Hey all. Thanks for checkin' this topic out because I need a bit of advice.
I am constructing a series of modules for my local gaming group.
In a nutshell, the arch-villain intends to sever the material plane's connections to the outer planes. The details are still ephemeral at this point, but the overall intention is to both keep the souls of the dead from leaving the prime material and block divine influence from reaching the mortal world.
This won't happen immediately (maybe not entirely at all), but near the end of the campaign the repercussions of my villain's plans must be dire and stopping him needs to be very important.
There are a plethora of important issues to wrestle with in order to make the campaign feasible (deific intervention, spell effects, etc). What I need to start with though is a process that would mirror the effects of Dimensional Lock, but on a global scale. I can build off of that easy enough.
I guess a series of strategically-placed artifacts might work but that idea seems fairly uninspired and a bit lazy. Is there a more organic or fantastic option to consider here? Thoughts?
TY!!
Hook him up with the Mi-go and use some of their technology. You could cut off travel on a planetary scale with some satellites. If you need to go bigger than that, you're going to need something a little more metaphysical than that.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Blocking interplanar travel is theoritically possible. With enough castings of dimensional anchor. And Hallow can do so to a small area for a year. So theoritically, a similar effect could be attempted to block off the entire planet, and be made of handwavium and plot.
However, the part where you will have trouble is preventing souls from leaving the plane. They might not notice as some souls become trapped, but when a significant number stop flowing in from the material plane all the respective planes will notice.
Heaven, Hell, the Abyss, and Elysium. All of them. None of them will be content to let you cut off the flow of souls.
Perhaps only Rovagug and Groetus would be content to let this happen. Nearly every other entity of the multiverse would be attempting to stop you. It would be a threat near as bad as Rovagug himself, and you could expect the gods to unite to stop the character from doing so.
Within the Pathfinder universe as written, it just isn't particularly feasible to stop the flow of souls or completely stop divine power from reaching the material plane.
One world on the prime material plane out of all the worlds out there? With worlds being destroyed, changed, created and all forms of mucked with regularly? I don't see what you want as being a problem or really even that noticable to the God Community as a whole.
Maybe it's part of a normal ebb and flow of connectivity and the Big Bad is taking advantage of being on the dark side of the cycle?
Perhaps the Big Bad got a little access to Godstuff hisself and is focusing on just mucking about with the said connectivity to further said diabolical plans. Other gods cannot meddle with this since what he's doing is 'within his portfolio' even though his access was ill-gained and not truly kosher.
What is the pantheon like? Maybe Big Bad is working powers against each other while she crafts her villainy?
The deities listed in the games are specifically for Golairon. Presumably, other planets have their own gods. Or at the very least other star systems do. We only know of a few other planets in the same star system, and not much is know about them (only a little information has been written about them). So it's hard to extrapolate.
But yes. At the very least all the good gods would actively be involved in ensuring their souls reach them.
As well, the demons would want their souls to consume.
And really, since souls are outsider fuel (human souls turn into outsiders given time) they're not going to be happy about the souls being directed elsewhere.
You statement that worlds are being created and destroyed is purely conjecture. We really have no idea what the material universe holds as a whole.
Now, somethign that could be feasible is that the villain is working to direct all the souls to a specific deity, redirecting them from their intended destination. At least then you would have a god a group of outsiders working with you, making it somewhat-feasible.
But wholesale cutting off the gods and stopping all souls from leaving the material plane....I just can't imagine a way in which it is possible without changing the basis of the Pathfinder setting.
Maybe toy with the tuning fork idea thats needed for planar shift. Like he 'mistuned' the universe or the plane so travel isn't possible or predictable.
Looking over your posts and talking to a fellow GM here, I've cemented a few ideas.
I've fleshed out most of the variables now that will allow me to exert control over the story and game world as needed to forward the adventure and explain the effects that I was missing.
I'd post some examples but each would require at least a paragraph, and who really wants to read a book on the forums?
Keep the ideas coming if you like though. Some of them might be more efficient for the story than mine.
Thank you very much for your help everyone!!! :-)
Blocking interplanar travel is theoritically possible. With enough castings of dimensional anchor. And Hallow can do so to a small area for a year. So theoritically, a similar effect could be attempted to block off the entire planet, and be made of handwavium and plot.
However, the part where you will have trouble is preventing souls from leaving the plane. They might not notice as some souls become trapped, but when a significant number stop flowing in from the material plane all the respective planes will notice.
Heaven, Hell, the Abyss, and Elysium. All of them. None of them will be content to let you cut off the flow of souls.
Perhaps only Rovagug and Groetus would be content to let this happen. Nearly every other entity of the multiverse would be attempting to stop you. It would be a threat near as bad as Rovagug himself, and you could expect the gods to unite to stop the character from doing so.
Within the Pathfinder universe as written, it just isn't particularly feasible to stop the flow of souls or completely stop divine power from reaching the material plane.
To be fair, there's not a lot divinities can DO after someone has managed to cut off access to a prime material plane. If you can't get out, they can't get in!
Loss of all divine magic and the trapping of souls is a really big deal though, and probably not that great a plot hook for golarion I agree. There's going to be a lot of restless dead!
However, if the OP is following planescape logic (no idea what setting he is running but he mentions primes), souls and divine energy actually travel the planes via 'planar conduits' that can only be used for these purposes, outside of handwavium. Thus it is actually possible to sever 'traditional' planar travel and leave divine magic and souls departing as normal. It's not an airtight seal though: although the conduits are not really designed to transport bodies as well as souls, I can imagine an enterprising high level wizard and definitely a diety could sneak one or two persons through at great expense --- but this is entirely within the realms of plot, not mechanics.
Does he say he's running golarion? I am just trying to provide a set of reasons that support the OPs goals rather than trying to tell him why he can't do in his game what he's tryingto do.
He didn't say he was or wasn't. However, it is sort of the baseline assumption when discussing Pathfinder. Golarion is the assumed setting for PFRPG, though Pathfinder rules can certainly be applied to a different setting.
In the abscence of a direct statement, the traditional cosmology of Pathfinder and even 3.5 (which are virtually the same) doesn't really allow for his idea. He is certainly free to change the world to support this idea, though such a change should be explained to the players before hand, because it is an important change to the world setting and how things function.
To be fair, there's not a lot divinities can DO after someone has managed to cut off access to a prime material plane. If you can't get out, they can't get in!
Loss of all divine magic and the trapping of souls is a really big deal though, and probably not that great a plot hook for golarion I agree. There's going to be a lot of restless dead!
However, if the OP is following planescape logic (no idea what setting he is running but he mentions primes), souls and divine energy actually travel the planes via 'planar conduits' that can only be used for these purposes, outside of handwavium. Thus it is actually possible to sever 'traditional' planar travel and leave divine magic and souls departing as normal. It's not an airtight seal though: although the conduits are not really designed to transport bodies as well as souls, I can imagine an enterprising high level wizard and definitely a diety could sneak one or two persons through at great expense --- but this is entirely within the realms of plot, not mechanics.
I agree if you managed to cut off the prime material plane from the others that deities would have difficulty intervening. But I guess my point was more that, this isn't something that would be easily or quickly accomplished without people noticing. And even then, deities are not hampered by mortal magic normally. Anti-magic cast by a mortal does not prevent a deity's magic from working, normally. So, this really can only be a plot device, not sometihng supported by the rules in any way.
Now, if a evil villain has the goal of cutting off the deities from the Prime Material Plane and trapping all souls, that can be a good enemy for the players to unite around with many different people. But, the villain realistically shouldn't be able to achieve such a goal.
|
There was a similar plot device used in the Dragonlance War of Souls trilogy. Not to be too spoiler-ific, but one of the gods of that world manages to steal the planet and move it to a new location in the multiverse, and effectively hide it from the other gods. The result? All connections to god-provided magic is lost (in that world divine and arcane are god provided).
You could pull a similar maguffin. Perhaps Rovagug decides that instead of escaping his prison, he attempts to pull Golarion inside of it, effectively using the prison built by the other gods against them, and blocking their access from the world. Of course if Rovagug's agents actually succeed, Golarion would be destroyed by Rogagug, which would free him from his prison, and unleash him on the multiverse once more.
EDIT: additionally, you could perhaps utilize the star towers scattered across Golarion. They are anchors to Rovagug's prison, built by Zon-Kuthon. I imagine that if you built a ritual and expanded their area of influence outward, you could use the field generated to effectively cut golarion off from the rest of the multiverse. It would even give you a bunch of handy locations, where the party has to stop the ritual from occurring, perhaps a dozen towers scattered across the entirety of golarion? As each tower falls to the ritual, regions (perhaps continents) of the planet are isolated, and cut off from divine influence.
|
Perhaps the villian plane shifted the entire planet into a demiplane, and there's only one way out of this plane. The villian would have to find a way to block souls from escaping, maybe the reverse of the spells that keep your body from being raised or turned into undead.
Or, the villian could have moved the planet into a black hole. Since information (souls) cannot cross , no one can plane shift out of the black hole, nor can their soul get out. Maybe the sun and light work differently (constant dim light 24x7 and no sun?). Google "black hole information paradox" for info on that.
Both of those have the advantage that it only affects one planet, not the entire prime material, and so if you have other gods they won't immediately go to war.
The much larger issue, however, is if information is blocked, such as souls, then how do divination spells and divine spells still work? What other spells are affected? Clerics cannot communicate with the gods. A lot of spells will be affected and you will have to come up with solutions. Summon monster would not summon extraplanar beings, no Call spells. Also, Banishment or Dismissal wouldn't work, (on extraplanar beings who got trapped there).
The advantage of the black hole over the demiplane would be ONE WAY communication is still possible for anyone who was a cleric before the planet got shifted into the black hole. The other gods can just keep sending spell power to their clerics. Maybe the clerics could not pick spells themselves, and some gods would send divination spells with pre-written answers so no matter what question you ask, you get one answer which is how the gods can send messages to their clerics, such as plans to fight the villian ala Carl Sagan's Contact.
TSA agents...I agree with darkwirrorkarg, they are the best way to go :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As it turns out, the villain can cheat.
His people are long gone and their existence predates the construction of the prime material plane because they were its original creators. (Shyamalan says "what a tweest!")
The villain himself was unintentionally trapped within a form of temporal stasis for tens of billions of years while his race's surviving demiplane experiment grew out of control and into the current, full-fledged prime material plane.
The details of this origin story are long, but in a nutshell the villain can sever interplanar access utilizing the ancient technology and nonsensical mathematics that his people built the material plane's original, experimental physics upon. The evolutionary process has largely destroyed much of the control that he could have once used to exert absolute dominion over the entire dimension, but pieces of the system remain- and they can be repaired. (dun dun duuuuun!)
I've decided that the villain will be able to pull the strings of his puppets from within the impenetrable bullspit of a network of extradimensional pockets that are connected by a series of crumbling spacial passageways.
Oh there are so many ideas bubbling beneath my hugely-sloped yeti brow.
A special thank you goes out to you guys/gals of course, but also to Games Workshop, Ridley Scott and Charles Darwin. :-D
If you have the opportunity to give the Iron Kingdoms setting a once over, take a glance at how they handle teleportation effects and maybe implement them?
Great to have already established mechanics to deal what you were looking for.
My solution would be to have the villain assemble a very complicated ritual that requires a magical whatzit that he made himself, tuned to various planes. These are then placed around the world in hidden locations where they're joined by the ritual in a network, who's end result is it acts like a firewall separating the world from other dimensional access. Further, the mystical wall is fed more power by the souls and spirits of the dead, consuming them and converting them to a arcane-divine energy. It doesn't destroy these souls or spirits mind you, it just taps the potential eternal energy they represent.
This cuts the various deities off enmasse, as well as any and all forms of magic that seek to go past the barrier, and to fully bring home the hammer you should limit all divine spells to no more than 3rd, maybe 4th level (in temples only where residual faith pools). Undoing this ritual requires very careful planning, because the whatzits are tuned to particular planes (or gods if you like as well), if you open it for one plane/deity that comes through in a rush while the others are still cut off. Massive power play with politics and intrigue to make your head explode as various factions of the faithful seek to make sure *their* god wins. Naturally, all those cool summoning spells don't work, making Druids giddy and drunk with power as nature summons are the only ones available, and if you want to have some fun there shut down their access of Elemental Wyldshaping with the explanation that when they go into elemental forms they're channelling a part of that plane into themselves. Barrier prevents this and they're now limited to non-elemental forms.
To keep tension going, besides the locations being hidden, make the ritual extremely obscure, and learning how to undo it costs one their sanity. It takes someone capable of casting 9th level spells, and as they learn the ritual they have to learn it for each tuning, increasingly they become paranoid, delusional, and psychotic. Bringing down the barrier thus is not only a effort of great coordination and dodging the intrigue/political/treacherous bullet of the many faithful, but now you got crazed high level wizards in the aftermath who could be up to all kinds of shenanigans.
So not only do the heroes have to figure out where this network's whatzit nodes are(of which you could make 100s if you were particularly sadistic) but they have a lot of eggs to juggle as they go about undoing the barrier, and after the barrier is down, you got plenty of material to keep them busy for a long time to come. If you wanted to be ambitious, you could run two groups in this, let them compete to see which set of gods/planes get to come in first.
I would go with Lovecraft for this. See, a mere planet is like a grain of sand to some of the forces out there in the darkness. They just aren't very interested in it. So, what the villain does is attract their attention, something that can only be done by fulfilling certain prophecies yadda yadda. If done, the world will be tossed into an entirely different cosmos, surrounded only by void unlit by stars. Bonus points if the heroes get to visit that future somehow to see the few survivors huddling together in the dungeons, safe from the horrors of the surface...
I think this is a Mythic plot at minimum. There are a number of fun Mythic spells that let you do stuff like terraform miles of terrain, so it's not too farfetched to allow your villain to research (or know from his ancient knowledge of being an ancient creature from ancient times. Ancient.) a spell that can do similarly powerful things.
It's a similar concept, actually, you're "terraforming" the planet from a place that's connected to other planes into one that is not, essentially shifting it to some sort of "frequency" that isn't bordering any other ones, so planar travel is no longer possible.
The deities listed in the games are specifically for Golairon. Presumably, other planets have their own gods. Or at the very least other star systems do. We only know of a few other planets in the same star system, and not much is know about them (only a little information has been written about them). So it's hard to extrapolate.
As I recall, it's implied (or outright stated?) in a few places that the gods are the gods on every planet, just with different names.
It's not that hard to restrict planar travel. You simply don't have to enable it. Here are some easy steps.
1. Print out a player's guide to your world. Put in an edited spell list as to what are the spell lists for each spell casting class. Leave out the spells that enable planar travel.(this includes miracle and wish spells btw) Don't mention doing so unless asked.
2. Don't include magic items that enable planar travel and be like me insist that your characters need to come up with a formula for ever item they wish to create. Lament over their failure to successfully research planar travel items when they try.
This doesn't particularly help him since what he wanted was ideas for a plot involving someone cutting off planar travel, not ideas for removing planar travel as a mechanic.
As long as it's not purely designed to harass your players but have a plot meaning I would simply go with some homebrew ritual (no rules needed).
"The ancient ritual of the Dark Sun Barrier can only be completed during a total eclipse and it will cut of this plane of existence from all other planes. As this ritual is from before the time when gods and mortals were created, neither of them can break thru this barrier".
If you want the players to bring this barrier down, add some old cryptic counter-ritual parts ("With the essence of time and the one who was before you will be able to break down this barrier, but you can only do this if you are in the same spot, at the same time, when the ritual was performed before!"
Plot-Rituals always, if used correct, solve such issues. Not every magic, especially of this impact have to fit into game terms :D
Have a look at obsidian apocalypse, a campaign for pf survival horror. In its basic setting it is completely cut off from the gods. No planar travel, no dimensional magic items, even teleports don't work well. The world is a sinkhole, in that creatures can be summoned or arrive by their own means but cannot leave. Not even wish can help. Worth a look.
|
Keep in mind some of the issues arising from restricting extraplanar travel.
No summoned fiends/azatas/celestials/aeons/etc.
No outsiders at all unless they were in before the pool closed.
No teleportation spells (they rely on the astral).
No dimension door.
No bags of holding or extra-dimensional storage.
And perhaps irritatingly for a campaign with trapped souls. No ghosts (they're ethereal).
Something like the Avatar storm from the old Mage game could work as well. Your Big bad could murder a city in order to collect the souls, shatter them into deadly shards of etheric matter and turn them into a metaphysical Blade Barrier between the World and the outer planes tearing and rending anything that tries to pass from one to the other.
Ghosts are no longer Ethereal as I recall. Just Incorporeal. So he can ghost away with impunity.
|
|
Yeti that is cool, good way to do it.
You can expand on the SF in a few ways:
Perhaps the villian is not a member of the original race that created the PM, but rather a construct. They are gone but their machines are left. And the machines are just finishing the experiments that were started long ago. They are not malicious, but still destroying the PM and everyone in it. Or maybe they decided the experiment has failed and must be restarted.
Maybe something caused the villian to wake up and he's thinking "#*&$*#& my experiment has run amok! I must fix it!" Not "evil" but just unaware. And even if he is aware, he cares no more than we would care about ants.
Or maybe he's trying to recreate his dead race, using souls of the departed as fuel to inhabit constructs that are "brain emulations" of people he once knew.
etc etc
You sound like you might be interested in the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds. I won't give away what it is about, since you find out near the end of the first book, but it's a great series (until the last book :) ).
To keep things setting specific (Golarion) and still cut ties to the outer planes, you could develop your plot based on the idea that the restrictions/bindings that prevent Rovagugs escape, can be extended to lock the planet (say 100 miles up or to the ozone layer etc...).
This extending device could be an artifact, some alien tech, or some ancient spell. Gods can't get to or influence PC's (and thus can't save the day) without releasing Rovagug. Has to be an inside job to destroy or disrupt the device/spell.
Edit - just noticed Kassegore had the idea first yesterday! Ninja'ed.
|
|
I like the idea of the BBEG getting others to do the work for him. Maybe he's some kind of false prophet, and predicts a great war in the pantheon/rising of rovagug/invasion by the great old ones, etc. Very few believe him, so he convinces the PC's to investigate and then rally various powers to his cause. Gullible clerics, greedy wizards, etc. The PC's go around and get everyone to agree on a massive ritual that temporarily severs the divine link to protect the mortal realm from whatever the approaching catastrophe is. Then the BBEG, who had been planning for this all along, makes whatever move he had set up the dimensional lock to achieve.