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Gnoman
2012-02-21, 09:31 PM
In my current campaign world, there is/was a pseudo-race of incredibly powerful ancient monsters from the early Godwar, each of which is unique. (The best way to describe them is a cross between Dwarf Fortress Forgotten Beasts (in form) and Balrogs(in the role they once served,)) At least one of the lesser of these was imprisoned beneath the earth after the deity that they served and who created them was slain by a human hero. Narratively, this was to make it plausible that some of them would be able to return when the Last Day draws near and said deity sounds the call to arms.

The trouble is, I'm having a hard time explaining why such a thing would be imprisoned rather than destroyed, and not having a reason bugs me. The best thing that I can come up with is the old "cannot be truly killed" idea, which feels a little lazy.

Grinner
2012-02-21, 09:37 PM
Well, imprisoning something that powerful might be easier than killing it?

I'm reminded of some Greek myth. :smallconfused:

Edit: Or perhaps they're necessary in some fashion. Like, their deity bound them to the fabric of existence, or something like that....

Elemental
2012-02-21, 09:42 PM
Having no idea of the purpose of Balrogs in Middle Earth, I'm going to comment anyway.

We could assume that these creatures in your campaign world still fulfill part of their purpose, even though they are bound.
Destroying them would possibly disrupt the natural order of things too much, thus dooming the world to misery.
An example would be the Old Gods of Azeroth. The Titans didn't destroy them because doing so would have weakened all creation.

Foxwarrior
2012-02-21, 09:46 PM
Well, in D&D, it's easier to bring someone back to life from the dead than from the living. True Resurrection (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/trueResurrection.htm) doesn't need a body, but Imprisonment (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/imprisonment.htm) requires that you actually go to the place they're imprisoned at.

DaMullet
2012-02-21, 09:46 PM
Depending on the level of myth in your campaign, it could simply be that the people of old didn't have the means to permanently kill them, at least not all of them. That's the old Legend of Zelda saw; no one destroys Ganondorf because he's too powerful, until Link comes along having mastered the Triforce and ready to smack down.

You say some human hero slayed one, but he couldn't possibly have been able to get around and slay ALL of them, perhaps he had some unique quality that couldn't be duplicated by the rest of the attemptees?

Coidzor
2012-02-21, 09:47 PM
^: And conveniently enough, that's how the PCs come in, thousands of years is a great amount of time for dude's genes to end up in just about any race you'd care to name.:smallbiggrin:

Death's too good for them. Slow, agonizing torture that makes them even crazier and ornerier than when they got imprisoned for all eternity sounds about right.

Alternatively, they sealed themselves up in order to hide themselves and avoid being unmade/killed/whathaveyou.

THEChanger
2012-02-21, 10:37 PM
Well, if these ancient evils were sealed away by a force of Ultimate Good(Copyright Pending), then one thing that could factor in would simply be mercy. After all, if the force of Ultimate Good(CP) just went around killing anyone they didn't like, then they wouldn't be very good, now would they?

ngilop
2012-02-21, 11:00 PM
So.. basically these beats are Fenris and The Last Days is Ragnarok.

just read some norse mytholgy and POW!!!

there is your inspiration.
below is a short sum up of all the BAD SH!T that happens

Ragnarok ("Doom of the Gods"), also called Gotterdammerung, means the end of the cosmos in Norse mythology. It will be preceded by Fimbulvetr, the winter of winters. Three such winters will follow each other with no summers in between. Conflicts and feuds will break out, even between families, and all morality will disappear. This is the beginning of the end.
The wolf Skoll will finally devour the sun, and his brother Hati will eat the moon, plunging the earth [into] darkness. The stars will vanish from the sky. The **** Fjalar will crow to the giants and the golden **** Gullinkambi will crow to the gods. A third **** will raise the dead.

The earth will shudder with earthquakes, and every bond and fetter will burst, freeing the terrible wolf Fenrir. The sea will rear up because Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, is twisting and writhing in fury as he makes his way toward the land. With every breath, Jormungand will stain the soil and the sky with his poison. The waves caused by the serpent's emerging will set free the ship Naglfar, and with the giant Hymir as their commander, the giants will sail towards the battlefield. From the realm of the dead a second ship will set sail, and this ship carries the inhabitants of hell, with Loki as their helmsman. The fire giants, led by the giant Surt, will leave Muspell in the south to join against the gods. Surt, carrying a sword that blazes like the sun itself, will scorch the earth.

Meanwhile, Heimdall will sound his horn, calling the sons of Odin and the heroes to the battlefield. From all the corners of the world, gods, giants, dwarves, demons and elves will ride towards the huge plain of Vigrid ("battle shaker") where the last battle will be fought. Odin will engage Fenrir in battle, and Thor will attack Jormungand. Thor will victorious, but the serpent's poison will gradually kill the god of thunder. Surt will seek out the swordless Freyr, who will quickly succumb to the giant. The one-handed Tyr will fight the monstrous hound Garm and they will kill each other. Loki and Heimdall, age-old enemies, will meet for a final time, and neither will survive their encounter. The fight between Odin and Fenrir will rage for a long time, but finally Fenrir will seize Odin and swallow him. Odin's son Vidar will at once leap towards the wolf and kill him with his bare hands, ripping the wolf's jaws apart.

Then Surt will fling fire in every direction. The nine worlds will burn, and friends and foes alike will perish. The earth will sink into the sea.

After the destruction, a new and idyllic world will arise from the sea and will be filled with abundant supplies. Some of the gods will survive, others will be reborn. Wickedness and misery will no longer exist and gods and men will live happily together. The descendants of Lif and Lifthrasir will inhabit this earth.

courtesy of Micha F. Lindemans

(much easier to copy paste than to type all this stuff out and besdies Micha does a band up job of putting all of ragnarok into a few paragrpahs)


lol at GITP censorhsip the **** words is the other word for rooster that you find in most literature up untill recently.

Steward
2012-02-21, 11:32 PM
Well, in D&D, it's easier to bring someone back to life from the dead than from the living. True Resurrection doesn't need a body, but Imprisonment requires that you actually go to the place they're imprisoned at.

This idea is really cool and I've honestly never thought about this way. Death doesn't really obstruct really powerful entities that much, does it? Villains who die can rise again as powerful undead. When Orcus (a demon lord from Fiendish Codex I) died, his spirit escaped as Tenebrous, a vestige that exists in a liminal realm that even the gods can't reach. Oh, and Tenebrous is still out there, even after Orcus rose from the dead, which is another potential angle you could take (killing the evil guy could cause his soul to escape and become one evil entity while his body reanimates as a second evil entity, essentially doubling the problem).

Sealing him away has its risks but at least it can't make it worse!

Engine
2012-02-21, 11:43 PM
This idea is really cool and I've honestly never thought about this way. Death doesn't really obstruct really powerful entities that much, does it? Villains who die can rise again as powerful undead. When Orcus (a demon lord from Fiendish Codex I) died, his spirit escaped as Tenebrous, a vestige that exists in a liminal realm that even the gods can't reach. Oh, and Tenebrous is still out there, even after Orcus rose from the dead, which is another potential angle you could take (killing the evil guy could cause his soul to escape and become one evil entity while his body reanimates as a second evil entity, essentially doubling the problem).

Sealing him away has its risks but at least it can't make it worse!

Well, I feel sealing them would be a bit contradictory if some human hero slain their creator. You know, why sealing the servants and kill the creator? Makes little sense to me, don't you think?

Unless.
Hm, did you play Baldur's Gate? In those games (it was a trilogy) Bhaal, the god of murder, foresaw his death so he fathered a lot of sons, each one with a spark of his divine power. When a Bhaalspawn died, that spark returned to the source so in the end Bhaal could resurrect.
You could use a similar explanation: they sealed these servants because each of them has a spark of his\her creator's soul, so killing them would return this spark to some kind of extraplanar source which, in the end, would resurrect their creator.

Steward
2012-02-22, 12:17 AM
That's brilliant! I really like the idea of killing someone damages part of them but allows another part of them to escape. Having both Orcus and Tenebrous floating around is worse than having either one of them alone, and if you rewrote it so that each of the spawn's deaths contributes to the creation of an even greater evil. If the protagonists don't figure it out, they might inadvertently bring the bad guy back by releasing enough of the divine energy (or whatever) from within the scions to recreate him. Or you could make it an evil catch-22; if the heroes don't kill the scions, the scions will eventually succeed in their plot to bring their father back. And if they do, their deaths will release enough energy to bring him back anyway. The past heroes decided to break the cycle by leaving the scions alive but trapped, but maybe the knowledge as to why they did that has been lost...

Fatebreaker
2012-02-22, 06:21 AM
You mentioned in your opening post that each of these creatures is unique, and that they were deliberately created. That gives you a whole lot of room to justify imprisonment over death.

Maybe each individual of this psuedo-race was created with a different weakness. Maybe their creator-god deliberately sought variation as a defensive mechanism. Maybe he never made them the same way twice (lots of reasons for that, from curiosity to boredom to love if you really want to go down that route). Maybe something in the very nature of creating them prevents them from being identical. Pick whatever backstory fits your campaign, but the important part is that these many, many differences made it much easier to just seal them outside of reality than to figure out how, exactly, to give each and every one their particular special brand of death.

On a similar note, if each member of the psuedo-race is somehow bound into the fabric of the universe (as others have suggested), an unintentional side effect of this might be that the conditions of their deaths are either fated or seemingly impossible to bring about. During the Godwar, they may have been killed and killed and killed again, only to resurrect because that death wasn't their true death. So the heroes of the age, unable to fight fate, sidestep it by sealing them away. There's some good examples of this stuff in Fae lore or old mythology. For a game example, Exalted has a lot of really cool gods, daemons, and worse that are like this. And Exalted is always worth looking at.

The unique-weakness vibe also lets you tailor each one, so it's clearly an individual rather than "Scion Daemon #834." And you get to build up sidequests for your players to learn their weaknesses and either weaponize that weakness or bring about the fated conditions to render them vulnerable. And sidequest options are always good to have on hand, just in case!

I really like the spark idea, though. That's definitely worth pursuing in some form or another.

Tyndmyr
2012-02-22, 09:34 AM
In my current campaign world, there is/was a pseudo-race of incredibly powerful ancient monsters from the early Godwar, each of which is unique. (The best way to describe them is a cross between Dwarf Fortress Forgotten Beasts (in form) and Balrogs(in the role they once served,)) At least one of the lesser of these was imprisoned beneath the earth after the deity that they served and who created them was slain by a human hero. Narratively, this was to make it plausible that some of them would be able to return when the Last Day draws near and said deity sounds the call to arms.

The trouble is, I'm having a hard time explaining why such a thing would be imprisoned rather than destroyed, and not having a reason bugs me. The best thing that I can come up with is the old "cannot be truly killed" idea, which feels a little lazy.

Regeneration + large resistances/immunities to fire/acid.

That doesn't make something entirely immortal....but it makes it sufficiently hard to kill that in general, imprisonment is more practical.

Cieyrin
2012-02-22, 12:17 PM
Regeneration + large resistances/immunities to fire/acid.

That doesn't make something entirely immortal....but it makes it sufficiently hard to kill that in general, imprisonment is more practical.

The tarrasque, in a nut shell, and its background fluff. Stupidly hard to kill (at least permanently, given the need for a wish/miracle. Disabling it isn't such a difficulty), containing it may be the best or only solution.

Sudain
2012-02-22, 01:44 PM
The beasts either carry a secret or connection a god which will be released when slain. Good reason to imprison versus kill.


-=-=-
Inside the beasts lie a gem or other monster imprisoned, which is acting as a fuel source for the beast. Slaying the beast releases the energy(possibly like a locate city bomb?) or beast(tarrasque or other wordly beast).

-=-=-
They deity did ask for the hero to slay the beasts. But the hero found it either too difficult or had a falling out with the deity. So instead of slaying them(as asked) he imprisoned them; perhaps to snub the deity. (Insert deity pimpslap onto hero). Now, the same deity has 'rigged' things behind the scenes to dupe another set of hero(s) - maybe more than one will be effective - to slay them.


Personally I like the idea of an epic spell/monster being imprisoned inside a different monster. You can't kill it because it's caging something worse. I also like the idea of a a hero going against the deity and just imprisoning them versus slaying them. If you combine this with the godspark idea then your players suddenly find themselves (once they learn this secret) as unwitting pawns in a much larger game. With great power comes great responsibly. :)

Crafty Cultist
2012-02-22, 02:37 PM
I think regeneration is the way to go. Don't make it a massive amount, just make it something very specific. If the "demons" regeneration can only be overcome by a weapon tempered with the blood of a diety, or forged in the fires of hell, or something equally impressive, then overcoming that regenerative power would become a major part of the plot, and explain why no-one in ancient times could permanently kill them.

Friv
2012-02-22, 02:39 PM
I would definitely go with "contains spark of the dark god that created them".

As an extra bit of fun, the spark could disperse into each of the others when one dies - thus, every time one of the monsters dies, the rest become slightly more powerful. When they break free of their prison at the end of the game, they start rampaging across the countryside towards one another, each one trying to destroy the others so that it can define the god's rebirth. The players might not realize this right away, but can figure it out gradually.

Fhaolan
2012-02-22, 03:04 PM
There's also the idea that "punishment is only punishment if the creature survives to learn from its mistakes". Perhaps the binding/sealing was really meant as a punishment, which means there's a deliberate release clause somewhere. Some point when the authority figure who did this believes the creature will have learned its lesson.

Coidzor
2012-02-22, 05:44 PM
The tarrasque, in a nut shell, and its background fluff. Stupidly hard to kill (at least permanently, given the need for a wish/miracle. Disabling it isn't such a difficulty), containing it may be the best or only solution.

We built this city.
We built this city.
We built this city.
ON THE TARRASQUE! (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?261519-D-amp-Dish-The-city-built-around-the-tarrasque)

Frozen_Feet
2012-02-22, 05:55 PM
Here's a spin on an idea I used for one of my own settings, as well as the priorly-posed idea of them somehow upholding cosmic balance:

Each of these unique Demons actually serves as totem creature / spiritual ancestor to one existing species. If you destroy one, you will render whole species it stands for extinct. Not necessarily immediatly - one idea is that creatures bound to a slain totem become unable to reproduce, or perhaps lose their will to live and start dying off from depression.

To fix this, you need to fix or replace the Demon somehow, ending you pretty much where you started.

Another_Poet
2012-02-22, 06:15 PM
How about mercy?

What if one of these creatures turned against his brothers, and went back to the gods, essentially betraying his fellow Balrog-like-beings and partly redeeming himself?

Perhaps the gods decided to spare him when they wiped out the rest of his race, but even so, he had to atone for what he'd done. And so he was imprisoned.

Of course, millennia of being trapped in his prison may have made him rethink his choices or even driven him insane...

Gnoman
2012-02-22, 08:17 PM
Some good ideas. Perhaps I should clarify the situation a little more.


The gilhausen served as the captains, generals, and direct representatives of the god known as the Betrayer. Each one is truly unique (the only one that's shown up so far, which was released by a defeated goblin warband as a self-destruct, was a three-legged, four-armed humanoid, while another is a twenty-legged spider with two elf heads.)

The Destroyer was able to be slain by a human mainly because he wielded a godforged weapon and she was spending most of her energies maintaining the seal that kept every other god out of the material plane. Once she was slain, the gods led an army of the dead to destroy her overpowering forces. Most of the three or four hundred gilhausen were defeated at this time (though many had already fallen to mortal heroes.) I don't mind (in principle) ressurecting several of them in some way, but I do like the Sealed Evil in a Can concpet, and the idea of a cult ressurecting a god and her minions seems excessive.

Potential cataclysmic consequences for slaying one do sound interesting. Perhaps I could make it so that each one killed may release powerful chaos magics that warp the fabric of the universe, or emit terrible poisons.

Prime32
2012-02-22, 09:32 PM
Potential cataclysmic consequences for slaying one do sound interesting. Perhaps I could make it so that each one killed may release powerful chaos magics that warp the fabric of the universe, or emit terrible poisons.Do what Lich did in Eight-Bit Theater. Find one of those Orbs that holds the universe together, and make it into your phylactery. :smalltongue:

So one of the pillars of creation was made into a monster, and it's slowly been warping its related aspect of the universe (increasing the amount of war/disease/lesser monsters/etc. the longer it exists). Killing the monster might fix things or it might destroy the universe, and multiple factions can come into conflict over how to handle it.

graymagiker
2012-02-22, 10:14 PM
Sometimes mortals make sub-optimal choices, for various reasons. If the destruction of some of the gilhausen was left to, or assumed to be caried out by, mortals then this explains it.

Example:

Why didn't Isildur destroy the one ring?

Dr.Epic
2012-02-22, 10:16 PM
The guy sent to destroy it was just a rogue with a huge bonus to bluff and a bag of holding. It went down like this:

"Stay in this bag for the next 1,000 years."
"You got it!"

kieza
2012-02-23, 03:18 AM
I had to come up with an explanation a while back as to why there were "Repositories" for bound demons and other nasty things. What I eventually came up with was that slaying a demon, etc. while it was on the Material Plane simply sent it back to Hell, and slaying it in Hell, while it would permanently kill the demon, would involve both getting to Hell and fighting a lot of other demons. Binding a demon, and then putting whatever it was bound into under heavy guard, would keep the demon out of circulation a lot longer.

So, now there are heavily guarded and warded vaults scattered around the world, run by various religious orders, governments, and mage circles. It gives the players a place to send defeated demons and elementals and whatnot, and it also provides adventure hooks in the form of bounties for escaped inmates, delves into Repositories where the wards have started failing, or investigations into corrupt warders.