Need help with Warlock Pact

[HunterMarked]

So I have this Pact of the Chain Half-Elf Warlock that left home searching for her Father and answers that time-leaped 500y to the future to an era of chaos that is/will be run be demons. What pact could a Great Old One ask of her and/or why did the GOO send her to that era? It's not necessary that he was the one that sent her - but I'm really liking this idea.

Plus how can the GOO merit from such a thing/pact? I'm thinking that maybe the GOO wants to summon himself onto her plane of existence and uses her to that extent but what pact would such a deal require?

I'm open to any ideas, pact proposals and explanation of pacts and the GOO's reasons to make said pacts with mortals.

[Falcon X]

GOO is a weird pact because they are usually beings that are indescribable and impersonal. Heck, it's even said that a warlock could be stealing their power while they sleep (Cthulhu mythos largely). I once created a GOO warlock from the god Mask while he was still a dead god. The warlock's family managed to tap into Mask's fragments of power that were still lingering in the universe.

That is all to say, GOO is one of the most creative pacts and it all depends on who you choose.
- Do you know what kind of relationship you want to have with the GOO?
- Do you have any specific type of source you would prefer, or prefer not? Cthulhu-esque? Dead god's remnant consciousness? Over-deity? Conceptual representation of evil (Satan, Dormammu, Tharizdun)? Other?

Ideas:
Era of Chaos means a lot more in D&D lore than you might think. It means the demons probably won the Blood War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_War). The Blood War was the evolution of the war between chaos and good, which stretches back before time immemorial. Not good...
- Asmodeus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmodeus_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)) (The Loser): Between 4e and 5e he ascended to godhood. But your game could be placed during the changeover, and the losing of the Blood War may have killed Asmodeus or made him into something new. As the one who LOST the Blood War, he probably has a pretty big interest in what is happening here.
Alternatively, this could be one of the other Devil Lords.
- Obyriths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obyrith) (Out-Evil Evil): Dagon, Pazuzu, Queen of Chaos, etc. They are classic GOOs, and ones with an invested interest. They were major forces for chaos during the Age before Ages, and could easily be vying for control of Chaotic Evil with the Demon Lords.
- Tharizdun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharizdun) (Rightful Ruler of Chaos): An Over-god and creator of the Abyss. He is imprisoned and might want to be freed so as to claim his rightful and undisputed rule.
Heck, maybe he already has escaped. That is an event that could have turned the tide of the war.
If you take that a step further, you might have some sort of reverse Time of Troubles (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Time_of_Troubles). The original has Lord Ao (Tharizdun's antithesis overgod) make all the gods mortal for a while.
Lord Ao (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Ao) (Returner of Balance): An over-god of balance and Tharizdun's antithesis. He does not normally grant clerical spells, which makes him a great candidate for GOO pact. You are his chosen one who will restore the balance.

Specific rituals or pacts would be highly dependent on who the GOO is and what they want your character to do.

[gfishfunk]

How about this: Your GOO patron feeds off of fear and frustration. It sent you into the future to get you to experience more of these feelings.

[HunterMarked]

Hmmmm... I am not actually the player. I am the DM and I have a first-timer playing a warlock so I'm looking into themes and ideas as to what GOOs can I throw in there and what the nature of a pact could be, so I can guide my player through the character's background and help create a decent story for the PC. It's just that having played/seen a Warlock only once my understanding of a pact is limited and I need to expand it.

The point is that I want to have some ideas and guidelines that do not strictly blackmail or railroad my player, while still keeping the GOO relatively accessible and impactful via her Imp familiar. The fear and frustration idea is nice but not to my taste as it includes a passive reception rather than encouraging the player to actively "keep her part of the deal".

Maybe drawing power from her asleep patron and following the Imp's main quests offers that lead to revealing artifacts and power sources for the GOO to feed off of when he awakes from his slumber a couple of centuries later. Any inspirational proposal is much needed and appreciated! :cool:

[Addaran]

In an old thread about how to break a deal with fiends, someone answered this:


Hide. In the space beyond space, in the dark beyond shadows. Find a place that devils fear to dream of, filled with Things that can't exist but do. You won't go to hell, but as time begins to melt and all joyful memories fade, you'll find you wish you had. The fortunate few will go insane, but for many, the laudanum of madness will not come. For expert players only.

So, the character gets thrown into an Era ruled by demons. While fleeing demons, she stumbles inside a deep cavern and get lost with the fiends on her tail. Then she enter a room with a huge http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/eternaldarkness/images/2/21/Greater_Guardian_(Ulyaoth).jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090706034106 sleeping. Either the fiends don't dare enter or they do and get killed horribly (suffocation would be scary, considering demons don't breath normaly). The character seems unarmed, so she stays there for protection. Eventually, there's a connection between the sleeping horror and her, she starts to have affection for it, even if she can't understand why. And she gets weird new ideas and knowledge, seemingly out of nowhere. She cuts a piece of it and shapes it into a companion (the imp) to never be alone. Then It sends her back in her real time where the "imp" can guide her towards his goal.

Possible goal:
Find a way to summon it in the present.
Find a way to wake it in the futur, where it will kill all fiends and turn earth into something even worst then hell.
Or my favorite: Find the means to know where it is in the present (still sleeping) then manage to summon the future one so it can consume his past-self. Which would enlighten it to a new level of existence while simultaneously causing a paradox that will destroy all realities.


edit: The picture is from eternal darkness, a video game. there's 3 mini-boss like this and 4 final ones. =)

[Zorku]

I tend to not picture GOO types trying to break into this world or wake themselves up- that's too much like a god or demon for my tastes. A GOO just shows up, or just wakes up, possibly due to mortal interference, but not because they asked for it. They're not playing chess like angels and demons, but when they show up they tend to tear through the chess board like a cannon ball. There are a few named entities that come from outside of the multiverse, but as weird as they are it's not so much that those ones were the strongest, just that they were the most willing to play chess.

With this in mind, I'd ask the player if they would want to be one of those cultist fanatics, treating their GOO like a god and largely doing things they think their god wants, albeit without any real prompting from their master.

IF that sounds perfect before you've even brought it up, and you know they'll stick around, you might consider giving them a little voice in their head or through their familiar, that gives them fairly god/demon-like orders, but with a roll attached to it each time. Keep a running tally of the rolls and when it adds up to (um... 100?) they get a little more personal meeting with their master, who doesn't pay them much attention, but the voice goes nuts with conflicting and confused demands, sounding more and more like them as it rambles, until they realize it was their own voice the entire time.

e: If you need a sort of theme for what their pact drives them to do, insanity is pretty much the name of the game. Rather that preventing harm and creating things (and being silly), like archfae, or hurting people and sentencing anyone and everyone to eternal torture (and disputes with rivals,) like archdemons, I think that GOO is more about damaging your mental health. The insanity effects that come in official materials are mostly bad for this, since they're about obvious penalties, but isolating the character from old friends that won't devote themselves to the GOO, making them see things that can't be unseen, and generally warping their outlook of their world and universe are some of the more potent options for this. Less inspired is pretty much anything a demon would ask for that's not a soul, but with a big dose of "this hurts me more than it hurts you." Since in many cases a short rest is just as mechanically refreshing for a warlock as a long rest, you might consider making them a bit sleep deprived due to their dreams taking on a disturbing quality.

If they can ritualistically hurt an individual for personal gain then that's almost perfect, but you need a side effect that fits the theme, and those can be kind of hard to come up with when you don't want to screw with their stats (or make a bigger deal out of it and hurt a stat for a direct power gain.) Undesirable transformations can work really well here, but you need a really good grasp of what the player wants if you're going to create a nuisance without outright upsetting the player, so I advise making a lot of "who I am" type changes temporary, but the tone of your game may not call for that. If they're the party face you probably don't want them doing Star Wars Emperor from this, but androgenous shifts might be just as unsettling. Or tentacles. Pretty much always tentacles, really.

[Millstone85]

If demons won the Blood War and now all of the Great Wheel is feeling the pull of the Abyss, is it possible that even the entities that lie outside the Great Wheel would be afraid? However, their solution might involve the annihilation of the Great Wheel. The whole thing is nothing but trouble anyway.

Alternatively, a victorious Abyss has nothing left to do but self-destruct. Those demons who turned their attention beyond the Great Wheel found that the mad destruction they embody was powerless against the mad creation that occurs there. Some decided to come back and undo their "victory".

[NecroDancer]

Maybe your patron was curious what different timelines could be like. The GOO sent multiple warlocks into different timelines to see what would happen in said timeline, you (unfortunately) were chosen to go into the "demon" timeline. The GOO now wants you to take notes of what the world is like so it can prepare for this possible future.

[Falcon X]

Alternatively, a victorious Abyss has nothing left to do but self-destruct. Those demons who turned their attention beyond the Great Wheel found that the mad destruction they embody was powerless against the mad creation that occurs there. Some decided to come back and undo their "victory".
Hence why I think the Obyriths might start coming into play again.

I once ran a game where someone was a Warlock of Glasya. She was a fiend-pact. I never fully fleshed out how the deal went down, but she is aggressive in her pact-making so we said that he ran into a cultist who offered him the power to avenge his family.
Practically, every time he gained a level he had a dream. Glasya came to him in his dream. Sometimes she merely spoke nicely to him, but slowly she made it clear that she expected things of him. Things like:
- I will give you no more power until you make a convert.
- I will give you no more power until you perform an act of lust.
- Here is a gift. It is a Fiendish Seed spell (3.5 Book of Erotic Fantasy. ALWAYS impregnates and the baby is ALWAYS fiend-blooded). Use it 3 times before next I see you.
- Here is another spell. Detect Sin/Virtue. It will tell you a person's primary Sin and primary Virtue (ex. Gluttony and Charity). Use it in one of the ways stated above.

How could he get out of the pact? That's pretty rough because it's legally binding. A few ideas:
- Get another power to buy the pact off the pact-maker (Garl Glittergold did this in one of my games).
- Get an overgod (Jesus, Lord Ao, etc.) to overwright it.
- Bargain with the pact-maker. Make a new deal. Get it in writing, signed in blood.
- Kill the pact-maker.

[gfishfunk]

Get out of the pact by 'paying it off', doing something so important for the pact maker that you have a legally binding free ride for the rest of your life....and then afterwards undo everything you can .