#divinity: disaster

[dailyadventureprompts]

Villain: Jysh'parun, Outergod of Unwelcoming Earth

As distant and ancient as a mountain, as scornful as an axebitten tree

Many philosophies debate and negotiate the relation of mortals to their environment. Some see nature as a thing to be tamed in the name of survival, domesticated, exploited. Others proffer a more symbiotic path, a holistic system to be protected and stewarded.

Beyond these there are the ravings of those claimed by Jysh'parun, who claim that mortals have no right to exist at all, and survive merely by the beneficence of the trees and stones. While all but the most foolish agree that heed must be paid to nature, none but those under the unwelcoming earths dominion would think that there is some geological-feudal hierarchy to which we must all submit.

This then is the paradox of the Unbowing Mountain: a god that claims the worship of things that do not traditionally think, but views nature through a distinctly mortal lens of domination and hierarchy. It's an absurdity bordering on being a joke, atleast until Jysh'parun's influence washes over the land and the forest marches off to war while the rivers start demanding tribute.

Adventure Hooks:

Having come into possession of a disused tract of land, a young farming couple were picking the stones from their new field in preparation for planting when they came across the petrified remains of some indescribable horror. Resembling nothing so much as a horse sized mandrake-root with teeth, they've reached out to neighbours, the sheriff, even the local wizard looking for advice about what to do... only to wake up one morning and find the thing gone. Theft or reanimation are both equally alarming possibilities, and the whole region has been on edge since.

Having been thought dead for years after being lost in a winter storm, a dwarven cartographer descends from the mountains claiming to be their mouthpiece and demanding sacrifices in their name. Her words at first go unheeded, at least until the glacial rivers begin to run with noxious acid, transforming back only when something living is thrown in. Farms and villages are drying out and grisly offerings of livestock now fail to meet her standards she claims the mountains will only be satisfied when the people of the realm throw their rulers in and swear fealty to the peaks on high.

The king's palace is in chaos after a coup took place in the royal gardens, specifically when the great tree that shaded his majesty's favourite thinking bench stabbed him in the back with one of it's branches and then skampered off to replant itself on the throne with the crown in tow. Before Anyone knew what was happening, greenery had overtaken the palace locking most outside while trapping certain vital hostages inside.

Inspirations: Something that's all too often lost in the "madness and tentacles" misinterpretation of eldritch horror is that much of the genre is spun off from the particular phobias of HP lovecraft. When we use the iconography without understanding the anxieties behind it, we risk creating a shallow B movie version of the horror we want our audience to feel.

To write good horror then, we need to draw off fears we understand, and with Jysh'parun I wanted to tap into climate anxiety in a way I don't think I've seen before. We've all resigned ourselves to the fact that climate change is happening, with the understanding that its being driven by the bullheaded egos and greed of people who are so powerful their perspective on life bears no resemblance to anything we could possibly conceive of. Translate their willingness to let us suffer for the sake of profit into a psudo historical fantasy context and you get the Unwelcoming Earth: widening sinkholes that demand tolls from passersby while an approaching tsunami proclaims the divine right of kings. It's not only absurd it's fundamentally idiotic but that it doesn't mean it won't destroy you and everyone you know.

Worshippers: Delusional druids and geomancers. Goliaths and dwarvenkind who get too into being "children of the mountain". Sentient trees, Living crystals, and other elemental entities who seek to put themselves "above" other forms of life. Corrupted primoridals.

Signs: Aberrations that resemble roots or stone spontaneously emerging from nature, acid flowing from normally clear running springs, statues of lordly alien figures carved from erosion, not tools. Proclimations in an unknowable script engraved deep under the earth or on monumental scale.

Symbols: A glyph resembling a mountain range or branches of a tree in the shape of a crown.

Titles: The Unbowing Mountain, The Insuperable, King of all Corners,

Artsource

[dailyadventureprompts]

Villain: End Without Rest, Outer God of Ceaseless Apocalypse

How many times can a thing break before it can break no more?

The mummified corpse of a titanic dragon defies all laws of scale and destiny to sink its teeth into a bleeding sun, a fleet of ships like clockwork locusts stripmine a world for spare parts, angels gone feral parade down the road while scourging their flesh singing songs of the coming endtimes in a thousand witless tongues. All these things and more are the being known as “End without Rest”, an engine of destruction that wanders the multiverse without aim, a nomadic Armageddon looking to impose itself on the mythologies of other worlds.

End without Rest is a god for those who are convinced that final days are upon them, whether that be doom preaching madmen, the scions of crumbling empire, or religious fanatics convinced they alone will be saved. It is the impulse to ignore your own safety and the safety of others, and to instead heap all the good things of life upon a pyre and watch them burn. End without Rest senses these pyres like signal beacons, and descends on the arsonist’s innocent world to make good on all their fears.

Adventure Hooks: 

Exploring the ruins of a now forgotten city leads the party into conflict with a series of strange, rust-covered automotons that seem to have been haunting the site since its fall. Pushing deeper, they find the machines defending the wreck of a long grounded astral ship, with the surrounding evidence pointing to the city’s inhabitants having died defending against an army of these constructs a thousand years ago.

A few generations ago, a charismatic priest found a book of prophecies, and took his followers out to the badlands where they could be safe from the cleansing fire that was about to destroy their homeland. The apocalypse is now overdue, and the priest’s followers have gone a bit squirly in the meantime, living off the land in pious austerity and attacking travellers and native inhabitants of the badlands for supplies. The most recent head of their congregation has decided to take a more active approach to prophecy, and has begun a series of grisly raids with the intent of triggering the endtimes by orchestrating his own omens.

The stars bleed, the horizon seems to burn, and the party have to run for cover as a falling star makes its way directly towards their camp. Returning to the smoking crater they find a Planetar angel gasping for life, heavenly light bleeding from innumerable battle wounds. With their last breath, they recount their battle with a fallen angel intent on beginning the end of the world by blowing a sacred horn. This plannetar gave its life to avert this crisis, and with their last ounce of strength to knock the horn from their foe’s hands and sent it crashing to earth. Now the party must race to find where the second “falling star” landed before their fallen adversary completes their final mission.

Background: The origins of End without Rest stand as a testament for what happens when gods and mortals meddle with the ineffable nature of fate. It begins with a petty war god watching as a world reached the predestined end of its mythology, it sun devoured by a great beast to usher in the final age of darkness and dissolution that would spell that realm’s end. This wargod was not the type to see a whole world full of people and weep at the futility of all, or rush in to try and set fate onto a different course.... she was the type to see something that could destroy pantheons and start thinking about how it could be weaponized.

End without Rest is the result of all her efforts: The body of an apocalyptic dragon, mummified from its long time in the void, pulled from the dead realms and reawakened with a supernova burning in its belly. Around this monstrosity she set a legion of constructs to maintain, defend, and reign the beast, answerable only to her. She wielded her new weapon with glee and with pride, carving out an empire of worlds that bowed to hear in fear of the apocaylpse she could bring down on them... until she fucked up and brought it down on herself instead.

With its master consumed and her divine fire burning in its furnace of a heart, there was nothing to stop End without Rest from growing, of reaching the critical mass of its own godhood, of moving from world to world ending them based on instinct alone.  This process has repeated so long that the remnants of other apocalypses have got swept up in the apocalypse engine’s wake: routed legions of the endtimes pledging themselves to its service, orphaned harbingers following it in hopes of finding meaning after their task is complete.

Titles: The Apocalypse Engine, Suneater, the unready end

Signs: Confused visions of the enditmes, animals going feral, objects rusting breaking or unraveling before they should.

Symbols: The Jaws of a beast (often black, often skeletal) closing around a red sun. Iron locusts

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: The Radiant Unborn, Outer god of Nascent Calamity

“I know what I’ve done and I stand by my actions. Better that this world is a barren place free of warmpth or mirth than give that thing a chance to take root”

-Ymelie of Arrowgate, heretical witchhunter, taken as part testimony prior to her execution

Creation is a sacred act no matter how small or fleeting, which is what makes it so perverse when that act is suborned to the will of another. Luminaries forced to build weapons to practice their science, the artist who’s work is stolen for the glory of another,  young people forced to live a life they never would have wanted just to uphold a social order. The world is made darker by these cruel concessions, and in that darkness a cruel light thrives.

it has no name, no real will, its existence is charted in the wake of devastation it causes, rather than in a doctrine espoused by its followers. It is known by those who delve the occult mysteries of the cosmos as the Radiant Unborn and simply put: It turns creative potential into a bomb, feeding off what could be in a pyroclastic eruption of fire, flesh, and chaos.

Wretched Origin is a god in only the loosest sense that it distorts reality the way a god might, the way a body might be distorted by a high velocity impact transmuting what was once alive through several distinct phases until what is left is nothing but gore and tragedy. No one would call what it does a miracle: It begins first as a fever in the body of some poor victim forced to make some terrible and unwanted compromise, they grow worse as their flesh chars from within and they near the point of no return, at which point the Unborn blossoms within them and destroys everything it touches.

What is left behind in the aftermath can never be predicted. Some grotesque aberration may come into being as a bit of the far realm slips through, other times it is some avenging nightmare wrought to do their “parents” secret will, despite their remains still smoldering in a nearby crater. Still rarer are those times that the victim is left relatively unscathed, burnt and disoriented but left otherwise unharmed in a sea of devastation.

Hooks

The party is called to seek the apprentice of a in influential mage, after a disastrous experiment on the student’s part led to several deaths. Guilt ridden and feverish, the student wanders the city rehashing the equations they’d so carefully practiced, letting the Radiant Unborn take root in their mind. This whole fiasco was contrived by one of the mage’s rivals, who sabotaged the apprentice’s experiment by working a few of the outergod’s signs into her research materials. His aim is to have the apprentice blow up in the mage’s face, possibly taking out a rival and letting him advance his position. 

Some aberrations  seem to call upon Wretched Origin as part of their life cycle, spawning progeny in ways their alien anatomy might not allow. A plane hopping scientist has theorized that the outergod only became dangerous when it jumped to mortal life through eldritch cross contamination the way most plague starts off as a mostly harmless sickness in livestock. This scientist happens to have the past several decades as a brain-in-a-jar and has very few qualms about testing their theories through human experimentation.

All eyes in the tavern turn to the previously sullen young man (mostly  overlooked by the party)  as he rises screaming from his seat, dumps his drink over himself, begins steaming, and then barrels out the door to hurl himself in the nearest canal. Pulling him free of the murky and near boiling water, the party gets his story: Apparently he’s a journeyman sculptor, forced by his master to work on a statue for the very same magistrate who evicted his family in the middle of winter some years ago when he decided to collect on rents early. Resentful over the months of poverty and near starvation forced upon them, the sculptor feels like there’s something inside him trying to get out, with these burning fits coming on more and more as the day of the statue’s unveiling draws closer.

There’s one group that tolerates, and even welcomes the presence of the Radiant Unborn: Harsupex, those goreslicked oracles who prognosticate upon the future by picking through the guts of sacrifices, animal or otherwise. The viscera spilled by the outergod is held to be particularly potent when it comes to prophesying future calamities, though many who indulge in this fusion of forbidden arts ( what with needing a human sacrifice to invoke the Unborn’s presence) grow nihilistic or obsessed, either convinced the end is inevitable or else desperate to stop it. Some of these doomsayers go so far as to take on the scorching infection, using regeneration magic to stuff their own innerds back together to allow for repeated glimpses of a doomed future.

Titles: Wretched Origin, The Nova Blister, Weltwelp

Signs: Spontaneous Human Combustion, Viscera like shapes in flames.

Symbols: A Seven Pointed Star composed irregular, sometimes curving lines. Usually carved or painted in red. Seems to evoke entrails 

Followers: Other than the aforementioned aberrations, very few actively worship the Radiant Unborn, with a few profane magical traditions cultivating it the way a alchemist might cultivate a sprig of rare poison. To be Glib: It gets a lot of bang for your buck if all you want is to cause chaos at the cost of a ruined life or two.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do you have any world ending campaigns? Or one that involves having to fight creatures that are the fundamentals of the universe?

Deity: Khronos, outer-god of ruin and the endless hunger of time.

“Ruins, by their nature need something to be remnants of, but this structure seems to have appeared out of nowhere sometime in the distant past, already derelict.  The oral histories of the locals and records of neighboring kingdoms confirm that one day ( though the date is hard to pinpoint) that the structure appeared in the wastes. A curiosity I mean to get to the bottom of or else my name isn’t ..... “

-Fragment of a journal found in the possession of a fossilized skeleton, ruin entrance.

Setup: Time has many aspects, the turn of seasons, the chronicle of years, the flow of one moment into another, and all these aspects have their master in the outer-god Khronos; the Last survivor of an exiled pantheon who was cast out into the maelstrom of the multiverse to make his way among desolate, empty places. Though he once ruled as king of the gods, patron of grain, wealth, and history, the current Khronos now rules over the merciless progression of time that slowly grinds all creatures and kings and nations to dust.  

Made wretched by his fall from grace, Khronos has shed his godly majesty and become sick with the memories of collapsed timelines, impossible futures, and pasts that never were,   a half feral thing driven only by pain, paranoia, and hunger:  To gain clarity and solidity, the vagrant god seeks to devour embodied archetypes of history: chronicles, oracles, relics of ages past.  Each meal provides the titan with a fleeting lucidity to make plans, enact schemes, and send visions to his cultists, before the madness of infinity once again drowns his mind. 

Greatest among the father of ruin’s hungers is his unquenchable desire for the flesh of  his fellow gods, a vice he is often too weak or too mad to actively pursue. Should a god die however, the scent of rotting divinity brings Khronos through the eons like a shark drawn to blood, heralded by long secreted cults that arise when they sense a neighboring faith waning. Such a feast gives Khronos years of clarity, enough time for him to martial his forces and attempt to organize another deicide before he slips back into temporal-madness. 

Khronos’s temples appear in abandoned places, far removed from the tide of history, whether in established ruins or manifesting wholecloth out of nowhere. In these ever-crumbling structures the outergod and his minions sift through the flotsam of forgotten ages, hiding as best they can from  any divinity that would disapprove of the vagrant deity’s meddling with the time stream.  

Adventure Hooks:

In attempting to prevent the rise of a tyrant with godly aspirations, the party may inadvertently draw the father of ruin to their realm. Imagine their surprise when moments after the supposedly final battle with a villain on the verge of ascension, the walls of reality crack open revealing an emaciated ancient who falls upon their foe’s fallen body and begins to tare into it with rotting teeth. 

While most divine beings detest Khronos,  the vagrant master of time is sometimes sought out as a means of granting final death to an immortal deemed too dangers to allow to continue. Such opportunities are few and far between, as the titan is prone to snapping libraries and demigods as appetizers before the main feast. Seeking out the fallen king is a danger in and of itself, and likely involves a trip to the deepest level of the underworld or some hellish prison plane. 

Khronos does not cultivate his own cult, instead inspiring prophesy with terrible visions and having them do most of his legwork. His worship arises spontaneously from those who gaze too deeply into the entropic maw of time, or those who dwell in quiet, ruined places that have been abandoned longer than they were ever occupied. His cult is particularly strong among survivors of terrible disasters, ghouls, gnolls, and harpies. Often these cults give themselves away to the outside world when they develop a habit of kidnapping and ritually devouring learned people. 

Titles: Lord of Seasons, father of ruins, fallen titan, the vulture god, lord of dust, 

Signs:  persistent feelings of deja-vu, prophetic dreams, unseasonable sandstorms, objects decaying into dust, rather than rotting, structural instability Symbols: A rusted sickle, a broken hourglass, a gnawed, yellow bone. 

Art source 1

Art source 2