Some advice would be nice

[Richard Logue]

My campaign world is of my own creation, but it is standard superhero, 4-color fare. The world has a decent history to it and the players are pretty familiar with the goings-on. Its time to shake things up.

 

Its time to write in one of those 12-issue crossover limited series that effects the entire world. What I'm envisioning is a mystical war. The sort of thing that involves all the sorcerors, mystics, and supernatural folks making war upon each other. And the poor super community is caught in the middle because, publicly, they receive the general blame for everything.

 

In my mind's eye, I can see great, epic battles between good and evil, between sorcerors and their minions. I can see necromancers raising the dead, and earth-bound angels (there's two or three in my world). I can see the public crying out against supers, even some of the more popular heroes, for the damage being wrought.

 

What I can't see is how it starts and how it plays out. And that's mostly waht I need advice on. I've never done a whole lot with the mystical community in my world. I have a few msytically-based individuals running around, including one of the PC's who gained his powers from a relic, but on the whole, I just don't have the experience with this part of the genre.

 

I'm hoping that some of you can help me out.

 

One of my biggest questions is how does the whole thing start? Is this something that happens every X amount of millennia when the stars are aligned? Has some relic surfaced causing the war? Maybe its a universal constant that's finally hit Earth. Perhaps its always gone on, but as a "cold war," and now some villainous sorceror has upped the ante.

 

As always, your help is appreciated.

 

Richard

[caris]

How about something and/or someone being unleashed? Nothing like archeologists opening some cage that they think is a tomb, and freeing an ancient evil upon the world. Have him rally the force of evil to his banner and off you go. The fun alternative is have it be an ancient good released that starts a good old fashioned war against evil.

[Monolith]

You might want to look at buying The Kandris Seal pdf from the online store. The 171 page book is about a mystical world balanced between good and evil. Such a battle between the Keepers of the Broken Circle and Thaumaturgia could easily spill over into your campaign world and cause the type of shaking up you might find interesting.

[AnotherSkip]

Other ooptions would be :the forces of Evil team up from own self interest and start trying to take down the good guys.

 

Or heck even one "Sorcerous Singularity" kicking the bucket early would make life difficult....

 

And it could give the team something to do while battles rage on.

 

Okies we need to find Kenny Drake, train him to fill the "Sorcerus Singularity" and then the wars will end.."

 

"THOSE BASTARDS, THEY KILLED KENNY!"

[Guest rbezold]

I think your idea of a millenial contest of some kind is your best bet. But let's throw a twist into it. Let us presume that the mystical forces know that an all out war would destroy the planet they live on. The idea, then, is to get proxies to do the fighting for you WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE! This is what makes it challenging. No mind controls, no recruiting, just deception. Like a chess game. All you need to do is (at some point) hand the players some clues (what REALLLY happened at Camelot? At Troy?) and you're off and running.

[Eyendasky80]

You should flesh out your world's mystics first, and introduce the players to some aspect of sorcery so it won't seem like such a startling break from accepted "reality". Maybe the war can start with something completely mundane and directly involve the pcs. Maybe they could move into a new HQ/Apt/House that is secretly some kind of mystical nexus and their renovations call attention to it.

[Argus]

Mystic War

 

I played in a game once that had ten players and four of them had some magical origin, one that wasn’t to tightly wrap.

 

One night the GM gave all four of the players a Mystic Dream; Three of the players saw these 12 Magical relics being placed around an Archway and hordes of monsters coming through to over run the planet and destroy everyone.

 

The other player had a dream about the same Archway and twelve relics also, but this time the monsters were under his control and they obeyed him and he used them to conquer the world and became the supreme ruler.

 

This started the Mystic Wars.

 

We ended up flying all over the world battling every Mystic Master, both Good and Evil, because no trusted anyone else. In order to fine the relics and keep anyone else from opening the Archway.

 

A.

[Ghost who Walks]

http://www.survivingtheapocalypse.com/

 

Website of possible help.

 

A lot depends on if you want to scare the players or not. If you don't wnat to scare them, have some demons or what not show up fro manother dimnesion.

 

If you want to frighten them, a little research may be needed.

 

Every culture has ther own myth about the end of the world. My personal favorites are Ragnarok (Norse), and Sumerian (Southern Iraq).

 

Raganarok was an apocalyptic battle, where all the gods were killed. According to legend, Raganarok is fortold by Odin, who can see the future. The key is to take some mythological component, and give it a real world component. For example: when the ice Giants are unleashed upon the world, have a supervillain create an iceberg making machine. The icebergs threaten shipping, commerce, and start to raise the oceans water level...

 

Sumerian myths mostly involve the release of Tiamat, who is much more interesting in myth than she is in D&D.

 

If you want hordes of undead, check out Egyptian mythology. They beleived death was just the other side of life.

 

As a side not, according to the Aztecs, their world ended right on time...

 

I did a ampaign similar to this a while ago. It basicly dealt with what happened to all the old gods/mystical monsters. In my history, I had them get banished to extradimensional prisons miullenia ago. During the campaign, one of them got freed. (I used the egyptian god Anhur). Wanting to be reunited with his buddy (Set), he started gathering about various mystical objects and people to free those who were banished. The problem was, no one remembered who was banished in which extradimensional prison.

 

So you had him teleporting around the Earth, conducting ceremonies on rooftops, then teleporting away when the big monster came out.

 

Was great fun for awhile.

[Supreme Serpent]

If your players don't have much traffic with mystic stuff, why not use something else? Alien invasion? VIPER makes its big play for power?

 

Or, to tie the players in to the mystic war - maybe they're the reason behind it. Got an old mid-level villain they haven't seen in awhile? Thought he was dead/retired/whatever? Nope, he got sick of being beaten by heroes, turned to the dark arts to get an edge - is now a powerful mage, and starts letting things loose that should not be, at first in an effort to destroy the heroes, but it quickly escalates into a general mystic conflict as this upstart has tilted the balance. Sure to be good looks on the player's faces when they realize the evil archmage is Binder or someone --- you know, "Binder" works really well - binding demons, binding souls, etc. to his will...

 

[Mayday]

Ragnarok was my first thought as well, followed by the Egyptian goddess Bast. At one point she went on a berserk rampage and tried to wipe out everthing.

 

Reincarnation might play a role, take some sort of myth featuring a war like King Arthur, reincarnate everyone as someone from the legend and go from there.

 

Another obvious route is the Book of Revelations. The hordes of the Anti-Christ versus the host of angels.

 

Some of the Hindu gods would be useful as well for a good-evil conflict.

 

I remember once in Thor comics was a run dealing with gods from several pantheons that grouped together, all the death gods, all the hero gods and so on. Dont remember why now but it was neat to see them all together like that.

[Mayday]

Oops I forgot, the greek gods vs the Titans. There was plenty of variety in the types of titans to make things interesting.

[pinecone]

If you can find it buy "once in the lonsome october" or something like that by Zelanzy...it's a Cool book and I've been saving up "the great game" for a big mystical throwdown" basicly there are two sides the Openers and the Closers ...the Openers want to let the things outside in and the closers like the status quo....they gather artifacts, bump off competitors then have a big ceremony to see who wins....

[Lord Liaden]

One notion which I found intriguing came up some years ago in the Dr. Strange comic series. There came a time for a destined battle between many of the Great Powers of the occult universe, apparently to establish their relative relationships and status. These Powers sought to draft warriors to their cause from among the beings who counted them as their patrons, were granted powers by them, or used magic spells empowered by them. You could combine this with the plot of Marvel's "The Eighth Day" comic one-shot: the Great Powers choose champions on Earth to conquer it and lead armies in their patron's name against those of the other champions, so as to establish which of the Powers is truly dominant.

 

For the concept I propose, war begins as various mystics choose sides and begin to battle each other and/or attempt to seize lands from which to build their armies. If your PCs have sponsors like those described above, they may find themselves being pressganged into the war by their sponsors. Should they refuse to fight they may be stripped of some or all of their powers by their miffed patrons, which can make for an interesting roleplaying opportunities.

 

With so many parties involved, it may be impossible for the PCs to win through force; they may have to find the Great Powers pulling the strings and convince them not to follow through with the war.

[Mutant for Hire]

There are a variety of ways to do it. One of the simplest is that there's going to be a sudden rise of the magical background energies of the world for a brief period of time, and yes, everyone knows about it. The more mystic power a site already has, the more it's going to gain for the Conjunction of the Spheres or whatever you name your mystic event.

 

That is going to trigger off a lot of mystic battles beforehand, as everyone starts fighting to claim and hold the great mystical sites of power of the Earth so they can perform their great rituals that will be turbocharged at the moment of the conjunction. And then there are going to be all the battles during the conjunction when each side tries to disrupt the powerful rituals of everyone else. Then as the magic levels start to drop, there's going to be the 'cleaning up the mess' aspect.