How would you go about creating an otherwise normal D&D campaign with New Phyrexia as the ultimate antagonist?
How do you introduce them in your setting? How powerful do you make them? Are they the villains from the start or they hijack a more typical BBEG halfway through?
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You'd want to start them off in a similar way to how the block did, have small amounts of oil corrupting things subtly at first. Remember though that they only had such an easy time corrupting Mirrodin because everything on it had some metal.
You'd want a world like Eberron where machinery is more common. This allows them to take over warforged and more ambitious artificers.
I wouldn't start with a traditional BBEG. Instead, have the players trying to prevent or stop a war brewing between two major nations. That can then transition to the goal of needing to unite them to try and fight off phyrexian incursions.
Remember that Phyrexians value progress, evolution, and survival of the fittest, so they should be making use of any tech they don't have as well. New Phyrexia is solidly Bant in terms of color identity, though that is arguably just due to how things worked out there. You could have them end up going another direction.
Well, could a paladin redeem-succubus Elesh Norn?
Because the players will try to waifu her
>Because the players will try to waifu her
I don't play with scum
Forgot to say, power level should bask ally be N+1 with regards to whatever the strongest thing they can get is.
If they've only gotten a hold of a warforged? Their foot soldiers will be min-maxed versions of them, likely with blades instead of arms and dark vision to help hunt down targets. If the strongest thing is a metallic dragon, expect them to amp it up so it's even more of a beast of destruction.
user pls
Also, how about an adventure in a plane the Phyrexians already control, where the players are among the very few un-corrupted beings?
At that point, it's basically post apocalyptic survival horror. You'd need a way to track corruption, but even then you're gonna be up against the most terrifying Phyrexian creations.
That sounds pretty rad
>fascinating.png
user I don't think you know the actual meaning of that face
Well, I suppose it could be. If you're a small enough threat, they may simply,use you as a testbed for new foot soldiers and creations. It'd be easy to just stomp you with a giant robot, so instead they just try and see what works and what doesn't on an infantry scale.
Directly facing the Praetors might be a bit too much. One can use this new hotness
Well, I was kind of going with the idea of Oil landing on a more typical fantasy world and progressing from there. I'm using the block events as a reference because it's the main example we have.
Obviously one won't fight the praetors eight away, if at all. Instead it's more about strange metallic creatures appearing and any existing machines getting corrupted. It shouldn't be clear what's behind it until it's almost too late.
Naturally, Atraxa can be the boss fight that signals the start of that point in a long-running campaign where the players 'take the fight to the enemy.'
Redpill me on these "Phyrexia" guys, who are they? Where are they from? Who is that cutie with the silly helmet and why is she covered in blood?
Long version:
In ancient times there was an evil planeswalker who made a plane where the lines of machine and flesh blurred. It was very similar to Mirrodin. The dark planeswalker ultimately died or fell into eternal slumber at the core of the plane. It had the shape of 9 nested spheres, basically being a series of hollow planes inside each other.
Eventually this plane was discovered by the Thran planeswalker Dyfed. A renegade Thran scientist, doctor, and artificer by the name of Yawgmoth convinced Dyfed to take him to this plane. (Planeswalkers could take mortals between planes before the Mending.) Yawgmoth enjoyed "fixing" damaged peoples by replacing parts of them with artifice, a process he called Phyresis. Thus so enraptured by the living artifice of the artificial plane, he named it Phyrexia. Yawgmoth ultimately set up shop there and started working on the planes inhabitants and began a lot of plans that eventually caused a lot of shit to go down, but is not really relevant to get into, then died. But Phyrexia had become more than Yawgmoth, it had taken in Yawgmoth's ideals and all the blueprints of his creations and condensed it into a fluid. This fluid has been tracked around the multiverse, and eventually some even dripped onto Mirrodin, causing Phyresis to spread naturally amongst the living artifice of that plane as well. Given time the phyresis has taken over Mirrodin, which has now been named New Phyrexia.
The cutie with the helmet is one of the constructed leaders of New Phyrexia, and she doesn't have skin because she doesn't need skin.
Short version:
evil magic zombie robots
Think the Borg from TNG, but more body horror, suffering from rapid infighting after the loss of their creator/machine god, capable of interplaner travel, and can come back from extinction, even after being literally reduced to a trickle of oil that someone tracked in by accident, because "NanoMachines son".
Oh also, think about the Borg if they existed in a fantasy setting, that happened to have magical machines, and theres no species 8472 to get in their way.
Yawgmoth wasn't an artificer. He was a surgeon who believed in eugenics, and enjoyed releasing plagues on populations for 'research purposes'. He also seemed to have a thing for pithing and vivisecting things.
As well, there WERE no inhabitants, beyond the dragon engines. It became inhabited first by the diseased of the Thran capital, and later by the rest of the population when the city got hit by its own magical nukes during a civil war (caused by every other Thran city wanting Yawgmoth gone, but the man having wormed his way into the council and managed to be Too Indispensible)
I suppose you could go with the standard 'You're aware of this threat but nobody is doing anything, time to get out there and make alliances before the world falls apart'. Which might then devolve into a resistance, post-apocalyptic sort of game if the fight doesn't go well.
If he wasn't an artificer how did he practice phyresis in the first place?
He's just a meat artificer unlike other Thran.
W-what is "Artífice"?
So they are magic oil that turns people into fleshy robots ruled bt cute, flayed girls with silly helmets?
Outstanding! So whats their endgame? Turning all organics into oil? Become gods?
They want to bring the perfection of Phyrexis to all corners of the multiverse. They like to compleat people.
They're not all qt either.
Artifice is a system of magical engineering in Magic's setting. It encompasses nearly every form where magic and science blend, whether it's cybernetics, robotics, fabrication, creation, repairing, assembling, and the application of items of every sort. Phyresis is essentially becoming a robot zombie, piece by piece of the body being replaced by living machine.
The process of achieving total phyresis is called Compleation. The Phyrexian's main goal is to Compleat everything.
Their motto is "All will be one". They desire the assimilation of all life into their ranks. Some take this more literally than others (the cute grill's faction merges people's bodies together with a porcelainesque metal
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Because phyresis ISN'T replacing stuff with artifice, it's progressive improvement, the opposite of phthisis - the disease causing progressive degeneration that he was brought in to cure. Not every Thran was an artificer, even - he just happened to be brought to the city to cure the most brilliant one, proceeded to not do that, took over, and used some of that guy's notes combined with the fancy metal plane filled with oil that he was gifted to turn people into biomechanical horrorzombies
We don't know for certain if the Furnace has been destroyed. The ONE thing that everything is pulling that from is not only from Elspeth's view, but the portion that it says it from says that they have limited information and that she BELIEVES it. She seems more certain that Koth is dead than that Norn is in control, yet Koth is confirmed still alive.
The null-red of Atraxa implies that even if Urubrask lives, his voice and faction have no say in Phryexia as a whole.
Atraxa marks the final victory in the Phyrexian conquest of Mirrodin. Once a Mirran angel who opposed Phyrexia's corruption, she was captured while single-handedly protecting a Mirran retreat. The praetor Elesh Norn honored the angel's tenacity with the blessed gift of Phyrexian compleation, inviting other praetors to contribute. Urabrask declined, but Jin-Gitaxias, Sheoldred, and Vorinclex all agreed to join Elesh Norn's efforts, and Atraxa was born—an awe-inspiring testament to Phyrexia's singular purpose.
Urabrask continues to give 0 fucks about anything other than his furnace
So, Phyrexians have an advanced level of technology, and I assume they are very powerful in magic and direct combat.
How could the adventurers defeat them?
By using this girl.
Some people are immune to the glistening oil. This may be because she was born free of metal, unlike most of Mirodin's population.
Besides the leadership, most individuals aren't magically talented nor very intelligent. They rely on numbers, fear tactics, and being more tenacious to win fights.
Leadership are all nutty powerful though, especially the praetors.
Defeating individuals isn't too difficult. What's harder is the long term of purging the corruption from oil.
It's not clear if that's even possible, though if you managed to catch it early enough it could possibly be contained. If there isn't a lot of metal available, the Phyrexians will also struggle with numbers.
Karn was cleansed of it but he is quite the special snowflake.
>It's not clear if that's even possible
Melira can cure others of the oil's taint.
Furthermore, the planeswalker's spark is by some measure mutually incompatible with compleation. Gaining a spark destroys compleation and compleation destroys a spark.
Fair. Still quite rare/difficult to do. You'd have to still be winning handily before you can put that to use on a solid victory.
What would the Phyrexians do with stereotypical D&D baddies?
What would Jin-Gitaxias do with, say, mindflayers? What would Vorinclex do with orcs? Would anyone willingly join the machine orthodoxy looking for greater power? Or would they join up with the stereotypical good races and try to defend their plane?
She was born free of metal BECAUSE she's immune to the glistening oil, not the other way around.
People on Mirrodin have metal bits because of low-level mycosynth spore infections, and mycosynth is a fungus infected with the Oil. Melira's immune to it due to being immune to the oil period, but if someone who had no metal bits (from being born elsewhere) came into contact with the oil, they wouldn't be immune.
Succubi are demons, which are affiliated with chaos. The machine orthodoxy is lawful evil.
Mindflayers would be a tasty target for compleation, due to their mental strengths. Orcs would likely be converted for maximum berzerking potential, just big hulking mindless gorillas with axe blades grafted on their arms.
Phyrexians will take anything and mish mash it into a biomechanical servant.
As for joining willingly, alchemists or scientists who find samples of the oil early on may go too far with their experimentation, inadvertently advancing the cause, compleating themselves and and research subjects.
Once it gets to open warfare, you get less outright traitors, as their motives are more clear.
Incubi/succubi are Neutral evil fiends coming in both devil and demon flavours
It's from his planeswalker spark. Having a functioning planeswalker spark and being a phyrexian are mutually exclusive. I'm not sure if a phyrexian can have a smothered-non functioning spark or if the very process of compleation destroys it. IIRC phyrexian's have no soul and the way the spark works is it needs to be connected to a functioning soul at all times to continue to exist. If you die your soul leaves your body, and if you were a walker and get brought back to life, your spark is gone. (Elspeth is a possible exception, probably because she died on theros and the nature of theros' afterlife). My understanding is Karn lost his spark and then another walker gave Karn his own, in the process reversing Karn's compleation and purging the blessed oil from his body.
I'm not saying your always wrong, but you certainly are in at least one edition.
if it was based on old Phyrexia - At start they find ocassional signs of sleeper agents/replaced servants who have guided the various villains into weakening the world's defenses. Maybe takes a while to figure it out. Then as it reaches the mid levels, invasion starts. Face off against old foes brought back as new rebuilt and stronger necro things. End with plane hopping strike into plane they are attacking from. Epic level stuff if need be, can be against their homeworld.
New Phyrexia? Design some praetors. Give each one an agenda. Run a normal setting, where your playyers can gather the free people to fight, or try to play the factions to gain an edge,
Honestly, the players' best bet of actual success is if the two ideas are combined - New Phyrexia invading elsewhere slowly, with its praetors currently working together to claim another world, but such cooperation being tenuous.
It'd start out the same way as the Old Phyrexia threat, yes, but once they hit the planehopping stage, instead of having the monolithic force of an entire world trying to murder them - and only stopping once they have annihilated said plane to its very core - they have the chance of attempting to play the factions against one another. Weaken one and another might pounce on it, trick another into thinking they were attacked by a fourth unprovoked, that kind of thing. If they're busy fighting one another, that's less effort they're putting into trying to conquer your OWN world.
He just means if, like succubi, Elesh Norn could be turned good from lawful good dickings.
I doubt about Norn, but Atraxa...
My setting has a phyrexian invasion about 300 years in the past, They were going through a golden age of artifice after a series of wars when machine cults started springing up. They went after the underground races such as the drow and dwarves first (wiping out deep gnomes among other races) and spread by their cults throughout the land. This lead to the Drow and Dwarves blowing up their own cities and dropping mountains on their settlements when Phyrexians invaded, the dwarves also put entire Myconid colonies to the torch instead of risking Phyrexians getting ahold of them (this wiped out the myconids)
After two years, the remaining leaders of races got together and their armies started pushing back using weapons and spells of mass destruction on compleation pits the phyrexians had established on the plane. They eventually "defeated" them by siphoning all of the magic energy in one particular area into a bomb and dropping that through the largest portal to Phyrexia.
That land is called the Northern Wastes now and is a dead magic zone
Drow had most if not all of their insane motherfuckers killed, so they eased off on the rape, backstabbing, torture, and hedonism of their previous society.
Most elves (other than drow) who were alive at the time push strongly against technology and the elvish liberation front actively commits terrorism against technological hubs
Dwarves are split between digging out their old settlements and being afraid that some phyrexians survived and will wake up if they do so.
Humans hardly remember anymore than the story at this point, same with halflings.
Gnomish culture was destroyed and they are a shell shocked race, they have responded by seeing what culture should look like and emulating it without understanding why you do things certain ways.
The Phyrexians ended up wiping out several races including Aarakocra and Goliaths. They are still alive and invading a neighboring GoW style plane.
Could Norn be turned with Chaotic Good dickings?
Now do a long version for people who don't know what Dyfed, Yawgmoth, Mirrodin, planeswalkers, "artifice", Thran, etc. are.
Thran were ancient humans who were good at a lot of shit
Yawgmoth was good at being a dickhead
Dyfed was a planeswalker (Planeswalkers are beings that can hop between planes of existence in a setting where that is really hard to do and near godlike wizards before the mending) she thought Yawgmoth could introduce her the guy she was crushing on and she helped him establish Phyrexia.
Yawgmoth thanked her for this by shoving a special knife in the back of her head and cutting the still living Dyfed open to see if he could find a planeswalking organ (spoiler: he couldn't)
Artifice is combing magic and technology
Mirrodin is a metal plane that was made by the Silver Golem, Karn, who got a planeswalker spark (what lets planeswalkers planeswalk) through shenanigans. Unfortunately he also had a bit of oil in him because the wizard who made him used a phyrexian heartstone to power him (WIZARDS!) so Mirrodin got corrupted.
Mirrodin's warden went from a robot to fat shirtless guy stapled to a robot who brought people from all across the multiverse and had them fuck to see if he could find a planeswalker and then extract their spark (Spoilers: he couldn't) After he was killed/turned back into evil metal monkey's paw, the corruption of Phyrexia got worse and Mirrodin had a shit one.
No, because you would be flayed alive and compleated long before you could accomplish anything.
A couple things:
You could have the players learn how their home was made. Have them be introduced to Memnarch and learn that they basically live in a giant fish tank to be farmed for a planeswalker spark. Maybe drive in the point that they are basically useless to what equates to their God because they lack this spark.
I think it's also important to capitalize on how intimate a threat like the Phyrexians can feel. Think of anyone you idolize becoming a grotesque bastardization of their previous self. In some cases giving up their cause simply to spread what they see as "perfection". Now imagine entire towns, family's, friends or anyone you hold dear falling to this seemingly omnipotent force. Then add some body horror. You've basically got a threat that mixes drug PSA's The Borg and Body Snatchers.
This is why I love this plane so much.
What is the appeal of Norn and Atraxa being waifus?
I'm not seeing the qt3.14 connotations to either character's form.
They look like they'd rather eat you alive.
Well, it's quite obvious. They're female and...that's about it.
They have nice legs and a better figure than most actual people. Honestly I've met people uglier in both body and mind than either one.
>Honestly I've met people uglier in both body and mind than either one.
Damn, son, pics or it didn't happen.
>They have nice legs and a better figure than most actual people.
>They're female and...that's about it.
Dammit, I almost got a boner when I went back and saw Atraxa in that light.
I'm not doing creep shots of my customers. It's unprofessional and I don't know how to hide it very well.
thats not why he was cured. his body was purged of it by Melira who had figured out how to project her immunity into a healing spell of some kind. Kinda like how the imperium takes Blanks and weaponizes their immunity to the warp.
She stated his heart itself was too far gone for her to cure, so venser performed heart surgery using portals with his own heart as the transplant. Exile the old heart and teleport his nice fresh clean heart into karn.
Since the fact the people living on Phyrexia has metal bits as a result of the Mycosynth which only exists because of the oil, and Koth is a walker and Gissa was, it throws a bit of a wrench into things that they are mutually exclusive.
>war between two nations
A wizard or cleric on one of the sides attempts a planar summoning to tip the odds in their favor, except the gate opens to somewhere unexpected.
The phyrexians seem controlable at first, even cooperative. A bargain is made, the first phyrexians quickly show up on the battlefield.
The rest writes itself.
>assembling
not yet it isn't
or he does and he has very particular equestrian tastes
Personally, I think it'd be more interesting to have it simply be oil at first. Some leaking into the wilderness, others being found by the wizard on one side and used by experiments.
Having it start off as a clear entity gives the mystery away a bit too early I feel.
That still leaves the question as too how the black oil got their in the first place
Maybe a random dying phyrexian got gated in by accident and started "leaking" all over the place.
>the party's face when they discover the source of this mysterious new plauge is a strange biomechanical corpse
That's probably an easy explanation. Ultimately it's not too key how it got there though, so long as it has somewhere to spread to.
Bumping with phyrexian cutie.
...
...
Its the hips and the long limbs. Elesh in particular has the proportions of a very attractive woman, and part of your brain is registering that, while the rest of it is probably recoiling at the fact that she's a flayed and porcelain covered monstrosity.
So, if I understand correctly, all you need is a Phyrexian Whateverscalledator to spit oil on you and you're pretty much done for?
Seems like any campaign like that would be really lethal
>evil
Lies and slander.
And given that tg is tg, that's a plus for most of us.
Probably not spit and more blood from dying, but that's why it'd need to be a sorce of score that would slowly creep up over time.
It's definitely a campaign with more dark horror leanings.
>How powerful do you make them?
More powerful than on Mirrodin if you want them in a "standard" setting
Every one and thing on Mirrodin was already full of oil (through the Mycosynth)
The Phyrexians' work was already half done
On most planes, you get something more like post-Yawgmoth Dominaria
There's oil in pretty large chunks of space, and if left unchecked it can acquire forces, but as long as it's receiving attention it's not a significant threat
A bard can save the world by chaotic good-dick Elesh Norn
Problem is, his dick will get flayed.
Is your bard a heroic enough dude to do it?
*Everyone and everything
For example, how high a CR should the Praetors have? An obliterator?