The Ascended Conflict in my Riddleport Campaign
While I’m using Golarion as the world for my upcoming Pathfinder campaign, I’m making changes to the powers-that-be in a move that is the ultimate change in top-down planning.
Spoiler warning: players in my campaign please read no further.
A big dynamic in my upcoming Riddleport campaign will be the Ascended – a group of near-gods who become ensnared by scheming over the Cyphergate. You will know the Ascended by name: Lloth, Demogorgon, Tiamat, Baphamut and Asmodeus, to name a few.
Borrowing from the excellent Malazan series, Primal Order and D&D 3E edition of Deities & Demigods, there are three types of higher powers in my version of Golarion: the Ascended, the Divine and the Primals.
The Primals
The first gods. Only the most knowledgeable sages and some of the Divine know of the existence of these creatures. Primals are thought to be non-sentient and responsible for the structure of the universe, including those forces that drive physics, magic and emotions.
These creatures are raw energy. In the past they have spawned Cthulhuesque nightmares to
perform inscrutable quests, giving unfortunate worlds and generations apocalyptic endings or crippling transformations.
Examples of Primals are Death, Chaos, Magic, Passion and Atrophy.
I do not expect Primals to come into gameplay, but they might make interesting trivia for PCs as they gain high levels. Some players also like having a mental framework for their fantasy worlds, and this information can help cap off the top end for them.
The Divine
Traditional gods. The first were birthed an unknown period of time after the Primals; all others have come from the Ascended.
The Divine channel the raw energy of the Primals, whether they know it or not. Each Divine is attuned to one or more Primals, making the energy of the affinity Primals easier to tap. In turn, the energy the Divine draws also transforms them so they embody their source Primals more so over time.
Only a Divine can kill another Divine being, with one exception: Divine can be killed by mortals in a specific way that is unique to each Divine. Knowledge of each Divine’s mortal weakness is jealously guarded – and highly valuable.
The Divine rarely confront foes due to their achilles heel, so the Ascended have become their foot soldiers in an eternal holy war.
The Ascended
Upon reaching epic level, a creature can beseech their parton divinity to give them a divine spark. If granted, the creature Ascends, which confers various benefits, some of which are universal to Ascended and some of which are unique to the Divine who shared the spark.
Ascending a follower weakens a Divine somewhat, so it is rarely done, yet many mortals pursue this path. And the Divine do need to replace dead, insubordinate or incompetent Ascended followers ongoing.
Ascended are mortal
A key difference between Ascended and Divine is Ascended can be killed by mortals, albeit with much difficulty. Divine assignments can therefore put them in great danger.
Like all middle managers, Ascended are in constant peril:
- Some Divine reward their followers with Ascendency if they kill an Ascended of the enemy. Thus Ascended are hunted.
- Great magicks can be woven using Ascended as components. This makes them targets of bold questers.
- Ascended are attuned to two planes. The first is their home plane, the second their patron’s. Every being with a divine spark has a shard that must remain on their home plane. This shard is similar to a lich’s phylactery, and has weaknesses of its own. Destroy the shard and you destroy the Ascended. (The Divine are just banished to their home plane in a weakened state until they expend more costly power to spin out a new shard.)Shards can never leave their affinity plane, though Ascended can. While every being with a shard protects it to the best of their ability – some build mega dungeons with their shard at the heart just for that purpose – circumstances will require they leave their shard behind while travelling to other planes or tangling with others.Thus shards are often the object of epic quests of enemies and rivals.
- Fellow Ascended seeking Divine favour and Elevation (the process where an Ascended becomes a Divine) create fierce levels of competition within a Divine’s ranks. Keep your enemies close and your friends closer.
The names will change
At this point I’m still noodling over the connection between the Cyphergate in Riddleport and the group of Ascended enemies who vie for control and advantage in the pirate city.
Most Ascended will fight by proxy using trusted minions. These minions are the foes the PCs will face most of the time, though an Ascended might make a personal visit if conditions warrant it.
My vision is the PCs will peel away the layers of various stage bosses to eventually confront one or more crime lords of Riddleport directly. At that time they will discover the crime lords are but puppets of the Ascended in an epic power struggle involving the Cypergate.
The Ascended will be known by other names than their monster manual entries. For example, Asmodeus is known as The Angel, and Lloth the Night Queen. The names Asmodeus and Lloth will never be uttered by an NPC – Divine or mortal – during the campaign.
Here’s the rub
More campaign plotting to come in future blogs. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your reactions and ideas, especially about what the link is between the Ascended and the Cyphergate.
A problem that sticks out to me is why the Ascended should pay such attention to the little city of Riddleport. Of all Golarion, why fight on this city’s streets? It seems a bit unbelievable that Ascended would take such risks, albeit mostly through minions, and give such focus to this small region.
One potential answer is the Cyphergate. It could be worth all the confrontation, resources and risks. And that begs the question of why the Cyphergate is important to the Ascended. I have a couple ideas, one which involves the shards of the Ascended, but they’re just ideas for now.
What do you think? Why does a group of Ascended enemies happen to be playing in the same sandbox as the PCs?
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December 3rd, 2009 at 4:30 pm
The Cyphergate is a scrying portal that allows one to ascertain the weakness of a Divine. The characters around the edge are letters in the Divine Alphabet and the mage who can assemble the Divine’s truename and speak it through the Cyphergate can gain awareness of the weakness of a Divine. The rub; only a mortal may speak the truename of a Divine, and only the shard of an Ascended may be used to power the Cyphergate to determine that weakness of the Divine attuned to the Ascended. Thus, you have instant conflicts around assembling truenames (make them like 256 characters long :), and Ascended trying to deny access to the device or playing the long game to take control to destroy a Divine.
December 3rd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Maybe the gate links the user (Ascended or mortal) directly to one of the Primals, making him a Divine without having to go through one of the established ones. Perhaps this is how the first Divines got their power, by building this gate? Maybe it can only be activated once every years and the time is coming up, so all the Ascended are making their moves on it now. It could be it takes a long time to perform the necessary ritual, so they can’t afford to have any other Ascended running around while they doing it.
Alternatively it could be some sort of Omniscience device that would give the user the knowledge of all the Divine’s weaknesses? Imagine the fun politics that would be involved with that.
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:13 pm
The ring shape … why such a shape? And it is clearly big enough that something can pass through it, hence all the suggestions that it is a gate or portal of some kind. So what if the Cyphergate is actually the “cosmic switchboard” that connects shards to their Ascended, and it is those ‘connections’ that pass through the gate?
This makes the cyphergate’s name a misnomer applied by ignorant mortals and its true purpose a surprise when it is revealed. The Ascended would need to protect it at all costs (even though it is seemingly invulnerable) because if it goes, they all go.
At the same time, it is a potential vulnerability to individual ascended, because (with sufficient time, effort, and expertise), the connection can be traced and Ascended can follow it past all the defences of an enemy Ascended to the enemy Ascended’s shard.
Each symbol represents one of the Divine, and hence also Connects the Divine with his agents, perhaps facilitating direct communications between them. If a new Divine is born/created, the symbols grow smaller and a new symbol mysteriously appears on the cyphergate. Presumably, it’s been a long time since this happened, so there is no mortal record of it.
And perhaps the Cyphergate is actually constructed of the immortal remains of the Primal, explaining it’s near invulnerability.
Oh, and one final notion: perhaps the descendants of the Servants of the Primal are still around as Abberations and the like – some working (ala the Serpent Priests in Raymond E Feist’s novels) to ‘release’ their masters from their “confinement” while others work to maintain their current state of independance? Throwing in another layer of conflict like this can only make things more interesting!
This could also be used to explain the dichotomy between Devils and Demons. Devils could be “dark divine”, the enemies of the divine, outcast by the other Divine, while Demons could be another branch of the servants of the Primal.
All these ideas make the Cyphergate (from a mortal perspective) the ultimate tool for understanding of the Divine and their natures, which only makes it more ironic that humans think it’s arcane in nature. And the presence of so many competing Ascended ensures (as a side-effect) that organised priesthoods are never permitted to stick around Riddleport long enough to recognise the nature of the Cyphergate – because every Religious group is in the service of someone’s enemy.
That, in turn, would imply that the presence of so many Ascended (ironically) makes Riddleport the most secular city in existance, the population most distantly removed from divine guidance – and if that doesn’t fit with the concept of a lawless pirate haven, nothing does!
The advantages of these suggestions are that they explain not only the Cyphergate and it’s connection to the Ascended and Divine, it explains why Riddleport was always going to turn out to be something akin to what it is: the Soddom and Gamora of this campaign world, inherantly corrupt and violent, with laws imposed by the strong on the weak by force, anarchy distilled. Riddleport becomes the central hub of divine politics without even knowing about it!
December 13th, 2009 at 5:39 am
Aw, this was a really quality post. In theory I’d like to write like this too – taking time and real effort to make a good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and never seem to get something done.