I've been kicking around the idea of doing a game based on Abaddon, the home plane of the Daemons. PCs would be petitioners seeking escape from the plane with their souls intact, but the harsh reality of Abaddon is that in order to survive you must be both hunter and hunted. The PCs must feed on souls, consume fellow petitioners if they are to find the strength to escape... but can they do so before they become daemons themselves?
With that in mind, I'm trying to come up with a good system for tracking their consumption but how I should weight things is eluding me.
The basic idea I had was that PCs would be required to consume X amount of gold worth of souls per day, as per the value of souls found in book about daemons, with X increasing at intervals to a new tier. Along the same lines there would be the Corruption mechanic to mark the tiers; each soul would provide a set amount of corruption depending on current tier.
So a fresh soul to Abaddon would be able to subsist on mindless spirits due to their low threshold required to be sated, but even a mindless spirit would provide them a low-moderate amount of Corruption and eating a sentient soul would be a large jump in Corruption; once they would advance to the next tier though the threshold for being fed would increase but the Corruption for each individual soul would decrease. Think of it like the PCs becoming both desensitized to the atrocities they have to commit and their spirit building up a tolerance, requiring more and more to be satisfied.
Mindless Spirits (10 gp): While it’s possible to capture the vital essences of vermin, basic oozes, and other such unthinking creatures, these paltry spirits are worth very little.
Animal Spirits (25 gp): This category contains creatures of animal-level intelligence, whose spirits—while presumably worth something to some deities, as reflected by the value of animal sacrifice—are rarely traded in the soul markets. In fact, though the existence of animal spirits is undeniably real, there’s rampant debate in many societies over whether such things truly count as “souls.”
Basic Soul (100 gp): This is the soul of a standard intelligent creature—a commoner, a low-level adventurer, a sentient monster of low CR, or any of the other hordes of weak or mundane folk who live out their lives with a normal amount of pomp and excitement. This is the lowest category of souls which interests daemons, who see animals and other nonsentient creatures as hardly worth the time to destroy.
Noteworthy Soul (500 gp): The souls of mid-level characters, rulers, famous or influential people, and other powerful, accomplished, and otherwise important people draw greater attention than basic souls, and drive bidding higher accordingly.
Grand Soul (1000–5000 gp): High-level characters, great heroes, dragons, powerful aberrations, and other such spirits of fabulous power and forceful personalities offer equally significant rewards to those who manage to contain their essences.
Unique Soul (priceless): For the truly unique souls—those of legendary figures, epic heroes, and other massive presences—there can be no going price. The unique sparks that live within these creatures are valuable beyond compare, and the frantic bidding (and backstabbing) that arises when one of these trapped spirits comes up for sale is the sort of thing fiends and undead wait thousands of years for, paying nigh-unimaginable prices for the right to consume or display such an artifact.
The more I think about this and what the values should be, the more lost I become. Has anyone done something similar and want to share how they did it, or do you perhaps know of a published adventure or module with similar rules in place that could be modified?
You ask some good questions, especially concerning the time scale. At that I'm not sure, but as for actual effects I had ideas about how to run it. Corruption was just the first word that popped into my head to describe it, but it would represent a PCs transformation into a full fledged Daemon, at which point they would potentially become an NPC depending on the rest of the party and how far they were along. Mechanically I was thinking...
1. Eating souls would also have a beneficial effect for the user besides staving off hunger, perhaps providing healing or maybe other buffs for a short time. To play into the temptation angle, there are more tangible benefits to indulging the hunger then just feeling full.
The more powerful the soul, the more powerful the effects, but as the user gets used to consuming souls, weaker would begin to provide less sustenance. Perhaps at the lowest tier any Basic Soul would affect the consumer as though with Restoration, but upon gaining the next tier that benefit would drop to Lesser Restoration and Noteworthy Souls would be needed for the normal version. Think of it like drugs in that regard; after extended "use" bigger doses would be needed for less effect and this would be represented with a tier system.
2. The most obvious mechanical use of the tiers would be to establish effects of each kind of soul on the user and the amount of souls needed to stop starving. Beyond that, I was thinking of perhaps poaching from the Soul Drinker prestige class and complete it with PCs getting increasingly ominous and louder mental calls from the plane itself; as they rise higher in tiers will saves would perhaps be necessary to stop themselves from attempting to devour any soul in sight.
3. Coming back to the time scale, yeah that is the issue for something like this. I wonder if some of the ambiguity could be relieved by offering ways to reduce "corruption." Maybe fasting for so long (while still accumulating starvation damage) could slowly lower it as long as it is a deliberate decision, a rejection of the plane's code, or perhaps being genuinely good could lower it as well. With things like that in place a system could potentially be made without a distinct time frame in mind.
maybe look in warhammer 40k and how thy handle the fall to chaos.
generally if you reach 100 corruption you lose, it is i think impossible to ordinarily lower corruption. most tasks raise corruption by 1, being directly influenced by daemons can net you 1-4 points though. however certain abilities worked off of corruption, and thus there was an incentive to even let a bit of corruption happen but then they'd become better with just a bit more...
when your get max corruption in the black crusade book you become a daemon, but depending on your infamy you either become a semi-mindless daemon, or become a daemon prince, all thanks to the gods of chaos.
ALSO, perhaps you could look into dark souls for the fluff bits, as there will be NPCs going through the same thing. In dark souls you need to obtain souls to prevent hollowing, the process will slowly make you forget the past, it starts with the oldest memories first. eventually the PCs will only remember their time on the plane, and that would be the time when i think they would wholly become demons.
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Here is what I would advise.
- You should provide an alternative mechanic to actively avoid damnation. Rather than eating souls, perhaps they have to kill demons and consume their flesh to stave off hunger. Doing so could carry along with it a poison condition or cause them to become nauseated for a certain amount of time. If you want to be particularly nasty, they might get hit with truly random bouts of nausea after consuming demon flesh; have them roll d20 on each action, and on a 1, they become nauseated for their next action (yes, I know it's more bookkeeping). Increase the chance by 5% for each consecutive day that they consume demon flesh, up to 95%. Eventually, it's going to be nigh-impossible to act if you don't consume a soul, which brings me to...
- Consuming a soul gives you a free damnation feat and keeps you completely fed for 1d3 days. Upon gaining four damnation feats, you're irrevocably corrupted into daemonhood. It gives characters incentive to want to slide into corruption. It carries increasing fringe benefits!
- There should also be limited (i.e. difficult & expensive) means of redeeming oneself of the taint of damnation, even in Abaddon. Somehow summon an angelic being to cleanse you of the taint, even if it can't escape, possibly damning the angelic being to save yourself and making it harder to summon another. If you summon a deva to cleanse you of your daemonic taint and it either cannot escape Abaddon, gets killed in Abaddon, must be sacrificed in Abaddon in order to cleanse you, or becomes corrupted into a daemon itself, devas should then become harder to summon as they refuse to answer your summons (and are powerful enough to resist the summons). Good luck trying to redeem yourself if you gain enough corruption before you escape.
- Physically warp the forms of any character that consumes a soul. Bloat them, deform them, warp their bodies, make them drip goo, make them leave burning footprints in their wake... Slowly transform them into daemons of equivalent CR.
I hope this is helpful to you. Best wishes!
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Some very, very cool ideas.
One thing you might want to think about, to help narrow it down for time scale, is "What level are the players at?"
One idea I came up with just reading this so far, if it interests you:
At whatever level the players are at, you can (surreptitiously, of course) go off of their wealth by level to determine how much they can afford, literally, to eat. To "enforce" it, perhaps the equipment section's cost of living () entry could give insight into how much they "expend" on their stuff.
What this doesn't mean: that they literally pay money you give them to get a soul (although they could).
What this does mean: that they have a slowly increasing "threshold" (depending on how personally powerful they are), and exceeding the value of that "threshold" means that they have exceeded their own corruption.
If you wish to tie this to "the more they eat the more power/corruption they gain", you can use spells such as deathknell or vampiric touch as a basic chassis to determine what is gained (maybe without the time limit those spells have). If you have a damaging environment that deteriorates the temporary hit points over time, it might require those kinds of effects to stay relevant - or perhaps the environment goes for temp hp first, but comes after the real stuff after that. Maybe restoration or healing (or, more likely, cureing) effects instead; this is especially useful if there is no natural healing, or, if there is, the healing is overcome by the normal damage they take or that the environment generates for or against them.
Or perhaps, if you go with the lifestyle-cost thing, drop all basic magical equipment, and note that, depending on their lifestyle, they can gain enhancement bonuses equal to +1/3 their level to most everything (nAC, AC, shield AC, attack, damage, an ability score or two, etc. - the usual "big six" items plus a few other perks). Maybe allow them to "expend" some of this "budget" (which may or may not be known to them) to imitate fabricate or the (major or minor) creation spells to create desired equipment, as if paying for spellcasting services... of course, as abaddon slowly corrupts and devours their equipment, they'll need more. Or perhaps those enhancement bonuses only work with items that "channel" them - requiring them to create their own self-aggrandizing Christmas trees, as it were, that are slowly decayed by the environment (either using that link to show how it targets the equipment, or perhaps it does some amount of damage to the substance material per day, whether you want it to be 1 damage [taking an average of five days to a weapon or five per AC bonus for armor or shield], 1d4 damage [two-to-three days on average, instead], or maybe just lowering it's hardness by 1 per day and having creatures sunder their nifty stuff).
As a "purifying" rite, you could take a page from an old 3.5 supplement, and allow them to "purify" by purging their literal life-force to do good.
The spell I'm fond of is create lantern archon that allows you to permanently lose 1d4+1 CON in order to create a new lantern archon that is an entirely real, sentient, and independent creature. These creatures could be allied with the party... until the party has to consume a non-sentient soul for any reason, at which point they turn hostile (and perhaps worsen in friendliness by 1 step per non-sentient soul consumed). This purgative effect may increase their effective "wealth" to "expend" on soul-devouring shenanigans by an amount equal to 25k x the number of CON points they lost, as a one time increase. (Again, not actual wealth, just "virtual" wealth to know how corrupt they are.) This would certainly not be something the PCs would do very often - that cost is a killer (perhaps literally), and would be exceedingly hard to use.
The anime Madoka Magica has a few great ideas as well - the idea that you have to use magic (which generate despair - or in this case corruption) to kill a "witch" (in this case a boss) who drops a "grief seed" (some soul gem or core) that you use ("eat"?) to purify yourself (maybe gain a virtual amount equal to the treasure it would normally grant?) so that you can do it again.
Based on Madoka Magica, perhaps you consume souls and can "purchase" spellcasting based on the total value of souls you've consumed in general, as if paying for casting services. Maybe killing bosses nets a little bonus (the value of treasure said boss would normally carry).
Anyway, there are no conclusions there, but a bunch of ideas... I hope they can help!
EDIT: for clarity and a link-fix
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This sounds like an interesting idea for a one shot, but a difficult idea for a campaign.
Used as is over a campaign, it would require a cleansing method. Without a reliable way to purge corruption, or a quick escape, doom is a certainty, either through starvation or transformation. However, if the means to purge are too difficult, or too punishing, they will be underused, or lead to death. If the means to purge are too easy, the corruption risk will have no teeth.
Might I suggest:
Instead of making the consuming of souls mandatory (or suffer the consequences) daily, you might instead consider having each character begin with one use of a power, a power that can make a meaningful difference. Something like "heal yourself for 1/2 of the damage you inflict until your next round", or "gain a +6 profane bonus to a single stat of your choice for one round", or "gain DR 5/- until your next round". The catch is, once used the power can only be refreshed by consuming a soul. This way consuming souls isn't an act of necessity for survival, which makes it less evil, but rather an act of convenience and thirst for power.
This will make it a true dilemma, because they might need power to overcome the obstacles and threats they face, but will have to weigh that against the evil cost of the power. Also, with this approach no purging method is required or even suggested.
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another thing i forgot, warhammer 40k you gain what pathfinder calls hero points for every 10 points of corruption you gain.
Any more headway on this?
You could skew mutations and defects to evil. The fiendish bloodline but no celestial bloodline. Black batlike wings. The deafness applies only common, not fiendish dialects.