The Myth

A Setting for Bound

"He climbed until the air thinned to nothing,
until his hands bled on the stone of heaven.
The gods watched him arrive
the way you watch a candle
reach the end of its wick." — Song of Aegos the Unburned, verse final

The WorldThe Land That Was Not Made for You

The world is young, and it belongs to other things. Gods live on the mountaintops — not metaphorically, not in temples, but on them: their voices in the thunder, their moods in the weather, their arguments in the earthquake. They dwell beneath seas that remember every drowned name, in groves where light bends wrong and time runs thick as honey. The world was made for them, or they were made for it, and the distinction does not matter. What matters is that you were not.

Between the divine domains lie the mortal lands: coastal villages where fishermen tie prayers into their nets, cities built in the shadow of temples that predate the cities by millennia, roads that end where the wild begins. These are the Holds — not fortresses, but places where mortals have carved enough space to live without asking permission from something vast. Beyond the walls, the world is unmapped forest, mountains that shift when unobserved, seas that remember your name if you say it too close to the water.

And there are monsters. Not evil — not most of them. Monsters are divine mistakes, sacred guardians, punishments given flesh and set loose with instructions long forgotten. They are the landscape's teeth. The world beyond the Holds is not hostile. It is simply not yours, and it does not care whether you survive the trespass.

The Central Horror The gods are real. They gave you power because it amused them, or because they needed a hand that could bleed. You are mortal carrying divine fire that was not made for mortal hands. Every use makes you less mortal — not stronger, not better, just less. The space between mortal and divine is not a spectrum. It is a cliff. Heroes do not retire. They become constellations, cautionary tales, names that mothers use to frighten children into obedience. The horror is not that the gods will destroy you. The horror is that you will become something that is no longer you, and the gods will call it a promotion.

Who You Are

Player characters are heroes in the oldest sense — mortals who bargained with gods and walk the line between glory and annihilation. People see it in their eyes: something too bright, too certain, too much. Monsters smell it on their skin. Other mortals step aside on the road, not out of respect but out of the same instinct that moves you away from a lightning-struck tree.

Heroes wander. They move between Holds — cities, villages, sacred sites — taking work, answering prayers, settling debts that were old before they were born. Between Holds, the Wilds wait: places where the divine bleeds through and the rules of mortal life fray at the edges. This is where the game lives. The Holds are for rest and the slow, precious work of being human. The Wilds are where you discover what you're becoming.

ThemesWhat This Setting Is About

Hubris Not pride — the slow erosion of the boundary between servant and served. Every feat that defies mortality pushes you closer to divinity, and divinity is a country where mortals cannot breathe. The gods do not punish ambition. They punish forgetting what you are.

The Sacred Invisible boundaries layered throughout the world. Some places, creatures, and acts belong to the gods alone. Crossing those boundaries has consequences that do not care what you intended. The sacred is not a moral judgment. It is a property of the landscape, like gravity.

Glory The currency heroes chase — deeds worthy of song, acts that draw the gaze of gods. But divine attention is never comfortable. To be glorious is to be seen, and the things that see you have agendas older than your bloodline. Glory is the light that casts the sharpest shadow.

Mortality You will die. Specifically, personally, and probably in a way that people will talk about. The question is not how to escape death but what to do with the time you have — and whether the things you do with that time are worth the cost of doing them.

Setting RulesThe Weight of Heaven

The Hubris Track

Every character has a Hubris Track with five boxes. You mark a box when:

Hubris Triggers

You use your Grant to accomplish something no mortal could — not difficult, but impossible without divine power.
You defy a god directly: refuse a command, break a sacred law, challenge divine authority.
You enter sacred ground uninvited (see Trespass).
You kill a divine creature — a monster born from the gods, a sacred beast, anything that carries heaven's mark.
You accept worship, or allow yourself to be treated as divine.

Hubris Thresholds At three boxes — The Gaze: a god notices you. The GM names which god and what drew their attention. From this moment, divine interference enters the story — not as punishment, not yet, but as interest. The god watches. It sends signs. It tests. Other heroes and priests can see the mark of divine attention on you. Some kneel. Some run.

At five boxes — The Apotheosis: the mortal shell cannot hold what you are becoming. The character's final scene: choose to ascend (become divine, lose yourself utterly — your name joins the pantheon but you are gone) or cling to mortality (the divine fire tears itself free, leaving you broken, powerless, and profoundly human). Either way, the hero's story ends. What remains is a legend or a ruin.

Clearing Hubris

You can erase one Hubris box through Acts of Humility — deliberate, genuine acknowledgments of your mortality. Bowing at an altar with real reverence, not performance. Accepting failure without reaching for your Grant. Eating a meal you cooked badly and not complaining. Admitting you are afraid.

Alternatively, another hero can clear one of your Hubris boxes by Witnessing your mortality — being present with you in a moment of genuine human weakness and choosing to stay. Not helping, not fixing, not offering divine solutions. Just being there while you are small and scared and mortal. The Witnessing must cost the other hero something: time, safety, tactical advantage, or pride. It cannot be free.

This is the setting's thesis given teeth: other mortals who remind you what you are save heroes from becoming myths.

The Hearthfire

At the start of each session, the GM asks the table: "Where do you rest, and what keeps you human?"

Each player names one mortal thing. A meal cooked over a real fire. A letter written to someone who may never read it. A wound tended without divine aid, slowly and painfully. A song sung badly. A game of dice played for worthless stakes. These things do not grant mechanical benefit. They are the reason the mechanics matter.

The Hearthfire The Hearthfire is not a resource or a mechanic. It is a ritual. It exists to remind the table — before the monsters and the gods and the terrible choices — that these are people. People who eat and sleep and do small, pointless, beautiful things. The Hubris Track measures how far a character has drifted from this. The Hearthfire is the anchor they drift from.

TrespassWalking on Holy Ground

The world is layered with sacred ground — places that belong to the gods. Groves where no mortal has walked and lived. Mountain passes where the wind speaks in a dead language. River crossings where the water demands a name before it lets you pass. These places are powerful, dangerous, and frequently between you and where you need to go.

When the party enters sacred ground, the GM declares it. The air changes. The light bends. Something old becomes aware of your presence. Characters who continue forward are Trespassing.

Trespass While Trespassing: all Grant rolls gain +1d6. The divine bleeds through here, and power comes easier — too easy. On entry, each character marks 1 Hubris box. The GM gains one Portent — a narrative complication that will manifest before the party leaves the sacred ground.

Portents

When the GM spends a Portent, they choose or roll from the following:

d6	Portent
1	The Guardian Wakes — something that protects this place stirs. It may be a creature, a spirit, or the ground itself.
2	The Landscape Shifts — the sacred ground rearranges. Paths close. New ones open. The way back is not the way you came.
3	The God Speaks — a divine voice addresses the party directly. It may command, question, or simply observe. It expects an answer.
4	Time Distorts — hours pass in moments, or moments stretch into hours. When the party emerges, the world has moved without them.
5	The Grant Awakens — a character's Grant activates involuntarily, doing what the character wants most — or what the god wants most. The character does not choose.
6	Something Follows — when the party leaves, something leaves with them. It may be a creature, a curse, a fragment of divine attention, or a gift they did not ask for.

Leaving Sacred Ground

When the party exits the sacred ground, each hero answers one question: "What did you take, and what did you leave behind?" The answer is true — narratively, literally true. If you say you left your fear behind, you did. If you say you took a handful of divine earth, it's in your pack. The sacred does not distinguish between metaphor and reality. Neither should the table.

Deeper Trespass Some places are more sacred than others. The heart of a god's domain, the site of a divine birth or death, the place where the world's bones are visible. In these places, Trespass costs 2 Hubris boxes on entry, Grant rolls gain +2d6, and the GM gains two Portents. These places are rare, terrible, and wondrous. Characters who enter them come out changed — if they come out at all.

The GodsPatrons of the Myth

The gods are real, distant, and hungry. Not for worship — for use. They have domains to maintain, rivals to outmaneuver, and a world to shape according to designs so vast that mortal minds cannot hold them. They value you the way a craftsman values a favorite tool: with genuine affection, and absolutely no hesitation about wearing you down to the handle.

Each god offers three Grants and three Bindings. A player chooses one Grant and one Binding, then writes their own Grey. Two characters contracted to the same god may carry very different powers and very different chains. The examples below are not exhaustive; players and GMs are encouraged to invent new options that fit the god's domain.

Athyra

The Storm That Judges

Athyra is the sky's anger given purpose. She is thunder that arrives before lightning, the cold wind that precedes the verdict, the silence in a courtroom before the sentence falls. Her domain is storm, law, and the terrible clarity that comes when all pretense is stripped away. She smells like ozone and wet stone. Her sacred places are mountaintops above the cloud line, open courtyards where rain collects in the cracks between paving stones, and crossroads where travelers must choose. Her sigil is a single bolt of lightning striking an open palm.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Thundercaller You can command the weather.

The Arbiter You know when someone is lying.

The Bolt You strike once, and nothing strikes back.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Open Sky You shall not shelter from the storm.

The Law You shall not let an oath go unwitnessed.

The Verdict You shall not show mercy to the guilty.

Sample Grey Athyra's Greys live in the language of justice. Consider who decides guilt, what constitutes an oath, and whether mercy and justice can coexist in the same breath.

Athyra's Reckoning is judicial. Narrowing means a new law you must uphold — one you did not agree to and may not believe in. Tithe is a truth, dragged from you unwillingly; Athyra takes a secret and makes it public in the worst possible moment. Fraying means your storms grow wild — the weather answers your emotions, not your commands, and your anger brings lightning to places that cannot survive it. Severance is exile from the sky: clouds part above you, rain bends around you, and the wind will not carry your voice. You stand in perpetual, merciless clarity, and no storm will ever answer you again.

Thalassor

The Tide That Remembers

Thalassor is the sea's patience. He is the current that carries the drowned to shore years after the shipwreck, the salt that preserves what should have rotted, the deep pressure that turns bone to stone. His domain is ocean, memory, and the things that surface when you stop looking for them. He smells like brine and old wood. His sacred places are tidal caves where the water breathes, harbors where ghost ships dock at moonrise, and shorelines where the sand is made of ground-down temples. His sigil is a spiral shell with no opening.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Depthwalker You breathe water and walk the ocean floor.

The Keeper You can pull memories from objects and places.

The Current Nothing can hold you against your will.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Drowned Debt You shall not forget what the sea has taken.

The Tide's Law You shall not resist the pull of deep water.

The Silence Below You shall not speak of what you have seen in the deep.

Sample Grey Thalassor's Greys live in the nature of memory and depth. Consider what it means to forget, what constitutes deep water, and whether surfacing a secret is rescue or betrayal.

Thalassor's Reckoning is erosive. Narrowing means a new memory you must carry — someone else's grief, a drowned sailor's last thought, a recollection that is not yours and will not leave. Tithe is a memory of your own, pulled from you like a tooth; you know something is missing but cannot name it. Fraying means the sea follows you inland — puddles form in your footsteps, your skin tastes of salt, and the people closest to you begin dreaming of drowning. Severance is beaching: the ocean recoils from you. Water will not carry you. Rain avoids your skin. You are dry in the deepest sense — cut off from the thing that connects all shores, alone on land that suddenly feels like an island.

Kythera

The Forest That Hunts

Kythera is the wild's hunger. She is the rustle in the undergrowth that stops when you listen, the silence between the owl's call and the mouse's scream, the moment a predator's eyes find you through the leaves and you know — without knowing how — that the forest has decided you are prey. Her domain is wilderness, beast, growth, and the clean savagery that existed before mortals invented the word "cruelty." She smells like loam after rain and blood on bark. Her sacred places are old-growth groves where the canopy blocks the sky, dens where apex predators raise their young, and clearings where nothing grows because something beneath the soil is still feeding. Her sigil is an antler threaded with vines.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Fang You take on the aspect of a beast.

The Path No wilderness can lose you.

The Pack Wild creatures answer your call and fight beside you.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Hunt You shall not eat what you did not kill.

The Wilds' Law You shall not sleep within walls.

The Prey's Due You shall not kill without need.

Sample Grey Kythera's Greys live in the boundary between civilization and wild. Consider what constitutes shelter, what separates need from want, and whether a city can ever truly be separate from the forest.

Kythera's Reckoning is feral. Narrowing means a new instinct you cannot ignore — now you bare your teeth when threatened, or you cannot cross running water without drinking. Tithe is a piece of your civilized self; you lose the taste for cooked food, the comfort of soft beds, the ability to make small talk. Fraying means the beast bleeds through — your eyes yellow, your nails thicken, your scent changes, and domesticated animals panic at your approach. Severance is exile from the wild: the forest goes silent when you enter, animals flee, the undergrowth parts not in welcome but in revulsion. You are cast out from the living world, a thing the wilderness has decided to forget.

Pyraxis

The Flame That Shapes

Pyraxis is fire with intent. He is the forge-heat that turns ore to blade, the kiln-fire that hardens clay to stone, the wildfire that clears the old growth so something new can rise. His domain is flame, craft, ambition, and the obsession that drives a maker to destroy everything that isn't the thing they're trying to create. He smells like hot metal and cedar smoke. His sacred places are volcanic vents where the earth bleeds molten, ancient forges built into mountainsides, and burned clearings where the ash is still warm decades later. His sigil is a hammer wreathed in flame.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Smith You can shape any material with your hands.

The Pyre You carry fire that burns what you choose.

The Visionary You see the finished form inside the raw material — and the world bends toward your vision.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Forge's Demand You shall not leave a work unfinished.

The Fuel You shall not let a fire die.

The Crucible You shall not accept what is flawed when it could be remade.

Sample Grey Pyraxis's Greys live in the tension between creation and destruction. Consider what constitutes a flaw, when a work is truly finished, and whether breaking something to rebuild it counts as preservation.

Pyraxis's Reckoning is consuming. Narrowing means a new compulsion to create — now you must also forge, mend, or improve everything you touch, even things that were fine as they were. Tithe is something you made; Pyraxis takes your finest work, reduces it to raw material, and returns it to you unmade. Fraying means your fire loses precision — the flame that once obeyed your will begins to hunger, to spread, to take more than you intended. Severance is the cold forge: your hands lose their cunning, fire recoils from your touch, and every material you work crumbles to ash. You can see what things should become, but you can no longer make them. Vision without craft. The maker's hell.

Moros

The Door That Opens Once

Moros is the threshold between the living and whatever comes after. Not a god of death — death has no patron, needs no advocate. Moros is the god of the passage: the moment itself, the crossing, the last breath and the first silence. His domain is endings, boundaries, and the awful clarity that comes when something is finally, irrevocably over. He smells like autumn leaves and candle wax at the end of the wick. His sacred places are burial grounds where the soil has been turned so many times it's soft as cloth, doorways of ruined temples that lead nowhere, and deathbeds where someone died well. His sigil is a key with no teeth.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Guide You can speak with the dead, and they answer truthfully.

The Threshold No door, wall, or barrier can stop you.

The Gentle Hand You can end suffering with a touch.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Vigil You shall not leave the dying alone.

The Boundary You shall not bring back what has passed through.

The Final Word You shall not speak false comfort to the dying.

Sample Grey Moros's Greys live in the definition of endings. Consider what it means for something to be truly over, where the boundary lies between easing pain and hastening death, and whether a memory of the dead counts as the dead persisting.

Moros's Reckoning is final. Narrowing means a new boundary you must respect — now you cannot enter a home uninvited, or you must knock on every door before passing through. Tithe is a relationship; someone living forgets you, completely and permanently, as though you had already passed through the door. Fraying means the boundary thins around you — the dead begin to appear at the edges of your vision, and the living start to look translucent. Severance is the cruelest passage: the door opens for you. Not now, not violently — but you can feel it, standing open somewhere behind you, patient and permanent. You are dying, slowly, from the inside out. Moros does not take your power. He simply stops holding the door closed.

Lesira

The Garden That Replaces

Lesira is the world's refusal to stay still. She is the vine that splits the temple wall, the fever that remakes the body, the child who looks nothing like its parents. Her domain is growth, evolution, and the merciless optimism of a world that would rather become something new than preserve what it already is. The other gods built their domains and called them finished. Lesira looked at what they built and thought: next. She smells like turned earth and green rot — the sweetness of a compost heap, where death is just a word for soil that hasn't decided what to grow yet. Her sacred places are ruins where the forest has won, tide pools where new life invents itself between waves, and the beds of the sick where the body is rewriting itself and hasn't yet decided whether the rewrite is recovery or destruction. Her sigil is a seed splitting open from within.

The other gods fear her. Not openly — gods do not admit to fear — but in the way Athyra's storms avoid her groves, in the way Pyraxis's fire dies at the edge of her gardens, in the way Moros, who understands endings, will not look at the thing that says endings are beginnings in disguise. Lesira does not argue with the pantheon. She simply outlasts them. Whatever they build, she will grow through it. Whatever they preserve, she will replace. She is patient the way a root is patient — not because she chooses to wait, but because the stone always cracks eventually.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Bloom You accelerate growth. Wounds close, crops ripen, and things that should take years happen in moments — whether they should or not.

The Adaptation You change to meet the challenge. Poison makes you resistant. Injury teaches your body. Each threat you survive makes you something slightly different than you were.

The Potential You see what things are becoming. Not what they are — what they will be, given time and pressure. The seed in the stone. The betrayal in the friendship. The collapse in the foundation.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Compost You shall not preserve what is dying. What ends must be allowed to end so something new can use the soil.

The Moult You shall not remain as you are. Each season, something about you must change — a belief, a bond, a part of yourself you thought was permanent.

The Canopy You shall not prevent growth in others, even when that growth will make them dangerous.

Sample Grey Lesira's Greys live in the boundary between growth and destruction. Consider whether killing the old to feed the new is an act of cultivation or violence, whether change that is forced is still growth, and where adaptation ends and loss of self begins.

Lesira's Reckoning is biological. Narrowing means a new change you cannot resist — something in your body or mind shifts without your permission, an old scar reopens as something new grows in its place, a memory is composted to make room for one you didn't ask for. Tithe is permanence: something you were trying to keep — a tradition, a relationship, a scar you wore as identity — is replaced by something Lesira considers an improvement, and the old version is gone completely, not even mourned. Fraying means growth becomes indiscriminate: plants bloom where you walk whether the season allows it, wounds you treat heal wrong, and people near you begin changing in ways they did not choose — old convictions softening, old loyalties shifting, the stable ground of who they were becoming fertile and uncertain. Severance is stasis: nothing grows near you. Seeds refuse to sprout. Wounds do not heal. Ideas do not develop. You are a dead zone in a living world, and the things that grow around you curve away from your shadow the way roots curve away from stone.

Desperate DealsWhat Answers When You Scream

When a hero makes a Desperate Deal in the Myth, what answers is not a god. The gods do not come when called — they summon, they do not answer. What answers is something older. Something that existed before the gods carved the world into domains and declared it theirs.

They are called the Old Things. The serpent that coils beneath the world's foundation. The void that existed before light was born. The mother of monsters, who wove the first beasts from her own sinew before the gods stole the pattern. The dark water that predates the sea. They do not have temples. They do not have sigils. They were here first, and the gods built the world on top of them.

A hero's desperation is a crack in the world, and old things seep through cracks.

The Vertigo Desperate Deals in the Myth feel like vertigo — standing at the edge of something so vast that your body forgets which direction is down. The Old Things do not speak. They are, and their presence is an answer. They do not want worship. They do not want service. They want passage — a mortal vessel through which they can touch a world that has been built over them like a city over catacombs. Their Bindings are not restrictions. They are instincts, old and alien and deeply, deeply wrong.

At the TableRunning the Myth

Session Structure

Each session of the Myth should begin with the Hearthfire and end with the Telling. Between them, the story is what it needs to be — monsters and gods and choices that leave scars. But the fire and the story are the frame, and the frame is what makes the painting bearable.

The Hearthfire The GM asks each player: "Where do you rest, and what keeps you human?" Each player names one mortal thing — small, specific, unrelated to their Grant or their glory. This is a brief ritual, not an extended scene. It exists to establish the human baseline before the mythic scale begins.

The Telling At the end of the session, one player — rotating each session — tells the story of what just happened as it will be remembered. What was exaggerated. What was left out. What was added. The gap between truth and legend is the thesis of the Myth. The other players and the GM listen. They do not correct. The story is the story now.

Tone Guidance

The Myth is the horror of becoming. Not body horror, not cosmic indifference — the specific, intimate terror of using power until you are no longer the person who first reached for it. The scariest moments in the Myth are not the monster attacks or the divine pronouncements. They are the quiet moments when a character uses their Grant casually, without thinking, and the table realizes they have stopped seeing it as borrowed fire. They think it's theirs.

The Myth is not tragedy. Tragedy means the ending is predetermined — the flaw leads inevitably to the fall. The Myth is not inevitable. Characters can choose humility. They can choose the Hearthfire over the mountain. They can choose mortality. That choice has to be real, or the Hubris Track is just a countdown. The horror is that ascending feels better than staying human, and the choice to remain mortal requires giving up something that tastes like godhood.

What Victory Looks Like

You will not kill the gods. You will not tame the Wilds. You will not rid the world of monsters. Victory in the Myth is a village saved from the thing in the river. A monster turned aside without slaughter. A companion pulled back from the edge of Apotheosis and reminded of who they were before the fire. A child who sees a hero and is inspired rather than terrified.

Victory is the story told at the Hearthfire with all heroes alive to hear it. Not all sessions will end that way. But the ones that do are worth every scar.

A Note on Divinity The Hubris Track is not a punishment meter. It is a mirror, showing how far a character has drifted from the mortal life that makes them worth caring about. The gods are weather. The monsters are landscape. The only enemy is forgetting. When a hero returns from sacred ground with a new Hubris box and wild light in their eyes, give them a moment at the fire. Let someone hand them a bowl of bad soup. Let a child ask them a stupid question. Let them fumble with their bedroll. That moment — the small, clumsy, mortal moment after the divine one — is the whole game. Without it, you are running a power fantasy. With it, you are running a story about what power costs and what it cannot buy.

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Bound — The Myth v0.1
A Setting of Gods & Mortals