Saurians as an old race of KaIm?

This idea was inspired by a conversation on discord. I was chatting with someone who criticized the backstory about how the Saurians awakened the Kaïm by creating the Black Moon. His argument was that it took agency and focus away from the title characters of the game. So that was his justification for removing the Saurians entirely. I disagreed, so I quickly thought of a way to reconcile our opposing viewpoints.

What if the Saurians were actually a type of Nephilim? A type of Onirim dragon? This would allow them to stay, while putting the focus back on the Nephilim.

So my idea is that Saurians were an early evolution of Kaïm, specifically the old race of dragons: lunar dragons. They had a pentacle of five Ka-elements, but Moon-Ka was hypertrophied and eclipsed the other branches, a ka-imbalance typical of dragons. This meant it was easy to confuse them as beings of purely Moon-Ka, even while they manipulated all the magic fields to create their civilization.

The Saurians were the first Kaïm to awaken on Earth. They assumed fleshy bodies for themselves, assuming the various reptiles shaped by the Moon fields. Dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles… they took all these forms and more. They built their own civilization, Lemuria. Then they had their own equivalent of a fossil fuel crisis: they exhausted the lunar field faster than the lunar ether could replenish it. This resulted in their civilization declining. The older Saurians accepted their fate, but a younger generation did not.

Led by the dark prophet Mu, the black Saurians created their own continent and raised a second Moon into the sky. This Black Moon eclipsed the Ethers and threatened to destroy the world. The other Kaïm, who had remained in slumber while the Saurians woke, were jolted awake by this disturbance. They went to war and destroyed the Black Moon.

The Saurians went extinct as a result of these two blows. Most only survived as ghosts: white Saurians lingered in the astral seas as sea monsters, while ghosts of black Saurians lingered in dark tombs and the depths of the lower planes. Some black Saurians survived and fled into the obscure corners of the world, becoming cryptids like the Loch Ness Monster, mokèlé-mbèmbé, and Grootslang.

The Ka from the deceased Saurians returned to the magic fields and nourished the Nexi that birthed new Kaïm. In a very literal sense, new generations of Kaïm were descended from the Saurians. Some would even have occasional flashbacks to moments from the lives of their Saurians ancestors. Those who take the most after them are a class of Onirim metamorphoses known collectively as the Ophidians, who all display obvious reptilian features to some extent or another.

The Selenim, obviously, are scions of the black Saurians. While lacking metamorphoses, their occult science of Anamorphosis allows them to assume any number of nightmarish (or beautiful) forms, limited only by the imagination and personality of the artist when constructing her Imago. What does this suggest the black Saurians were capable of before their demise?

Some possible plot hooks:

⚸ What are thought to be crocodile attacks occur in Lake Placid. However, autopsies show something very strange: the blood and internal organs are necrotic as if they’d been dead for months already. The wounds aren’t consistent with crocodile bite patterns either, but with hypothetical bite patterns of plesiosaur skulls.

⚸ A Satanic cult, calling itself the “Scarlet Lodge”, performs various ritual murders, of both mortals and the occasional Nephilim, using snake symbolism. Justice believes these are the work of the Cultes des Goules and their Selenim and Devil patrons... until the victims start including Selenim and Devils. Who is hunting who?

⚸ A clique of Lovers invites a Selenim PC to Assuage as they partake in a party held by the mysterious “Cult of Ecstasy”. However, s/he notices something strange. Several mortals are unusually resistant to giving up their Solar-Ka. Upon inspection in Ka-Vision, the PC is astonished to see that they have small cores of Moon-Ka orbiting their Solar-Ka!

Hope you enjoyed!