posted
Whenever I'm DMing, no matter what system we're playing or who my players are, I almost always end up setting things up so that the players are forced to accidentally unleash a godlike entity. Usually the god in question goes on to become a major antagonist over the course of the campaign. The first time this happened, it was pretty cool. The second time it was still pretty cool. By this point it's happened something like 7 times, and some of the players are starting to get tired of it.
The thing is, each time, it's not something I deliberately plan. I plan out a number of worldbuilding elements, and base an adventure around one or two of them. And then a few sessions later I suddenly realize that those elements have inevitably led to a situation wherein the players will release a god.
I think the problem has less to do an addiction to making players unleash gods and more to do with trapping them in God-Containment-Units in the first place. I mean, once you have a god trapped in a box, it's just begging to find a way to be set free. (Sometimes there was actually no good reason for the God to be released, but a power hungry player actually thought unleashing it was a good idea and did it anyway despite a billion warning signs not to)
So now I'm planning what is probably going to be the last adventure in long campaign. Originally it was supposed to focus on one PC's father, a dwarven serial rapist who was given a prophecy that he would sire a child who would be crucial to the saving the world. After his first child died and the second was incredibly weak, he gradually went crazy and became less concerned about his partner(s) being willing participants in his, ahem, world saving activities, and he went around the continent identifying women with strong magical potential.
50 years later, the father is dead (and one of the children did indeed save the world), but now there's a small army of half-dwarf children with super powers running around. The adventure was supposed to focus on what those children did once they found out about each other.
On what I THOUGHT was a completely unrelated note, a while back I randomly had decided that a whole bunch of godlike beings called Eldritch had been buried under the earth in various places, and that some of them had infected nearby earth spirits, and that the diety who had given the dwarf the prophecy in the first place was one of the infected ones.
So yesterday, while trying to figure out how to tie a few plot elements together without making the players feel like they were being railroaded, my roommate suggested that the prophecy was intended to be self fulfilling. The infected earth god did want the world saved, but specifically told the dwarf father about it because it knew eventually the children could be used to release all the other Eldritch from their prisons.
There are other plot devices I still could use, but this one is by far the most appropriate when considering all the pieces that have been put in place already (including many that I didn't list here because to avoid summarizing the entire campaign). But this will be the 8th (and simultaneously 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th) god I've put the players in the position of unlocking. Even if they choose not to, it's still relying on the same plot device and I feel like I should be more creative than that.
Bleah. Not sure what kind of response I'm looking for, but everyone else I could rant at about this would be to people who will be playing the game in question.
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posted
That will likely be the point of this adventure, and I suppose given how frequently in came up in this particular campaign it makes for a fitting climax. But whatever my next campaign starts I think I'll need to institute a "no trapping gods in boxes" policy to prevent me from falling into the same trap.
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posted
Kill the gods off, but don't tell the players. They're all hyped about unlocking the first one . . . and it turns out it has been eliminated. You could either involve some specific protagonist (if you didn't want one super-powerful person, create a vast and pernicious organization that uses magical rituals involving thousands of members to kill the gods -- no one person is overly powerful, but they're in the background everywhere. Think the Brujerķa from Moore's Swamp Thing), or you could have the elimination of the gods be due to some change in the natural order of things, possibly one you need your characters to reverse.
I suppose you could have the players find out earlier than when they open the prison of the first one if you wanted to be nicer .
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Ooh, that's fun, too. Maybe have the eldritch who'd been released already after them, and they have to prove somehow that they didn't do it.
I should start coming up with ideas for a Spirit of the Century session I'm running next week -- so far the players are a Scottish vampire slayer with magical bagpipes, a devil-may-care and easily bored jewel/art thief, and a neptunian agronomist gunslinger. There'll be one more character of which I know no details, yet.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Kill the gods off, but don't tell the players. They're all hyped about unlocking the first one . . . and it turns out it has been eliminated. You could either involve some specific protagonist (if you didn't want one super-powerful person, create a vast and pernicious organization that uses magical rituals involving thousands of members to kill the gods -- no one person is overly powerful, but they're in the background everywhere. Think the Brujerķa from Moore's Swamp Thing), or you could have the elimination of the gods be due to some change in the natural order of things, possibly one you need your characters to reverse.
I suppose you could have the players find out earlier than when they open the prison of the first one if you wanted to be nicer .
I kinda already did that. Actually, did all of it EXCEPT for the main point, which was having the gods already be gone. (The first half of the campaign was the players trying to locate people who were born with a shard of the sun god inside them, and there was a rival organization trying to assemble the sun god for their own purposes, meanwhile using the shards to manipulate cosmic events).
I might be able to work with "Surprise, the Gods are already gone!" subversion, but the whole reason the idea worked so well in these circumstances was that the Oracle God had deliberately created a self fulfilling prophecy resulting in the dwarf children finding the Eldritch. To subvert the trope in these circumstances I'd need a character even more all-knowing that a god of prophecy. (Actually come to think of it I'd previously created a chaos goddess who could presumably throw a kink into the plans)
However, the actual god-unleashing was supposed to happen off camera, afterwards. The actual point of the adventure was and is to provide a resolution to the "evil father" storyline. Previously the characters went to kill the father, but learned he had become a pretty sad, pathetic old man. The adventure was anti-climactic.
So now, one of the children (one of the oldest and most powerful) is trying to continue what the father started, breeding a race of superior beings and using the Eldritch power to elevate them to godhood. The point is to give the players an antagonist who fills the role they had expected the father to fill and let them have the resolution they wanted. The final fight is *supposed* to be against the the eldest son, (preventing him from going to find and harness the Eldritch power), and the only way for god-unleashing to directly enter the picture is if they say "You know what, breeding a race of godlike super-dwarves and conquering the world sounds like a pretty good idea. Yeah, let's go do that!"
I suppose I can keep the "tricker goddess throws everyone for a loop and steals the Eldritch first" plot in reserve to punish the players if they make the selfish (and kinda stupid, since they know how dangerous Eldritch are) choice.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Ooh, that's fun, too. Maybe have the eldritch who'd been released already after them, and they have to prove somehow that they didn't do it.
I should start coming up with ideas for a Spirit of the Century session I'm running next week -- so far the players are a Scottish vampire slayer with magical bagpipes, a devil-may-care and easily bored jewel/art thief, and a neptunian agronomist gunslinger. There'll be one more character of which I know no details, yet.
You had me at "magical bagpipes."
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: *grin* You could always frame them for the murders.
I actually did that last time. When they restored the sun god, the players also killed about a hundred thousand vampires at once, who had all been used to going outside whenever they felt like it for the past thousand years. One of the surviving vampires convinced the empire that the players were responsible for all the deaths caused by a cthulhu-like diety (which they DID in fact release a while back, although at the time it actually did make sense).
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