Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Great Order]

Actually I think I pinned down the dream-inspiration. There's an SCP, I assume based on the nuckelavee, which are centaur-like things that search battlefields and target wounded people. Some part of it is the diary of a WWI soldier talking about them, finally mentioning his friend disappeared and he saw one that looked like him.

[King Zultan]

Sounds pretty metal.

[Loud Whispers]

Actually I think I pinned down the dream-inspiration. There's an SCP, I assume based on the nuckelavee, which are centaur-like things that search battlefields and target wounded people. Some part of it is the diary of a WWI soldier talking about them, finally mentioning his friend disappeared and he saw one that looked like him.

A dark fantasy WWI setting where all the dead horses, cavalrymen and porters start getting fused in the trenches is really brutal and metal

[Great Order]

Actually I think I pinned down the dream-inspiration. There's an SCP, I assume based on the nuckelavee, which are centaur-like things that search battlefields and target wounded people. Some part of it is the diary of a WWI soldier talking about them, finally mentioning his friend disappeared and he saw one that looked like him.

A dark fantasy WWI setting where all the dead horses, cavalrymen and porters start getting fused in the trenches is really brutal and metal

"The spasmodically squirming, braying, and snorting half-corpses were heaped each upon the other, until at last I was rid of them. The warrens had become a landfill of snout and hoof, gristle and bone - a mountainous, twitching mass of misshapen flesh, fusing itself together in the darkness."

[Loud Whispers]

"The spasmodically squirming, braying, and snorting half-corpses were heaped each upon the other, until at last I was rid of them. The warrens had become a landfill of snout and hoof, gristle and bone - a mountainous, twitching mass of misshapen flesh, fusing itself together in the darkness."

'Oh yeah the papers always liked to rile everyone up with big tales of the trench beasts, but really it was no big problem. You just kept your lanterns lit and your bayonet sharp, and a few prods and the thing would scurry away. They're scavengers looking for an easy meal. They don't like resistance.'
'So... What do you do if you don't have your bayonet?'
'That's the thing - you never let go of it. Not in the trenches.'

[Egan_BW]

The good news is that most of the trench beasts get killed under artillery barrages, while you hide in safe dugouts. The bad news is that the remaining ones are angry.

[Great Order]

That's what the flamethrowers are for.

You know, now I'm wanting some sort of game or book series or something set mid-WWI where just overnight there was some sort of utterly undirected supernatural invasion. There's no major intelligence behind it or anything, just the world, all geared up to be killing one another suddenly rediscovering the fear of the lion on the savannah.

Only these lions are unnatural monstrosities with significantly more body parts than they have any right to own.

[Egan_BW]

since we're in the RPG thread, would make for an amusing horror oneshot probably.

[Kagus]

That's what the flamethrowers are for.

You know, now I'm wanting some sort of game or book series or something set mid-WWI where just overnight there was some sort of utterly undirected supernatural invasion. There's no major intelligence behind it or anything, just the world, all geared up to be killing one another suddenly rediscovering the fear of the lion on the savannah.

Only these lions are unnatural monstrosities with significantly more body parts than they have any right to own.

I mean, that's more or less the plot (such as it is) behind Necrovision. Also kinda Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, but there I think they have to specifically track down the gribblies instead of just having all the lines suddenly overrun by them.

[King Zultan]

WWI seems like an under used back drop for horror games, wish more stuff would use it.


Also I'd play this WWI horror thing if someone ran it here.

[Rolan7]

I've been deep thread-diving and I'm nostalgic for liches.  My group's DM loved them, made a whole state of them (along with ghouls and other undead).  Necropolitan mortals, too, studying to become liches using special gems (vampiric diamonds?) mined by the proletariat.

What I'm wondering is:  Where the heck should a lich's phylactery be?
Order Of The Stick has Xykon hiding it (heh) away in an unthinkable (heh) corner of the astral plane.  That seems like the obvious choice, even for a sorcerer-lich.
On the flipside, what makes for the best story?

My favorite was a story where the phylactery was embedded in the father of one of the PCs or something, for pathos.  That might have been Penny Arcade and it didn't make much sense.  I guess a ridiculously popular fantasy author who-should-not-be-named pulled something similar.  But it's supposed to just be an object.  Can finding a magic item make a good coda to defeating a lich, already a terribly powerful end-boss?  I think it can, but it needs preparation.

In our campaign the society of liches just had a special vault for their phylacteries and we basically had no chance at true-deathing any of them.  That mostly turned out fine, as we "ended" a high-ranking but spiteful lich general into greater and greater fury until he/it became a ragemancer.

I have no idea how he became a general in a geniocracy/technocracy like this.  He was exceptionally stupid and impetuous.  I think... I think he was just good at torturing and scaring people, honestly.
maybe a sorcerer

Edit:  Haha 2013 but:  Don't you know?  You never split the party!

[Grim Portent]

There is precedent for a phylactery being inside of a living thing, though not necessarily being the thing itself. They're based on Koschei the Deathless, who had his soul hidden inside an egg, and then hid that egg inside animals who were themselves inside other animals (usually a hare and a duck IIRC, though I cannot recall the order,) with the outermost animal being hidden in a location, such as a tree.


I like the idea of a lich putting their phylactery into something that's really valuable or powerful, such that keeping the phylactery intact in order to use it is genuinely tempting. Powerful swords, magical horses, nigh-impervious suits of armour and so on. Stick your soul into something of extraordinary value, give that something away as a gift and let it build reputation until almost no one could turn down the chance to keep it for themselves. It's no secret that the item is a phylactery, it's just also really nice, and you don't leap to being obviously malevolent until it's had time to become a desirable artifact.

[Egan_BW]

Don't liches need access to their souljars in order to feed by cramming other people's souls into it? Which they need to do in order to remain "sane"?

[Rolan7]

Don't liches need access to their souljars in order to feed by cramming other people's souls into it? Which they need to do in order to remain "sane"?

This is the kinda thing I was sorta wondering about.  I never heard that though, not when I was playing.  We didn't have any liches after we switched to 5e though, so maybe?
Skeletons and other mindless undead similarly changed in fundamental nature.  Instead of animating some bones, it became a soul lock.  I guess??  I don't know 5e necromancy well, I think our GM didn't like the changes or was tired of using undead.

[Egan_BW]

You can probably make it work any way you want, but I got that from the 5e monster manual. Liches keep the Soul Jar spell prepared and use that to shove people into their soul jar. If if they don't do that they don't die but do go maaaaad and turn into demiliches.