanors are associated with specific Lineages, and to learn one, a Promethean has to have at least three dots of Azoth and the assistance of another Promethean who already has an Athanor. (It doesn’t have to be the same one.) At four dots you can learn another Lineage’s Athanor, and at five you can make up your own. Athanors use Reagent points to power their abilities, which are generated and spent separately from Pyros.
Finally, a Promethean can only ever have one Athanor.
Azoth: Refined, innate Pyros; how much of it you have determines how powerful you are. How much Pyros you can hold, and how much you can spend per turn, is determined by your Azoth. Increasing your Azoth to 5 or more, especially above 8, also makes it easier to become human at the end of the Pilgrimage. Walking around with a high Azoth has detrimental side effects; it awakens Pandorans at a greater distance (by Azoth 7 it wakes up every Pandoran within city limits), and it makes it harder for mortals to resist the onset of Disquiet, even other Prometheans’ Disquiet if there’s another one near you. A lot of miscellaneous Promethean things also have their intensity or duration determined by your Azoth, and as with World of Darkness magicalness stats in general, its potency affects your resistance to supernatural powers.
Azothic radiance: A Promethean’s aura, the size of which is determined by how high your Azoth is. As mentioned previously, it wakes up any Pandorans within its range. Other Prometheans can sense it too.
Bestowment: A medium-potency power granted to you as a product of your Lineage. Each of the five standard Lineages plus the Zeka has a few standard Bestowments available, although only one per Lineage is in the corebook. The Unfleshed can have any other Lineage’s Bestowment, or any two-dot Transmutation as a Bestowment. Custom Bestowments are also an option, especially for oddball Prometheans with strange Lineages (for instance, all Extempore).
Construct: A Promethean made out of inanimate materials such as wood or stone. Can belong to any Lineage, and the five standard Lineages each have a material that works best for creating Constructs.
The material used to build them confers particular advantages and disadvantages, such as a wooden Promethean being even more vulnerable to fire but half as vulnerable to bashing damage. They also completely lack the illusory human form that other Prometheans (even the Unfleshed, who also aren’t made from human corpses) have. Being made of a solid mass of non-biological material means they don’t need to breathe or eat and have none of the vulnerabilities of internal organs, but they also don’t generate as much free Pyros since it’s being used to fuel themselves, and their Disquiet builds faster.
Demiurge: The human (or, on much rarer occasion, other supernatural being such as vampire, werewolf, or changeling) who creates the first Promethean in a Lineage.
For the five primary Lineages this happened anywhere from a couple hundred years to several millennia ago, but for the Zeka at least five people have done it independently during the 20th century and for the Unfleshed it’s actually more common to be created by a demiurge than another Unfleshed.
The Extempore, by nature, do not have them.
Disfigurements: What a Promethean actually looks like, more specifically the features that couldn’t possibly be parts of a living human’s body, such as gashes that leak black ectoplasm or an obviously dead complexion. Usually not visible to anyone except other Prometheans, but they become visible for a brief flash when using transmutations or doing anything else that involves spending Pyros, for a longer time when you tap into electrical power to heal your wounds, and they stay visible when you’re dead. There are a couple other things that reveal them, like one Unfleshed-specific Merit.
Disquiet: A supernatural influence causing mortals and most other gamelines’ supernatural beings to distrust, dislike, and generally be assholes to Prometheans. It starts with troubling dreams and intrusive thoughts, and escalates from there over time into compulsive toxic behavior of various types, a fixation on the Promethean, and eventually the desire to kill them.
Each Lineage has a different kind of detrimental effect on the reactions of others through their Disquiet; the Unfleshed and the Extempore either have their Disquiet take unique, personalized forms, or cause essentially the same Disquiet reactions as one of the other Lineages.
The Divine Fire: The metaphysical transformative force of nature that powers Prometheans and incidentally also Pandorans. Most other things in the world react poorly to it when it’s present in the concentrations necessary to run an entire creature off of it, although it is in fact abundant in nature at greatly lower concentrations.
(”Pyros” is sometimes used as an alternate name for the Divine Fire in general, and “Azoth” is also used this way sometimes for Promethean-specific things.)
Elpis: An aspect of the Divine Fire that grants prophetic visions and spiritual guidance. To use Elpis, you have to purchase it as a Merit, with the number of dots determining how many clues it gives you when you use it.
The term is also sometimes used for the helpful side of the Divine Fire in a more general sense.
Firestorms: Hurricane-like storms with extra fire, caused by Flux and wasted Pyros.
This can happen as a result of multiple dramatic failures on rolls that involve spending Pyros, or just one dramatic failure if you have a high Azoth and were trying to spend a lot of Pyros. They also show up to accompany greater qashmallim, can be summoned on purpose if you don’t care about wrecking the place, and sometimes just appear near the end of a Pilgrimage.
Weird shit can happen in a Firestorm, including temporary mutations or even Prometheans being briefly turned human (on a strictly physical level, not metaphysical).
Flux: The dark side of the Divine Fire; the destructive, entropic counterpart to Azoth. Pandorans run on Flux the way Prometheans run on Azoth, and Flux soaks into the local environment when they’re an active presence in the area. A Flux-tainted location can cause physical and mental degradation to humans, normal animals, and other supernaturals just by being there, although for the most part it’s reversible if you leave and stay away long enough.
Going to the Wastes: Going into the middle of nowhere and isolating yourself from contact or straight-up hibernating, without using any Transmutations there. This pauses the aging process and allows you to scrub the Torment out of your aura; it also causes Azoth to drop, by one dot for the first month and then twice as long for each successive dot. (The discarded Azoth escapes into the world and can potentially be eaten by Pandorans or consumed by Firestorms.) After you come back from the wastes, you get a bonus to resist Torment until you start raising your Azoth again.
Humanity: Your replacement for the Morality meter mortals have; it reflects how connected you are to human morals and your ability to pretend you’re human. It’s also used as a dice pool when resisting Torment, preventing a new Promethean from exploding into Pandorans when you create them, and attempting to turn into a human at the end of your Pilgrimage.
Kryptae: Animals or plants that absorbed a bunch of Flux out of their environment (for animals, this is basically always by eating a dead Pandoran) and turned into Pandoran-like vicious mutants. They seem normal until the first time they encounter a Promethean, which activates the Flux like it does with Pandorans.
Lacunae: Thefts of Vitriol from the body of a Promethean, as performed by a Pandoran or another Promethean.
Because it’s horrible, this causes Prometheans performing it to automatically lose a Humanity point on top of the usual Humanity degeneration roll you make when you do horrible things.
Unsurprisingly, having lacuna’d someone within the last year provides the biggest possible penalty to a roll for a Promethean to become mortal, and having done it more than once - often enough to get desensitized - may well prevent the perpetrator from ever becoming human.
Lineage: What kind of Promethean you are, more or less. Essentially, it has two meanings: which specific Promethean Progenitor you descend from, and more generally what category of Promethean you belong to.
The options are Frankenstein, Galateid, Osiran, Tammuz, Ulgan, Extempore, Unfleshed, and Zeka.
The overwhelming majority of Prometheans from the first five Lineages go back to a common ancestor anywhere from a couple hundred years ago to several millennia in the past, whereas the Zeka have at least five unrelated Progenitors, the Unfleshed are more often created by demiurges than by others of their kind, and the Extempore appear spontaneously after massive natural disasters infused with the Divine Fire.
The Measure: An instinctive assessment of another Promethean based on their Azothic radiance. Past Torment is noticeable here if you haven’t gone to the wastes between then and now and removed the signs. Personality isn’t a factor in the Measure, it’s just a matter of whether your Azoth is compatible at that point in time.
Milestones: Significant life events or achievements that help a Promethean understand what it means to be human. In addition to character development, these also generate Vitriol.
Mockeries: Pandorans’ equivalent of Promethean Lineages, reflecting which type of Promethean spawned them.
Each Lineage has one; the five core lineages produce the Torch-Born (Frankensteins), Ishtari (Tammuz), Renders (Ulgans), Sebek (Osirans), and the Silent (Galateids), as well as Gremlins from the Unfleshed and Carcinomas from the Zeka.
The Extempore and other oddball Prometheans who aren’t part of a larger Lineage generate unique Mockeries patterned after themselves when they try and fail to create progeny.
Pandorans: Monsters that spawn from failed attempts to create a Promethean and try to steal Pyros and Vitriol from any Prometheans they later encounter. (By eating them. Many are smart enough to trap and/or incapacitate a Promethean and just nibble on them intermittently instead of devouring them all at once, too.)
In the absence of nearby Prometheans they are forced into an inanimate state called Dormancy, and even when active, encountering a human can force them back into Dormancy for a short time.
Most are smaller than an adult human, and most are nonsapient creatures possessing only animal-level intelligence,
but there are exceptions to both of these rules.
They’re capable of fusing with other Pandorans if they’ve been eating plenty of Pyros
lately, although the fusion doesn’t last long; the merged Pandorans are called Praecipitati, or a Praecipitatus if there’s just one. They
do have a Vice, but never a Virtue or morality-type meter such as Humanity, because they’re naturally awful creatures that range from amoral and inconveniently hungry to actively sadistic and malicious.
Pilgrimage: A Promethean’s quest for mortality. The end result is known as the New Dawn or Redemption. The Pilgrimage is also known poetically as the Magnum Opus.
Pilgrim marks: Pictographs used to inform other Prometheans who pass through the area about any notable dangers or resources to be found, whether that’s “generous person who gives out food” or “keep out, severe Pandoran infestation”. Kind of like a cross between hobo signs and alchemical symbols. With the use of a particular Transmutation they can be made invisible to non-Prometheans; otherwise they look like weird graffiti.
Progenitor: The first Promethean in a Lineage, in the sense of having being created by a human demiurge instead of another Promethean.
This makes no functional difference to the potency of the powers you get or the Transmutations you can learn -- you have to start at Azoth 1 just like everyone else -- although a unique, never-before-seen Bestowment is a possibility.
Also it might attract both good and bad attention from other Prometheans if the news gets out, since this is a development so rare that many believe it to be impossible. (This is a plot point in one of the pregenerated stories; by default the character is a not-quite-Osiran created by a human, but the option is left open for him to be an actual Osiran created the usual way who just has an atypical Bestowment and a cloud of misinformation surrounding his origins.)
Pyros: The Divine Fire in the form of unrefined, fluid energy that can be collected and expended again as fuel for Promethean powers. (Basically mana, in other words.) All
Prometheans can hold 10 points of Pyros; each dot of Azoth up to 6
allows them the ability to store one more point in total and spend one more point at a time, and at Azoth 7 your Pyros pool starts expanding even more for each level.
Qashmallim: Angel-like beings (just one is a qashmal) made out of pure Pyros, which might be human-looking, or might be a bunch of abstract shapes that are actively on fire or a car-sized pile of melty wax with a brass seal for a face.
They manifest with a specific purpose -- which can be anything, regardless of whether it’s moral or immoral, vast or trivial; even the qashmallim themselves are unaware of why they need to get these things done -- and are very literally single-minded in their dedication to it, popping into existence with exactly the knowledge and abilities that they need for their Mission and absolutely nothing else.
Some of them have to complete their task by a certain time, others can keep trying until they run out of power. (Depending on power level and whether they’re given a way of refilling Pyros this can take anywhere from a week to several weeks, hastened by actively using their powers.)
If one qashmal ultimately fails at its Mission, no other qashmallim will try to repeat it.
They have two factions, one of them distinctly more destructive and chaotic in the goals it promotes than the other, with discernible differences in aesthetic and powers.
They’re both utterly unknowable and inhuman, and thus even the “good” faction can cause a lot of undeserved suffering and death to others in the pursuit of their Principle, but the Elpidos are more likely to be on your side than the Lilithim are if you don’t like entropy and destruction.
The Ramble: A sort of ritualized infodump about oneself and/or any other Prometheans you’ve met or heard of, conducted when two or more Prometheans meet. Serves as the primary vehicle for Promethean oral tradition.
Redeemed: A Promethean who successfully turned themself into a human. They may or may not remember being anything else. They are the same as regular mortals for almost all purposes, and can potentially be turned into some of the other NWoD gamelines’ formerly-human supernatural beings. (Embraced by vampires or kidnapped by the True Fae and turned into a changeling, for instance, but not turned into a werewolf because in this setting lycanthropy is strictly inborn.)
Some of the Redeemed are immune to Disquiet, but you can’t count on that.
Refinement: The philosophy a Promethean chooses to follow.
The main ones are Aurum (Gold), Cuprum (Copper), Ferrum (Iron), Mercurius (Quicksilver/Mercury), and Stannum (Tin); the expansions add Aes (Bronze), Argentum (Silver), Cobalus (Cobalt), and Plumbum (Lead).
The names are mostly for aesthetic rather than informative purposes. For instance, Gold represents studying humans directly and trying to fit in with them, Iron represents trying to perfect your body, and Silver represents studying the other supernatural beings you can cross paths with in the World of Darkness. They also have names for their adherents, such as Furies for practitioners of Stannum or Mimics for practitioners of Aurum.
Finally there’s the Centimani, also known as the Refinement of Flux or the Hundred Handed, the only Refinement where achieving humanity is not a priority and often not on the agenda at all. They focus on embracing their monstrous nature and the power of Flux instead, and often learn to bend Pandorans to their will or use the same gross shapeshifting transmutations.
Sublimatus: A Pandoran who is a sapient being, created either when an attempt to create a Promethean goes especially badly, a Praecipitatus breaks apart just the right way, or a regular Pandoran feeds on Vitriol. They can sometimes learn Promethean Transmutations. They still have no moral compass whatsoever and are basically always huge jerks.
Throng: A party; a group of Promethean bros. Formally joining one (becoming a member of a branded throng through an alchemical pact) can allow access to unique Transmutations and slow the progression of your respective Wastelands.
Torment: A state of overwhelming emotion that leads to unreasonable, largely uncontrollable behaviour, and which all Prometheans are afflicted with at least occasionally. Different Lineages have different kinds, such as the Zeka’s frenzied and gratuitous Pyros-spending (on anything, the more destructive the better) or the Osirans abruptly losing all concern for emotional matters and remaining ruthlessly emotionless until the Torment wears off.
It primarily builds in response to major personal setbacks, seeing friends succumb to Torment, experiencing the many negative aspects of Promethean life such as someone being a jerk to you specifically because of Disquiet or being threatened with fire, or just from just going too many days without food. However, there are also supernatural means of inducing Torment.
Transmutation: The main, open-ended type of powers Prometheans have. It’s called that because it involves altering the Divine Fire within yourself to do your cool supernatural stuff; Pandorans can do it too, but theirs more often involve shapeshifting into something weird.
Vitriol: The physical manifestation of fulfilled Pilgrimage goals, which exists as a fluid inside the Promethean up until either they use it to improve themself, or someone or something rips it out of them. (It’s also essentially a physical manifestation of XP, but XP that can only be spent on Promethean things, not, say, skill dots or general-purpose Merits.)
Wasteland: The deleterious effect of a Promethean’s presence on any place they spend much time in, and the places so afflicted. It starts out as a minor effect over a small area and gradually both expands and gets worse.
