Elder Evils and Apocalypses

[Tanuki Tales]

Has anyone ever used the concept of massive, powerful near-deific harbingers of pure annihilation as either the backdrop frame for an entire campaign or as the suddenly revealed final boss for ending a campaign?

Elder Evils has always been one of my favorite splatbooks from 3.5 and I always felt that the effort and work that went into crafting each horror was a master piece in of itself (except for Kyuss who's been around for a while and his section is probably adapted from the Age of Worms campaign path).

I've recently been flipping through it again and it just made me curious if anyone really made use of one of the pre-generated Elder Evils or if they crafted their own to be-devil the careers of their PC's.

I used Atropus once before; not as a campaign framework or as the final foe but as the origin story for the entire campaign. The players were whisked from their home planes and deposited on a planet that had fought and repelled Atropus at a terribly high cost. It was pretty fun to run before the group broke up.

[DoctorGlock]

I have not actually used any elder evil from the book because aside from atropus and pandoryn none pose a threat to high level parties, and that's only because i wouldn't have them punch out an aspect so much as stop the moon from crashing and because i'd feel fine dropping pandoryn on my parties at level 15.

However I've allowed players to pledge themselves to elder evils for free feats and certainly cranked out a few of my own. Most of my game have had an apocalyptic type ending, thankfully the PCs can avert it. But like your example I have certainly hinted at them in cosmology, even had players land on the remains of worlds visited by the evils, in some cases even had the players release a few to make war on the gods.

The fact is deific powered bad guys with alien motive can be fun, but not often as fun to build a whole world around as a villain the players can understand. Elder evils I have built have included a touch of humanity for that reason. Still, I do sort of want to run a game using one directly from the book in a traditional sense.

[Callos_DeTerran]

Has anyone ever used the concept of massive, powerful near-deific harbingers of pure annihilation as either the backdrop frame for an entire campaign or as the suddenly revealed final boss for ending a campaign?

Elder Evils has always been one of my favorite splatbooks from 3.5 and I always felt that the effort and work that went into crafting each horror was a master piece in of itself (except for Kyuss who's been around for a while and his section is probably adapted from the Age of Worms campaign path).

I've recently been flipping through it again and it just made me curious if anyone really made use of one of the pre-generated Elder Evils or if they crafted their own to be-devil the careers of their PC's.

I used Atropus once before; not as a campaign framework or as the final foe but as the origin story for the entire campaign. The players were whisked from their home planes and deposited on a planet that had fought and repelled Atropus at a terribly high cost. It was pretty fun to run before the group broke up.

I hear a lot of complaints about how the Elder Evils just aren't powerful enough for most people's tastes, which is why they always make their own, but I've never seen that as a particularly large problem considering I've never played in a high-op/OP game before or run one.

That said, I've always wanted to run a game using the Leviathan, Atropus, or Father Llymic.

[Yora]

The probelm with Elder Evils is, that they devour settings.

- If you have created a fleshed out setting with lots of stories, people, and interesting places, you probably don't want to destroy it, if the PCs do badly.
- If you don't intend to make it possible that the PC fail, the players will probably notice and the whole concept falls flat.
- If you just come up with a generic setting for the Elder Evil to threaten, there's not much incentive for the players to fear that they might lose.

In either way, it's hard to make the concept work.

[Claudius Maximus]

On the other hand, if you're retiring a setting that they know and love, a looming apocalypse can be a great way to motivate them in a final campaign.

[TheGeckoKing]

I hear a lot of complaints about how the Elder Evils just aren't powerful enough for most people's tastes, which is why they always make their own, but I've never seen that as a particularly large problem considering I've never played in a high-op/OP game before or run one.

The problem also goes the other way, too. If an Elder Evil is too hard to beat, people get annoyed because it's the epitome of over CR'ing monsters - forget TPK's, we're talking Total Campaign Setting Annihilation.

[Tvtyrant]

I really want to do one with Spelljammer and Atropus together; your sailing around in space and then find out that the Atropus has entered into your sphere. You race home and try to stop him by using a fleet of spelljammers to assault the surface, and have to fight the aspect when the moon sucks all the ships down onto its surface.

[TurtleKing]

I am trying to get an Undead party campaign going on the forum's pbp. How would an undead party interact/react to an Elder Evil? Also how would certain Elder Evil interact with them.

[Gensh]

I am trying to get an Undead party campaign going on the forum's pbp. How would an undead party interact/react to an Elder Evil? Also how would certain Elder Evil interact with them.

Dead or not, the PCs still need a world to live on; that's the main requirement. If an Elder Evil doesn't destroy the world, then there are only aesthetic considerations when deciding whether they want to stop the EE.

My first campaign was actually based around the coming of an EE. In the days gone by, the council of gods cast out the traitor serpent who gave dark (arcane) magic to mortals, but as his flesh was burned by the light of the sun, he swore that one day his son would take revenge and slay all gods, until his pain finally came to an end. Occasionally an arcane caster would rise up claiming to be the Serpent Prince, but they were all inevitably put to death by the descendents of the gods. The players started in an era where the cult of the Serpent Prince was growing strong under another candidate, and signs of his coming were becoming widespread.

What's interesting is that the party didn't care at all and instead rode out the fear caused by the cult and made themselves god-kings by killing the candidate and then killing each other over the position, only to rise as necropolitan sleeper agents for the real Serpent Prince. Unfortunately, the game ultimately unraveled, but it was great while it lasted.

[DoctorGlock]

Elder evils get really amusing when the PCs have to fight on the side of villains to save the world because the villain has a better infrastructure than the wandering hobos. Even better when they know what the human cost of that infrastructure is.

[LibraryOgre]

I am trying to get an Undead party campaign going on the forum's pbp. How would an undead party interact/react to an Elder Evil? Also how would certain Elder Evil interact with them.

Spike: We like to talk big... vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." That's just tough-guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I _like_ this world. You've got...dog racing, Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision. With a real... passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Good-bye, Picadilly. Farewell, Leicester-bloody-Square.

Perhaps not horribly appropriate to the less nuanced undead of D&D, but certainly worth considering for a world where vampires have more human motivations.

[Mixt]

I have had quite a number of these suckers to deal with.

Though one in particular was a bit...ehh, just see below.

Big horrible world destroying abomination.
It's motive for destroying the world?
It's hungry, and horny. Also, due to the whole "No morals" thing and having overwhelming cosmic power that makes it virtually impossible to stop...
Joy, the Elder Evil is a rapist that eats it's victims after it's finished with them, and it's going to do that to the whole setting.
Because it feels good.

Yes, it's the evil hedonist monster, constantly indulging itself in it's lust and gluttony, and screw the fact that the whole world is falling to pieces as a result.

It also came with several hints that this thing may in fact have been born from the collective selfishness, lust, gluttony and greed of all sapient life, with humans being the biggest contributor, closely followed by chromatic dragons...which must have had some influence on it's appearance, considering what it was described to look like...

It won in the end, caused a TPK due to us making several critical errors in our strategy. Carelessness doomed the world.

[TheGeckoKing]

I am trying to get an Undead party campaign going on the forum's pbp. How would an undead party interact/react to an Elder Evil? Also how would certain Elder Evil interact with them.

As long as you don't use Atropus, you should be O.K - I guess even then, the death of all life could motivate a vampire or a ghoul.

[Gabe the Bard]

In one campaign, I took some ideas from Elder Evils, mainly the Spawn of Kyuss and Worm that Walks which I particularly like. The main villain in that campaign was a worm-like lesser deity of hunger who was trying to control an elder evil, Dendar the Night Serpent, and invade the Region of Dreams, in order to devour the Dreamheart and reshape reality in her own image.

However, I wanted to make it less about an apocalyptic threat and more about traveling through the players' dreams. Either way, I think it's important to make the players feel like someone or something close to them is being threatened, rather than just saying "the world will come to an end." That was hard to do when the party encountered a new reality with new imaginary people in each person's dream.

[NOhara24]

Total Campaign Setting Annihilation.

TCSA. I like it.

That being said, Elder Evils are (supposed to be) campaign-enders. It says so in the book. A lot of people shy away from them simply because they don't like the notion of pulling the ending to their campaign out of a book.

As Yora said earlier. Pulling up an elder evil and saying "Sic 'em boy!" on a non-generic setting is a bit like building a tower one day, and demolishing it the next. Even the slightest of effects from Elder Evils have world-altering consequences.

Elder Evils as a whole = Good concept, poor execution.

[NichG]

I used two literally total-campaign setting-ender Elder Evils of my own creation in a recent campaign. One of the characters started off sworn to one of them, and by the end another character took the other one's place.

The first was an entity that embodied the cosmic idea of Truth. Essentially, it deleted from existence anything that was fundamentally false or paradoxical. However, this particular entity was somewhat vulnerable to having axioms presented to it by beings that knew its true name. In the early times of creation, a group of individuals had formed order from chaos by giving Truth a set of axioms to construct a logical cosmology from. This was mostly to remove those things that would make existence over long times unfeasible: infinities, exponentially growing unstoppable disasters, etc. In meta terms, they used Truth to create the ban list for the campaign.

By the start of the campaign, someone had started using Truth to create axioms specifically designed to get entire universes booted in order to make space for their own projects. One of the axioms was 'This particular substance can only be one topological shape at one time', with the effect that if the substance was damaged, it would either delete all timelines where it was damaged or all timelines where it was not. The PCs had been implanted with this stuff, so every time a PC died a universe would shatter. By the end of the campaign they'd fixed that situation, but had gotten down to a single time line at one point; they also deleted all Illusions and time-related powers from the campaign by accident by showing Truth the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The other Elder Evil, Typhon, was everything that had been excluded from the universe. Another PC got a fate to fall in love with someone, but they were the type of character who couldn't love anything, so their fate was 'impossible' and so ended up directed outside the universe into the chaos. In the final session, the PC killed and subsumed the sentience behind the chaos that had fallen in love with him.

As far as statting these guys went, it never actually mattered. Truth was dealt with by taking out the organization that was messing with it, and then not talking to it. Typhon was dealt with by RP and plot considerations. Directly fighting Truth would've been a real last-session thing, since it could erase entire sets of class abilities and spells from the universe (fight it outside and you're fine though). Directly fighting Typhon would also have been nasty as it had an attack that would randomize portions of people's character sheets (for example, an attack caused one character to have a feat replaced with Blessed of Tem-et-Nu; they were immediately bitten by a hippo and permanently lost the feat slot).

[Tanuki Tales]

@NichG: Those are two very interesting E^2 you made there.


I sit to wonder now, can E^2 be used in a less campaign smashing manner if there is never the actual threat of their full power being unleashed to bare and the PCs merely need to deal with the machinations of an aspect of the E^2 (like how killing the Aspect of Atropus sends the entire moon scurrying for deep sapce).

I mean, still make it so the stirrings of the E^2 have drastic changes to the face of the game world (like what Deathwing did for Azeroth in WoW's Cataclysm expansion) but not ones that kill the campaign, just change it.

[The Reverend]

Buddy of mine had an interesting campaign setting along these lines. Used to be a typical DNS high fantasy world, until ultra-tech cthulian Aliens had a war on the planet then left. Their goals, reasons, etc all unknown. They just came in and ****ed **** up and left. Leaving behind some dead the size of small mountains, "pets", half broken war machines, parasites, munitions, and some pockets of known species changed for their own purposes.

One memorable location was a dwarve and gnome settlement that had gotten one of the half broken war machines much less broken. Kind or a biotech citadel overlooking a major river, mountain pass, and fruitful farming areas.

[LibraryOgre]

Buddy of mine had an interesting campaign setting along these lines. Used to be a typical DNS high fantasy world, until ultra-tech cthulian Aliens had a war on the planet then left. Their goals, reasons, etc all unknown. They just came in and ****ed **** up and left. Leaving behind some dead the size of small mountains, "pets", half broken war machines, parasites, munitions, and some pockets of known species changed for their own purposes.

One memorable location was a dwarve and gnome settlement that had gotten one of the half broken war machines much less broken. Kind or a biotech citadel overlooking a major river, mountain pass, and fruitful farming areas.

I gotta say... that's just awesome. I'd almost be tempted to use it myself, but change it from "standard high-fantasy" as a base to "random Earthlike world", with magic and such being a legacy of the invaders. Tech-priests and magicians, using alien powers they don't fully understand. (Formerly human?) new races across the globe.

[The Reverend]

The Witch King is his handle here on the boards. His worlds are true works of greatness. they balance fantasy, originality, and......realism? virisimiltude? The worlds have unfolded in ways that completly make sense given the base rules and starting points. His "Navy of The Witch King" was just awesome. Look up "Kobold Force 5" for a Great one or two seccesion or Convention game, also "Fire Whales".

His take on the scenario was that entire episode wasn't even a major conflict on the Alien's scale of things, just a minor action.

another location, alien Bivuac area. Its latrene is an important bio/alchemical component source.

[Tvtyrant]

I have a bit of a weird question: Do you think the Eldrazi from MTG could be made into good Elder Evils? With Emrakul, Ulamog and Kozilek as the Elder Evils themselves, and the Eldrazi acting as their sign.

[TurtleKing]

Yea could work quite fine.