new world setting infodump
I'll probably want to reference this at some point.
Every matoran feels the divine deeply -- they can't explain it, it's just obviously true that there's a guiding hand. (This is because they all have leftover code in their heads, things like control overrides and a unified behavior protocol. They have free will now, but their brains weren't made for it.1) So they did, and do, their best to understand it, and this is their current understanding: The Great Spirit, who lived in the sky, (and is a colony ship now crash-landed,) created them for some purpose they still don't know. (To prepare a planet for colonization by their builders.) The Spirit intended to shepherd them to their destiny, but he was betrayed by his brother, the Master of Shadows, (who is the ship's governing AI2,) and struck down. (The Master discovered that the planet they were set to colonize was inhabited, and refused to make a unilateral declaration of war. It gave the matorans free will (losing its own in the process) so they could decide what's right. This caused chaos and the ship crashed.)
(We will get to the inhabitants of the so-called new world in a later post.)
The Master of Shadows can be seen in the sky during the daytime, surveying his domain and creating shadows, his spies and servants. The Great Spirit, now dimmed, can only be seen at night.
The matorans are just barely past the "getting set up for basic survival" phase, so they haven't had time to fully survey the islands they live on. What they have found are relics that suggest the land was made for them, with preexisting matoran likenesses found in caves and buried relics and such. (Fragments of their broken ship.) Thus, the Chronicle: Each village has a Chronicler whose job is to record all the things they discover and periodically meet with the other Chroniclers to revise their understanding of the world.3
It's understood that discovering what the Great Spirit had in mind for them would be Good, that the Master of Shadows is Bad for preventing this, and that the Master of Shadows still lives while the Spirit is dying.
The Master of Shadows, now a slave to his programming, is all about Murder and Conquest and Whatever It Takes. He constructs shadow beings from the bowels of the world (the forges inside the wreckage) and sends them to the surface to destroy life and replace it with his own dark mockery thereof. (Terraforming for an alien race of builders.)
The Great Spirit, now on backup generators, shattered and buried beneath layers of wrecked crust, is able to send signs (wireless signals) that are strongest inside his temples. He warns of danger and urges the matorans to find their own destiny (the Master's last message).
So you have Chroniclers as the record-keepers and interpreters of the Great Spirit's will. These are just matorans with special masks, masks that store two or three times as much data as normal. (So the Chroniclers have "lived" longer than most. They have not needed to replace their masks.) They have old blueprints and labor directives stored in there, so they kind of know how to build and repair, and organize teams effectively. For these reasons they are revered as wise-men, but their nature is as inquisitive and naive as anyone's. The Great Spirit hypothesis is their faith: The more they discover, the more it seems it must be true. They hold regular meetings with their villages to share knowledge and interpretations. They would meet with other Chroniclers, but this is impossible for them at this stage, because of the terrain.
Then there's the matorans, of whom every one feels the presence of something divine. The Onu-matorans, living underground, believe the Great Spirit hypothesis entirely. The Ko-matorans, high in the mountaintops, have many doubts and alternative explanations.
The shadow-beings don't have minds of their own. In the case of enshadowed matorans, their free will and personhood are suppressed while shrouded in darkness. Such is the way of the Master of Shadows.
Toas are new to all of this. They didn't even exist in the Time Before Time. (The matorans, inexperienced at exercising their newfound will, desired authority, so they built the toas, repurposing the same forges they themselves were made in. This infuriated the Master, who had just sacrificed most of himself to give the matorans agency, only to see them trying to throw it away. He refused to grant the toas life. It was only after the crash, when the matorans were scattered and beyond the Master's reach, that he relented, awakening the toas and succumbing to darkness himself.) Toas don't feel the Great Spirit's influence. They are unbound by anything, which is a dangerous thing to be in the new world.
If this was the first time around, or if this was a campaign premise -- "to find out the secrets of the world!!" -- I might want to obscure these details from the players. But anyone who's interested in a Bionicle game is already familiar with the "big reveal." Instead, I think it might be interesting to explore the dramatic irony. We all know what's going on. The characters do not. Walking the line between science and fantasy, program and fate, created facsimiles of people and their real emotions, can make for good storytelling.↩
I find Makuta to be highly compelling... before he was explained to be just one member of a whole race of anti-people or whatever. (I'm not calling him Makuta Teridax. Get outta here with that.) There's something I really like about his assertion in Mask of Light that he's helping. His presence as a force older than the matoran, who personally knows Mata Nui, really elevates him as a villain. I'm reworking a lot of stuff here, and one of the changes I'm making is to Makuta. I hope this makes him at once more threatening and more predictable. Players should be able to intuit his responses to their actions, I think. It also casts him as sympathetic in some fashion, which we love in our villains. But he's a bad omen. He's one possible future for the matorans themselves.↩
These are standing in for Turagas. I don't see any reason, beyond toy sales, why the Turagas need to be a different "kind" of creature to the Matorans.↩