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View Full Version : DM Help Starting a New Campaign(or Rebooting an old one)



MonkeySage
2016-04-23, 12:22 PM
So I have decided to reboot a campaign that has been inactive for about a year. One of my decisions has been that I want to overhaul the story, create something more consistent.

So, here's what I've got so far:
I want to use time travel, and have got a formula down for how time travel works in my setting. Basically, it's a form of many worlds time travel.

The villain of the story is a primordial being who has obtained a means of traveling through time. The entity, Sriyqea, is ordinarily limited in its power, restricted to acting through proxies. Sriyqea is omnipresent and aware of every evil act ever committed. It can take the image(but not the body) of any deceased evil person, or person whose death was the result of an evil act. And it's central goals are to spread Taint and set itself free. It is currently locked somehow outside of the prime material plane, and uses what little power it has in the prime material plane to help itself break free.

So, the method it has chosen involves time travel.


Sorry this isn't more... coherent... Trying to put words to my thoughts is a bit difficult. If it looks like a jumbled mess, that's because it kind of is.

Anyone wanna help me better organize it?

SirBellias
2016-04-23, 12:44 PM
First, what is Taint? How does it spread? What effect does it have on the world around it?

Second, how does time travel help? I could see a time traveling embodiment of evil going around to different times, and driving good people crazy with images of their enemies/loved ones, pretending to bring people back to life for services, and generally swaying the populace towards gloom and doom in this way. I don't really know what many worlds time travel is, so I won't be much help here.

What is the key to the lock? Mass sacrifice? Breakdown of civilization? Warping dinosaur genes so that birds become the ultimate carrier of the taint/servants of its will?

MonkeySage
2016-04-23, 01:37 PM
Taint: Things like mass sacrifice, bloody and pointless warfare, or genocide warp the landscape. Same thing when massive temple are erected in service to evil deities, or something to that effect. This warp can infect the land and its inhabitants. So these areas are necromantically powerful, and to an extent mutagenic. Taint can have some pretty nasty effects, and usually people infected with taint start to manifest both unpleasant physical symptoms and psychological damage(murderous urges, for example). If someone dies infected with taint, they have a chance to rise as an undead creature(based on their hit die, this can range from run of the mill zombies to mohrgs, and so on).

Sriyqea's methods typically involve driving people to commit evil acts, or else playing mind games by taunting people with their own past evil acts. For example, the hero from the last game i ran with this villain had an accident; she accidentally killed someone who abused her. So, Sriyqea took the image of that person, and told her that they had it coming. This traumatized the hero, leaving her an emotional mess for the next several sessions.

It can also possess willing vessels, called "Proxies"; usually cultists.

If you're familiar with The First Evil, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that's pretty much where I got the idea for this character.

The chief idea was actually the time travel. I've always wanted to run a game about time travel, and that's why I'm here: I'm trying to come up with a time travel plot.
According to the many worlds hypothesis, whenever someone goes back in time they create a new parallel timeline from the point of arrival. In this way, the future world that they came from still exists, at least for the moment. You could go back in time, kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother, and you'd be perfectly fine. The world that you came from, where your grandfather met your grandmother, still exists along side the new one. But I emphasize "For the moment". Rionis has to sort through this mess that you created by travelling back in time.

The key to the lock is the taint itself. Sriyqea believes that by creating tainted timelines, it'll create a window for escape.