Fate of the Fallen (D&D)

[Academia Nut]

So the D&D bug has bitten me once again. Here's a quick bit of campaign info to whet the appetites of everyone else around here and stir up some interest.

Ancient History

Over two millennia ago The First and his forces stormed out of the Great Plains. A warlord of immeasurable power and charisma and unknown race, he lead a vast coalition of evil tribes and species into civilized lands. None could stand against his armies, and all who resisted looked forward to only one fate: utter annihilation. The conquered were forced to either join his armies or to toil away to supply his troops with arms, armour, and food, binding all to him with foul blood magic. For a century he drove his forces in all directions, creating an empire of such vastness that had never before and has never again been matched in size. Such was the terror he inspired in his subject populations that his name was forgotten and he was only known as The First.

The First’s bloody, tyrannical rule came to an end not from any mortal elements, but as a result of his destruction of the temples of the gods along with everything else that stood in his way, he broke the religion of millions and starved the deities of that which they needed most: faith. They sent agents to put a stop to The First, but his personal power was as strong as that of his empire, and he added celestial blood to the sanguine seas he had already spilled.

Without the faith of their followers and their champions dead, the gods began to wane in power until finally the time was right and the creatures of the Underworld burst out of their prisons and surged out across The First’s empire, intent on showing the warlord the definitions of ‘tyranny’ and ‘slaughter’ while they also sent their forces to storm the gates of the heavens. While the armies of the gods were pushed back, The First proved a harder foe to conquer, legions of devils and hordes of demons devoured by his mortal armies. Furious fiends discovered that their assassins fell just as easily as the celestial ones had, but where the gods had been on the wane they were on the wax, their abattoirs and torture chambers flush with souls taken from the heavens and the mortal realms.

Setting aside the eons old conflict of the Blood War for just one day, a group of archdevils and demon lords pooled their powers and magic and led a personal assault on The First. None know exactly what happened as neither the fiends nor The First walked away from the conflict, which left no surviving witnesses. In the area thought to have been The First’s final battlefield there is a mile’s long gouge in the earth and rent in the universe called The Rift, a foul, tainted place where abominations leak out into our world and not even fiends tread lightly.

The effects of the Fall of The First were many and affected a dozen different planes. With the death of so many archfiends, great civil wars wracked the Underworld, stalling their advances in the divine and mortal realms for decades. The celestials took the time to fortify their domains, but by then the good gods were already dead and gone and countless souls had been dragged off to the Underworld, so there existed little to defend at that point. In the former lands of The First, those who had aided him waged a desperate war with those who opposed his rule, resulting in further bloodshed and chaos. Mortal powers that had existed at the edge of the empire took advantage of the disunity and the stalled advance of the fiends to carve out their own territories, the most successful groups being the dragons and the yuan-ti.

Perhaps worst of all, The Rift not only spilled monsters into the world, but its presence tainted the soil around it and poisoned the land, killing all plant life, causing it to crumble to grey dust. Without the roots of the plants to hold the soil together, the land crumbled to dust and sand that were picked up by the winds that were no longer held back by anything. For hundreds of miles around The Rift, everything perished, transforming the grasslands of the Great Plains that had once supported the hordes of horse tribes that had been the backbone of The First’s armies into the Great Rift Desert.

When the fiends resumed their wars, they found the heavens too well defended to be worth the effort for the pitiful scraps left there, flights of dragons ready to defend their new territory, snake worshippers in fortified jungle strongholds armed with divine magic, a vast desert filled with abominations, and their greatest enemies once again each other. A strange sort of balance of power settled over the ravaged landscape that has persisted in an ever shifting form for centuries since.

Powers That Be

Golgara (LE) – Capital of the domains dominated by the devils, the centrepiece of the city is a great nine-stepped ziggurat that houses the hellish administration that enforces its will on those mortals unfortunate enough to have been caught up in their conquests. At the very peak of the ziggurat is a massive, permanent portal to the Nine Hells that devils can march out of ten abreast.

For mortals in Golgara, there are three roles they can take: slave, lackey, or sacrifice. Any not granted the favour of the ruling devils are implicitly slaves and exist only to serve their betters through their labours, the most common being farming or smithing for men and bearing children for women. For those who serve the devils more proudly, volunteering as the slavers, soldiers, and clerks of the region, they can instead enjoy the fruits of the slaves’ labour, if at the discretion of the devils above them. For those who find that they cannot obey the laws of slave or lackey, the third group exists as a stark reminder of what awaits. Whenever legions of devils are not marching out of the portal there are long lines of ‘criminals’ are marched into it for sacrifice and the eternal torture of their souls in hell. Of course, even strict adherences to the laws of Golgara are no protection, as the internecine plotting of the devils creates a shifting game board where human pawns are discarded all too readily.

Byssia (CE) – If mortals are slaves in Golgara then they are playthings in Byssia, the capital of the demon dominated domain. The only law in Byssia is the survival of the strongest, and the demons are by far the most powerful. If any mortals prosper in Byssia it is because their begging for scraps amuses a demon, but if a patron’s whims are not fulfilled immediately, no matter how vile or impossible, then a supplicant will quickly discover how little loyalty means to a demon.

The centre of the settlement is a great sucking maw of a hole to the Abyss, where demons pour out to vent their incomprehensible hatred of all things upon the first things they see, which are typically other demons. Those that leak out past that charnel house find the winding, blood soaked streets contain apartment blocks full of helpless mortals brought in as fodder for whatever depravities the fiends can think up. Amongst the mortals, the scum floats to the top as those who are best at diverting the attention of the demons to others survive, some become facilitators or even cultists.

The Rift (NE) – Laying at the centre of the Great Rift Desert and roughly in the middle of Golgara and Byssia, The Rift forms the natural divide by the two feuding factions of fiends as the unnameable things that dwell within the lightless depths of The Rift are more than a match for the fiends and the mortal levies of either force are unable to make the march across the near lifeless desert in any case. Despite the murderously dangerous terrain, mortals still live there and quite possibly have the worst lot of them all. The lucky ones are slaves or food for the mind flayers, aboleths, and beholders that make the crags of The Rift their home. The unlucky ones are fodder for whatever rules the very depths of The Rift, twisting flesh into grotesque mockeries of mortal forms for the purposes of sick amusement.

Tiamat’s Protectorate (LE) – A realm of dragons ruling the eastern mountains and portions of the Great Rift Desert, they are considered the best of a bad lot in that their motivations are relatively simple to understand: the dragons want wealth and territory and are willing to kill for it, but unless bored they would prefer others to bring it to them. To this end the dwarves are the most populous race in their realm since the hardy miners bring them the wealth of the earth refined by skilled hands to their scaly overlords. Not that living within the Protectorate will prevent a dragon from wiping out a village possessed by a rival in a feud or a dragon for eating a servant in a fit of anger, boredom, or hunger, but their moods are generally less mercurial than the demons and their laws less strict than the devils. Of course, considering that the dragon overlords gleefully export thousands of excess slaves to the demons and devils in exchange for riches, this makes things rather hard on the neighbours of the Protectorate, who often pray to dead gods to simply die in a raid rather than be carried off.

Dominion of the Serpent (CE) – Carved by the yuan-ti in the southern jungles, the Dominion wages war to bring back endless streams of captives to their vine wrapped pyramids to sacrifice to their dark god, who so empowered by the rivers of blood returns the power by making the place a nightmare for uninvited guests. Rain forests soaked in gore and evil and granted a spark of animate intelligence by the rituals of the yuan-ti gleefully devour intruders, making the entire Protectorate impregnable by even the fiends, not that it stops either group from occasionally throwing away a few thousand lives to remind the yuan-ti that they still exist, or to eliminate over-ambitious subordinates, or, as is the most common reason for the demons, because they can. The only group that the Dominion at all gets along with is their fellow reptiles in the Protectorate, and even then it is more of a mercantile relationship as the dragons will sell their slaves to anyone in exchange for more wealth.

Two Kingdoms (LE) – Cut deep into rock where the dust cannot erase its course and fed by distant rains unaffected by the heat, the winding Claw River cuts across the Great Rift Desert. Its ever flowing waters dilute and carry away the poison of The Rift, allowing life to exist within the heart of the desert. Every inch of the thousand miles of the Claw is cultivated, and the people there have resisted the encroachment of the fiends, the abominations, and the dragons for fifteen centuries, although it must be said that consistency of leadership helps. Knowing what awaits them now that the heavens have been sacked and their gates barred the leaders of the Two Kingdoms rule over both the living and the dead. Undead necromancers that perform profane rituals and experiments to extend their own existences, they possess enough magical firepower to make even the demons blanch. The liege of the Kingdoms is a demi-lich who may have been around since before The First and who has eaten the souls of more pit fiends, balors and dragons than any other powers in the universe.

For the mortal residents of the Kingdoms, life is not actually that bad. They must toil to provide wealth for their undead masters, but since the Claw is the only place that supports agriculture in the region, the primary export of the Kingdoms is food. Also, since the liches and mummies of the ruling class make it abundantly clear what happens to the dead now that the fiends are charge of the afterlife, many gladly support the experiments into undeath performed upon their loved ones. Of course, any questioning whether or not the soul is still retained within a mindless skeleton or zombie is quickly given a firsthand demonstration of the procedure.

Scorpion Nomads (N) – Violent and xenophobic yet not bloodthirsty or without honour, the Scorpion Nomads are a loose collection of tribes of humans and goblinoids descended from the nomads that once rode with The First thousands of years ago. Roaming the wastes of the desert, they move from oasis to oasis, fiercely defending their territory from the myriad enemies who would enslave or devour them. Their survival is attributed to the monstrous scorpions they ride and to what some consider a fragment of The First’s strategic genius having passed down to them. Able to use the desert to nearly disappear and appear at will when and where they want, the nomads make ferocious hit and run attacks on their foes, scattering forces and destroying logistics so that quickly an army that enters their territory is lost, leaderless, and without food or water. Despite their ferocious defence of their territory and the cairns of skulls, mortal and otherwise, that mark the boundaries of their lands, they are quite helpful to other mortals who are unbranded by the fiends who are lost or passing through their territory, helping them along their way, although resources are scarce in the desert and the nomads have little to spare, so their hospitality is rather stingy.

The Web Below (NE) – In the mountains of the south-east, abutting the jungles of the yuan-ti, there is a kingdom unknown to all but a select few. Originally a group of elf mages fleeing from The First, they conquered and enslaved tribes of kobolds to labour for them beneath the earth. In tunnels that stretch like highways through the mountains and great caverns, these elves surrounded themselves with strange rocks that emit powerful magical fields, especially when gathered into large quantities. Preventing magical searching and teleportation, these rocks and the hidden nature beneath the mountains of their communities have kept the elves safe from the monsters that surround them, but not without side effects. Physically, the elves have separated into two castes: one pale from lack of light, the other burned dark by the stones they work with. Both are arrogant, xenophobic, and soaked in magic and hatred. Over the past two thousand years, barely the passing of three generations for the elves, they have bitterly held on to their memories of the way the world was before and they blame everyone else in the world for the state it is in now, leading them to one inevitable conclusion: everyone else must die. To that end they have taken to worshipping dark gods promising them the knowledge of how to remake the world into something more suitable for them, and their raiding parties strike confusing wounds upon their neighbours with the intent of turning them upon each other. Their short term goal is to get the dragons to turn on the yuan-ti, but a grand plan is forming amongst the leadership to take the sun, an immeasurable source of energy they no longer have need of underground, and use it to wipe out all of their enemies in one catastrophic attack. The sanity of this plan is rarely questioned.

Storm Raiders (CN to CE) – For some, the only escape from The First and then the fiends was to travel where armies could not march after them, taking to the seas off the west coast. Living on craggy, volcanic islands, these mixed tribes of humans, dwarves, and orcs live by two rules: family first, and survival at any cost. While opinions vary from island to island, the general consensus is that if someone is not related to you then they are fair prey. Sailors by trade and pirates by opportunity, their favoured targets are coastal towns they can sack for loot and slaves to later sell to the highest bidder. Protected by the seas and the storms their wrathful goddess stirs up that only they know how to ride out, the Raiders are the undisputed masters of the seas, their mercantile networks spreading out for thousands of miles.

Free City of Bones (N) – Bones is situated about fifty miles to the south of where the Claw meets the ocean and exists mostly because no one can tolerate it not existing. With the Scorpion Nomads to the east, the Storm Raiders to the west, and the Two Kingdoms to the north, Bones is in a perfect location to act as a trade hub between the three powers while simultaneously being just far enough that none of them have a particular desire to project power into the city unless one of the other three makes a move first, which none of them particularly want to. A city of merchants, one can purchase anything in Bones, including slaves who may eventually end up on a sacrificial altar somewhere. Simultaneously, if one makes it into the city out of chains then as far as the powers within the city are concerned, that person is and always has been free.

Bones takes its name from the fact that it is built on the bones of a much, much older and larger city, one that used to cover nearly a hundred square miles of coast. A truly massive metropolis that was once fed by a river that has since dried up with the birth of the Great Rift Desert, now only the bones of tens of thousands of stone buildings remain. Abandoned millennia ago, most have long since been picked clean, but the shifting sands of the desert occasionally reveal some treasure left behind by the ancient inhabitants of the city. Of course, just as often something hostile is released, often an angry spirit seeking to vent its fury over some perceived injustice on the nearest mortal it can find.

Pact of the Sacred Seal (N) – Existing in a tiny enclave on the far edges of the dead metropolis that Bones claims as its own, there is a group of scholars who uncovered ancient treatises that speak of a time when there were gods that did not demand sacrifice and bloodshed. Seeking these beings out, the scholars managed to contact one, sort of. The bitter remnants of an ancient deity trapped outside the normal bounds of the universe, somewhere between life and death and mortality and divinity. It explained that there were other beings like it, fragments of powers that once were, called vestiges. Soaking in this knowledge, the scholars came to a conclusion: the good gods are all dead and only vestiges retain anything worthy of worship. While still small, the Pact of the Sacred Seal seeks nothing less than the downfall of the current divine order and the destruction of the fiends, and they are looking to the furthest reaches of the universe for the help to do it. While most of the mages within pursue the new field of pact magic, there are a few who pursue even stranger alliances, not all of them particularly pleasant.

Brotherhood of the Rose (LG) – Only a few scant years old, the Brotherhood is housed within the ruins of a building on the far southern tip of the Bones metropolis. Once perhaps a villa of an ancient noble, the sands of the desert buried it quickly and preserved what the Brotherhood consider the greatest treasure of all: the Tome of the Rose. The tale of a knight who devoted himself to the highest ideals of truth, love, and justice and who in turn drew power from his own innate goodness. Discovered by a barely literate ex-slave fleeing from his former masters nearly two decades ago, he drew hope and inspiration from the pictures and eventually managed to translate the dead language it was written in. Seeing this story of a warrior of ultimate good, he sought to emulate the teachings within, taking the symbol of the rose from the book as his own heraldic element, he found that his devotion to higher ideals did in fact manifest as incredible power. While still small, the Brotherhood is finding many recruits within the downtrodden populace of Bones with their preaching of a better way and of actually going out and doing something about the nightmares running their world.

---

The campaign would likely start in Bones and the surrounding area since there are plenty of ruins to explore, lots of different sort of people tend to drift there, and it is the one place in the world where you can actually find an actively good and semi-good organization. Rules wise I am obviously including elements from the Tome of Magic (pact magic explicitly), but there are a few other things of note. Fluff wise, the only clerics are those of either evil gods or cultists for the archfiends, but while the Brotherhood of the Rose is clearly a paladin organization, one could conceive of a cleric whose devotion to good is so strong it manifests as magical power.

Also, more mechanically, after having experienced Star Wars Saga Edition, I am taking a hammer to the skill system and grouping a lot of skills together into more logical divisions. For example, I will have Listen, Search, and Spot all grouped together under Perception and Hide and Move Silently are becoming Stealth. There will be a lot of other regroupings and I will probably knock a few skill points per level off of bard, rogue, and ranger, but that will be because they will not have to invest in skills they need to function that really should have gone together in the first place.

So, thoughts?

[SirNitram]

I notice ALOT of undead and places that suggest dead.

I wonder if one can be an Undead at start...

'Only the honor of a paladin is unbroken, even by death'.

[Academia Nut]

Most of the intelligent undead are spellcasters of some sort, and the last paladin died two thousand years ago, with the concept only being reborn in the past few years. There is however another option I think you might like. Every day thousands are unfairly damned to the Hells because of the actions of the devils and not any stain of evil on their own souls. While rare, there exists the small possibility that a soul so branded may possess sufficient will power and inner goodness to resist the pull of hell, the pull of death, even as the flames come to claim it. Of course, such a titanic struggle would likely cause incredible damage to a soul and the energies of hell would leak into its body as it struggles to stay alive.

So yeah, hellbred would be allowed, although things would be even tougher for them because looking like a fiend in a world half conquered by fiends is not conducive to long term health and the only way to avoid damnation as a hellbred in this world is to either bring back the gods of good or kill enough devils that there's no one left to run hell... you'll probably have to depopulate the Abyss as well to keep the demons from taking over.

Incidentally, I am strongly considering introducing some form of 'destiny' mechanic similar to the Fate point system in Dark Heresy or the Destiny point system in Saga edition. 'Depopulating the Lower Planes' might be a bit too epic, but there's nothing stopping a PC from trying anyway

[fgalkin]

I don't suppose I can do something silly like play a neutral demon or devil (what? Fall-From-Grace shows they exist!).

I don't think a thing like a "good" human is possible in most of the evil-aligned parts of the world- imagine a 2-millenia long Auschwitz, and what it would do to the human psyche

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Academia Nut]

I don't suppose I can do something silly like play a neutral demon or devil (what? Fall-From-Grace shows they exist!).

No, for two reasons. The first is that there's really nothing that can actually push a fiend away from evil anymore. They won, and you don't celebrate victory by switching teams. The second reason is more practical in that there's nothing available to play that would fit the level restrictions. Everyone who has any sort of power in this setting is a Grade A asshole, and those who oppose the fiends out of any reasons other than selfish ones are only just starting out. Basically, the good guys are starting from scratch here, so I'm thinking a starting level of 1 to maybe 3.

On the other hand, there are plenty of tieflings who aren't particularly happy with the way their ancestors act.

I don't think a thing like a "good" human is possible in most of the evil-aligned parts of the world- imagine a 2-millenia long Auschwitz, and what it would do to the human psyche

Oh most definitely, that's why the campaign will start in Bones. Anyone from the regions around Golgara or Byssia will pretty much have to be an escaped slave, probably not even born in either place but captured or sold from elsewhere. Anyone else would be a heartless bastard willing to sell their own children for a few more days of life, which is just the way the fiends like it.

[fgalkin]

I don't suppose I can do something silly like play a neutral demon or devil (what? Fall-From-Grace shows they exist!).

No, for two reasons. The first is that there's really nothing that can actually push a fiend away from evil anymore. They won, and you don't celebrate victory by switching teams.

Just because the team won, doesn't mean everyone on it won, now did it? I mean, Grace became Neutral after being tortured by the devils for millenia, so I don't see what's different here.

The second reason is more practical in that there's nothing available to play that would fit the level restrictions. Everyone who has any sort of power in this setting is a Grade A asshole, and those who oppose the fiends out of any reasons other than selfish ones are only just starting out. Basically, the good guys are starting from scratch here, so I'm thinking a starting level of 1 to maybe 3.

I'm not that well-versed with D&D cosmology (the only games I ever played were Bioware CRPGs), but I already know of several ways how it could work off the top of my head

On the other hand, there are plenty of tieflings who aren't particularly happy with the way their ancestors act.

And are in a similar position as the humans, I imagine, with the majority being trusted lackeys, the lowest slaves, or sacrifices, depening on who their parents were, and how they go about their lives.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Academia Nut]

I'm not that well-versed with D&D cosmology (the only games I ever played were Bioware CRPGs), but I already know of several ways how it could work off the top of my head

The problem is that the lowest of the low amongst the fiends are the equivalent of 4th level characters, and most of the more human ones are like 10+ level characters. Thus its something of a practicality problem in that there would be no one else in the world (ie the PCs) who would be able to actually keep up with such a character.

[fgalkin]

Well, I had ideas involving posession and using mechanics for a tiefling warlock (I took a detour and looked at the D&D books at B&N last night), but perhaps something like hellborn might also work....

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[frigidmagi]

This is 3.5 or 4.0?

[Academia Nut]

It is 3.5 with a few personal mods after having experienced Star Wars Saga Edition (as interpretted by Hotfoot). I just didn't click with 4E, so I have no material or experience with it.

[Jason_Firewalker]

I would be interested in this game, but unsure as of what interests me most of all, a Ranger in the service of the Brotherhood or a Bard who sings tales of the days before the First in a seedy tavern off the main drag in Bones