[4e] Speraggium

[Lord Raziere]

"Evil, is not the color of darkness, the visage of an ugly face, or just some part of life. It the Enemy. The eternal enemy. It has no qualms, no remorse or regrets, no limits. It is a shapeshifting, deceiving monster, forever reforming, forever finding a new place to resurface, forever finding a new victim to twist and turn down into its darkness, if given the chance. Ift could come for you, for me, for anyone. Don't mistake it. We fight a war against this enemy. We have always fought this war. We must keep fighting it, Or we will lose."- High Commander Lasrauge

Speraggium is a world where the primordials were completely wiped out, the world is closer to the Feywild and the Astral Planes, the normal monstrous races are not there, the gods wage wars daily and the world is incredibly beautiful and mystical. Basically? its my reconstruction of heroic fantasy.

1. The Primordials are completely gone.

2. Gods and their servants are more commonplace

3. The war between the good and evil gods is actively happening.

4. Orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, dragonborn, dragons, trolls, and other races don’t exist

5. The evil races are corrupted versions of the good ones. No one in the world is naturally evil.

6. The Fae have a bigger influence upon the world.

7. Asmodeus has created a thing called The Corruption that is constantly trying to infect and twist everything around it towards evil. It was created during the Dawn War, under Asmodeus deceiving people that it was an empowering tool to help fight against the Primordials and their creations.

8. There is no balance between good and evil. Evil is a plague, an infection, it isn’t apart of the universe, it doesn’t help the universe in any way, and the world is only improved when evil dies. Literally.

9. Adventurers are not wanderers or people who got their stuff by chance. They are actual super-soldiers of good trained to resist the Corruption and fight evil with special fortress facilities for housing, equipping and training them. You don't need inns and stores here, you got fortresses designed for you.

[Calliope121]

Sounds like a very good idea! I love the idea of not having a typical monster in the place, but how are you going to manifest the corrupted of the races. Tolkien said that his orcs were corrupted elves. Are you planning on doing that or doing undead or what?

[Lord Raziere]

Sounds like a very good idea! I love the idea of not having a typical monster in the place, but how are you going to manifest the corrupted of the races. Tolkien said that his orcs were corrupted elves. Are you planning on doing that or doing undead or what?

no, undead, no monstrosities.

and the Corruption ain't a set in stone thing, it evolves.

the scariest part of it...is that the Corrupted races still are those races, just their negativity and flaws taken up to eleven and all their positive traits lost, a corrupted human is still human. just an evil one, but still human. The corruption cannot say, turn you into a eldritch abomination or some hideous monstrosity, prolonged exposure can say, change your features to become more evilesque but, not make radical changes into some weird direction, a corrupt tree is still a tree.

In short the Corruption cannot warp you beyond your nature, you are still you, you are just an evil twisted you- its just taking what is already there and bringing it to the forefront.

that is to say, monstrosities and undead do exist, it just ain't the Corruption itself that causes them, people who are Corrupted can themselves make something hideous and such if the Corruption brings out the potential in them...but ultimately it is about exploiting the darkest natures in people.

[Rourke]

That sounds awesome! Are there ways to tell if someone has been Corrupted? How do you become Corrupt?

[Lord Raziere]

That sounds awesome! Are there ways to tell if someone has been Corrupted? How do you become Corrupt?

Thats the problem. Its hard to tell. and there are many different ways of becoming Corrupt.

You see there are many different strains of the Corruption.
some are faster and explosive: suddenly it jumps on a bunch of people angry over something the government done wrong and turns it into a full-blown riot, sometimes it suddenly makes everyone in a tavern in a bar fight to escalate to suddenly slaughtering each other instead of rough-housing, or it targets a lot of people in despair, like beggars or slums and makes them violent.

Other strains, get into food or water, make an entire town start becoming paranoid and closed off, makes them suspicious and distrustful of outsiders, slides them down into an attitude of burning the witch and xenophobia.

and thats just the common people. some are slower and target higher-ups, strains the prey upon the pride of kings and nobles, turn good rulers into tyrants, slowly decays the morality of people in power and makes them addicted to abusing it...or worse, turn into war-mongerers who want to conquer other lands

then there are others that infect the land itself. turns into a harsh, cruel place where only the strong survive, starts infecting people living there with the attitude of a survivalist, then makes that survivalist attitude grow into outright darwinism.

Some, target young people who have suffered a tragedy, children. very slow, corrupts them as they grow up and such kind of strains are hard to detect even when fully matured, for by then the people corrupted by this strain are incredibly capable of passing themselves off very well as someone who is good.

and that is just some of the known strains. The Corruption is inherently designed to evolve, take multiple different approaches and generally always find a new way to attack good, the Corruption might even be intelligent, though not by any definition we know, if it is intelligent, it is a mind or even minds that wouldn't think in any way that we understand, except for the fact that it is always seeking to do evil.

in short, the DM can make up the Corruption however he wants and turn it to whatever purpose he can think of.

[Lord Raziere]

On Completely Wiping Out The Corruption

Asmodeus is not stupid.
He knew that when he sent out the Corruption that there might be people come looking for his designs on it to figure how he made it and how one could dismantle it.
That is why Asmodeus burned all designs on how the Corruption was made while laughing maniacally, made fakes, put them where people would expect to find them, put traps around said fakes, wipe his own memories of how he designed the Corruption, then not announce to anyone that he did any of this and let people assume that he still has the plans for the Corruption, including his own lieutenants. Resulting in many adventurers trying to search for these designs and dying from said traps while Asmodeus laughed at his own twisted form of comedy.
You will not find any answers from trying to beat Asmodeus and finding whatever plans he stashed away. No one knows this of course, and they still send out adventurers to do this, never to return.

The Good gods, are busy fighting the war against the evil gods in the outer planes and have no time to go down and investigate the Corruption themselves. If they abandon their front, evil will destroy it for sure and cannot afford it. Furthermore, even if they did investigate it, despite all their powers it is still the greatest creation of Asmodeus, its design isn't exactly obvious, easy or simple. Furthermore it might have the capability of adapting even to the gods and start Corrupting the gods themselves or become even harder to flush out. That is assuming, that Asmodeus hasn't planned for the good gods trying something like that and putting in some nasty trap or safeguard against the gods.

The mortal humanoids, are mortal. They aren't exactly incredibly powerful and super-intelligent. Wizards have been studying the Corruption for millennia to no avail in search for a way of wiping out the Corruption at its roots- right now, all people can really do is use Redeemer Weapons which cleanses people of the Corruption thus redeeming them and helps kill Irredeemables- people who have been so Corrupted, they can't be redeemed anymore. this is clipping the leaves of the weed rather than rooting it out from the ground.

That said, it is highly unlikely there will ever be a way of permanently eradicating the Corruption, there is a teensy possibility- but there is a chance that it might never occur.

[Lord Raziere]

The Protectors

The response to the Corruption, are the Protectors.

An elite organization present in almost all nations in the entire world, it consists of the best of the best champions in the world. Every member of the Protectors receives the best training, the best equipment and all the information they could have to help fight against the Corruption, funded by every nation, with its own force of wizards working together and researching said Corruption day in and day out.

They are the best hope to beat the Corruption. They are taught techniques on how to resist it, on how to spot its many different forms, how to fight Corrupted and so on.

There are limits however:
The Protectors, are not police, and they are not an army.
They can't clean up ordinary crime or fight in wars, that is outside their jurisdiction. All their efforts, all their powers must be focused on the Corruption for the greater good, they have no time to go around beating up petty thieves or trying to save lives on the battlefield.
If they are assigned to go kill all the Corrupted soldiers in an army- they will kill all those Corrupted soldiers, and not a single man more.

Furthermore, when they suspect that a king or noble might be Corrupted- they can't just go and kill him with no evidence. At best they can investigate and see if there are any signs or whatever. However at the same time, if their evidence turns up Corruption-positive and they kill the King and plunge the kingdom into a feudal civil war? They suffer zero legal consequences even if everyone in the kingdom suffers because of the death of the Corrupted king- because by Protector logic, a kingdom in chaos is much preferable to the Corruption gaining a foothold.

However between killing the obviously corrupted mobs and the corrupted kings and all its political implications, most Protectors are mostly investigators, they find that something is weird or strange, they send a squad out to go look at it, see if there is any Corruption around, if they find it they start redeeming everything with dark energy in it fast with their redeemer weapons, or in grimmer cases, start killing things if its too late for redemption.
If they find anything about normal crimes or anything like that- they are under no obligation to do anything about it. They don't have time with dealing such things and the higher ups prefer it that the Protectors focus on the long term goal of fighting the Corruption, the most morally conscious of them saying the proper procedure is to just hand it off to local authorities and hope they can deal with it, the least saying that they should outright ignore such unimportant matters and get back to work.

However there have been recorded cases of Protectors defying the orders of their superiors and taking care of ordinary crime or other evil acts anyways due to pure morality, or the fact the local authorities aren't strong enough to deal with the problem, or any other reason of their own. This often earns them some punishment for what the superiors consider wasting their time, but the superiors are unlikely to kick them out of the organization- they need all the help they can get to fight this thing.

So yea- the Protectors are meant to protect the world from the Corruption, but not protect the world from itself. They can do that, but they won't receive any rewards for doing so. Which of course, causes conflict among the Protectors themselves...

[Trog]

An excellent concept. Don't know if you are looking for feedback or anything but I'm just going to jot down a few things I thought of as I was reading through this. Do with it what you will.

So I would assume that any PC adventuring in said world would either be or aspire to be one of the Protectors. The Corruption makes for an interesting nebulous villain to go after and would lead to all sorts of whodunnit-type adventures I would imagine.

I could see the Corruption changing the way the world functions too. Like say that one of the head senior members of the organization of the Protectors gets the corruption and sends Protectors on missions to wipe out various heads of state. In the end, for the sake of fighting the horrible Corruption, of course, the Protectors take over as the leaders of men.

Now to make it interesting perhaps this only has happend to a portion of the world. In some areas kings still reign, protected by their protectors who answer to them in the normal order of things. But in other places the Protectors themselves rule and seek to wipe out those who would conquer them. This could be done legitimately (i.e the Protectors are still good and the people they wipe out were deserving of such) or done because the Protectors themselves have been corrupted and seek only power and to wipe out those who would set things aright.

Another thought - and this is more of an Big Idea for a Campaign™ sort - is that the Gods, knowing they themselves could not undo Asmodeous' evil created a similar plague - The Cleansing. The PCs could, perhaps, be on missions for the Gods to spread the Cleansing. Or could uncover the means by which the Gods could create the Cleansing first and then go about spreading it later from there. This isn't a magic button which eradicates the Corruption but is, instead, a similar catching condition. Then Asmodeous' forces could be sent after the Cleansing in the same way that the Protectors are sent after the Corruption.

And of course all sorts of variants can be made from these conditions resulting in a bunch of different nations and conditions and even cultures based off of dealing with these conditions either recently or over a long period of time or in the past. And the question of what happens when someone catches both the Corruption and the Cleansing. - Do both cancel out? Does one defeat the other? Do both co-exist making the person's actions vary wildly and essentially driving them insane? Etc.

Fun concept. :smallsmile:

[Lord Raziere]

Good ideas Trog. do what you will.

Protectors and Politics

Here is the thing: All that money for your super-Protector squads? Has got to come somewhere, doesn't just come out of thin air.
Sure, almost everyone funds them, the Guilds, the Lords, the Kings, everyone.

But not all the same amount. You see, since the Corruption is constantly changing, being cleansed and wiped out in one area only to rise in another, the various nations of the world funding for the Protectors also changes; namely changes depending on how much threat the Corruption is to them at that moment.
For example, Nation A funds the Protectors a lot, mostly because the Corruption is really threatening their nation and could get destroyed. Therefore the Protectors go and destroy the Corruption there and go to find another place under attack by the Corruption, by say Nation B
Now since Nation A isn't immediately threatened by the Corruption anymore, the funding goes down. Sure its still a potential threat, but the nation has got to think of its economy, the Protectors are expensive. To the nations point of view, too much funding for the Protectors means not enough money for them or the people, or for food, or housing-y'know what I mean.
Meaning the Protectors in Nation A are suddenly underfunded, and if a threat rises, they will have limited resources to deal with it.
At the same time in Nation B since the Corruption is starting to become obvious, more funding is starting to come in. But, Nation B could already be compromised....
As a result, not all Protectors are equal, not all of them are equally equipped, or equally trained, or equally experienced.
For example, one nation could have an abundance of level 10 super-Protectors experienced at this and ready to destroy evil with their angel-blessed gear.
Another could just have a couple of level ones with some good steel.

Of course this also colors peoples opinions of the Protectors, some see them as real legit super-elite guys to save them.....others think they are wimps and that they are doomed. and then there are the rare places where people have level 20 guys who think said guys are overlords who abuse their vast powerful or are paranoid and don't trust them.

And then there is the fact that some Protectors have to work with nobility on a daily basis, not just to protect them from the Corruption, but to protect everyone if the nobility itself becomes Corrupted. This puts them in the strange position where they have to protect them, but they also have to be on watch in case they need to start killing them, and it doesn't engender much trust between the nobility and the Protectors.
And then, there are the manipulations of the nobility itself, such as one noble using the Protectors to investigate another noble, just to bring that nobles reputation down just so that the first noble can have a better shot at the throne or something

And then lastly of course, you always have the possibility of Protectors themselves becoming corrupted- meaning there isn't a lot of trust to go around, anywhere.
It becomes worse when things actually involve the Corruption.

Politics and the Corruption

Here is the thing: The Corruption can be used to justify a lot of paranoia.
It can be used as en excuse. Nations have gone to war over accusations of one or the other or both being Corrupted, no matter how true, wars that unfortunately the Protectors have to deal with, with no funding from either because it means that both are being investigate and that both of their people might get killed...its just a big mess.
Nations have launched attacks on villages, barbarian tribes and other such things on the justification that they were Corrupted, elves and dwarves have played the Corrupted card on each other for centuries for numerous wars, there have been wars over kings being accused of being Corrupted, all on the justification that its the right thing to do and we should wipe out whatever is being accused from the earth, for the good of everyone.

and then there are nations recently weakened from the Corruption. to other nations they are sort of vulnerable, might have good resources to plunder, maybe invade them, take it over on the justification of protecting them from further harm, all they have to do is pay some tribute, y'know some money and resources to help fund the "protection". Then there are barbarian invaders, you don't want to succumb to barbarian invaders do you? They might be Corrupted to, maybe we should kill the barbarians, just to be safe.

And then of course there are various religions around claiming they would NEVER succumb to Corruption- they are holy and pious, full of virtue and happiness. how could they be Corrupted.
Well some just sign up for the political power....and some like to accept bribes from nobles....and then there are the people who are a little TOO zealous....a little too fanatical....the Corruption, turning their virtues into sins.

So to summarize: Who do you feel like trusting? :smallamused:

[Calliope121]

I like this a lot. It seems like the kind of place that has thousands of viewpoints that all hate the others. Suggestions: as part of a campaign for my characters, I created a group of god chosen superheroes called chosen. It is a template you apply to the character on top of races and classes. They represented their deities in battles, or in noble courts, or pretty much anywhere. You might want to consider adding them. Unfortunately I don't have the templates because they were deity specific to a different set of dietys