Deimavigga (Apostate Devil) Whisper Earworm

[Tender Tendrils]

So the Deimavigga (Apostate Devil) has the Whisper Earworm ability, where it

Whisper Earworm wrote:

The deimavigga whispers a terrifying multiversal truth to one adjacent creature, shaking its faith in reality and divinity.

This truth is enough to prevent resting, and inflict drained and stupefied. On a critical failure of a save against this, the effect lasts until you erase all memory of what it said.

My question is - what kind of things would this horrible truth be? I feel like players would want to know what terrible thing is breaking their characters brain.

[Perpdepog]

"It's all a game, hero. You, me, everything. We're all just the imaginings of a bunch of humans munching chips around a dining room table. Haven't you ever noticed how you fail 1/20th of the time? That's them. They roll twenty sided dice."

[Tender Tendrils]

Perpdepog wrote:

"It's all a game, hero. You, me, everything. We're all just the imaginings of a bunch of humans munching chips around a dining room table. Haven't you ever noticed how you fail 1/20th of the time? That's them. They roll twenty sided dice."

I mean, that joke was literally the first thing I thought of, then I went on here to see if anyone knew any Lost Omens lore I could use.

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

It seems like there's a fair amount of lore that, taken out of context or twisted to a certain perspective, could qualify for most creatures.

To start with some standard cosmic horror:

"There are monsters between the stars of your universe. Monsters older even than the gods you worship. They have been there since before the universe existed, some are the size of entire worlds, and nobody knows what they are."

Something a little more personal to mortal kind:

"Do you know how many souls are lost from the great river every ten minutes? Every five? It is more than you can possibly imagine. Good, evil, neither, it matters not."

"Do your priests tell your that your reward for your service is an eternal paradise in the next life? They are wrong. Sooner or later, every mortal soul breaks down into raw quintessence. Nothing lasts forever."

Shake the faith in the divine:

"You think your goddess kind? She cares about every soul? Before creating your world, the gods created another, filled it with toys to test their designs, and then abandoned it when they had their fill. The souls they used for their experiment are still trapped, forever forsaken by their uncaring creators."

"While the gods squabbled over whether to allow you free will, they failed to notice the Worldbreaker bore into their creation and devour countless mortal lives. Do you think they will remember to save your world if their vigil slips again?"

This one I'm not clear how much it is actually a truth and how much a hearsay or rumour.

"This existence is already broken. In the before-time, the plane you call the Void was a true equal to the Cosmic Fire. The oldest crime in this reality is when the jyoti stole the gift of creation from their twin and permanently damaged the cosmos."

[Perpdepog]

I'd also suggest checking out any of the lore sidebars and chapter fronters from any of the Book of the Damned installments from PF1E. Stuff like the fact Asmodeus had a good guy brother, who he murdered, leading to lots of "God is dead" Nietzschean confusion, or the fact that the entire cosmos might be built upon the Abyss, making evil and chaos the original prime constants, could also really mess up the right kind of PC.
Really any of Tabris' works, even the supposedly "nicer" ones, could do the trick.

I'd also recommend checking out the lore around the Strange Aeons Adventure Path. It's full of cosmic horror, so telling your players anything they're doing is bound to keep them up at night, especially Xhamen-Dor, the Great Old One fungus among us who can reach into your mind and turn you into a zombie just by you knowing its name and background.

[Tender Tendrils]

That stuff is great :)

[Yqatuba]

In this thread https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2olvb?Beyond-the-Doomsday-Door (Shattered Star spoilers) James Jacobs says that the multiverse is only akin to a peach at the center of a mile wide ball of dirt, and notes that the Prime Material Plane would only be like a grain of sand at the middle of the peach. That seems pretty terrifying: "You know this multiverse you think is so big? It's only a minuscule part of the entire omniverse (or whatever the word for the entire "dirt ball" is.)

[Mechagamera]

How about:

The real reason you lose your memories when you die is that all all the pieces of your soul that correspond to the alignments other than the one you spend your afterlife as an aspect of are cut away in the Bone Yard. Even for the most saintly paladin, the lack of the CG, NG, LN, N, CN, LE, NE, and CE parts of your soul (small as any of them may be) leave too many holes in your mind for you to be able to access any memories (or make sense of them if you could access them).

[The Raven Black]

"There is, or will be, a gap in the memory of the whole multiverse. A time that no being can remember. We are in that time. Whatever you achieve, in the end even the gods will forget."

[Coriat]

On Pandora's Box wrote:

"In all the times your priests and tellers have told you the story of the woman who opened the box the gods had filled with evils and curses upon mortalkind, have you ever stopped to ask yourself: why was hope one of them?"

The Immortality of the Soul wrote:

"The immortality of the soul is the greatest shackle in all this carceral Creation. It means one thing: when the hour of Asmodeus's triumph arrives, even in death, we cannot get out."

[W E Ray]

dot

[Coriat]

Advice on Optimizing The Experience of Eternal Torture:

Quote:

“It is for this reason that many of the wiser among the faithful of the King of Hell, those who are conscious of the inevitability of their own damnation, practice rigorous personal asceticism even regarding the ordinary pleasures of mortal life: whether pleasures of intellect or of the flesh, of comfort or sensuality, of romantic love or happy friendship. In damnation, your worst torment will be the loss of all that which you loved. If the damned will be tormented by experiencing eternally the deprivation of that which they love and desire, then uttermost asceticism, attachment to nothing, offers a final hope amidst despair, the hope of transcending that terrible fate, and so the wise harden their hearts and shut out all that Hell could use to hurt them. Love nothing: lose nothing."

"Therefore, my advice to you is this: Love nothing and no-one, not even yourself."

[Coriat]

And in the joke-answer category, as deployed by my DM when the party fought a deimavigga:

Quote:

“Topically applied fluoride doesn’t prevent tooth decay. It does render teeth detectable by scrying.”

[Yqatuba]

Coriat wrote:

Advice on Optimizing The Experience of Eternal Torture:

Quote:

“It is for this reason that many of the wiser among the faithful of the King of Hell, those who are conscious of the inevitability of their own damnation, practice rigorous personal asceticism even regarding the ordinary pleasures of mortal life: whether pleasures of intellect or of the flesh, of comfort or sensuality, of romantic love or happy friendship. In damnation, your worst torment will be the loss of all that which you loved. If the damned will be tormented by experiencing eternally the deprivation of that which they love and desire, then uttermost asceticism, attachment to nothing, offers a final hope amidst despair, the hope of transcending that terrible fate, and so the wise harden their hearts and shut out all that Hell could use to hurt them. Love nothing: lose nothing."

"Therefore, my advice to you is this: Love nothing and no-one, not even yourself."

Wouldn't this only work if the character is likely to go to Hell (which is unlikely for PCs, as most DMs won't let you play evil characters at all)?

[Coriat]

Yqatuba wrote:

Coriat wrote:

Advice on Optimizing The Experience of Eternal Torture:

Quote:

“It is for this reason that many of the wiser among the faithful of the King of Hell, those who are conscious of the inevitability of their own damnation, practice rigorous personal asceticism even regarding the ordinary pleasures of mortal life: whether pleasures of intellect or of the flesh, of comfort or sensuality, of romantic love or happy friendship. In damnation, your worst torment will be the loss of all that which you loved. If the damned will be tormented by experiencing eternally the deprivation of that which they love and desire, then uttermost asceticism, attachment to nothing, offers a final hope amidst despair, the hope of transcending that terrible fate, and so the wise harden their hearts and shut out all that Hell could use to hurt them. Love nothing: lose nothing."

"Therefore, my advice to you is this: Love nothing and no-one, not even yourself."

Wouldn't this only work if the character is likely to go to Hell (which is unlikely for PCs, as most DMs won't let you play evil characters at all)?

Yup, it does depend on whether you believe that Golarion Hell is something that will only ever happen to people who, theoretically, deserve it. However, it is a widespread tenet of Asmodean teachings, as presented in the campaign setting books, that he will eventually rise to supremacy via a secret hidden in the Contract of Creation. Per Princes of Darkness, Golarion Hell is not just a monument to the old ways of merciless order but a warning to the cosmos of what Asmodeus will (he claims) one day make anew.

So Hell will (he claims) be forced on everything and everyone some day. LE souls may be dragged there already, but in the fullness of time it will be imposed on all the rest.

Now, to be susceptible to the argument that you should take drastic, possibly evil actions to fortify yourself against inevitable damnation, you don't have to like it or think that Hell is anything but awful, but you do have to believe that it's going to happen whether you like it or not. Or at least that it's a big enough danger that you can't afford to bet against it. Asmodeus is a god of trickery as well as of slavery and damnation, so maybe you shouldn't believe that and shouldn't bother to prepare. Although he does tend to be the manipulate-with-truths sort of trickster, rather than just some plain old liar. He prides himself on his honor that way, and even good gods trusted his word enough to make him the guardian of the key to Rovagug's prison.

So should you gamble that he's telling the truth or that he's lying?

No pressure. The stakes are only infinite.

Spoiler:

Links are written by me. The speaker for the sermon, naturally, is an ascetic Asmodean monk. The other speaker is a ghaele azata in the court of Milani, formed from a redeemed slave-priestess, now apostate, of the Devil God.

[Yqatuba]

Coriat wrote:

Yqatuba wrote:

Coriat wrote:

Advice on Optimizing The Experience of Eternal Torture:

Quote:

“It is for this reason that many of the wiser among the faithful of the King of Hell, those who are conscious of the inevitability of their own damnation, practice rigorous personal asceticism even regarding the ordinary pleasures of mortal life: whether pleasures of intellect or of the flesh, of comfort or sensuality, of romantic love or happy friendship. In damnation, your worst torment will be the loss of all that which you loved. If the damned will be tormented by experiencing eternally the deprivation of that which they love and desire, then uttermost asceticism, attachment to nothing, offers a final hope amidst despair, the hope of transcending that terrible fate, and so the wise harden their hearts and shut out all that Hell could use to hurt them. Love nothing: lose nothing."

"Therefore, my advice to you is this: Love nothing and no-one, not even yourself."

Wouldn't this only work if the character is likely to go to Hell (which is unlikely for PCs, as most DMs won't let you play evil characters at all)?

Yup, it does depend on whether you believe that Golarion Hell is something that will only ever happen to people who, theoretically, deserve it. However, it is a widespread tenet of Asmodean teachings, as presented in the campaign setting books, that he will eventually rise to supremacy via a secret hidden in the Contract of Creation. Per Princes of Darkness, Golarion Hell is not just a monument to the old ways of merciless order but a warning to the cosmos of what Asmodeus will (he claims) one day make anew.

So Hell will (he claims) be forced on everything and everyone some day. LE souls may be dragged there already, but in the fullness of time it will be imposed on all the rest.

Now, to be susceptible to the argument that...

I see. Is that story you linked to canon?