Qlippoth goals and means


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion

Silver Crusade

Just a passing thought, but:

Qlippoths have a mad hate on for demons, and in order to stop more demons from being made they extend that hate and violence towards mortals and sin itself, because they have a tendency to make or become demons.

But for the most part, Crush-Kill-Destroy tactics tend to result in dead mortals, a percentage of which are going to result in more demons. When they wreak havok on a worldwide scale, they're pretty much flooding the Abyss with their most hated foes.

But then there's the Iathavos. That thing shows up in a city, and the populace is quickly going to be reduced to either smoldering chunks(dead) or gibbering, flying piles of intestines(horribly alive).

I wonder if this could be a thing for Qlippoths to expand upon. Instead of killing all mortal life, maybe they could pursue transforming it. Instead of killing mortals that wind up becoming demons, they turn living mortals into more qlippoths and bypass the usual system. Or maybe they would attempt to kill off non-evil and non-chaotic mortals with extreme prejudice while targetting evil and/or chaotic mortals for transformation. These guys target a demonic cult, they can easily swipe potential demon lord assets right out from under their noses.

The speedbump there is that only the Iathavos has the ability to turn mortals into qlippoths. Maybe that's something new qlippoths could do. Things that infect mortals with David Cronenberg/Junki Ito-level body horror, inflicting And I Must Scream* fates upon their victims more often than death(quick or otherwise).

*Course that tropes could easily be a kyton thing too. And a devil and demon thing. But Qlippoths could claim a certain flavor of it.

Or is just conventionally killing off all mortals enough to satisfy their goals, if they can cope with the flood of new demons?


The thing that makes Qlippoths so horrible is that they'll kill babies and pregnant mothers first, in preference to all other targets. That way the babies can't get the option to sin.

Turning mortals into Qlippoths is a pretty heavy ability.
I think it would be cool if they tried to kidnap mortals and drag them off to the IathAvos for "correction". That's a plot hook that'll get your players to the Outer Rifts. That's something I could work with.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

This is probably doesn't work at all with qlippoths as canon, but i always thought, that a neat (if paradoxical) niche for the qlippoths would be to try to discourage the accumulation of sins all the while trying to engineer ways of slowing the reproduction of the mortal races to a standstill. Like, setting up cults of (albeit twisted) virtues that abhor the (obvious) sins, where the center of the cult belief is the denial of the selfish pleasures. As they draft people far enough into the cult, even reproduction itself is a sin- the material world itself is by itself sinful so by having children you are just afflicting souls with more suffering.

So you kind of got a cult of celibacy and temperance here that (on the surface level) discourages sin (at least at the superficial level of understanding the alien qlippoths have of mortals) and promotes acts of generosity and kindness (again, from the superficial understanding of qlippoths) The big thing here is that the qlippoths are spreading an insidious philosophy that attracts very angry, "straight edge" types that, unwilling to engage in sinful pursuits, direct their spite at those who indulge themselves and the social infrastructures that support them. Very much like how Abraxas' cult (Green Ronin's Book of Fiends, p. 21) functions in my eyes- living a live of hateful self-denial and self-torture to achieve greater things in the lives to come.

Although ridding mankind of sin in such a fashion probably won't work so well, if the qlippoths (particularly the shoggti) could incite some wars between the goodly faithful and the sinful pawns of demonkind, so much the better. And by suckering people into not having children in the first place of their own accord, they are preventing more souls from being born in the first place. Perhaps by following these cults of twisted virtues (rather than out and out sin) they could grasp ahold of mortals (who may not be totally witting tools, and thus not become demons as we know them) and bring them into the qlippoth fold, created not by intentional mortal sin but something else entirely- perhaps not conscious evil but rather madness itself.

Admittedly, the biggest problem here is that the qlippoths in the book aren't very subtle- with the possible exception of the mind-bending shoggtis. A plot like this would also be a lot more convoluted than your typical rpg plot.


Well, there's a possibility to stop all sin from happening by destroying any potential sinners as fast and possible and preferrably inviting daemons to chain all souls preventing their escape to Abyss. The trick is in that dead mortal can't propagate, so even if the Abbyss is overran by demons at the moment, they need souls to keep that up. Once the mortal coil stops, demons have already lost, because without souls they can't procreate and qlippoth can outbreed them as they have once outbred the qlippoth. Another thing would be some plot to disrupt the flow of souls for good. When there are no souls for Abbyss, they have won.

Today they are darkness under shadows. Terrible things lurking under madness of the demonkind. The thing that demon cultist accidentally summon and can't control. Impregnation is just one method, but all qlippoth have some kind of transformational powers and if I remember it correctly, first demons were created by feeding specially treated soul to a qlippoth, so they must probably avoid soul consumption. Triffling with mortals and rending their soul while still in the body could be much funnier thing to do perhaps?


I have always kind of figured the Qlippoth are just as a whole rather impersonal about slaughtering mortals.

In their "eyes", demons are like termites infesting your house. They could keep smushing them, but that doesn't solve the root of the problem. You have to cut them off at the source (mortals). When Qlippoth annihilate a city, they view it in the same way we might step on or swat a pest. That's quite a bit of difference from other evil outsiders, who gain some sort of pleasure in the act. Sure, they could work with good outsiders to erradicate sin and reduce the number of demons being created, but that is sort of like like me scooping up ants in my apartment and taking them outside. Bug spray and a strong boot are much faster options.

I mean there original "final solution" for the mortal problem was Rovagug. Not exactly subtle beings.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Zmar wrote:

Well, there's a possibility to stop all sin from happening by destroying any potential sinners as fast and possible and preferrably inviting daemons to chain all souls preventing their escape to Abyss. The trick is in that dead mortal can't propagate, so even if the Abbyss is overran by demons at the moment, they need souls to keep that up. Once the mortal coil stops, demons have already lost, because without souls they can't procreate and qlippoth can outbreed them as they have once outbred the qlippoth. Another thing would be some plot to disrupt the flow of souls for good. When there are no souls for Abbyss, they have won.

Today they are darkness under shadows. Terrible things lurking under madness of the demonkind. The thing that demon cultist accidentally summon and can't control. Impregnation is just one method, but all qlippoth have some kind of transformational powers and if I remember it correctly, first demons were created by feeding specially treated soul to a qlippoth, so they must probably avoid soul consumption. Triffling with mortals and rending their soul while still in the body could be much funnier thing to do perhaps?

Actually, I think I read somewhere that, ironically enough given their similar goals, qlippoths hate daemons since the daemons were the ones who started infesting the abyss with human souls in order to promote death and decay.

MMCJawa wrote:

I have always kind of figured the Qlippoth are just as a whole rather impersonal about slaughtering mortals.

In their "eyes", demons are like termites infesting your house. They could keep smushing them, but that doesn't solve the root of the problem. You have to cut them off at the source (mortals). When Qlippoth annihilate a city, they view it in the same way we might step on or swat a pest. That's quite a bit of difference from other evil outsiders, who gain some sort of pleasure in the act. Sure, they could work with good outsiders to erradicate sin and reduce the number of demons being created, but that is sort of like like me scooping up ants in my apartment and taking them outside. Bug spray and a strong boot are much faster options.

I mean there original "final solution" for the mortal problem was Rovagug. Not exactly subtle beings.

I'm not really sure they'd ever work with good outsiders. Going for the extermination analogy, with a lot of high duty extermination jobs you don't want to spend all your energy killing them yourselves but you also want to give the vermin (say, worker ants for example) some kinda poison they think is good and then have them take it back to where they live, thus having the vermin do themselves in. So if they can deter or at least slow down sin, great, but if they can make people/society dysfunctional/unable to reproduce without making them evil/sinful, well that works too.

And of course, going around massacring mortals in the guise of normal demons/evil outsiders can work well to go with this strategy, as it not only kills mortals but also can draw attention/moral outrage at the various other demonic cults (the qlippoth lord Shiggureb from the Book of Fiends uses such a strategy in order to mobilize the ghaeles to wipe out demons, for example).


How do Qlippoth view the other Outsider races?

They hate demons and by extension daemons (who I think everyone hates).

But what about the Axiomites or the Devils, very different views there.

I could see the Celestials being so alien to the average Qlippoth mind that they can't even comprehend the differences. Qlippoths aren't evil as a manifestation of belief they just have no concept of any other morality. They could be the only race in the outer spheres that cannot fall or rise, completely incapable of redemption. It's just beyond their comprehension.


Quick thread res with this thought: in the PF cosmology, the River of Souls flows through the First World to get to the Prime. Along the way the waters of the River sometimes splash, creating Fey. Eventually souls are carried into the mortals of the Prime and then they live lives including sins.

Mortals who've sinned terribly and without remorse may have their souls flung into the Abyss. Here they are transformed into Demons, who in turn vex the Qlippith.

So the Qlippith want to destroy Demons, Daemons, and in turn all mortals right? The ultimate goal being that no souls = no more Demons to vex them.

Why not have a high-level plot then for the Qlippith to work with the Fey Eldest? The Qlippith Lords and Fey Eldest combine their considerable powers to stem the tide of the River of Souls. They might also find a way to corrupt the watercourse in some way.

The Eldest want to cheese off the gods for basically abandoning the First World in favor of the Prime. The Qlippith Lords interrupt the creation of new Demons. The result among mortals is a sudden decrease of births globally combined with a surge in monstrous creations instead.

Lamashtu would get blamed; Pharasma would be up in arms but perhaps be too neutral to take any action directly. Instead it would be up to 4 plucky adventurers to figure out why

1. monsters are on the rise
2. Lamashtan cults are seething
3. Fey creatures are darker than ever

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