Assistance Required for Elder Evil Signs

[Pinkcrusade]

Hello everybody.


So, I am going to be running a very Far Realm relevant campaign quite soon, and I was wondering if anybody could assist me in creating some Far Realm-esque Signs for my campaign (Faint, Moderate, Severe, Overwhelming)


Any input is greatly appreciated, thanks.

[OldTrees1]

Is the adventure on the material plane or into the left of the far realms?

What does/do the BBEG(s) look like?

[Pinkcrusade]

Oh, sorry, I should have specified. These signs are present in the material plane, and I was wondering what signs would accurately portray the coming of a being hailing from the Far Realms, similar to how the weather is representative of the Leviathan

[DeltaEmil]

What does your Far Realm-Elder Evil represent on a whole (aside from lulz bicycle made of fish riding on number that has been divided by 0 and other nonsense)? Father Llymic for example is a far realm-like Elder Evil-entity who is all about cold and freezing, so the world freezes slowly to death. Ragnora makes everything grow wilder with her signs.

Is your Elder Evil some kind of dream-manipulating psychic monster? Then its signs would be that people get more and more nightmares, and those nightmares become real.

If your Elder Evil is some kind of tentacle-monster that turns everything into gibbering tentacle monsters, then people might perhaps become convinced to follow some weird new fad where they implant themselves with tentacle-appendages that a totally harmless not-cult is spreading for free.

The signs should represent the Elder Evil in some way.

[OldTrees1]

Alien Geometry
Faint: All checks related to movement suffer a -2 penalty.
Moderate: The penalty to movement checks increases to -4.
Strong: Switch to a hex grid as the alien geometry becomes more apparent.
Overwhelming: Moving more than 30ft in a round causes you to teleport* 20ft in a random direction (1d8 to select direction).

* You do not actually teleport. You went in the 4th spacial dimension.

[tiercel]

The works of HP Lovecraft seem more than relevant here. If nothing else, if you've ever played the "Arkham Horror" board game, some of the "Great Old Ones"' game effects could be relevant, depending on just what kind of Cthuloid horror is coming for your PCs' world.

(Note: I believe that Father Llymic is actually written as a Far Realm entity already, so you could use that straight up.)

If blotting out the sun isn't your thing, here's a few ideas cribbed from the Arkham Horror set (stated in general terms, rather than in five distinct steps):

--the approaching horror spawns pseudonatural/Far Realm harbingers of Its coming, and if the harbingers aren't stopped/slain, they only hasten Its approach
--cultists and/or spawn of the approaching horror are infested with a horrid supernatural disease that transforms them into pseudonatural creature under Its control (see, e.g., Father Llymic here)
--steal "undead" effects from Atropos, except that every time a major character of the world falls to the undead/arises as undead, it hastens Its approach
--madness and/or unexplainable, unavoidable weakness plague all living things, resulting in growing penalties to all Will and/or Fortitude saves; those whose saves sink too low (e.g. too negative) run the risk of running permanently insane or being bodily destroyed
--apathy steals over all living things, at first making emotion-based effects easier to resist/harder to use, but also making NPCs more apathetic about aiding PCs, taking major actions, or eventually doing anything at all with increasing sign
--corrupting magic: any time a certain flavor of (or any flavor of) magic is used, the user must save (against increasing penalty) or find his alignment shifted/Will or Fort save penalized
--guardian of the Gate: interplanar summons, callings, portals, and even nondimensional storage items become less reliable/more hazardous to use over time, eventually becoming nonfunctional and/or potentially lethal

[Edit to add:] As others here have mentioned, the effect your Elder Evil will have will depend on the character of that Thing (and the tone you want to set with your campaign, be it dying sun, undead-o-rama, burning sun, creepy critters, creeping insanity, etc).

Another kind of generically applicable effect in the Cthuloid tradition you could have is the slow introduction of the Sanity variant rules from Unearthed Arcana (adding more of the rules/higher DCs with progressing signs) -- available as OGC http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/sanity.htm

[Pinkcrusade]

Thanks for all of the replies.

The Elder Evil that I am creating is similar to Thoon, and it looks similar to a Reaper from the Mass Effect series. It represents nightmares and madness (but not the bus made out of salami with blue spots silly madness).

I was thinking of his coming creating rips in the fabric of time and space? Perhaps portals tearing open in the sky, or something similar to that. Opinions?

Thanks!

[akward Lad]

For a nightmare based elder evil I would go along the lines of
Faint- all sleep is restless, filled with hidden terrors (characters require 9 hrs of rest or be fatigued)
Moderate-sleep now takes 10 hours to be rested, fatigued characters sometimes experience waking nightmares/dream (treat as an illusion spell with fear/suggestion components only they see)
Strong-sleep still takes 10 hrs but characters must make a will save to fall asleep in the first place (start with a high dc but give players a bonus for every day they have been awake), lack of sleep causes exhaustion instead now. In addition the nightmares have started to become real (they actually do damage, influence events, and do general creepy stuff)
Overwhelming- the fatigue caused by lack of sleep can no longer be cured by magical means only 12 hrs of rest cures it, in addition people begin seeing not only their own nightmares but those of the people around them as reality is torn asunder
There is a ton of fluff you can add to this, the elder evil could very well be in one of the nightmares a PC keeps having that no one else can see until it has fully pierced the veil, so to speak

[lsfreak]

I have no specific advice, but you may want to take a look at Realm of Chaos' Xenotheurgy in the homebrew forums. I've pulled stuff from there - primarily the Incursions - for far-realm-type stuff in games before. Fractured World is a personal favorite.