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Window459
2011-03-21, 09:26 PM
So I'm currently running a pathfinder/3.5 game and the big bad guy has a plan to unleash 3 ancient evil being known only as the Destroyers,...and well I have no idea what the Destroyers are going to be. I mean this is supposed to be a kinda sequel campaign to a Ravenloft-esk campaign I ran, which end with the party freeing the plane from the clutches of the Mists. So I look to you playground for ideas on what the Destroyers are, their CR needs be probably around 16-20ish, thanks in advance.

Lhurgyof
2011-03-21, 10:13 PM
So I'm currently running a pathfinder/3.5 game and the big bad guy has a plan to unleash 3 ancient evil being known only as the Destroyers,...and well I have no idea what the Destroyers are going to be. I mean this is supposed to be a kinda sequel campaign to a Ravenloft-esk campaign I ran, which end with the party freeing the plane from the clutches of the Mists. So I look to you playground for ideas on what the Destroyers are, their CR needs be probably around 16-20ish, thanks in advance.

One of them could be releasing Kalid-ma.

Although I think he'd be a bit too powerful for the PC's.

Hiro Protagonest
2011-03-21, 10:16 PM
So I'm currently running a pathfinder/3.5 game and the big bad guy has a plan to unleash 3 ancient evil being known only as the Destroyers,...and well I have no idea what the Destroyers are going to be. I mean this is supposed to be a kinda sequel campaign to a Ravenloft-esk campaign I ran, which end with the party freeing the plane from the clutches of the Mists. So I look to you playground for ideas on what the Destroyers are, their CR needs be probably around 16-20ish, thanks in advance.

The three destroyers, let's see...

There could be a martial one, a warrior of great skill.
An arcane one, a wizard or sorcerer of great power.
The third one could be divine or psionic.

Lhurgyof
2011-03-21, 10:22 PM
Kalid-Ma "Tari Killer", 15th Champion of Rajaat
Dragon (Augmented Humanoid)
Defiler (Wizard) 20/Wayferrer (Psion ) 20/ Dragon 10

Those are Kalid-ma's base stats, but I think he'd lay waste to the party.

You could easily argue that his psionic abilities are suppressed when in Ravenloft, and have him just be the strongest arcane casters in the world.

Window459
2011-03-21, 10:24 PM
The three destroyers, let's see...

There could be a martial one, a warrior of great skill.
An arcane one, a wizard or sorcerer of great power.
The third one could be divine or psionic.

Well that is kinda what I am going for, just trying to figure out how I'm going to pull it off, am I going to home brew some baddies or use give creatures from books, that was what I was wondering.

Lhurgyof
2011-03-21, 10:27 PM
Since he is currently kept in a comatose-like state by his senior-most templar, it would easy to break the seal. A weakened, but still quite strong Kalid-ma (Defiler 20/Dragon 10 maybe) would fight the party, and they would do their best to lock him back away and/or send him back to Dark Sun (since the characters probably wont know what that place is just "from whence he came" sort of deal).

Window459
2011-03-21, 10:29 PM
Since he is currently kept in a comatose-like state by his senior-most templar, it would easy to break the seal. A weakened, but still quite strong Kalid-ma (Defiler 20/Dragon 10 maybe) would fight the party, and they would do their best to lock him back away and/or send him back to Dark Sun (since the characters probably wont know what that place is just "from whence he came" sort of deal).

Well what the Destoryers are supposed to are 3 beings that kinda just ran amok all over the plane, destroying and causing chaos. Kinda sort of choosing my own baddies kinda thing

Kaun
2011-03-21, 10:37 PM
You could set each one up as an avatar of different types of destruction.

For example;

An avatar of elemental fury: Raging fires, cyclones, earthquakes and tidal waves.

An avatar of Time: Not sure how this one would play out but time gets everything sooner or later.

and the third, i dont know maybe an avatar of Man or the warlord or something like that.

I realise this doesnt help much with the crunch but sometimes an idea is all thats required :smallwink:.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2011-03-21, 11:00 PM
This seems like the perfect opportunity to use a monster I dreamed up years ago. It's called the Dark Trinity, although that could easily be interpreted as the Three Destroyers in the course of time...

The catch, however, is that it's a single monster. Although I suppose they could all act individually...that said, allow me to present the monster.


The Dark Trinity

A chill winds sweeps across the plain, cold as death and as bleak as the gray wastes. It howls mournfully across the vast grasslands and an empty despair settles in its wake, washing the fields in shades of gray.

An eerie silence descends, and the empty air echoes with a soundlessness that reverberates in the minds of the watchers, straining their will and their sanity. The world is bleak and desolate, its color washed out, its substance drained. The wind dies down, and all is still and empty. Nothing moves, nothing is heard, and nothing remains to show that this plane was once, and still is, alive. The world is a mausoleum, silent, foreboding, lifeless.

And now something moves. It is on the edge of reality, almost out of sight beyond some unseen veil, and yet it moves. A twisted form, its true nature obscured by the mists of existence. It is faint, but it grows stronger. There is no drama, no noise, no display of raw power…and it is disconcerting. It should not have arrived in this manner. It should have come with fanfare, with thunder, with some ominous, booming portent of the horrors to come. With the rumblings of a stirring apocalypse...it should not have come in silence. And yet is has. Suddenly, like a maggot bursting out of rotting flesh, it is there, throwing off the mystic force that bound its form in ether.

A tall shaft of dark, twisted metal hangs gently in the still air, three figures seemingly hovering around it. Three female forms, pale as bleached bone, their naked bodies draped in ragged garments of transparent black silk. Black silk, punched through with wicked iron spikes driven through their bodies and binding them tightly to the dark metal. Back to back to back they stand, impaled by corroded spines, seeped in their own ichors, their wrists and ankles bound by rusted, pitted chain, their arms raised beseechingly to the heavens. Black blood falls from ancient nails driven through their palms, pinning each one hand to hand with the others. It is a ghastly trigon of humanity…or what was once humanity. What it is now, even it cannot say, for each mouth is sewn shut, vile secretions oozing from between the stitched lips, staining each face with black slime.

The entity ceases its constant turning, and three pairs of eyes, long sealed shut by layers of bloody tears, snap open, revealing orbs of glowing violet, pupil-less and hideous to behold.

The sixth veil has finally broken. The Dark Trinity has arisen, and the world reels in rising madness...

Randel
2011-03-22, 01:02 AM
The Nothingness
A sort of animated Sphere of Annihilation, this destroyer looks like... well a hole in the universe. It doesn't growl or announce its presence, it just moves toward things and anything it touches is erased from existence. Looking at it for too long is a very bad idea since it has no physical form and depth perception gets messed up... it may look like its been standing still from you perspective but its been moving towards you!

Its effectivly immune to most attacks and has a cold calculating intelligence that makes it eliminate the most vital things in the world first. Can only be destroyed with a select few items and it will actively avoid those.

Defeating it basically consists of finding whatever can kill it (rod of cancellation?), tracking it down, and hitting it. The problem is that its very dificult to track and is simultaniously hunting down important people or artifacts to destroy.


The Silence

A creepy monocrome fey figure, this Destroyer looks like an elven Bard as if drawn by a small child. He dances and seems to play the flute, but no sound comes out. In fact he radiates a large Zone of Silence that remains in an area long after he passes through and an anti-magic field that protects him. All magic effects around him are surpressed and he has other abilities that destroy magic items like Mages Disjunction.

This destroyer seeks to drain all magic and music from the world. He can steal the voices of those around him and bring silence to an area before destroying the magic there.

Fortunatly he is suceptable to mundane attacks, unfortunatly several tough monsters follow him around.


The Conflict

This destroyer is a ghost that posesses people, namely it posesses those who kill its previous host. During its first rampage across the multiverse it first posessed a lowly farmer who then attacked a monster, when the farmer was killed the monster rampaged and killed many people before being slain by a knight. The knight was posessed and began killing others. This continued until it posessed the most powerful dragon in the world who layed waste to kingdoms. It was eventually defeated by a Lich who petrified it.

Eventually the stone statue was shattered (which killed the dragon), the ghost then posessed the Lich who fought for control of his mind before succuming. However, now the ghost was intelligent and began wrecking havok with hordes of undead and dominating kings across the land. He was eventually destroyed but posessed the adventurer who killed him.

His defeat came about when the ghost stormed the gates of Hell, fought and posessed his way through the ranks of the demons on his way to Asmodeus himself. Numerous attempts were made petrify or curse it this time but the ghost grew stronger and simply posessed any nearby powerful being once its current host grew weak.

Even Asmodeus himself was close to defeat at the hands of the Conflict when suddenly a Tarrasque was teleported into the lowest layer of the Abyss (apparently by a controlled Prismatic Sphere) and rampaged across the landscape, killing the current host of the Conflict. The Conflict posessed the Tarasque and prepared to focus the creatures wrath on Asmodeus when suddenly the Tarasque fell back into its millenial slumber.

The ruler of the Abyse then had the Tarasque locked away in a dungeon somewhere in an altered time field to keep it from ever awakening. This is where it was eventually unsealed.

The Conflict basically posessed the most powerful creature around and makes them kill everything around them (either with force of by manipulating events). If its current host is killed then it posesses whoever killed it or the strongest nearby thing it can find. It also can remember the skills of all its previous hosts, it current form is a Tarasque with the spellcasting ability of the greatest spellcasters and warriors of the Abyss.

Lhurgyof
2011-03-22, 07:17 AM
Well what the Destoryers are supposed to are 3 beings that kinda just ran amok all over the plane, destroying and causing chaos. Kinda sort of choosing my own baddies kinda thing

As a defiler, he'd be destroying everything.

Literally, all life around would just die simply by him casting his spells.

Yora
2011-03-22, 08:11 AM
So I'm currently running a pathfinder/3.5 game and the big bad guy has a plan to unleash 3 ancient evil being known only as the Destroyers
And then what? Releasing three ancient evils is it's own reward?

Hiro Protagonest
2011-03-22, 02:58 PM
It could be three powerful mortal warriors.

The breaker: an orc barbarian.
The tyrant: a warblade or crusader, with white raven maneuvers.
The black death: a rogue/fighter.

bladesyz
2011-03-22, 03:59 PM
So I'm currently running a pathfinder/3.5 game and the big bad guy has a plan to unleash 3 ancient evil being known only as the Destroyers,...and well I have no idea what the Destroyers are going to be. I mean this is supposed to be a kinda sequel campaign to a Ravenloft-esk campaign I ran, which end with the party freeing the plane from the clutches of the Mists. So I look to you playground for ideas on what the Destroyers are, their CR needs be probably around 16-20ish, thanks in advance.

What exactly do you want to accomplish with the "Destroyers"? Just a boss battle, or something you can use as a plot hook?

Window459
2011-03-22, 05:18 PM
What exactly do you want to accomplish with the "Destroyers"? Just a boss battle, or something you can use as a plot hook?

The players are slowly getting clues to what he wants to accomplish, which is get revenge on a divine being that helped the characters in the previous campaign save the world from a abstract being known as the Nameless, (was thinking of making this be on of the Destroyers, but decided against it). The divine being is very protective of the plane seeing it as his little experiment and doesn't want anything directly f*&#ing it up, but doesn't want to get directly involved since last time he did, the planed ended up becoming one with the domain like in ravenloft and he end up being a sort of pseudo dark one, which if that happened would play well into the BBEGs plan.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2011-03-22, 05:39 PM
The players are slowly getting clues to what he wants to accomplish, which is get revenge on a divine being that helped the characters in the previous campaign save the world from a abstract being known as the Nameless, (was thinking of making this be on of the Destroyers, but decided against it). The divine being is very protective of the plane seeing it as his little experiment and doesn't want anything directly f*&#ing it up, but doesn't want to get directly involved since last time he did, the planed ended up becoming one with the domain like in ravenloft and he end up being a sort of pseudo dark one, which if that happened would play well into the BBEGs plan.

None of the presented ideas strike your fancy, I take it?

If that's the case, a greater idea of what YOU envisioned the Destroyers as would be helpful.

Window459
2011-03-22, 06:01 PM
None of the presented ideas strike your fancy, I take it?

If that's the case, a greater idea of what YOU envisioned the Destroyers as would be helpful.

The ideas are helping, alot actually, its just I have a slight perfectionist problem and I want to make them some that when my players here their names the cringe years from now, my brain keeps seeing one as some sort of draconic like beast large and all menacing, the other as being some sort of giant beast like out of a Japanese monster movie, and the other being some sort of elemental force made of the various elements, having no stable form but the closet it get is kinda like a multi-elemental golem like thing

Djinn_in_Tonic
2011-03-22, 06:11 PM
The ideas are helping, alot actually, its just I have a slight perfectionist problem and I want to make them some that when my players here their names the cringe years from now...

If this is what you want, I'd recommend going with the unearthly and horrifying over the "giant monsters." The latter are seen, by PCs, to be something that they can beat up. The former (the unspeakable horrors, alien forms, and so forth) are the ones that will make a party stop, think, and dread the upcoming encounter. The dragon, giant beast, and giant elemental have their place, but, as a player, that's just more of the same. Just bigger isn't really that much of a threat, as monsters like that are everywhere in fantasy literature and RPGs in particular.

Hence why my suggestion, for example, was as strange as it was...it's something the players have never encountered, have never imagined, and have no idea what to do against (and no knowledge of what it can do). If these are unspeakably terrible being who have been locked out of reality (as it seems they have been), the "super-sized monster" gimmick seems like a bit of a let-down. All my opinion, but still.

Window459
2011-03-22, 06:23 PM
If this is what you want, I'd recommend going with the unearthly and horrifying over the "giant monsters." The latter are seen, by PCs, to be something that they can beat up. The former (the unspeakable horrors, alien forms, and so forth) are the ones that will make a party stop, think, and dread the upcoming encounter. The dragon, giant beast, and giant elemental have their place, but, as a player, that's just more of the same. Just bigger isn't really that much of a threat, as monsters like that are everywhere in fantasy literature and RPGs in particular.

Hence why my suggestion, for example, was as strange as it was...it's something the players have never encountered, have never imagined, and have no idea what to do against (and no knowledge of what it can do). If these are unspeakably terrible being who have been locked out of reality (as it seems they have been), the "super-sized monster" gimmick seems like a bit of a let-down. All my opinion, but still.

And its a very good opinion and is helping my thought process, greatly, the players are at least 4 sessions away from meeting the Destroyers, I just want to be able to have built in advance instead of whipping it all up at the last minute.

Hiro Protagonest
2011-03-22, 07:28 PM
Something memorable?


All of these are aberrations.
The devourer: a gigantic creature that looks like a worm with multiple heads and rows of sharp teeth.
The corrupter: a huge creature that looks roughly humanoid, but has tentacles instead of hands, no visible eyes, and diseased skin.
The crusher: this one is a gargantuan humanoid that carries a big two-handed hammer made of otherworldly material.

Ajadea
2011-03-22, 11:29 PM
Hmm....

Kazmalut, Destroyer of Body
Colossal Aberration (Incorporeal) The antithesis of matter shouldn't be made of much of anything, but should be able to touch a lot

Kazmalut should have some sort of disjunction/disintegrate (objects only) on touch effect. And should fly.

Mahvanil, Destroyer of Life
Medium Undead Not alive, not dead. Outside of life altogether.

Every time it speaks, treat as wail of the banshee. It is effectively covered with a permanent symbol of death, triggered by looking at it. Kazmalut, Mahvanil, and Uita are attuned to the symbol. Its natural weapons should deal energy drain damage, and anything killed by it is affected as if by a soul bind spell, with the gem being Mahvanil itself.

Perhaps make it destroy trapped souls within it utterly in order to fuel its wail of the banshee SLA?

Uita, Destroyer of Thought
Dimunative Aberration (Psionic) Or about the size of a human brain

SLAs: At will- Programmed Amnesia (CArc), Dominate Monster

It is effectively covered with a permanent symbol of insanity, triggered by looking at it. Kazmalut, Mahvanil, and Uita are attuned to the symbol.

Mind you, with all the instant bad-stuff triggered by looking at them, these are probably epic-level threats as-is.

ffone
2011-03-23, 03:50 AM
'Awakened ancient evil' has quite the pedigree. Why not pick your favorite three from the master list:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SealedEvilInACan

akma
2011-03-23, 06:48 AM
They are called destroyers, so I assume they were made by someone in order to destroy something. Will they work togather or individually?
For exemple, if one is the destroyer of land, one is the destroyer of sky and one is the destroyer of sea, then each of them will have his part and will work without the others.
Also, auras could help make them look them more powerfull. For exemple, a destroyer of sky will have the sky bleeding around him. Having the auras harming could also pose another challange - it won`t be simply the challange to defeat them, it would also be a challange to reach them.
They could also be spreading diffrent emotions - fear, jealousy and rage, and make everyone else destroy for them.
Also, in a sidenote, I realy liked the idea of the conflict.

Aidan305
2011-03-23, 08:00 AM
I common trope that I absolutely despise in any medium is the idea that any evil can be defeated by the hero, despite the fact that no-one was ever able to manage it previously. It always hits my suspension of disbelief and I find myself wondering why, if all it took was a sword made of crystalised light (for example), did no-one ever do it before?
Keep your evil big, keep it unfathomable, keep it undefeatable.

With that said, when you're looking for a good BB, it's always good to turn to concepts, rather than people. A human, a devil, an angel, even a very, very big monster are all, in a sense, real. We can picture them, we can know them. This makes them seem less threatening.
If on the other hand, we take something unreal, something that can't be properly defined or seen, and it becomes something more menacing, an unfathomable "thing" which can't be fought or harmed and against which we are all helpless. Done well, this can make for a far better game than a giant monster can.

And now I'm thinking of the Nothing, from "The Neverending Story". Can't be fought, can't be beaten back, but can be stopped.

Cartigan
2011-03-23, 08:39 AM
So I'm currently running a pathfinder/3.5 game and the big bad guy has a plan to unleash 3 ancient evil being known only as the Destroyers,...and well I have no idea what the Destroyers are going to be. I mean this is supposed to be a kinda sequel campaign to a Ravenloft-esk campaign I ran, which end with the party freeing the plane from the clutches of the Mists. So I look to you playground for ideas on what the Destroyers are, their CR needs be probably around 16-20ish, thanks in advance.

Four Gods wait on the windowsill
Where once eight Gods did war and will
And if the Gods themselves may die
What does that say for you and I?
[...]

bladesyz
2011-03-23, 10:30 AM
The ideas are helping, alot actually, its just I have a slight perfectionist problem and I want to make them some that when my players here their names the cringe years from now, my brain keeps seeing one as some sort of draconic like beast large and all menacing, the other as being some sort of giant beast like out of a Japanese monster movie, and the other being some sort of elemental force made of the various elements, having no stable form but the closet it get is kinda like a multi-elemental golem like thing

The key to being memorable is to be mysterious. People fear the unknown, and not knowing what exactly the "Destroyers" are capable of is magnitudes more frightening than a bunch of stats on paper, no matter how high the numbers.

randomhero00
2011-03-23, 10:54 AM
Go for the sins. One could empower gluttony where ever he goes, so much so that the village he's in the people eat themselves to death.

Another could be Sloth. He uses minions whenever possible.

The third could be murder. Basically a super elusive assassin.

Could also go with the horsemen theme. Famine, war, and pestilence. I personally like that one the best. War would be a straight up hard fight. And pestilence would have some huge disease aura, with plenty of disease DCs when he attacks. Famine would cause all crops to whither and die within a 100 sq mile radius and have a lot of poison DCs for attacks.