The Ngoroi—the Living Gods—are entities of vast power that are the ultimate source of all life on Arumo. They are often cruel, amoral, and capricious, embodying the most terrible aspects of the natural world they created. However, many are willing to help humanity, and can even grant humans great boons and incredible powers.

Almost no one has ever seen an Ngoro’s true form, which is buried beneath swaths of living creatures. Ngoroi are stationary, knowledge of the world brought to them through various sensing tendrils. While the Ngoro’s physical self is small, its extended body can be the entirety of the Living Lands that it has infiltrated with its sense organs—while this is not unlimited, since rival Ngoroi will often destroy sense tendrils that extend too close to their territory, this sense band can range from one-hundred meters or so for the weakest Ngoroi to tens or hundreds of kilometers for the greatest Gods. Even if an Ngoro cannot reach a region, many of the animals that serve it can retain information with great accuracy—by consuming that animal’s brain at one of its own sense organs, it learns what the animal has seen and heard.

Ngoroi need not merely observe. They can also create, and they can act. As the Living Gods, they created the first life on Arumo, and they possess this power still. The slightest act of volition will begin the generation of a creature, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to several days, depending on its size and complexity. The creatures created are instinctually loyal to the Ngoro that created them, although they will otherwise act as nature dictates.

Most Ngoroi surround themselves with their own creatures in a circle of life as far out as they can extend it. Most of these creatures are stationary plants, and can be controlled directly with tendrils snaking into them. These creatures can then be made to lash out, entangle, and perform other feats. Mobile creatures can be controlled in a vague manner through the release of mood-altering gases that can whip them into a frenzy or pacify them, or even cause them to attach themselves to tendrils so that they can be fed instructions more directly. An angered Ngoro can control nearly everything in its domain, and is capable of causing horrific destruction. Fortunately, an Ngoro can not observe everything at once. Enemies entering a God’s domain hope to avoid its notice, and thus its wrath.

Even with such incredible power, an Ngoro’s influence is sharply curtailed by how far it has expanded, which is limited by the other Ngoroi. For this reason, many Ngoroi enlist the help of humans who act as priests, servitors, and warriors. Uncounted cults have sprung up around different Living Gods, dedicated to defending and expanding their territory. And Ngoroi do not merely receive benefits from their worshippers; those considered most worthy are often granted great powers.

Arumo is host to several dozen significant Ngoroi, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of creatures of considerably lesser power known as Bomoi, which are otherwise identical to the true Living Gods, and often serve under them.

While there are many Ngoroi, five of these mighty creatures—known as the Hlabu Sai—the Glorious and Shining Gods—are considered the greatest of them all. These five gods each stretch across an entire continent, and possess incredible power. Each god has come to be identified with one of the five elements of traditional Arumu thought—Air, Fire, Flesh, Mind, and Water.

Only a few Ngoroi do not serve one of the Hlabu Sai. These are the Mboroki, the Secret Gods, who maintain their existence by playing one pantheon off against another. They often form loose alliances with one another to stave off threats, and often control powerful and fanatical cults dedicated to defending their God.

Adrua: Flesh

Passionate, uncivilized, and bestial, Adrua is the Ngoro of the Thriving Continent. Between the waters of Oromos and the scorching realms of Hasut, Adrua is hot, wet, and teeming with life. Dense jungles, rainforests, and swamps grow throughout Adrua. The region seems almost impossibly fertile, with plants growing nearly fast enough to watch, and terrible, carnivorous creatures devouring whatever enters their domain.

Adrua is only thinly settled, not being suitable for extensive human settlement. Many of the swamps, bogs, and mires and too poisonous for humans, and the jungles are either too difficult to clear, or virtual deserts because all life exists in the treetop canopy and no life can reach the forest floor. Adrua likes it that way, and is more than willing to defend its domain against intrusion by calling down hostile animals, or simply wiping out those who offend it with a terrible plague.

Those who follow Adrua believe in a natural lifestyle. They eschew civilization and its sins, and instead live simple, brutal lives deep in the wilderness.

Gomas: Mind

Gomas is believed by some to be the progenitor of the other Ngoroi. Civilization sprang from the fertile plains and forests of Gomas, and that is where the largest cities and empires still exist today. Gomas is seen as the patron and nurturer of civilization and culture. It is perhaps the most powerful and influential of the Living Gods, although it has seen its power sharply curtailed in the current dark age, as other Ngoroi move in to claim its abandoned cities and ruins.

The region of Gomas is lush and temperate, with forests, lakes, and open plains. Much of it has been cleared by humans, with Gomas becoming part of the cities they create. With such a high concentration of humans in his demesne, Gomas makes frequent use of his most powerful ability: influencing mortals through dreams. By guiding the subconscious thoughts of a few important people, Gomas can control entire cities.

Hasut: Air

The wide-open reaches of Hasut are made up of grasslands, savannas, hot and cold deserts, and scrub forests. The region is in many places lush and fertile, and contains a sizeable human population, which subsists on the game passing through the open plains each season. A number of influential empires have appeared in Hasut. The most amazing and mysterious aspects of Hasut, however, are the islands of air.

Formed by dozens of interconnected organisms, all buoyed up by vast stores of floating gas, the islands of air float high above the world, forming their own unique ecosystems. Most are in fact tethered to the ground by ropy strands, although some move through the sky of their own volition. The islands of air are a recent development, having been known for only a few hundred years, and only recently have humans begun to colonize these strange realms.

Oromos: Water

Most of Oromos is underwater, buried in a gigantic freshwater sea. Over the years, it has created half a dozen large islands and hundreds of tiny islets. Humans, who originally inhabited the coasts and swamplands of Oromos, moved to these islands and established cities, thanking the Living God for the generosity of its creation.

While Oromos is considered a giver of life and hope, it is also known for its storms and savagery. Oromos is quite capable of hurling tidal waves at those who offend it, or simply tearing apart their island homes and sending sea monsters to feed on the survivors.

Zirelnu: Shadow

The regions of the far north are home to Zirelnu, the Ngoro of Shadow. The lands of Ngoro are mostly cold steppes, and harsh, snow-swept wastelands. Only a few cities of worth exist in Zirelnu, and while attempts were made to civilize the barbarians during the Age of Flowers, these clans have reverted to their traditional lifestyles, often raiding the southern cities to supplement their supply of food and weapons.

Many follow one Ngoro or another, firm in their faith that after their deaths their reward will come when they become one with their God. Only a few, however, a specially blessed by their God. These, the priests of the Ngoroi, are capable of calling upon their master in a time of crisis. So longer as the lanu is within his God’s realm, his prayer is likely to be heard and may be answered. Since an Ngoro is capable of turning any living thing in its realm to its will, an answered prayer can have an amazing effect.

The price of being blessed is that the follower must serve. He does not merely worship; rather, his entire life is devoted to obeying every message and missive from his God.

In the early days of the Kingdom of Flowers, when the city of Arumo had been newly freed from the Ngoroi, a group of natural philosophers experimented with the flowers, believing them to hold the secrets to immortality.

In their experiments, they found more than immortality. By consuming special potions brewed from flowers, they gained the malleability of form found only in the organisms crafted by humans. This group, known as the vashtai—the sorcerers—gained the ability to shape their own bodies. The natural forms and powers of any known creature could be learned and assumed by eating the creature’s flesh and performing extensive meditations and rituals. These gruesome rituals often involved manually re-shaping the vashta’s body, by carving off flesh with a knife. Because of this, many vashtai are quite insane, and see nothing wrong with sharing their exquisite agony with others.

Arumo made extensive use of the vashtai, especially as shock troops in defense of the city, although they were often derided and terrorized elsewhere for their horrible rituals. The Black Petal War saw the destruction of most vashtai, as the same plague that poisoned Arumo’s flowers poisoned their bodies. New vashtai are also exceedingly rare, since the ritual performed to become one requires flowers—real flowers, not the sick skeletons that adorn Arumo’s walls today. Further, most Ngoroi hate the vashtai for usurping their powers, meaning that they are hunted nearly to extinction in many places.

The vashtai have not been completely exterminated because of their sheer power. They possess amazing shapeshifting ability, and are able to form the natural defenses of many animals, such as claws and thick hides. Some have learned even stranger powers, such as spraying acid, from consuming exotic animals. Those that hunt the vashtai work in large groups, or are masters of the art.

This terrible plague was engineered by Zathaguan crafters when Arumo interfered with their attack on Kanath. The Shambling Plague, as it is often calls, kills its victims, then infects the subject with spores that return them to some hollow mockery of life. The creature that arises in known as a tusu, or shambler—a mindless creature of rotting, infected flesh whose only goal is to devour the living.

A tusu’s goal is to consume living things, but if a person is only wounded by such a creature, he will nonetheless die as a result of the infection, becoming one of the shambling people in a few hours, his intelligence and vitality stripped away. Very rarely, a person will become a gurat, a tusu that still maintains some rudimentary intelligence. These so-called ghouls are fast, intelligent, and brutal, often organizing into terrifying packs to hunt down their prey.

Created hundreds of years ago by the mad crafter Ivora, nassara, or wildlings, are creatures shaped into near-human forms. Ivora sculpted thousands of nassarai, and used them to launch a massive invasion of Arumo, resulting in a war that lasted many years. When Ivora was eventually killed, many of her creations were left to their own devices, and fled to uninhabited regions.

While many still appear human, nassarai possess only a limited intellect. They range in size from no larger than a hand to two or more times the size of a man, but all possess simple minds and exist only to feed and survive in the wilds. Many have begun to degenerate, their appearance becoming less and less human as the laws that govern their forms reassert themselves. Even with their limited intelligence, they understand this, and some of their most intelligent (rarely with intelligence greater than that of a three-year-old child) strive to cure their condition. They are most likely doomed, and will degenerate to completely bestial forms in a few hundred more years.