a world tearing at the seams [3.5]

[Brendan]

In a current campaign I'm running, a team of cultists failed a ritual to summon the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse and end the world. As a result, the horsemen are trapped in the "gateway" between worlds, kind of caught in the hinges, leaving a crack open in the gate. the four horsemen are ridiculously powerful elder evils and their thrashing is going to dislodge and release things that should have never been let loose. I don't want big swarms of abominations pouring into the world, but I do want to show the players that reality is slipping and that their precious world is cracking slowly. I ask you, residents of gitp, if you have any ideas for how to show this world to be falling apart without killing millions of people or making some huge magical outbreak? keep in mind that they are the only beings on the planet with PC class levels and are only third level.

ps. has anyone ever statted out the 4 horsemen or made any kind of d&d equivalent for them? i'm fine with homebrew and pretty much anything else out there.

[vampire2948]

So, you're asking for suggestions on how to make this apparent to your players?

Maybe make magic start working differently / randomly / with a % chance to do something else. What classes are your players?

[Yora]

Elder Evils has a nice section of bad omens that herald the comming of an elder evil that will destroy the world. Ideally, the effects should somehow be related to the power of the elder evil and give a taste of what is to come if they are not stoped.
A good way to start would to come up with the effect it will have when they pass entirely through the portal. Then take that and scale it down.

[Brendan]

bard, pally, fighter. distressingly low power. no npc.

[vampire2948]

Well... As Yora said, take a look at Elder Evils.

Not really sure what you could do for the Fighter. If the party is pretty powerful relative to the rest of the world, maybe they'd be good targets for some sanity-reducin'-whispers-in-their-dreams.

For the Paladin.. well, God tells him something is wrong, or he 'feels it' using his pala-sense.

Bard, magic starts working strangely? Perhaps?

No idea about the fighter. Maybe just different enemies start popping up. But you said you don't want an abomination style invasion..

[Warlawk]

Well, each of the four horsemen has a different MO. What I would personally do for this is have regions effected by one of them at a time.

Perhaps they are traveling and find a small town that has suddenly started having trouble. With sickness. Strange sickness, that no one here has encountered before. Stranger yet, even though it should be killing them en masse, no one has died, death is a different horseman and if they died they could no longer foster the diseases and such that pestilence represents.

War could be finding a place where to extremely peaceful organizations/temples/whatever have suddenly started going crazy and killing people for the slightest provocation. Maybe the first instance was something stupid like a person accidentally bumped a monk (as in the profession not the class)and spilled his drink/soup/begging bowl and he just stood up and beat the person to death with his bare hands then started attacking everyone in the area because they didn't help him. Have this person be a well known pacifist who helped people out and devoted his life to others.

That sort of thing.

[Brendan]

I might go with subtle things like parts of the world losing a law of physics or time distortions. I want the horsemen to remain the main threat but i want to make it clear that the world is breaking and could easily be destroyed by just the ripples created by the summoning. I probably will have some magical creatures or abominations be released, if only so the fighter feels a little useful. also this group does enjoy having something to stab.


That sort of thing.

that sounds good. i like the idea of the monk for War. small scale effects should work well to give the hint that the world is breaking without just being massive disaster after massive disaster.

[nyarlathotep]

Which set of horsemen are you using?

The biblical set: Conquest, War, Famine/Strife, Death (with Hades as his page)

The traditional set/inaccurate set: War, Famine Pestilence, and Death

[Frozen_Feet]

The moon is red and full for extended periods. Dark clouds cover the sun and its glow seems strangely diminished. Malnourished crows flock near settlements. Shadows seem off and flicker in unsettling ways. The air is conspicuosly dry and smells of smoke and blood, even when there aren't people around for miles. Strange nightmares plague common folk and everyone looks pale and weary for it. Livestock give birth to two-headed stillborns. Seeming lunatics wander on the streets, preaching that the world is going to end. The sound of horse hooves striking the ground can be heard from the distance even when nothing can be seen.

[Brendan]

Which set of horsemen are you using?

The inaccurate one. i'm not 100% focused on loyalty to the biblical version and im really just interested in the idea itself and the emotions it evokes in the players (who are familiar to the fake set.) also I feel like pestilence is more interesting than conquest...

[nyarlathotep]

The inaccurate one. i'm not 100% focused on loyalty to the biblical version and im really just interested in the idea itself and the emotions it evokes in the players (who are familiar to the fake set.) also I feel like pestilence is more interesting than conquest...

That works I found in campaigns conquest only works if he's physically manifest or possessing someone, because he represents a sort of peaceful coming to power of evil, by popular support and charisma. I will however agree all ideas like this hinge heavily on preconceptions held by the players, and that purely based on influences pestilence is more interesting.

[Incompleat]

I am not that sure if the folkloric version of the four horsemen can be represented well as elder evils - they are more personifications of unpleasant aspects of the universe than incomprehensible entities of unspeakable evil from beyond reality, I think.

As for suggestions, what about this?

As you said, the four horsemen are trapped between worlds, and their influence is spreading through it - but not everywhere or everywhen in the same measure, and the four have different measures of influence in different "zones". It's not that they are fighting for dominance, per se, but each one of them finds it easier to slip through some kinds of "cracks" than through some other ones.

If a piece of land falls under the indirect influence of one of the four, the basic nature of reality in that territory is warped accordingly - for example, if it is under War's domain people become unnaturally aggressive without even realizing it, a faint sound of armors clashing can be continuously heard at a distance, and so on. This even affects the history of the place: for example, people in a zone of Pestilence may talk about horrible plagues which happened thousands of years before, and which, according to the PC's own knowledge, did not happen at all - indeed, they are not events of the "natural" timeline, but rather of the artificial one spawned by the Horseman's unholy influence.

These zones will be expanding, of course, and majorly freakish stuff at the boundary between two zones "owned" by two different horsemen - the sun could never fall or never rise, for example, and spells could malfunction with thematically appropriate effects, and perhaps space itself could be bound in such a way that attempting to walk "along" the boundary would cause people to end up walking towards the center of one of the two zones instead. Also, occasionally zones which have grown too big would "break" into two smaller ones, belonging to two thematically opposite horsemen (so war-famine and pestilence-death, I suppose?). This could be jarring for the PCs if they were within that territory when it happened - for example, they are talking with a beggar about the neverending famine that caused so many deaths in the last five centuries ("Wait, what? We were here a week ago, and there was no famine at all...") when, without missing a beat, the wretch straightens up, tightens his hold on his spear ("Did he even have a spear before? I don't think so...") and screams "But enough idle chatter, the enemy is coming! Dirty thieving invaders, they have been attacking us since forever...".

You get my drift - minds are breaking, space is breaking, time is breaking, and no one except the PCs and perhaps a few high level NPCs is even noticing that.