Gods Game Player Guide+Set Breakdown+Nature Era Set

The Natural Era is the second set with an emphasis on organic growth from primal origins.  It asks the players to reinterpret the origin of their gods through an evolutionary lense.  For example, what is the origin of Dragons?  Are they magical creatures that were simply created by the gods?  Are they gods themselves?  Or are they simply the evolutionary winners of natural selection in a seemingly magical ecosystem?  This set explores this last question by placing the players in a low-scale environment, possessing a single animal or family of animals as they climb the food chain to dominance. 

There could be several interpretations of this.  Perhaps these were the conditions of the Great Game; each god must prove themselves and rise up from the form of their sacred animal.  Perhaps there never was a mythological magical era, and this is the true origin of the gods; dragons and their ilk invented stories of their origins to enthrall worshipers in later eras. 

Whatever the case, this is a time of great conflict out of which emerged the gods and/or monsters of the ancient world.  There's not much story here beyond what the players make of it.  As something of a reversal from the Magical Era, gameplay drives the story, so the winners of each battle dictate the unfolding events of the narrative.  It's survival of the fittest.  Mostly gameplay involves a battling card game (occasionally including non-combat elements, such as mating or migration), where the winner is rewarded with new cards reflecting evolutions of their core animal / creature.  Over the course of the season, an unassuming lizard could gain the powers to fly, breath fire, or grow to gargantuan size... effectively becoming the first dragon.  However, the players are not limited to this suite of powers, and may come up with a variety of creative monsters with which to battle.

This is a low-scale set based on the Wheel's nature-axis and adjoining colors, so Rha (Personality), Dau (Strength), Wim (Will), Ela (Spirit), Biz (Fortune), and Yun (Constitution).  100 cards of each color are represented (only a few as multi-colored cards), with 300 total cards in the set.  There may be as many as 150 additional special story cards, likely the Greater, Main, and Lesser Gods of these colors.  As a low-scale set, card values range from 1 (common), the lowest in the game, to 1K (mythic rare) and the story roughly covers a period from 200 million years ago to 20 million years ago (or the evolution of dinosaurs and mammals across several extinctions).  This set is the first real introduction to card-based gameplay, with the low-scale, gradual build-up of abilities serving as an approachable learning curve.  The season will begin with an emphasis on primal survival in battles of the fittest, and end with more social play as the great bloodlines and lineages of the ancient world are founded.