Destroying Creation 101

cyl

cyl

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So, I came back upon some notes I made a while back, for possible epic series with a Damascus sword above Creation and pcs trying to stop it and now 2e is mostly done, I'm wondering if people had taken new directions / ideas that could be exploitable by others.


From what we have there were 4 and a half major threats to Creation as a whole in a very short time:


1/ the Primordials: they were taken care of apart for one who's still at bay


2/ SWLiHN's cracking orb:


3/ the Contagion + Balorian Crusade: 80% of the population gone, and gods know how many lands lost to the Wyld


4/ the Kukla: but he's been put to sleep


So... that makes 4 & 1/2 holocausts, and apart from the Kukla, there are no immediate "end game threats".


What could you think of if you had like 10 years and a plan to destroy Creation / end humanity ?


I thought of a Zombie Contagion, but considering the distance between cities, the seas mountains, forests, jungles etc etc, it's going to take forever to get rid of humanity completely... not so viable in the short run.


Waking the Fire Dragon and / or the Earth Dragon could also work.


And of course there are the behemoths / hekatonkires... but I'm looking for something a little bit more dramatic and less insidious. Sone kind of direct threat the players could prevent from rising.
 
Ishiika, the Grass-Cutter Scythe, is a Wyld Behemoth N/A. It is a scorpion the size of Creation made entirely out of blades that was owned (and, presumably, wielded) by Prince Balor, leader of the Balorian Crusade, before he was killed. It'd be pretty terrifying if someone found and attuned to it (quite possible even without Graces), right?


Autochton, as far as I understand is basically a giant sphere of metal. If he came back, it could be as a city or something, but it could also be as a giant, hovering ball, an extra moon of sorts. Assuming something goes wrong (Engine of Extinction finally kills the bugger, for example) he could just drop, crashing down and destroying everything in a gigantic shockwave. Also, there's only three days left until this happens and there's a little kid in a mask running around and messing with everybodies' lives.


A mad Daybreak has constructed a giant Void-engine inside the Imperial Mountain, murdering any Mountain Folk that come too near. If he succeeds with his machinations, The Elemental Pole of Earth will drop into the Underworld and be sucked in by the Mouth of the Void, soon to be followed by the rest of Creation.


Is that direct enough for you?
 
Take one Imperial Mountain. Add a huge number of innocent people. Execute them all in under a minute. Cue one Shadowland, one Pole of Earth dropping into the Void, and one bam.


In fact, the most efficient way to do that'd be with a Forsaken Life Engine, wouldn't it?


This is inspired by Arrghus's suggestion, just putting a slightly different spin on the methods.


Actually, destabilising any Elemental Pole'd do that, wouln't it? Join Wood with Bone, and Fire and Air might start spreading down to the East as the Pole of Bone has to balance bnoth the Creation and Underworld ones.


Or, of course, you could try to make a shadowland around the manse with the Realm Defence Grid controls (I forgot the name...). Surely a Deathlord's powerful enough to swan in, take over and BURN THE WORLD?
 
Fabricati said:
Except that the Underworld doesn't HAVE poles...
Click to expand...
Which just means that the whole event will be that much more destabilizing. A Shadowland in one of the Outer Poles could quite possibly fuse it with the Labyrinth (or drop it into an endless field of nothingness, it's never really specified what's at the edge of the Underworld), and the spot corresponding to the Earth Pole is the Mouth of the Void. Now, imagine what would happen if you dropped an Elemental Pole in one of those locations...
 
I vaguely recall it being written somewhere in canon that due to the stability of the pole of earth, shadowlands almost never appear on the blessed isle.. from there could extrapolate that to actually cause a shadowland containing the imperial mountain, you'd have to kill a -lot- of people.. certainly magnitudes higher than for any similar sized shadowland (which would be massive anyway given the size of it) .. I highly suspect the pole of earth would be the very final thing that got sucked into the underworld and collapses everything.
 
Under normal circumstances, yeah, but there're all kinds of crazy things people might try- like rounding up most of the population of the Isle and using a Forsaken Life Engine to eat 'em all.
 
Remember the Usurpation. The Imperial Mountain was literally covered in a city, and that city was populated fully - it would have had way more people in it than are in the Realm now, maybe even in all Creation during the Age of Sorrows! And they almost all died, amidst the greatest betrayal in human history, killed by what was essentially a self-destruct device for the geomancy of the whole thing. Every Solar artifact, experiment and Manse effectively broke and went wild all at the same time, and the essence across those slopes is still poisonous to this day.


And it did absolutely nothing to the Mountain underneath.


Gotta remember that the Imperial Mountain has the Sword of Creation under it. Not the defence system, the actual Sword of Creation, a giant pillar of MMs with all the essence of Creation running up through it that no one can even get near without being consumed. I think that, to turn the Mountain into a shadowland, or any of the other Elemental Poles, you'd have to kill so many people through the most horrible method that you'd have basically killed everyone in Creation anyway.


It is the central anchor of Creation. The primordials would have made it the strongest thing that they possibly ever could. Forget mortals - you'd have to kill a primordial on top of the Mountain to do anything to it. Probably several.


You can also consider the idea that the Imperial Mountain isn't really the Elemental Pole of Earth. It's only part of it; the real Direction of Earth isn't the Center, it's down - Mount Meru is only the tip on the limitless Earth that extends down below Creation.
 
Compass of Terrestrial Directions: Down.


Semirelated: In my Exalted, the entire Blessed Isle is the Imperial Mountain - one gigantic mountain the size of eurasia. Mt. Meru is just the peak.
 
I had a thought: According to the White/Black Treatises, a few Deathlords might have intimate knowledge of the Salinan Working. The Working itself is, obviously, ill-suited to this task, and almost certainly far too complex to be recreated in full by any force currently existing in the Age of Sorrows. Fortunately, we don't need to. All we need to do is get a few sorcerers into place at each Elemental Pole, give them the sorcerous equivalent of gigantic hammers, and tell them exactly what to smash. Boom, Creation dissolves back into the Wyld.
 
Well if you assume that the Elemental Dragon is linked to the Pole, you'd have to kill the first, and destroy the latter... Good luck with that :mrgreen:
 
And, of course, even with the intimate knowledge of how the Poles do that voodoo they do so well, (which your Deathlord might not even have) you'd probably need Solar-circle sorcerers for a task of this magnitude...which Abyssals can't be.


Well, I said it'd be simple, not easy... :mrgreen:
 
The Lover's got the best chance of pulling it off, then, as the one who seems to do best at... persuading Solars to work for her.
 
I suppose I could just wait for the Bodhisattva Anointed By Dark Water to finish off his centuries-long plan to destroy Creation, but frankly, I don't like him as a person, so I wouldn't want to see him succeed.


I'd maybe try to arrange things so that the Yozis can return to Creation. I'd REALLY like to find a way to awaken the Kukla, so that the world isn't just ended, but replaced with a world that might be slightly cheerier. Whisper of Oblivion to his guardians, perhaps?
 
Well, ROGD I suggests all it would take would be 13 sorceres summoning the Kukla himself, being able to bind the 12 essence 8 elemental guardians that would answer the call before the dragon and ultimately the Kukla...


Hmmm now that you mention it... there ARE 13 deathlords :twisted:
 
and if they can pull the timing off, Yu-shan only gets about four hours of warning, before The kukla is free
 
That, however, requires a Deathlord tag-team, and I'm willing to bet none of the others would want to get Eye and Seven Despairs in on it.
 
Eh, if I were a Deathlord I'd be much less worried about Eye and Seven Despairs compared with Mask of Winters. E7D is creepy and pathetic but as long as you just phrase it in terms of how it'll hurt his deathknights, or offer him a frilly pink dress for the next bizarre gender-bending identity he decides to create, he shouldn't be that hard to manipulate.


Meanwhile Maskie has fully half his resources devoted exclusively to screwing the other Deathlords over. The potential for him figuring out how to use the Kukla Summoning to ruin everybody else's day is immense.
 
One interesting thing about the setting: The roots of the Elemental Pole of Wood are in the Underworld, in the Labyrinth specifically, with a massive city made of soulsteel hanging from it.
 
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