Who is the ISIS of your campaign setting?

Who is the ISIS of your campaign setting?

There actually are two settings I use. The Forgotten Realms has groups of racial supremacists who are quietly rebuilding abandoned elven settlements with their own people to build up numbers for a strike at the dirty humans, while my own custom setting has no real parallel groups, since the Pantheon personally steps in to kick groups like that around. Think Dogs in the Vineyard, only the avatars of demigods personally accompany some people on missions and pop in on towns for Q&As.

>Think Dogs in the Vineyard, only the avatars of demigods personally accompany some people on missions and pop in on towns for Q&As
Tell me more.

Long story short, the Pantheon tried the whole 'lead from afar' and 'lead in person' things and they were utter failures that resulted in the total and absolute collapse of civilization and the casualties of about 19/20ths of the
sentient people of the world. So, the three out of forty two deities who survived just now hold town hall meetings every so often, so the people can hear their words directly, all the churches and so forth are abolished so nobody has an excuse to fight over the will and interpretations of the deities, and every so often, they'll send Avatars along with adventurers to destroy ancient, divinely-or-Chaotically infused artifacts that are too dangerous to use or to touch.


Back to the topic, there are no religious terrorists any more, though just before the 'present day' of the setting, there was a rough equivalent of the ancient mongols who managed to unearth some Prohibited magical superweapons and used them to create a massive zombie army. She had to jump through every hoop to conceal what she was doing from the Pantheon, since they would have vaporized her entire country to get to her if they knew what she was doing, and she very nearly did do that to the country she was invading. She gambled that the Pantheon wouldn't destroy an innocent nation, so she moved her zombie army into it and started taking over, to use the civilians as living shields. The Pantheon started destroying the country anyway, so her brother stepped up and cut her head off, and the zombies just fell apart.

Elves.

The Party

I mean, if we're going with religious extremists, it has to be a faction/entity that goes variously by the name Operators, [the] Unity, or in the case of the few individuals of the insectoid hivemind society, Highqueen.

They're basically the Borg, but a hive mind who believe disconnected lifeforms are heretics, and so attempt to forcibly make them "repent", i.e. connect to their hive. This doesn't end well for 95% of lifeforms they encounter.

In terms of non-OC content: I'm running a slightly adapted version of Sundered Skies right now, removing certain post-apocalyptic elements from the setting (less post-apoc survival horror and more Final Fantasy 12 / Monster Hunter 4) but the Loyalist Elves are all basically huge racists and faaaaaairly much just Lucius Malfoy from the second Harry Potter movie.

Veeky Forums

Nobody really? I mean, there's probably some failed human state out there in somewhere, but when the Gods are a definite existence that act in verifiable ways in the world, religious conflict tends to be a bit . . . ehhhh. I mean, go on and kill each other all you want for your human reasons, but the Gods each have their roles and don't really have conflict with each other. Or identities as recognizable to mortals.

So slaughtering the followers of another god in the name of your own usually leads to either a) Nothing happening because the Gods don't really care that much about mortals killing each other for mortal reasons, or b) fucking your shit up hard and fast because you disturbed something the other God actually cared about, and when one Gods "flow" is disturbed it disturbs the flow of the other Gods who view creation as more of a performance art piece than anything else.

Just to be clear, it's probably going to be ALL the Gods fucking your shit up. And probably that of anyone around you. And it's not even going to be personal or anything but just to try and balance out whatever abysmally stupid cock-up you just did.

Religions are pretty much the study of Divinity and trying to interpret the meaning of reality as a performance, and also trying to predict what not to do to cock it up and disrupt the Gods. Religious violence happens between people saying "We definitely shouldn't do this thing, no matter how much money we could make", people saying "You really, really shouldn't do this thing" to like, Kings and shit, and most of all between the Religious sects that say "We should try not to ruin it, as part of the piece we have a role to play and we should try to understand what it is" and the Religious sects that say "We're part of the piece, but unique in that we can act on how it develops just as the Gods, so we don't have a set role to play and we should try to learn how to act with the Gods instead of for the Gods."

the tribal people of not!Arabia that are rebelling against the kingdom of the south

That sounds like a boring campaign. Why not take a page from real world eligions where gods can be convinced to aid a battle through sacrifices, some gods are enemies of each other, gods might try to have their own people be attacked because the lack devotion, theres a god for virtually everything etc. A combination of remote, petty and super concerned with human affairs seems more gameable than peaceful gods who never have conflict.

Hizb-ut-Amriki, an Islamic terrorist group native to the United States in 2055 and active in Chicago, St Paul and San Angeles. I run a cyberpunk setting.

Elves here too. Damn forest elves who eat people and own like half of the continent because it's untamed wilderness.

The Mistral. They're an anti-human, anti-Imperial terrorist militia, rebelling against the xenophobic human Empire. They were commonly employed by small and mid-level nobleman inpetty disputes and squabbles when they couldn't afford to get their hands dirty - burn and pillage some neighbouring villages, murder some people, the works.

Lately though the organization has become much more fundamentalist and fanatic, going from simple bandits with a code to downright fanatics who believe it is their moral duty to instigate as much people as possible, so they can rise in rebellion and dismantle the Empire

Without realizing that, in fact, they are kept in check by being funded and aided by the Emperor himself, deftly using their "victories" as fans to increase the anti-rebel sentiment, all while consolidating power on himself and reamassing a huge army

Not the most original of creations, but clichés work for a reason

...

My players are like that too

Onward warriors of the Monolith, avenge your fallen brothers, blessed as they are in their eternal union with the Monolith.

Are they knife ears? Why does everyone make their elves so dickish?

The players. They're basically space ISIS. They use suicide bombers, IEDs, spacecraft-based and vehicle-based IEDs, and have brought a Grand Cruiser crashing into a hive.

Islamists, just like in real life.

Players.PDF

They don't in my setting, There's large-scale wars, but they're not about race.

>Paladin of violent god
>Cleric of the same
>Barbarian
>Ranger
>pyromaniac Sorceror
Let's face it. It's us.

Nobody.
The world isn't as advanced to know terrorism.

If you meant who are the settings Arabs then Orcs worshiping a great old ones philactery is the answer.

same here

Came here to say this

Me

Yes we are.

Any of the numerous cults of the Dark Symmetry in Mutant Chronicles could cover this angle. I might try a narrative like this next time I get a game going.

they're a coalition of elves (which have been forcibly displaced from their homeland and into indentured servitude), dwarves (forcibly annexed into the empire) and other, non-human races that make up the rest of the group.

They're not dickish per se, rather, they are dickish because of years of personal and institutional discrimination and open violence - imperial creed is basically HFY