If any of my players come reading this they are going to get in big heap load of trouble if I find out. So Al, Alex, Alice, Jeff, and John none of you better come reading this.
Hi folks. I'm running a game that is set in the world of Greyhawk. The group started in Dyvers and has been moving through the Gnarley Forest on the way to Verbobonc, the main site of the game that we will be playing. I love the old Elemental Evil stuff, and have always really liked my experiences with Elemental Evil. Having a bad guy that there is just no question is bad can be redeeming to all of the morally grey areas that I see in many games and use in my own.
The group is going to get to Verbobonc City tomorrow, and I have been working on different things that they can pursue during the course of game. One series of events that is going to happen will lead them to an out of luck blacksmith that has fallen over to the cult of Elemental Evil. He is not a good guy by any means, but a character that they can use for information depending on how things go (some things that happen may make him believe that his religion is betraying him).
So I went through and wrote out what he believes has been going on, I'm posting it up here to see if it seems to be somewhat logical descent to madness and trying to figure out where I have holes in the train of thought.
The cult that he has come to be involved in (for those that don't know)doesn't know a lot of the true aspects of what they are following, and instead generally think they are following a few different aspects of demons or other bad creatures, but not a trapped deity that wants to destroy all of creation.
Here is what I put together for the blacksmith so that I would have a reference for him, or for other sources of information that the group may come across.
Three months ago Garm was down on his luck (a streak that has not changed to this day). His business was failing, his wife had passed, and his child had followed. He felt that his faith in the lords above had been for nothing, as nothing had ended up going his way. One night he ended up going to Lester’s House of Cards to drink his problems away and gamble. It was a beast night at Lester’s and so he involved himself in watching the beasts fight.
While he was watching a man approached him and began talking to him about the lucky animals down below, how they didn’t need to hold their aggressions in, for them it was a simple life that whatever they felt like doing they would do. Garm agreed with the man, not really paying attention to him, but instead of moving on or quieting down the man continued to talk to Garm.
Garm started to listen to what he had to say, and it seemed like this man too had his faith betrayed by those he had spent his life relying on. He spoke with passion and feeling on the matter, and Garm felt the same passion for the subject well up within him. He told Garm that he had found a way out of the cycle, a way to get back to what we were all supposed to be, like those animals below them, fighting for their very lives. He asked if Garm wanted to see.
Garm was interested and drunk enough, and so he told him that he did want to see. The man told him to meet him after last bell down by the river, and then Garm would see what he had found.
The rest of the night passed in a drunken haze, and after the gambling hall closed for the evening Garm moved about the city, waiting until it was time to meet with his new benefactor down by the river. The two of them met and went to a mostly abandoned warehouse, a warehouse that quickly filled with other working class individuals. They set up a ring in the warehouse and fought each other, allowing the blood and sweat to mix with the damp of the warehouse, while all of them cheered each other on.
Garm started to attend these events regularly, and slowly he became more and more addicted to the feeling that he got there, of fighting with another man to be triumphant, to take out his aggression at the situation that he was in on another living thing. At times they would bring animals to the events and fight the animals, but mainly it was about the raw rage and fighting, the power it gave you.
The man who initially brought Garm here, Vaylr, seemed to be in charge of the group, or at least everyone listened to him. After Garm had been coming regularly for two months, the man told him that there was another group, one that Garm might be interested in. They were a group that was trying to change the way things worked in the city, and if Garm was interested Vaylr would bring him to meet the group.
Garm listened to Vaylr, and said that he would like to help, he was ready to stand up and make sure that things changed in Verbobonc. Vaylr said that was all he needed to know.
Two nights later Garm was awoken in his bed as people attacked him, he didn’t know where they had come from or why they were in his home above the smithy, but there were too many of them and they quickly subdued him, threw a bag over his head after gagging him and then moved him. He fell in and out of consciousness for a while, but the next thing he solidly remembers is being in a dark room tied to a chair.
The voice in the room said that he had been a very bad person, they knew he had done many things wrong, but this was his one chance to make up for all of it. All he had to do was roll over on those above him, if he could tell them who was in charge of what he had been doing they would go easy on him.
Garm told the shadowy figures to go do things to themselves that are generally vied as anatomically impossible.
He was there for three days, in the dark room, though he didn’t know it at the time. The hate that he had for everything around him made him strong enough to get through without breaking to the torture (something his body had become used to during his weekly fights). At the end of the third day, Vaylr told him that he passed initiation.
The group that Vaylr spoke to him of was a cult that promised to remake the world into a place where loyal followers would hold the power for the future of creation. This recreation was spoken of in their religion as the occurring when they, the loyal servants of Elemental Evil, had succeeded in bringing down corrupt governments and civilizations allowing the world and humanity to embrace their primal aspects unhindered by the rules that society forced upon them.
Thanks for thoughts and feedback.
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I read an article ages ago in a gaming book about using an 'onion' structure to design a cult in a Lovecraft-style game.
The organization would start out similar to a 'friendly society' like the Masons or Oddfellows or Lions club or Royal Order of the Drunken Ferret or whatever, and only those who reach a certain level of initiation learn a secondary objective, to plant their people in positions of authority or whatever. More initiations and tests of character and loyalty, and another layer of the onion is peeled back, and the apparently loyal organization is revealed to be older than the city / country / religion it professes, and to integrate older 'truths' into the current bastardized precepts believed by the unenlightened masses. These 'truths' seem reasonable, but are geared towards furthering the agenda of the cult. "People are animals, and we must shephard them, for their own good!" the cult maintains, creating a built-in justification for both keeping their wonderful humanity-boosting agenda secret from the masses *and* for setting themselves up to make decisions *for* those unenlightened masses... For their own good, obviously. Five levels of initiation later, they are culling those who are holding humanity back from enlightenment, still happily doing 'good work' murdering anyone the cult deems an impediment to their plan, and there is no more pretense, among the illuminati, that their faith is 'pre-Christian Mithraism,' or that their loyalty is to 'American values.' (It was a brilliant multi-page article, with, like *nine* onion layers of initiation, and it's been at least a decade, so I'm doing it no justice at all...)
With Tharizdun, that sort of 'friendly society' stuff might be way much, but you've already gone all Fight Club, so that's a fine way to start. Sales techniques include the idea of getting a ball rolling by setting someone up to do the deeds desired of them. In this case, the cult wants it's cultists to A) keep their mouths shut and B) do lots of illegal stuff and C) respect it's authority over any other.
A Fight Club, if illegal, serves some of this agenda, as it requires the potential followers to keep secrets (and tests those who fail) and it urges them to continue breaking the law and defy whatever local authority forbids these sorts of underground events. If they get raided, on golly gosh, it's an illegal pit fight. *Not* a cult of Tharizdun. When the inevitable raids do occur, it's easy enough to 'find' connections between the raiding authorities and various seeds of corruption, that further cast their authority into question (perhaps guardsmen have been seen betting at the towns legitimate gambling parlor, and the word has been spread among the attendees of Fight Club that they want to shut down the 'illegal gatherings' not to uphold the law, but to protect the finances of their dirty benefactor at the gambling hall, who is paying them off to eliminate the competition).
By creating the appearance that the lawful authorities are dirty or corrupt or complicit or even just incompetent and undeserving of respect (sometimes by manufacturing such evidence or 'spinning' events, but, this being a world of fallible men, also by leaping upon any actual improprieties by men of authority and publicizing them far and wide, exaggerating every gaffe or misstep as some sort of high treason, importing malice and sinister signs of conspiracy to single acts of ignorance), the individual who wants to urge people into lawless and self-serving behavior has primed them for exactly the sort of world-view he needs them to hold.
Further destroying the shallow threads that seperate legitimacy from 'conspiracy,' the cult leader and his crew will make few direct accusations, but always *suggest* things. They will never say "Mayor X sleeps with goats." They will whisper that they heard someone else say such a thing, and hint that it's someone who works for the Mayor and 'would know such things.' By denying a name to the rumors they sow, the sources of those rumors remain shadowy and their own integrity unquestionable. If the leader says, "Bob said." someone else can say "But Bob is a drunk, and he hates Mayor X anyway..." but if the leader says "I heard..." or "Some people say..." there's no source whose veracity can be questioned or challenged.
As more and more of the Fight Club get their information from innuendo, and are trained and conditioned to scoff at any contradictory information as coming from 'obvious liars,' their world-view turns more and more in the direction the cult seeks, until they are screaming 2+2=5 and the world is flat and some pigs are more equal whatever other nonsense the cult wants them to believe.
Even when that nonsense gets to the point where the cult is teaching them that the world is worse than it's ever been, that children are more disrespectful, that natural disasters are worse than ever, that crime is worse than ever, that leaders are more corrupt than ever, that dirty foreigners are taking over, that the rival religion (or godlessness) is corrupting the youth, that life is cheap and food doesn't taste as good and the sun doesn't shine as brightly and remember when we could trust our neighbors and wouldn't the world be better off if a whole lotta people died in some grand cataclysm and Tharizdun took the rest of us to a better place?
The world is broken. Wouldn't it be better to wipe the slate clean and make everything better?
Hallelujah and pass the apocalypse.
Halleluja and pass the apocalypse.
Quoted for awesomeness.
Ya, I'm with you on the article that you talk about and had some ideas like that in mind when I was working on things this evening. I was trying to figure out if there should be another layer after the fight club before the cult.
I guess that would probably be starting to do bad things around the city other than just beat each other up. The line to cross there would go something like it is one thing for us to realize that we need to fight back and take our animal instincts for a ride, but folks in the city need their world shaken up so they can start to realize things like this too.
After you are doing that, and show loyalty eventually you can be brought in on the most basic levels of the cult, realizing that you are working for god now, and he will help you when all those other gods wouldn't.
Authorities being corrupt or incompetent...good to mention that. Realizing that you can't trust them and that they only make things worse empowers the individual when they realize that they have to fight to make things go their way. Part of that stuff was covered, but not so much spelled out. Thanks for thinking for me.
Rumormonger is another good way to make sure that you get your people with you. Great, got a few more ideas to toss in the pot. Thanks much Set.
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When I ran a secret underground cult like this that wore a "pretty" civilized face, I used evil bards as the middlemen between the priests and the unwashed masses. They are especially useful for spreading lies and rumors about your PCs and misdirecting investigations. In my game, the PCs spiked a particularly juicy plan the bad guys were running, and suddenly a very catchy, funny song about them, painting them as clueless and easily prone to jumping at shadows emerged on the streets. After that, it was especially hard to convince anyone in the region that there were bad things happening right under their noses.
On a side note, one really great benefit was that the party became emotionally involved in thwarting this bard after he humiliated them, that they sort of lost focus on the real bad guys, the evil cult, so even in losing, the bard kept winning :)
The last time I ran something like this as a plot element, the individuals that the group encountered, while insane demon cultists, weren't portrayed as such. They were attractive, cheerful, pleasant sisters who had more in common with the young people that come around on Saturdays trying to get you to come to their church than the popular image of robe-wearing, chanting psychopaths. They flirted casually with folks, offered them tea, and talked about things in terms that completely obscured the acts in question, such as 'escorting the aged and deathly ill to Great Lord Pazuzu's cloud-filled realm in the skies' (sneaking into villages and taking the old and sick to be staked out in the desert and devoured by fiendish vultures), and so on.
Things were helped along by having the sisters cheerfully and happily volunteer information about, and assistance against, a competing cult that the party was mixed up in a conflict with.
Going along with your idea, ala Fight Club, this is what I came up with.
Disenfranchised members of society are very carefully selected by a group of individuals we will call the Reds. The Reds are an organized group of anarchists who all have a personal grudge against the city, and society in general. After observing a person for a while, the Reds send a member of the Pinks to approach them, and ask them to join their late night illegal fight club. The Pinks are in charge of not only running an underground fight club, but sewing random chaos in the city. They are obviously anarchists as well, but this is the less plans and more moltov style anarchist. If the person approached by the Pinks works out, they get to join the Whites, which is the bottom rung, aka members of the fight club.
As time passes, and a person shows the right personality traits they are upgraded from White to Pink. And after more time, and more tests of loyalty and mental instability one will assend from Pink to Red. It is the Reds who lead the whole shabang, subtely directing the Pinks destructive energy toward targets that could potentialy pose a threat to the group, as well as anyone who would work towards making the world a better place. As the better the world is, the less disenfranchised blacksmiths there are to recruit.
Now, obviously you don't want all your eggs in one baskit, so along with the Reds, there are the Blues. Blues work within society's gears to acomplish much the same that Reds acomplish by acting the part of the wrench. They are the corrupt politicians, influencial aristocrats, and manipulative clergy that insures the poor stay poor, organized crime can't be truely stopped, and the status quo isn't threatened. Under them are a whole slew of individuals and small groups that form a spiders web far too convoluted for any simple color comparison...
Now, if I only had the time we could talk about the Purples...in short, the Purples are where we start to hear the name Tharizdun...