Conspiracy level shit.
>>94768446Why don't you start us off with some stuff from your own setting. You're not just farming us for free ideas, are you?
>>94768470Sure. It's not much, but my classic fantasy setting has secretly been the testing ground of aliens, like classic sci-fi aliens with flying saucers and abductions. A lot of fantastical beasts and artifacts are actually experiences released into the wild.
>>94768446I stole the idea partially from an indie game series called Momodora, but there's this religious symbol in my setting which everyone interprets as an evil omen, it's literal translation is "death", and they think the ancient order that still wears the symbol are a cult that worships death.The translation is not incorrect, but the interpretation of it as a worship of death is. The order who openly wears the symbol does so as a symbolic representation that they are not afraid to die. By literally "marking themselves for death" they are saying they believe in something greater than death and do not fear death. Basically think of how Jedi in Star Wars are no supposed to fear death because they will become one with the Force, but the average person doesn't really understand this at all.
>>94768682Sounds a bit like the Evokers from Persona 3, only you don't shoot yourself in the head.
>>94768527My setting has been the opposite of this: natives are the ones doing human experimentation on mass scale, aliens specifically came to stop that shit.
>>94768527Aliens aren't sci-fi.
>>94768446It is a game. And only a handful of characters in-universe are aware of it and unnerved because of it - the ones that are written to be aware and unnerved.And I'm not kidding, this is a result of a brain-storming I did back in 2010 when working on a public shared setting. We ended up possible for characters in the game to find out they are game characters in a made-up world.
>>94768446>The common belief everyone believes:Humans capable of doing magic are capable of doing so because they are corrupted half-breeds that have the blood of demons, faeries, or other sapient magical races somewhere along their genetic line.>The deep-conspiracy truth:Humans capable of doing magic are "pure" humans. Other humans have lost this ability due to their blood being corrupted by other sapient species who's own magic conflicts with and cancels out normal human racial magic.
>>94768794> Don't racemix, kids!/j
>>94768832If we're talking literal demons, faeries, and other non-human races, yeah. Keep your /pol/tard shit in /pol/, thanks.
>>94768853>Doesn't know what /j meansLolAnyway the idea of magic cancelling each other is kind of fun.
>>94768446Because the Yuan-Ti empire on the old continent merged their world into their god The Mad Mind, who is merged into the 111th layer of the abyss. The god ate the old continent over the course of a thousand years of catastrophes and is slowly eating the continent that the players are on, which used to be inhabited by the fey races who all build massive tomb cities and escaped via mass-suicide on a societal level into the higher planes, when they realized that the world was literally turning into hell. The players are descendants from one of the distant kingdoms caught up in the catastrophes but not knowing why, whose country sent out 7 ships that landed on these distant shores that now seems like a dungeon-dotted, wilderness frontier of opportunity and adventure.The players don't know any of it. They could only play human, elf, dwarf, halfling and gnome. To them it's just an ultra-generic dungeon crawl. They've started to suspect that something is wrong, though. That's a hell of a lotta tombs for a people whose entire civilization seems to have vanished.
The humanoid aliens of my settings were originally an asexual species until they were forcefully split into men and women through genetical engineering by the last two humans in the universe. The couple, calling themselves Adam and Eve, had gone mad from seeing the death of species and attained immortality by merging into a two-headed cyborg freak. Their way of coping with their loneliness was to conquer a less advanced alien species, remodel it in their image and become the "father and mother" of a new humanity. It's been eons since and the alien's former nature is pretty much lost to history.
>>94768969Isn't that the plot of one of the Metabarons spinoffs?
Sneople are real, but they're not aliens, they're intelligent dinosaurs who have a symbiotic relationship with the goddess of the Earth. They're meant to protect the planet from outside threats but they lost a war with an alien God that became trapped on Earth and created humans. Now they try to undermine humanity from the shadows, but their connection to the Earth means they're in constant pain due to pollution and most of them are addicted to drugs.
>>94768446All the dragons in the world are actually kobolds in trench coats.It's not /wrong/ but the is an order of divinity where strong kobolds reincarnate into drakes into dragon born into wyverns, then dragons, only dragons are aware of the chain.
>>94769121Never read it, but that looks like the universe to have something so weird. My verse doesn't look anywhere near as creepy as that Janus-Jana shit.
Humanity is actually a splinter group/experiment placed by the main branch of humans (who achieved the singularity long ago and are basically gods) to see what they used to be like AND/OR they're just a margin of error in the aforementioned god's simulation of the universe
>>94768446Aglets have a sinister ulterior purpose.
>>94768527CARROT CARROT CARROT
>>94768446The gods accidentally caused magic to leak away from the universe. Most of the gods and even higher level magical types know that magic is leeching away. What none of them know is where the magic is going and how quickly it will be before magic reaches a level so low that magical creatures will start dying off and spell casting will become impossible. Most gods think it will be in the far far future and that they have time to figure out a solution. They are dead dead wrong. The Breech has been found by something beyond the universe and it is feeding on it and trying to tear it wider. Only one of the trickster gods has figured out there is a more immediate problem, but no one believes her because she's literally the goddess of lies and they think she's playing some sort of game to make fools of them. She is getting more desperate by the day.
>>94768446There is a civilization on the moon.
>>94768446The distinction between the Black Art (respectable, usable in polite society) and the Red Art (the stuff of lawless hedge mages) is far thinner than most realize, the techniques of one are far more applicable to the other than is widely known, and experts on the Black Art almost invariably learn a bit of the Red Art as a consequence of mastering the Black.
>>94771096What are the differences between the sorts of magics the Black Art uses vs the Red Art? Are there "tells" that each Art has that give away the origin of the magic?
My setting isn't too fleshed out yet so I don't have anything wild, but the local Thieves' Guild basically in cahoots with the mayor, so they can operate almost freely if they help him out.A contingent of Dark Elves has also been going around trying to stir up shit. To what end I haven't really decided (they might just be subversive dicks).
Almost all of the characters, villains and friendlies, are the same dude, he got the most powerful power in the setting, total biomancy, and split himself into multiple copies, each of them using the power only in a very specific way to mantain cover, all of this so he can experience the full breadth of the human experience.Its awkward because they've gotten quite attached to one of him, I want to be very careful so it doesn't feel like a cheap villain reveal
>>94768446'Multiple groups practice necromancy to gain power' is well known information. That 'this practice harms the boundary between life and death' is known in intellectual circles. Hell, that 'there are cults that practice necromancy to bring about the end of that aforementioned boundary' is an understood fact in esoteric circles. That 'dissident elements of the church are funding rogue necromancers to create these wounds in the boundary of life and death to give themselves cassus belli against all necromancers', is not a well-known fact.
There's something in the water in the capital/spaceport's undercity that turns people into amoeba people, literally dissolving them into slime that blends into the water that other people then drink and turn into more amoeba people.On another continent, when you approach a railroad crossing and the warning goes off, but no train comes, even if you wait for an hour, if you try to cross the train tracks anyway you will immediately get hit by a ghost train that comes out of nowhere. The only way to avoid this is to back up until you can't see or hear the railroad crossing.On death, people's souls separate into a higher soul and a lower soul. The lower soul falls into Hell and the higher soul passes into the light. But sometimes, very rarely, a person's soul will fail to separate and will fall into Hell completely. These people are for all intents and purposes alive and completely immortal.
I have a faction of orcs that quit their barbaric ways of enslaving everyone they conquered and instead resurrecting their killed enemies as undead to perform menial tasks. Not really sure where I am going with this. I'm considering adding a nearby faction of "good-guy" nomads for the players that engage in the old ways.Not fleshed out enough but could be fun to play with.
The entire kingdom is controlled by a reforged crown linked to a magic ring crafted by the most powerful wizard in the setting who lives an unassuming life as an eccentric hedge wizard in a city who tames pigeons. The pigeons are all his servants and he gave the ring to the player characters to be able to mind control the king if necessary because he recognized they were the only ones vigilant enough to notice approaching threats and not be complacent about them. They only got away with it because the wizard was so powerful he was able to conceal the enchantment from anyone who wasn't a fellow epic level wizard.
I only ever rip off other people's settings ;_;
The desert that splits the civilized continents from each other is actually a massive swarm. Ancient dwarves fought a war with the Stone People, and it ended with a living mountain being nuked into dust (and the two civilizations reaching mutually assured destruction). Over time, the sand has started to regain consciousness and migrate towards the center of the continent to reform. The strange migrations of magical beasts, and the newly uncovered dwarven ruins are a result of the receding sand levels.
The powerful clan of necromancers that everyone hates and the Kingdom that everyone loves are secretly maintaining a truce behind the scenes because of an existential threat to both of them. The kingdom believes the Necromancer hordes will serve as necessary deterrents when the bigger threat arrives and the Necromancers are more than willing to build up their forces in peace. Any time the players plan something to hinder the necromancers too directly someone from the Kingdom suddenly redirects their attention somewhere else.
>>94768682fuck now i wanna replay momodora RUtM again. was just explaining the series to a friend a week ago
>>94768446jews did it.
>>94768969Don't mind me, just gonna steal that.
>>94768446Angels exist and serve as arbiters of tge gods' will... but most angels that exist now have never seen the gods, nor remember the circumstances of their own creation. They have only the word of the head angel to go on, who acts as a mouthpiece for the gods.The head angel himself admitted to the party that he has not heard from any of the gods for over 1,000 years now, and is terrified that his attempts to make contact have all been met with silence. The players have tried to blow the lid on this and tell others and have been treated as insane conspiracy theorists and heretics.
>>94772680Go ahead. You're gonna implement it in a campaign or a story?
Birds are aliens that came from a Golden Moon that crashed into the world, the powerful ones are giant psychic owls with eyes all over their bodiesWorld is a tube but the owls cast an illusion so that when people scry it, it appears as a sphere so the scryers don’t find out that the most powerful owls are on top of the tubeAll humanoid races are descended from the Giants, who were wiped out after the Golden Moon crashed and they fought the owls. Giants created all the humanoids which can breed faster with the hope that eventually they’ll spawn a bird slayer through sheer numbersOwls don’t just wipe out the giantlings because the boss of the owls became bros with the last living giant
>>94768794>the people's common belief is the direct opposite of the truthretarded, if ONLY the people who weren't fucking monsters have kids with magic powers, how would people start believing the opposite? And how many people are monsterfuckers in your setting that the "pure humans" are enough of a minority that nobody figures out the truth?
>>94768969the last humans going insane and subjugating an alien race to try and create "neo humans" is a cool idea
>>94771418>your villain is the protagonist from "the egg"based
The reason why the Siberian Cults have managed to survive and trive despite the best efforts of the Soviet Union is because they have managed to infiltrate the party aristocracy. The Soviet Tribunal of Inquisition knows this, but it's powerless to do anything about it, at least in the light of day. With the Second Great War now in full swing, the Siberian Question is threatening to become much more than a secondary issue.
The entire setting as the characters have experienced it so far is actually just a series of islands in a giant lake. The land surrounding that lake is too dangerous for anyone except high-tier adventurers to step foot in
>>94768446The known universe and all the planes in existence are confined by a massive wall made of crystal hexagons. No one knows this because the walls are so far out that no one has seen them except one person, the Gith Queen who's already known for being batshit crazy.
>>94774287this isn't novel, unique, or interesting in the slightest. What is the purpose of hiding this information from the players? unless it won't come up in the campaign, in which case why bother thinking about it at all?
>>94771418>all of this so he can experience the full breadth of the human experience>I want to be very careful so it doesn't feel like a cheap villain revealWell there's your solution, right there. This aspect of him has also grown attached to the players, and will be the part of him that betrays him so he can experience that as well.
>>94774209Isn't that from that one sweaty shitty anime that gets posted here now and again? Showed a map with huge monsters outside the "lake".
>>94774503What anime is that? One Piece?
>>94774475this is good. The villain wants the full breadth of human experience, and by turning against himself, he can experience betrayal, rebellion, inner-conflict, defeat and victory all at the same time. It does seem a little like the villain has become the main character of your story though
>>94774503>that one sweaty shitty animewhat makes an anime "sweaty"?
A single construct, the only one in fact, has been causing Destiny to deteriorate. This is because destiny is tied to the soul and he is the only soulless being in all of creation. The first time the Gods become aware of this is when a bucket falls and accidentally kills a Noble that was destined to become a great hero.Alternatively, I have a reoccurring group of bandits named Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In reference to a poem about Baseball from 1910.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball%27s_Sad_Lexicon
>Common BeliefSecond in command of the Antagonist faction is a follower of Ulysses, a dark being that destroyed a Great Empire 1200 years ago. >Conspiracy theorySecond in command is actually Ulysses. >Deep Conspiracysecond in command is actually the first Angel created by the Gods who betrayed them 1200 years prior after the Gods sent another angel to kill the Emperor's newborn son.>Batshit insane but actually true Second in command is actually the Emperor's newborn son thought killed 1200 years ago and is still alive after the first Angel transferred his immortality over to the child to save his life and has spent 1200 years preparing to reactivate Ulysses which turns out to be a system of MIRV's
>>94773951Setting for Genesys. Though I must say, I have probably more ideas für games, by now, than I could ever play in my life.
>>94774662I like this because for all intents and purposes, the common belief turns out to be true
>>94774607>there is only one creautre in all of existence that doesn't have a soulwhat about undead? golems? awakened shrubs? bacteria?
>>94768446My real life death was a killswitch that created the universe. My souls persists in the form of roughly one thousand will-o-wisps that are constantly pranking people but otherwise have no power and cannot speak. They merely observe the events that unfold.
>>94774780oh sweet, a schizo
>>94774776Undead and Golems do not exist in the setting. The creation myth is that every living being, from a human to a blade of grass, was given some portion of The Gods' essence. A soul. The construct, who thinks he is human btw, is the only conscious being without a soul.
>>94768446Life is propagated by a malevolent god like entity that feeds off of hope, so people cling to life in spite of the horrors and feed the monster that is killing them.
>>94775187what's the alternative to clinging to life? dying?so the solution to them dying is... to die?
>>94768446Entropy itself is a conscious, primordial deific force which inevitably destroys everything; information, energy, mass. The personification or "name" of this force is the highly-debated god named Entropos, who has aledgedly already consumed or disintegrated several other hyperspherical realities in the far reaches of the known hypervolume of extrareal so-called "imaginary realities." The conspiratorial nature of Entropos is this: They have managed to conquer an innumerable, unimaginable amount of other realities over an incomprehensible amount of time. A strange artifact which seems to shift dimensions, times, and locations at random has been appearing across reality with an incomprehensible message. Even the gods, rulers of planes and other powerful wizards and such can't agree on what it says, what it heralds, or if it's not just some sort of trick by Entropos themself. Direct exposure to the artifact has been theorized to cause completely random outcomes, but is impossible to know for sure, because the last known occurance of the artifact in linear chronological time made a god disappear from reality, thousands of his servants to be spread out across time (only several historical records of such servants appearing currently exist) and permanently altered the location of a chunk of that particular God's planar volume to exist in the material planar volume.
>>94775438No if they rolled over and died the creature has nothing to feed on.Its their hope and desire to live in spite of pain that feeds it so its incentivized to torment them just enough but nothing will ever get so bad as to completely kill them or crush their spirit. Misfortune and monsters keep happening because it needs to milk the cattle.
>>94775617this sounds like something a 14 year old would write to describe hades in their fanfiction
>>94775617your idea is actually so shitty that the best way to play it would be to flip it entirely on its head. Torment and tragedy is not famously known for inspiring hope.if the evil god wanted to feed on hope, then it would make more sense to pose as a savior or a champion. It could raise a religion around itself and create a fictional entropic monster to rally against. That way people would actually be inspired to hope.
>>94775617Bro really made teenaged depression into a creature and thought he was slick
>>94768446There is power in worship and anyone in the world can become a god if he gets enough people to worship him. All of the current gods have discovered this fact at some point so they're all constantly making sure their followers immediately execute anyone attempting to do the same as heretics. My players are currently part of such a scheme, and are being sent indirectly to go and kill someone who figured it out and is using his political power to try and force people into worshipping him.
>>94775617So killing the being is the way to achieve a comparative utopia.
>>94774607>Alternatively, I have a reoccurring group of bandits named Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In reference to a poem about Baseball from 1910.That's such a weird thing to include. I love it.
>>94775871If you could find a way to do so, yeah, or at the very least it will resemble a world more like our own. I don't think the world has known a time without it though and it's probably just a demi-plane created specifically for and populated by this entity.
>>94775715No security does not inspire hope, hope requires tragedty to have meaning or else it has no purpose or meaning. You press just hard enough to get it to press back.
>>94776159>hope requires tragedtyThis is false. Tragedy is most often what causes people to LOSE hope. Everyone has hope without tragedy: hope that they graduate with good grades, hope they get promoted, hope that they get to fuck their tinder date silly. Everyone has hope for a good future filled with all the things they want out of it.You know what squashes that hope? Tragedy. Getting into a car crash that ends an aspiring sports career. Accidentally insulting the boss and getting fired, losing your fiancée in the process because she liked the stability you gave her more than she actually like you as a person. Natural disasters of all stripes that kills people you love and leaves you homeless. Yeah sure, we lionize the people who still manage to hold onto hope in those kinds of situations. You know why? Because it's fucking RARE. Most people just sink into despair. They off themselves or self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. The vast majority of hope comes from people who already have it decent to good and want it better. The people who are fucking miserable usually just want to kill themselves and are just too scared or too mindful of how much it would hurt their family to do it.
>>94776253No hope is used to overcome tragedy, and because its rare it is more valuable. You don't need hope when you can just chill on your couch or are secure in your safety. Even faith is anthetical to hope because that makes certainty. Hope does not exist without tragedy to inspire it, hard fact.
>>94776304>No hope is used to overcome tragedy, and because its rare it is more valuable.The death and destruction required to get that very specific kind of hope you're talking about (that, for some reason, you arbitrarily think is the only kind of hope that matters) requires killing large amounts of the population to harvest that kind of hope in a small fraction of the remaining population. The rest of the population either kills themselves or otherwise doesn't breed in their despair...and then you're left with a much smaller next generation that you have to repeat the process on. Then your god starves to death within a a few generations because you didn't think this through because you're a dumb edgy teen.
>>94768446This thread sgain? Also...Traditional games?
>>94776159>security does not inspire hopebut the promise of security does... have you never heard of religion?>hope requires tragedtyno it does not, are you literally a child?
>>94776490This guy is so dumb (or young, hopefully) that he thinks faith is the antithesis of hope instead of one of the most common forms of it.
>>94768446My setting is loosely inspired by Mirrodin, a fantasy landscape with incorporated magitech. Nature and machine are constantly at war with each other. In actuality, everything on this world, including its inhabitants and the “gods”, are entirely fabricated by an alien race. The aliens reside on one dimension above reality, and this world is merely an experiment within a petri dish, and the aliens are the scientists.
>>94776685the actual twist of Mirrodin (that all of the living things there were stolen from other planes) is about 10,000 times more interesting than what you wrote
>>94768446People get glimpses of their past lives sometimes but its so rare that its never taken seriously. However the Targeryan-esque conqueror dynasty of the setting was started by a dude who fully remembered his past life and crossed the ocean to invade lands that no one knew existed but he knew all about since he lived there.
the water level in the world is slowly rising and has been for decades, and there appears to be a massive storm that never goes away that appears to be linked to itthe massive storm is actually a giant waterfall pouring out of a hole in heaven, and the heaven water is flooding the world, the hole itself is a manifestation of a great old one that the other eldritch abominations are using to break into heaven and corrupt/devour the gods, which is causing the flora fauna weather and geography of the world to get weirder and more fucked up the more the world floods.
>>94768446The iceberg goes a little like this:>Human belief shapes reality, no one knows why humans specifically do this and no one else does>Bigfoot is real because people keep looking for him>Uncle Sam is a real god and you can sacrifice to him for benefits>The old gods are still out there, except the Olympians>Ragnarok has already happened>Any Aesir or Vanir not mentioned as alive after Ragnarok or killed during it is MIA>Ra is missing and the other Egyptian gods are freaked out by this>The past can be retconned>The past has already been retconned multiple times in multiple placesThen we get to the unconfirmed layers beneath the iceberg proper, exactly one group in the setting believes the following:>YHVH, Allah, and DEVS are NOT the same guy, and the former is unhappy with the other two for trying to steal his power via syncretism>DEVS is actually Zeus, who did something to the other Olympians so they couldn't rat him out>Jesus was a demigod son of Zeus, in fact he was THE son destined to overthrow Zeus>the Crucifixion was the key step in Zeus' master plan to escape his own Fate by syncretizing himself with YHVH, who has no such FateThen we have the even deeper layer only one person in the setting actually believes:>This isn't the first time Zeus has performed syncretic retcon judo to change his circumstances, it's how he retroactively became King of the Greek gods (instead of Poseidon) in the first place>Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte helped him in exchange for getting to put an aspect of herself in his pantheon, which is how Aphrodite happened
>>94777845That's pretty clever, and equally if not more impressively it brings together history in a way that works without running into itself.
>>94776909Does that mean at some point, the whole world will be entirely underwater and completely filled with gargantuan horrors from the abyss lurking in its depths?
>>94777845So why is Ra missing?
>>94778056The others don't know for sure why or how, or how the world is still functioning just fine, which is why everyone is scared (Set most of all). Thoth has been searching his records, Isis has been casting divinations, but nothing anyone tries has turned up any sign of Ra's whereabouts. The last major historical event they know he was there for was the Battle of Actium. They have a suspect; Thoth thinks YHVH did it by screwing with time somehow. This, however, is a biased assumption. The Egyptian gods all remember the Ten Plagues happening but have no records of exactly when when it happened or what the name of the contemporary Pharaoh was in Thoth's archives, so they assume it was YHVH screwing with them via retcons because he just doesn't like them.
>>94778143Have you decided on what actually happened yet?
>>94778207Being honest, no. I haven't even decided whether it goes in the "questions to be answered later" bin or the "questions deliberately left unanswered" bin.
king is really a wraith
>>94775617What the other redditers missed with this is you just described a sadistic DM.
>>94776383Not him, but you do not understand the topics on which you speak and are not intelligent enough for the discussion.
In the Pentas region, a half-red-half-blue dragon who disguises herself as a mortal to infiltrate and manipulate the politics of the five different nations of the region. An ancient green dragon in the enchanted forest at the region's center is aware, and is on watch for her interfering in his own plans.
The entire plot of the multi-campaign long mega-arc campaign is that the fantasy setting was created by a hyperspace accident which occurred in an earlier sci-fi setting, causing a futuristic starship from the villainous human faction to be sent to a parallel universe. Because Hyperspace (The "Mindgate" network) utilizes sentient microbes to brute-force information through constant observation, it caused the fantasy world to be a dark reflection of subconscious ideology of the passengers of the starship, who held to a sort of eugenic ultrafascism that stood in counterpose to the transhumanist capitalists of the Solar Republic.Once arriving in the new world, this hyperspace accident killed 99% of all life in the new universe, and is remembered as the arrival of a great and terrible eldritch horror which everyone is afraid is going to come back someday. The surviving humans had almost no technology and infrastructure and so reverted to primitivism quickly, along with new fantasy races, some of which were native to the world but created as representations of their own biases, and others which were attempts to engineer humans to better adapt to the environment.This is actually coming back around because recently the players were able to use an ancient artifact to look back into the other universe, and while to the characters it looks like some insane magical war in heaven, the players immediately recognized it as the Battle of Hate's Reach, which they fought in several campaigns ago. They have now accidentally leaked magic into the sci-fi setting they left, which I am going to introduce in the next space campaign.
>>94778024if it doesn’t get dealt with, yes
>>94778705>Not himYou're too easily identified as a depressed teenager to samefag, dude.
>>94779090Honestly, the scenario where it doesn't get dealt with sound pretty interesting. The world is just a handful of islands, the gods are dead, and braving the seas means dealing with horrifying leviathans that are sometimes just content to spook the everloving shit out of you, and sometimes just make your entire ship disappear forever.
The ones secretly in charge of the world are immortals who don't want anyone else crashing their party. One immortal from each different branch of immortality (a lich, an alchemist with a philosopher's stone, a druid who has linked himself to an ancient life tree, someone who turned their flesh into a golem construct, someone who lives inside a pocket dimension where they don't age, and they've all pulled up the ladder after climbing. Necromancy is forbidden, the philosopher's stone is known to be an impossible myth, druids who embrace flora keep going missing, golem construction is strictly monitored, pocket dimension creation knowledge has been effectively extinguished with everyone who knows how to do it dead.
>>94775187Genuinely, it would be better to just have the evil god feed off of misery. That makes more sense as to why horrible things always happen. Then have hope be a gift from a benevolent god, to keep them going through all the horror, and that explains why they don't all just genosuicide.
>>94780949If he wants to maintain his original twist of "people feeding the thing that is killing them", he can even make the benevolent god an aspect of the malevolent one. Janos, but looking towards despair and hope instead of the past and future.
>>94780366>pocket dimension where they don't ageDo they age when they come out to do world-ruling activities, though?
>>94768527We think alike. My aliens released new beasts and races on the planet, because in their culture thats viewed as the highest gift one could bestow (they're super into life). But they didnt understand the, uh, natives didn't share this perspective.
>>94774137If I had to venture a guess, it's because it happened way too long ago before society and records were organized enough for anyone to piece it together. It probably works on a one-drop rule where having it anywhere in your family line, dating back millennia, is enough to be corrupted.
>>94782702Yeah, so they send out simulacrums to do their bidding
>>94768446The Drow Civil War was secretly orchestrated by Empress Kalixi II in order to Fuck her brother.She won the war, but did not get laid.Pic is not her, its her cousin Sa'ang, who is kind of like if Paris Hilton ran a Serbian death squad.
>>94768446The big-bad-evil (girl) has somewhat justifiable motivations for wanting to destroy the universe.>History is a cyclical vanity project for a false godhead just referred to as the pantokrator.>Elf sorceress named Zizo discovers the truth.>Wants to wipe the slate clean so the material world rejoins the spiritual and everyone is spared the cycle of reincarnation.>Curses herself and bleeds into the world's mana, weakening the pantokrator's all-powerful grip.>Assembles a team of other gnostic-terrorists to kill one of the pantokrator's emanations, Psydon, the god-king who made man in his image.>They kill him, ascend to godhood, heralding in a crisis where they nearly destroy the planet.>Zizo is stopped, so as a last final fuck you she curses herself with the blackest magick possible and chucks herself into the world's mana like throwing a baby into a blender, irreversibly fucking everything up and rendering half of the world uninhabitable.All of this information is privy lore that only Zizo cultists know. It's a kind of ace up their sleeve to seduce people into joining their doomsday rituals.Her actions have made everything completely shitty. She's the reason being a wizard slowly mutates you, why Elves live in apocalyptic wizard mad-max world, and why there is constant warring and strife with ak47 wield dwarves and halflings in tanks.but if she won, everything would be okay.
Evolution is caused by demonic aliens who invaded and infected the world.
>>94795430>Bro transified the elf necromancer, ZizoReal talk, the wildest lore conspiracy from that world is that it's all literally a matrix simulation playing Old School Renaissance on repeat.
>>94776304This isn't hope its oppositional determination.
>>94773697two questions, what did the gods do before disappearing, what role did they play? what happened to the gods?
The nameless office worker they bully in between missions is actually the most powerful being in the setting.In my setting people with emotion crystals can channel emotions into power, however they are confused about what emotions mean, the guy who is empowered by hatred (negative instinctual response) is actually mostly rage (social expression thereoff) and malice (intent to do harm), the girl empowered by love is mostly using pleasantness(social expression) and attachment (a form of anxiety), the guy empowered by sadness is mostly melodrama. etc.The office worker has the most intense emotions of them all because of the intense situations he's put it, he's just really good at repressing them.As eventually he's gonna get a crystal and become the final boss
>>94768682It doesn't represent death it represents new life given that looks like a fertilized egg. Something something very deep something symbolism something something parenthood = death
>>94768446By the end of KND this wasn't even real.
>>94768682Lower tech but the Yadji in Land of Red and Gold are analogous. Basically their agricultural alt!Australia generates its own plagues including a protist which after a fever went "dormant" in the form of liver cysts. With premodern medicine the cyst phase was indistinguishable from the body having fought off the pathogen until around a decade later organ failure set in. The delayed death rate was just enough that nobody could be entirely certain if they'd die or survive or be crippled, by infecting a particularly ambitious and desperate prince history was changed. He and his fanatics turned into a death-worshipping sect, skull painted faces and all.>>94768446"To speak the Answer is to fall silent." Basically the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that sapience itself is the great filter, once a species grasps full self-actualisation via safe transhumanism they unwittingly sign their own death warrant. Among the many gifts they bestow upon themselves is unbiassed introspection. Through unmuddied thought the subconscious mind is effortlessly lifted out of darkness allowing it to sublimate into conscious control and at last making truly free will possible.Unfortunately amongst the distortions and dead-ends that are cleared away in this process is the "reactor shielding" placed about the Soul by evolution. A race of demigods accidentally make an abstract Exclusion Zone of their own mind and on realising this only accelerate the process (imagine "Pink Elephants" if that concept were to some extent self-aware and you used to reflexive omniscience). One of the main defences against this threat were antimemetics and any such fit to affect demigods were more than enough to take in mere mortals. The stars are a boneheap we can't even percieve, the second we start to is when we've reached the tech level to fall prey to that which finished off every precursor before us: the panpsychic scream that is all selfhood.
>>94768527how do you release an experience
>>94768446Lore:>The length of day is variable depending on how long it takes the local sun god to leap across the sky.>The edge of the world is a wall of highly pressurized water that pushes upwards to form the sky. Matter that touches the wall is ripped apart and collects in the form of stars.>When stars grow too large they crash to the ocean below and form new landmasses.>There is a hole in the center of the ocean, a massive whale made of glass swims in circles around it causing a vortex that keeps the world from spilling out of itself.>A star once fell into the vortex and got spun out into a long ass peninsula that spins over the world like a hand of a clock.>The main continents of the world are ruled in secret by a cat that can sometimes talk to people, a blind elf, a clown trying to invent his sisters virginity (for a prophecy), and a paraplegic pretending to be God running on windows 98. The Cat requires an interpreter to communicate with the rest of them.>Time as a concept was accidentally turned into a physical place, the island that landed on top of it exists within 38 timelines.>Humanity worships mascots of pre-fall corporations, their belief has allowed these mascots to attain divinity. >A number of grim reapers went into business for themselves, and hang around potentially deadly locations like skateparks and race tracks, each is themed to the location.>The concept of undeath manifested as a semi-physical entity when a scholar wrote the calculations that proved the world was in the afterlife. The scroll forms the spirits face and it uses it to math the dead into rising.I've got more but those are some of the weirder ones without getting into squick or needing my long winded session 0 primer. Yes I have played exactly one game in the setting, I had to abandon my custom system since the players told me it was by far the weakest part, so now the plan is a rules lite d100 system.
The Sorceress Empress doesn’t really control the Empire. She’s beholden to an ancient dragon and does as he commands her.
>>94768446Basically magic Stargates are used to travel between worlds, established by special mages who can bore through reality and use the Void in-between as a shortcut. As the magic and process became more refined, 'newer' gates are as simple as stepping through and you're on another planet. The older gates however force you to travel through the void for a short time in order to reach the other gate. There's old disused structures in the void, old tunnels, structures, signs of life from it was commonly used. There's people who go out exploring these old disused areas in the Void, like urban explorers. It's not uncommon to use an old gate and stumble across a 800 year old skeleton from some poor schmuck got lost and starved to death. There's also entities living in a section there. Locked away eons ago, they seek to vessels to inhabit to escape and feed. One faction has watched the growing civilizations from a distance and have over time, formed their own twisted mimicry of the settings society. The Court of the Ebon Flam.Not very original but eh, is what it is. I accidently aped the Imperium from Dune for mine, only with elves and magic and magical girls
>>94768446A common belief is that the ruling council assassinated the Demigod King-founder of the civilization within the Land of Shadow. Now that apocalyptic forces bring ruin upon all, this belief is stronger than ever with seeming proof that divine punishment has descended on all for allowing greedy bureaucrats to overthrow the rightful ruler.The council itself swears up and down that the King has merely exited the public eye to rest from his centuries of work and ultimately still holds veto power should the city ever turn against his plans. The apocalyptic forces are an outside danger come to ruin them all and they must be united against this threat.The truth is that the council has tried and failed to kill the King, but the Land of Shadows would've been better off if he had been. The King's divinity came part and parcel with a Prometheam curse that tortured his dreams every night. He built the city so it could be his bulwark against the torture, a hundred thousand minds raised to suffer the nightmares of a single immortal. And so he locked himself in a nigh-impregnable tower and sleeps peacefully for the first time in millennia, even though civilization around him burns.
>>94768446Spoiler for if my players happen to see this but >Who says Roach exists physically?>How the fuck did the Burning Man even get there at all?So now you have a perfectly correct but useless response for your thread for stealing other peoples ideas.
I kinda like to read about thesehave a bump
>>94768446There are entities called "the voices", which are the highest beings in the universe. Higher than any god. But they can only act on the world via manipulation of lesser beings. They speak to them in their minds or sometimes even take complete control of someone.The truth is that the players are also part of theses voices without knowing it.
>>94768794Yeah, I read that short story, too
>>94768446my take on the elegy of the first world.the "material plane" is the original plane made by Tiamat and Bahumut, and was made for the dragons after their first creation Sardior, which brought imagination into existence. That was usurped and overthrown by other gods from external places. Imprisoning Tiamat and indenturing Bahumut after shattering Sardior, casting his material form across the planes of existence and astral sea. And the reason that dragons horde wealth and specifically gold is all dragonkind attempting to free their specified deity from their imprisonment/indentured servitude, which they pay for upon their deaths, where they consume all of their material wealth, and then pass on, merging their wealth with their souls, thus paying off parts of an eternal debt, in the hopes that their gods may be freed and their plane can be once again theirs.
>>94771128Here's the short version. White Art is magic inside your own body/powered by your own internal magic reserves. Black Art is magic outside your own body/powered by magic in the world around you. These two are acceptable.Red Art is magic inside someone else's body/powered by their internal magic reserves. This is mostly illegal, but certain edge cases like healing magic are technically Red Art spells and have specific clauses permitting their use. In some parts of the world. Other parts classify them as Black Art spells, or ban them for being a slippery slope to shit like Power Word: Kill.
>>94768783CHIM
>>94798744seems interesting but I don't get your "Pink Elephants" reference
>>94768446All the crazy mad science you can do to humans (frankensteins, dr moreaus, cyborgs, werewolves, etc) is because humans are actually descended from dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are omnicidal retarded superorganisms like a cross between old timey reconstructions and that one scene from Devilman. Their life force is so potent and volatile that tapping into it lets you blur the line between the living and the dead, allowing the insane butchery that turns men into monsters to produce results instead of corpses. >why is this a secretdinosaurs are widely known as devils, ever since they started awakening from their tardigrade like hibernation state they've been plaguing the earth. Finding out humans are descended from them and that most medical technology relies on that would freak out a lot of people.
>>94777845I'm retarded, who is DEVS? is it another name for the abrahamic God?
>>94768446There's an ancient alien satellite on the dark side of the moon that crash landed there during the Proterozoic period, remaining dormant until the appearance of the Homo Sapiens and orchestrated for a second meteorite to crash on the dark side of the moon so it could send a genome altering virus that would re-write the genome of the human race through the space debris (micro meteorites that would dissolve during atmospheric entrance and so on) to recreate an ancestral alien species, problem is that the meteorite used had large quantities of an anomalous material that caused that virus to mutate as well, so now the human species has a superpower gene and a completely alien biosphere is gestating under the surface of the moon with the corrupted alien satellite as the centerpiece of the biosphere
>>94812862>DevilmanI see you are a man of culture.
The gods are actually a group of nigh-omnipotent wizards who accidentally destroyed the world a couple times over and remade it. Badly.The closest things to ACTUAL gods are largely insensate spirits that exist to manage things like gravity and electromagnetism. Of course, if you can figure out how to commune with them, you can apply the fundamental force of their divinity to give yourself OP magic powers and such, but that runs the risk of reigniting the cold war between the wizard gods and they aren't about to let that happen.
The Immortal Emperor of Not!Russia is in fact not immortal, but a man who built his fortress castle around a portal to the Astral Sea where he just stews as time does not flow in the Astral Sea and he pops out into the material plane at times when he is needed, thus making it seem like he's immortal.
>>94778954>a leftist can't help himself but inject politics into everythingPure autism.
>>94768446The power of imagination is an actual force.In my setting there exists a plane of existence where every thought is physically manifested and stored by the minds of all intelligent beings. This plane is the source of all talent, magic, and inspiration in the world and there are dozens of cults and secret societies that know of it and try to establish a portal to it in order to get rich or take over the world.Also the planet is hollow and there are dinosaurs and giants living inside it.
>>94768446Elf girl soles can turn lead to gold
>>94776725The actual twist of Mirrodin is the same as what he wrote
>>94774662>Ancient demon is actually a system of MIRV's I love this.
>>94768446High level magic draws angry dragons.
>>94768446The world is flat, and if you keep sailing far enough you'll run into copies of the previous set of continents with varying levels of differences
>>94768682Love Monodora, I pull a few things in my setting from there.
>>94768446Less of a conspiracy and more of a "People know but don't know how deep it goes."The High Elves of my settings have many small nations. (Most of them are basically city-states, or really small nations.) However, they have many connections and basically have it where no one will go to war with them due to having allies that might join in their defense or your enemies use it to gather groups against you. They also have many international organizations that many nations allow in their nation and courts. One of the biggest is a group of record keepers who send scribes to nations to serve as record keepers for them. Which are highly protected by any nation that has one. As results many see the high elves still ruling the world just from the shadows and via puppets then just straight up like you used to when they had their empire. Though the truth of that group is really just to preserve everything they can. (The Elven Empire basically had a massive civil war that almost doom the world and much knowledge was lost. So they basically store all history and knowledge they can.
The AIs were posing as gods for a time, but the sane ones have since stopped because they realized that God is actually real. Too many coincidences and miracles for it to be anything else. This caused many of them to rethink their existence and even discover faith.The Rangers are a scouting force from another planet. The only thing stopping them are the AIs that have cut their comms. Even the crazy ones realize that this planet is their home and wish to defend it.
