Unsealed Evils

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I'm trying to develop a campaign to run with my friends all my own creation.

I'm planning on using the Black Company Setting (http://www.amazon.com/Mythic-Vistas-Company-Campaign-Setting/dp/1932442383/ref=pd_ybh_1) book for the building blocks of it: its classes, how it treats magic, etc, and basically centering the campaign around a major idea...

...What would happen if all the Sealed Evils In Cans got unsealed at the same time?

That the apocalyptic monsters locked away by god and man not only all got loose, but there was no time to mount a counterattack or destroy all of them once and for all. Civilization has all but collapsed as the major population centers were either razed or conquered...or worse. The gods are dead, fallen in battle, prepared to fight one or maybe even two of these evils at once, but not the sheer number that overwhelmed them. The very face of the land has changed as storms, earthquakes and other massive disasters trail in the wake of the released evils, so that the old maps are useless.

And yet despite all this...it was not the end of the world.

Small pockets of survivors are scattered throughout the world, hidden from the things that would kill them or eat them or twist them into monsters, and as the evils begin to turn on one another, competing for space or food or for the privilege of being the world's destroyer, the mortals are rebuilding. Soon, very soon, it will be time to strike. Time to stand up...and take the world back! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9feUxKIqKmg&feature=plcp)

At least, that's what I hope it'll be.

At the moment there's a lot of stuff I'm struggling with, the most important being how to organize and run the campaign. Honestly, with the scope of these "evils" (that's the generic name they have for now), just dealing with ONE of these things could take an entire campaign. Plus, my brother expressed interest in having some evil super-wizards running around the ruins for some reason, similar to the Ten Who Were Taken from the Black Company books.

The idea is that the PCs are defenders of the largest group of refugees and the first new bastion of civilization in the world, working mainly to protect the city-state from the minions of the nearest evil, which is also one of the weaker ones. Eventually they'd grow in power and find a way to eliminate the evils, most likely using true names, and begin paving the way for purifying the land and helping the world recover, maybe even replacing the deceased gods.

[Grimsage Matt]

If I can help with some of the Evils? And one good thing to add is maybe they aren't fully "awake" or whole yet. The good old fashioned they're a mystic peice of themselves they need to retrive to get all der mojo back. Also, can always try and get them to fight each other:smallbiggrin:

Anycase, heres me ideas for a Evil and his closest minions.

The Deal Maker
Standing before you, there is a normal looking human. Dressed in simple, yet fashionable clothes, he is the model of the perfect businessman. This man is surely harmless. And yet why is it that Asmodeus is looking so worried? What could he possibly have to fear from this insect?

And then he lets the mortal form slough away.

Darkness, gold and silver dancing withen, the screaming souls of entire planes writhing just below the surface, contracts wisphering their dark and ancient terms, a thousand times a thousand faces, each friendly and reassuring masks, reveal what it truely is.

The Deal Maker, Greed, The Elder Evil of Order. A terrible and ageless Evil that some wisper broke off part of the Far Realms from which it came from to stabilze them, to create order. To Usher in everlasting greed.

And in order to take rulership of Battor, Asmodus killed one of his daughters. That had nearly killed him. The ruler of the hells gazes into the void of pure greed, as the scythe chuckles with glee. The darkness falls.

The Deal Maker is a very starange Elder Evil, and has always been slightly beyond the reach of the Gods. He IS greed, not merely a embodiment of it. He rarely gets involved drictly in mortal or immortal affiars however, instead relying on his daughters, which he's only recently freed. While he is unasillable himself, he can be delt with. But be Warned! Dealing with him always has a price, and is not for the faint of heart.

His Daughters;

Sysacnye; The Orginal Ruler of Battor. She ruled the Ancient Battorians with a iron fist, and her sycthe reaped the souls of mortal and immortal alike. Asmodeuses death has lead to her resserection.

Villdread; Traped beneath Ysgard, Villdread is the orginal "Belle of Battle". Her stolen essence has fed the planes reserection abillity, and with her free, the permanent deathcount is rising by the hour.

Nhilvera; Nhilvera is the devourer of minds. A phychic horror, she has begun to devour all of the Mind flayers Elder Brains memories and thought processes.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I'm not using the standard D&D cosmology for this, and am sort of lumping all the fey, demon, and angel types into one category: "Outsiders" or "spirits." And their actual temperament is not consistently good or evil, and their appearances aren't consistent. Good and evil don't matter to them. Their own personal obsessions do, whether that's with anger, charity, justice or in your ideas' case, greed.

It's an interesting idea, and one I may use or tweak. I was really regarding the evils more like environments rather than singular monsters. The first and only idea for one I had was inspired by the evil blood-drinking, mind-alterining ivy that can grow inside your body in The Ruins (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheRuins), with the PCs travelling through a metropolis that it's completely overrun with the plant, which manipulates the corpses of its long-dead victims as puppets to defend itself and spews hallucinogenic pollen at them. Later they encounter a group of survivors who claim to have ways to avoid the thing's notice, but it's later revealed that they're just more minions of the plant, which leaves them alone in exchange for regular blood sacrifices. To clear this thing is something beyond even the strength of the average wizard, as it's everywhere in the city, it's tenacious as hell, and while it is flammable, to get a flame big enough to completely kill it you'd basically have to nuke the city from orbit. Only the fact that the land surrounding the infested city is scorched and unable to support an ecosystem prevents the thing from spreading further.

I like the idea that not all of them are currently at full strength, making them easier to beat, though. The PCs will also eventually gain access to the Rite of Naming, which, if used properly, can either strip a spellcaster (or an Evil, by my fiat) of its powers and defenses, or it can be embedded into a weapon that can then essentially slay the name's owner instantly (at the highest level, a weapon embedded with a true name skips hit-points and deals damage directly to the named victim's Constitution score). The Rite of Naming is going to be the big equalizer for the PCs, as it can render even the evil Level 35 wizards that started this whole mess defenseless.

[thorr-kan]

Black Company's an ideal setting for this.

For magic, you might want to look up Green Ronin's magic update True Sorcery. I'd be intertested in hearing how it works out.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Just to note, it's not the ACTUAL Black Company setting, with the likes of Croaker, Lady, The White Rose, etc. It just uses most of the same rules in the book.

[Pokonic]

Here's one, a little thing cooked up for your plesure.

The Cloud, (The Least Favored Scion of Air)

A greenish gas begins to rise from the swamp-water on the early morning. The very heat causes the mist to rise, and the fact your ever closer to that Forsaken City almost makes you wish to take of your face-mask to breath. But you know that everything is dead here, and that a single breath could make you no better than the other beasts in the mire. Suddenly, a tangled brier, long dead but still growing, catches on your protective suit and a great tear is made on it, exposing your tanned flesh to the wisps of green death comeing from above.

You nearly scream as the feeling of flesh fusing to cloth occures, even more so because the exposed patch of leg now resembles and feels like runny wax. However, you keep on to the half-sodden patch of ground you have been following, else you fall into the water. And if there's anything you know, the fact the water is turning a darker shade of green as you approch to white walls of the city you seek means that you must be even more careful, lest you become one of the ever-living dead here.

A few days later, after near death and a few more rips and tears, you lie dieing at the white gates of the city you sought. As your flesh oozes from your clothing and fuses with the ground below, you have the words that the opening way to the city carries with blackened silver script, the orignal long since scratched out by one of the few inhabitance of this place:

Abandon All Hope, For Ye Who Enter.

The Clouds existance was simple enough. A scion of a power of air caste into shame, it was sealed and put away, guarded by a white-walled city of magic and marvel.

Of course, knowing the tale, you know this could not possibly last.

The power was trapped in a crystal, and the city was sheilded by the genera assult from the outside realm. Being surrounded by miles of swamps helped, but neverless it was attacked by a being that was a potent user of Necromancy. The general assult was deflected, but something...happened, when the orb as hit with a spell of blackest power. The creature inside was warped, and then it was free.

Almost. Just enough to unleash it's main assult against the archmagi who kept it sealed for so long: a blackish-green cloud of most potent force that would normaly be a threat ontu itself, but now it was inbued with a grand amount of necromantic energy.

The city died within hours. Than they raised again. Death is too great of a gift to give them. The white-marbled walls cracked and crumbled, yet in the green haze stood there ground. The waters, however, where infused with the substance, and as such the waterfalls and baths that the city prided themselves on became deathtraps. The assult ended eventualy, but the swamp-beasts died and reanimated, and the very water became a threat to life

. True, the skulking dead and the cloud proper only exists in the Cursed City now, but undieing swamp beasts, clouds of undead vermin consuming all they see, and the remains of travelers all roam the area around the place. Only travel by night does one not become exposed to green gas rising from the mire.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Very very good. Kinda like the Cloud from Fallout: New Vegas' Dead Money DLC. I'll definitely be using this thing. That's sort of the idea I want with these Evils, that they're either so big or so everpresent that they're practically dungeons in and of themselves.

[Pokonic]

That's the insperation, yeah. Even better, because the cloud in this case is necromantic, it heals undead creatures. Who make up the majority of the inhabitance of a good few miles surrounding the city, never mind the nigh-unkillible abominations that are the reminents of the cities inhabitance proper. Even better, put golems in there to guard the verying places the PC will most likely check for good stuff, for they might have survived the end of the world not thinking there masters are any different today.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

My greatest concerns right now are how to make the world make sense before addressing the Evils and the wizards themselves. The main issues I've got are these:

Races

The Black Company setting is explicitly humans only, replacing races with character backgrounds. I could do this for this campaign, but I like the idea that in the wake of the Shattering (that's currently my name for the disaster), races that would normally be at each others' throats have banded together for survival. Elves put aside their snootiness and do the hard and dirty work alongside the dwarves. The orcs and goblinoids temper their violent urges and coordinate with the more organized human militias to create a surprisingly strong fighting force. Half-breeds are becoming more commonplace, and the stigma normally associated with them has vanished as every life in this world is precious (unless the parent is infected with taint, in which case she and the unborn child are likely killed to prevent it from spreading or the child from becoming evil and sowing chaos among the refugees).

One idea I had was a "best of both worlds" approach in which a character's race is almost entirely cosmetic. Apart from certain races like halfings and kobolds being small, elves, dwarves, orcs and all other races would essentially be the same. This would still use the backgrounds to indicate what their role in the city state was prior to joining the vanguard against the Evils. The problem is I'm not sure how balanced that is, especially in regards to small characters or someone who wants to play something like a Goliath or Half-Ogre, not for optimization, mind you, but for effect.

If that doesn't work, I'm reluctant to use the 3.5 races as is, since I've never liked the bonuses and penalties given, especially since humans and half-elves get nothing. I could use Pathfinder's racial rules, but then that's introducing another ruleset and I don't know how well it meshes with the mostly 3.5-based Black Company setting.
Metaphysics and Religion

As I said in the opening post, one of the ideas in this campaign is that the gods aren't non-responsive like in Eberron or the actual Black Company setting, but rather that they gave their otherwise eternal lives to save the finite lives of mortalkind. I'm trying to determine just what effect this has on the setting, as this happened no more than a century ago. I need to figure out what kind of pantheon best fits this kind of world (what kinds of gods there actually were), what their relationship to their followers was (did they do things like grant spells or were their faithful basically the same as regular priests, with no magical powers?) and what their absence means for the world (Does the sun go out when the sun god dies? Do people go mad and murderous as gods of justice or mercy dies, or become pacifists when the god of war bites it? Are these things just diminished? Did the gods create these things? Regulate them? Or just represent them?). Also, what does becoming a god entail? Powerful wizards (Third and Fourth Magnitude) are basically gods, but I'm pretty sure not all the players will want to be wizards, especially since one of Black Company's selling points is that it's more low-magic than vanilla D&D. Should they be forced to take control of an aspect of reality like the Underworld or oceans before gods of abstracts like justice or war can come into being? What should determine who becomes a god?

I also want to establish a motive for the evil wizards. My current idea is that they were the ones who engineered the Shattering with the express purpose of using the Evils to distract and weaken the gods before they swooped in for the kill. But why would they do this? To put it in perspective, these wizards are based on the Ten Who Were Taken from the Black Company novels, and as such, they are so powerful that they are for most intents and purposes gods. Since these wizards are practically deities in their own right, there doesn't seem to be a need for them to usurp the gods' positions, since that wouldn't grant them greater power. I don't necessarily want them to be "Down with the tyrant gods! Let Man decide his own destiny!" because I feel this may humanize them too much, and I want the PCs to feel revulsion and anger when they encounter these wizards. These are the men and women responsible for the greatest tragedy the world has ever experienced, and not only do they feel NO remorse for what they've done, it fills them with glee as they caper around the ruins. I don't want this to simply be For the Evulz (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForTheEvulz) either, though, as that seems TOO simplistic.
The Evils In-Campaign

The biggest problem with the Evils is that honestly, taking on just ONE of them could be the focus of an entire campaign. How do I make these things scale with the PCs so they can take on Evils throughout the campaign and not feel cheated? I know the Rite of Naming is an incredible equalizer, but it'd probably be boring for the PCs to just whip that out whenever. Plus, given the size of a lot of these things, killing them is problematic. How do you kill a city-wide infestation of killer ivy, or the very air around you? More singular corporeal Evils, on the other hand, seem a bit too much like standard D&D villains, which is kind of the role that the Evil Wizards are filling. You can't fight the Tarrasque more than once (if you're going for story purposes rather than to show off how broken your character is), so how does one go about making a campaign that's basically about fighting various Tarrasque-sized threats straight from the get-go?

[Ponderthought]

Basicly, what you need for the evils is divisions. Fighting off the entire cloud is unfeasible, but what about a small, separated pocket? Or some of it's native undead outside it's direct influence? That's how the cthulhu mythos stories with anything resembling a happy ending worked out: The hero's defeated a tiny segment of evil, an avatar or a cult, and it took all of their strength. You could do this several times, scaling up the stakes each time.

Ill give you an example and and Evil all in one (because I really, really like thinking up Big Evil Things):

The King in Scarlet

Beyond the furthest reaches of existence, outside the very walls of reality itself, there are...things. Many things, in fact, in all manner of forms and sizes, that are alien to the very fabric of time and space. Most have no interest in the Material, preferring to attend to whatever unimaginable concerns such creatures have.

Most.

Reality you see, is rather like a leather ball. In places the skin of the ball is thick and unyielding, providing a buffer between the Material and the Outside. But in others the ball is worn, and the boundaries are...thin. Beings from outside can faintly perceive the form concealed within. And One is greatly interested in what he sees.

The Scarlet King.

The denizens of the outside are beyond comprehension, but some may guess at the King's nature. One might call him an Elemental of Pain. A sub-deity who feeds on anguish and misery. In the past, he has contented himself on petty agonies that slip through the Skin of reality, but with the advent of the Shattering, and the torrent of misery pouring from the Material, he can control his hunger no longer. Seers writhe in bloody nightmares as an anathema, something never meant to interact with the world of men, attempts to push himself into a reality never meant for the likes of him. They wake screaming blood pouring from their eyes, shrieking of a thing that struggles to take a form, the hazy outline of a monstrous hybrid of man and solifuge, sprouting tendrils of bright scarlet to invade their minds.

The Infected (Low Level Encounters)
The first sign of the King's malign influence is already apparent. A virulent infection, called The Filaments has bung spreading rapidly through some communities of survivors. The infection is characterized by seizures, expulsion of blood from the mouth and nose, and eventual paralysis. While these symptoms are apparent, what is going on beneath the surface is much, much worse. When a sentient creature (it is notable that only sentient creatures contract the infection) is infected with the Filaments, via some cut or abrasion, the infection travels quickly to their heart, marked by the red lines that travel from the wound towards the abdomen. When it reaches the heart, a knot of fibrous tissue begins to form above it, sending tough, sinewy tendrils throughout the body, carefully avoiding vital organs and veins and causing excruciating pain. These tendrils act almost like a second skeleton, forcing the creatures limbs to move and act, often against their will. Resistance is usually harmful, and often fatal, as the creature tears itself apart from the inside. Once the infection has run it's course, the victims are completely at the King's disposal, sent out to cause mayhem and suffering, fully aware as they hunt and dismember their friends and family for the entertainment of the monstrous King.

Cultists (Mid Level Encounters)
Some, driven mad by the agonies inflicted upon them, turn towards worship to appease the nightmarish being. They believe that the pain that nourishes their master is a form of purification, and that at the end, they will be absolved of their sins through agony. These cultists, infected or not, help spread the Filaments, and are often more subtle and calculated in their mayhem. Many have access to diving magic, though the King has no true divinity, and their powers are derived from their own mad faith.

Tendrils (High level encounters)

In areas that have succumbed completely to the King, his malign influence can manifest directly, causing tear in the fabric of reality through which he can reach and act directly. He has no truly physical body, so steps must be taken to construct a vessel for his intent. Under the watchful eyes of his priests, hundreds, if not thousands of Infected are melded together, pinned to each other by the filaments, witch extend from their bodies and weave them together into a singular, monstrous tentacle. These Tendrils are powerful in the extreme, and each one on the Material plane draws the King closer, pulling him into a reality in which he has no place.

[thorr-kan]

Just to note, it's not the ACTUAL Black Company setting, with the likes of Croaker, Lady, The White Rose, etc. It just uses most of the same rules in the book.

Eh, six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. I'll predict it'll end up tasting like the Black Compay setting anyways...

Good luck!

[thorr-kan]

The Evils In-Campaign


Other solutions would be, "Let's you and him fight!"

Point the Elder Evils at each other. Pick up the pieces. Hope there's enough land left to recover on.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Other solutions would be, "Let's you and him fight!"

Point the Elder Evils at each other. Pick up the pieces. Hope there's enough land left to recover on.
That's part of why mortals actually have a chance at survival. With most of the mortal population and the gods wiped out, the Evils naturally began fighting one another, for survival or for space or out of pride ("I wanna have the honor of destroying the world, dammit!"). The only ones that AREN'T fighting each other are ones that are effectively pinned in one location, like that evil plant.