One of the things that I wanted to do with velotha’s flock is create an interesting world that people haven’t seen the likes of before, to make something that challenges their conceptions of what many of the basic tenets of the game’s world are.
Of course, I put a lot of the elements of the game down in tradition too, because I don’t want to explain anything and I want to reward readers and players who have a strong interest in intellectual pursuits for doing what they do best and finding connections between things.
The first big point of velotha’s flock is a Miltonian struggle between Creator and Adversary. I don’t think that I need to say it outright, but these represent the Judeo-Christian God and Lucifer, respectively (though, again, with a heavy Miltonian interpretation). Lucifer’s prime motivation is the domination of the world, which he considers to be his domain.
This puts him in conflict with the were-ravens, Velotha’s flock whom the game is titled after. The Adversary will not tolerate unbent knees, especially ones that threaten to change or even take control of the world he considers to be his own.
The were-ravens, or korakthropes (raven-people, in butchered Greek because korakanthropes isn’t cool-sounding) are interdimensional wanderers of sorts, coming from another world where Velotha and a deity known as Kelö-ur were locked in a struggle. Velotha sacrificed everything to create the korakthropes, and Kelö-ur killed her in an act of vengeance.
For the korakthropes, this old world is their Edenic paradise. Before she died, Velotha was able to protect them and give them boons such as limited immortality (will not die of age), regeneration, and shapeshifting between their forms and other lifeforms they can connect with in their environment.
In the old world, the shapeshifting was useless, but Velotha knew they would have to leave their home, their Eden, and go to the Wasteland.
The Wasteland is represented the fallen mortal world of our reality. As with most other things in velotha’s flock, it is heavily inspired by archetypes, so we filter our reality through a lens and add into it supernatural elements in the form of our own struggle between good and evil.
The Promised Land is a mythical place in which the Korakthropes don’t have to deal with the problems of the Wilderness or the wrath that made them flee from Eden.
The Oracle, a mystical figure in the korakthrope mythos, was the one who gave them what they knew about the Wilderness before they entered it, and also hinted at the Promised Land.
The Promised Land is simultaneously pursued as a literal and figurative thing. As aliens in the Wilderness, the korakthropes have problems adapting to their environments: they have problems with advanced technology (and even simple technology if it operates in abstract ways), and are prone to suffering violence from the inhabitants of the Wilderness.
The Promised Land can be literal; another place locked away behind its own set of gates, somewhere that the korakthropes approach when they are able to find the path.
It can also be figurative, the results of righteousness overcoming the wickedness of the Wilderness and transforming it into a new world.
Everywhere you look, archetypes unfold.