Interesting concept I need help with...

[SilverWolf]

So, my group and I haven't played a game in a few years and haven't been in the IK realm for longer than that. We are all getting together soon and they want me to run an IK game. I'm fine with it, but I can't seem to run a normal game. I have a flair for the dramatic; I wanna kill a god.

Anyone have any ideas for this? I was thinking starting the game in a mid-apocalypse IK setting, where the gods are much more active and one is trying to destroy everything (the obvious choice for this is the Wurm, but I may re-rout and go Menoth). I obviously plan on giving them high levels and prolly one or two epic weapons, but how would they get to said deity?

[Oldgrue]

Go back to during the Orgoth invasion, make them all serve Menoth, and kill the Orgoth god spurring their retreat and eventual fate as snacks for Toruk.

[Psychomancer]

It seems to be easier in the IK to get your gods to come to you...or that's apparently what the elves thought, at least.

Easy solution: The Retribution is right and your party is all human arcane spellcasters. Go forth and finish the job, lads!

[SilverWolf]

Haha I forgot about that! The elves did bring there gods down here didn't they? Any reference on how they did that?

[Psychomancer]

It's all very ancient history...but as I understand it, the elven gods could come and go from the Veld (what humans would call Urcaen) pretty much at will, and did in fact rule from Caen for a long time. Things went poorly when the Lyossan empire decided it would be cool to build a bridge to the Veld so that they could jaunt over there whenever they felt like it, too.

Nobody knows exactly what went wrong, but the resulting explosion damn near blew Immoren in half and wiped out most of Lyoss. Adding to this, all the elven gods but two are MIA now, and Scyrah isn't doing so well, while Nyssor is frozen in stasis and holed up by the remaining Nyss in Khador.

Actually, the more I chatter about it, the more sense it makes...Nyssor and Scyrah are already in Caen, thus eliminating the need to go traipsing about into Urcaen to try to get one of the human gods. Scyrah is somewhere in Ios, as far as I know, and Nyssor is in Khador, as mentioned. One of the Cryxian warcasters (I don't recall his name right off) could be your PC's puppet master- he tried to gank Nyssor, but even frozen, that's a tall order and he couldn't do it. However, if some human "specialists" could do it for him...
On the other hand, the Retribution of Scyrah has been bopping about whacking human arcanists of all sorts for a while now, and now that they have a chance of pulling their race out of a downward spiral toward extinction, they're tromping around the Iron Kingdoms in force causing all sorts of trouble.
And so, Yuri Mensk, a high ranking Greylord, has been tasked by the Empress to deal with the problem ("We've already got Everblight knocking on our door, nobody else likes us, and now we have freaking ELVES running around putting their Menoth-damned arrows into everything. Fix this!") A scholar with decades of accumulated knowledge on the elves and their shadowy past, he comes to one conclusion: no more Scyrah = no more Retribution...perhaps even no more Ios, which would leave the Empire some very juicy territory to annex. But such a task would require a group of people with special sets of skills...and maybe your crew is just the one to do it.

So there you go- two gods, two possibilities, several delightfully apocalyptic endings.

[SilverWolf]

....Wow. Um.... thanks a lot, that's quite an interesting scenario you've played out there. I was thinking a lil more universal apocalypse, but I like it!

[Whimper]

Usually when players want to kill gods in D&D, it's because they secretly (or not-so-secretly) wish they could kill their game master.

What does it mean when a game master wants their players to kill a god and bring ruin to the setting? I can't fathom it.

[Catbeard]

You could take a look at the Cyriss metaplot for inspiration... from what I can recall of the Libre Mechanica (it's been a while so some of this is prolly wrong) all her clockwerk minions and cultists are running round the IK building strange little temples for the express purpose of bring about her manifestation as a physical being on Immoren.

It's never made clear whether this is a good thing or a bad thing...

... but it would change the face of the Iron Kingdoms permanently, and I'm quite sure the powers that be would be happier with the status quo.

Just a thought.

[SilverWolf]

Haha! I love these forums! Haven't changed my overall plot, but I am using the Cyriss and Scryah idea in a sort of "pre-apocalypse" missions to eliminate a few of the more active gods interests in teh material plane. As catbeard said, most of the powers that be would love a status quo, but one of the gods isn't happy with eternal struggle.

[PPS_Mod:Zirik]

If you're thinking in D&D terms for planes, IK isn't really like that. Sure, you could call Caen the material plane, but it's not really comparable to the D&D material plane. Rather than being infinite, it contains only one world (as far as anyone knows, and no divination has revealed any others so far). There are only two other planes: Urcaen and the Infernal Realms. Three if you count the Void, but I get the impression that it's not really a place so much as an absence of place where things can exist but there is nothing to interact with.

I would think an excellent candidate for god-killing would be an Infernal Executor at the culmination of some millenia-long ritual of soul-stealing.

[SilverWolf]

Yea it's been a while since I played IK but I remember they take less of a "fantasy" approach to their realms. However with multiple proven gods, there must be multiple realms or at least multiple kingdoms within the Urcaen. Like psychomancer said, the elves apparently found a way to the Veld (or whatever I kinda forget haha), so it's not too far of a stretch to have my PCs find an ancient portal to Urcaen or a hyperspeed way to ascension (ala Enkihieridon on crack), is it?

PS - Whisper, I am totally stealing your post for my sig line!

[PPS_Mod:Zirik]

Urcaen is a single plane, in which there are cities (one for each god) separated by untamed wilderness (where the Devourer lurks). The Veld is usually held to be synonymous with Urcaen. The same with the gods of the Dwarves. The different races have different names for the same thing.

The elven gods did find a way to bridge Urcaen and Caen. We all know how well that went, don't we? :P

Edit: As far as I recall, two gods do not have a place in Urcaen. Three if you count Toruk. Dhunia cycles the souls of her followers back into Caen through reincarnation. The elves used to have something like this but their god in charge of reincarnation kicked the bucket. Cyriss is the other. Her place is supposedly a distant planet that can be seen from Caen.

[SilverWolf]

Interesting, I didn't know Urcaen was so definitively laid out. Is there a source for that Zirik?

[PPS_Mod:Zirik]

I don't recall specifically. The IKCG has some on it, and I think bits and pieces have been mentioned throughout the various fiction and in No Quarter. I think most of the info has come from Doug's forum posts.

[SilverWolf]

Interesting...... I've caught some nice facts from here.

On a totally unrelated note: Can anyone help me with a problem I have every game? On the account of CR and enemies.... I have 5 lvl 10 PCs and wanna throw a good challenge at them, say a Gorax. But the gorax CR is only 2, and with only 19 HP, even a few of them would be a joke to lvl 10s. How do I fix this?

[PPS_Mod:Zirik]

You can advance a monster by HD, class levels and templates. Throw a giant gorax at them, a legendary alpha gorax that is possessed of feral cunning and frightful rage. Maybe some Circle Druids have even managed to train it in a few Barbarian levels.

[SilverWolf]

Okay, but when you advance it by HD how do you recalculate stats and BAB and fun stuff like that?

[PPS_Mod:Zirik]

Monster Hit Dice are added just like levels. They increase hit points, BaB, saves and skills, and grant feats and ability increases every few levels in the same manner.

In terms of Challenge Rating, Hit Dice tend to be worth less than character levels.

[SilverWolf]

So they'd advance everything in kind of a 3/4 cleric BAB/save increase? Haha, sorry for my ignorance; for most games my job was to kill monsters not make them more powerful!

[PPS_Mod:Zirik]

The d20 SRD has monster advancement rules.

http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/improvingMonsters.htm