What strange and ancient powers are hiding in the wild corners of your world, Veeky Forums?

When the god who forged the ring designed it, he included an inlay of mechanisms that would shift and move over time. This was so when his wives examined the ring, it would never appear the same.

Mortal scientists observe these movements as tectonic shifting.

In a mountain that rests on a peninsula in the eastern hemisphere, there is a great palace. Within it's ivory cathedrals is a throne.

Should a woman sit upon the throne, tenderly holding the heart of Re Asnmh, the god torn asunder, she would control the motions of the day, the tide of the seas, the spine of mountains.

She would also command the dragon and her children

The unstoppable power of synchronicity.

Those that are favoured by fate dodge swings without even trying to, arrows always miss them, random leads they chase always end up with instant and critical results. They always find the weak spot in an opponents armour with a random swing. Money and favour flow to them with what seems like the greatest luck ever.

Opposing that your ultimate champion dies when his Achilles heel is randomly stuck by a peasants dropped pitchfork, every quest ends in failure or at best mixed results. Their armour rusts, they're forgotten in place of people way below their talent.

There are 12 Gods in my setting, all with different aspects and all are worshipped by all. It's just that only one of them is actually real and bestows favours.

There's a king and an adviser who are waging mass war on all around them and the king is considered to be a bloodthirsty monstrous dictator.

In reality there's a sleeping ancient demon below his kingdom who's slowly perverting his soul and his adviser is the lackey of the demon who failed to awaken him during the king's father's reign and is trying again by large blood sacrifices.

None of the PCs know

Fragments of the First God. The bigger they are, the more power they have.

Said power can gift someone with anything from unbreakable courage to harnessing nature itself and shaping the landscape as their possessors seem fit.

The fabled power everyone seeks is defying the Second God's restriction on pyre and ban on the harnessing of thunder.

Also there are effigies created by slowly escaping malignant spirits that the First God kept at bay, but the Second God doesn't know about. Still haven't figured what they do apart from making people that own them make horrible life choices.

Bump for more interesting ideas that I can steal.

The eastern continent's God of Death has hidden herself for millennia since her followers took to worshiping the corpse of an elder god that is the Moon. What few followers remain have hidden themselves in the airship-driven courier services, delivering packages, correspondence, and assassinations for the right price and number of stamps. They also fight ghosts.

On the Island where an imprisoned eldritch horror with mastery over time is kept, the locals have built many things they see in the visions that plague them night by night. These include a functioning smith & wesson 9mm pistol (with no bullets) a saxophone, and exactly one half of an airplane.

In the east, the fortress-city of Eganjo-Cho gotta get my dumb references in there somewhere has been at war with the confederation of the Akashan Plains for centuries. However despite being absurdly outnumbered and outgunned, they stand tall and implacable to this day. The secret behind this lies in the city being built upon a site where thousands of years ago, a Daemon of Grit was born when ram killed a pride of lions and died from its wounds rather than relinquish its grazing spot. The Daemon supplies magic and tactics to the people of the city unbeknownst to all but their leader, in exchange for hidden sacrifices and worship.

Also the dead corpse of the moon is actually still alive. Or well, not entirely dead.

...

A blade wielded by an emissary of the creator long ago.

The blade itself is a key on a pedestal which seals a far greater evil said emissary could not defeat, said pedestal and sword also acts as a key to open a gate to the realm of the creator. It lies at a very important point only noted of on certain stone obelisks scattered across the world, each one carrying a clue to the sword's location. A location where both light and shadow meld, connected to the lines of power that permeate the world.

...

The centerpiece of my current campaign is an archipelago of islands that became a common destination for outcasts and exiles harboring a hodgepodge of cultures and cults.

As such, abandoned Mesoamerican-style Pyramids are now great places of worship for demon lords due to the inherent magic within, and the campaign is about hopping islands, doing piracy and shutting down these cults one by one, before they open gates of hell. And the jungle environment gives precedence to twisting and raping nature magic, basically making trees into eldritch horrors.

Also it is believed that all clerics have god blood flowing through their veins because ages ago all gods were exceptional mortals walking the earth - like Greek heroes of mythology - who kept mating with people over the centuries. Demons and Demon Lords are bloodthirsty warmongers with godly blood in their veins. Diluted godlike blood leads to the birth of a 1st level cleric, and he basically unlocks his potential from that little spark as he goes. So basically Divine Sorcerer.

There is a town of ghosts living in perpetual Groundhog Day because of their goddess' love for them, frozen on the day before they'd have been otherwise destroyed and enslaved by a demon warmonger, and they don't understand what's going on. But the goddess' spell causes the living to go insane -- IF they ever disturb the bodies. An insane necromancer living off mold and dirty water is the only living person in this town.

...

Dragons. Hundreds of them.
Slumbering through the start of the new age, in secret, well hidden places, fearing a threat long since passed.
Only two have awoken since that time, one rules the strongest kingdom known to man as its living God, and the other commands the loyalty of those creatures that infest the deep places far beneath the surface of the ocean.

Both are young and weak compared to their ancient kin, and fear that another will awaken.
They do not exercise much of their own magical power, for doing so may rouse some kin from their slumber, and upset their balance.

With the Gods quietened, and the heroes of old gone from mortalkind, should the great Draconic race rise once more, the world shall truly be theirs, and the mortal races nothing more than pawns, pets, and food.

Magic trees which were ancient temples to the old ones but the idols have now become gods themselves

All of the Fey Lord Patrons that exist in the world have a special tree or plant that is actually their true body and is distinguishable by the fact that it's vastly larger and especially hidden regardless of the environment it's in. More os, each one has a particularly large root that goes from it.

All the roots connect back to a single tree.

All of the Fey lord Patrons are actually the splintered mind of a magic AI construct from an ancient ship that crashed on the planet. She spread her roots out into the world to attempt to make the world more livable for the surviving humans. She still exists but she no longer can control her "children" and each one has altered the nature of their given area to their own whims.

Angels. They don't do a whole bunch, mostly because standing orders that humanity should perish or flourish on their own merit. Most of the time they sit around and watch, and occasionally when some outside force tries to bring humanity down on to large a scale they do the whole swords of holy flame thing.

Long ago, the world was ruled by three primordial great powers, locked in constant struggle for power over the others: The Dragons, the Titans, and the Djinn. They settled into an unsteady equilibrium for a time, only for that delicate balance of power to be thrown once more into chaos when the fae arrived, traveling from their own plane to carve out territories in the Prime in furtherance of their own age-old feud between the Seelie and Unseelie courts. The fae invasion cast the world into a great war of unprecedented scale and ferocity, as each of the great powers (now numbering five, with the addition of the two fae courts) scrambled to capitalize on the turmoil. This led to a magical arms race, ultimately culminating in a great Cataclysm that radically altered the face of the world.

The precise nature and origins of the Cataclysm are unknown, but it devastated the great powers, while somehow largely sparing the lesser races. The great powers were wiped out entirely, most of their number killed outright, while the survivors were reduced to mere shadows of their former selves: The terrible and cunning Dragons became the various animalistic drakes and drake-kin, the wise and powerful Titans became brutish giants and ogres, the reality-warping Djinn were stripped of their innate magic to become ashfolk, and the noble fey became the lesser elves that now populate the world. However, rumors abound that isolated survivors from the great powers still can be found in some remote corners of the world. Hidden caverns where true Dragons still slumber, paths deep in the mountains that lead to strange pocket-realms where a Titan still dwells, ruins buried in the desert where one may find a Djinni spared from the Cataclysm by his imprisonment in a bottle, faerie-rings deep in the forest marking the site of an ancient portal to the Faerie that may yet be stirred to life.

stop seeking validation for your shit taste

>Tower of the Elephant
>shit tastes
wut

it's what every pleb who has hardly touched howard touts as his best work when in reality it's one of his most heavyhanded, banal tales -- something to appease the same idiot masses who extol lovecraft or machen as the height of weird fiction

Lightning, when i strikes certain things, doesn't disapate as a flash and a bang, but continues to spark and flow. If left to it's own devices, it can empower whatever happens upon it, or eventually find something it can dissapate with. If found, and caught by a wizard, or anyone else who knows how, It can be used to power items, constructs and spells far more powerful than the norm.

A stillborn world, unfinished by its maker before they died.

Mine takes place in a modern/semi future Shadowrun setting.

"Long ago, when the pyramids were still young, Egyptian kings played a game of great and terrible power. But these Shadow Games erupted into a war that threatened to destroy the entire world until a brave and powerful pharaoh locked the magic away, imprisoning it within the mystical Millennium Items. Now, 5000 years later, a group of chucklefucks unlock the secret of the Millennium Puzzle. They are infused with ancient magical energies, for destiny has chosen them to defend the world from the return of the Shadow Games just as the brave pharaoh did 5000 years ago."

The greatest legend lost in the wilds of the world is a place known simply as the Library. Housed inside is said to be Geom, the Book of the World, which pages are said to contain the tears of the Void, used to shape existence at the beginning. Most don't remember the legend, and those that do see it as just a story, but there is the few that do believe and some even try to seek it out.

A more common wild treasure are thr stashes found in the tumuli of the old ogre Stone Lords scattered across the continent. Burial sites of ancient warlords and powerful geomancers that used to rule before man overthrew the ogres and enslaved them, they were entombed with various golden bobbles and gemmed items of old meaning and value.

The greatest piece in each mound would be the enchanted stone weapon of the Stone Lord. Made of polished stone and embued with runes, these weapons are great and unwieldy to most, and have grown heavy with age, absorbing magic from the roots around them, so only the mightiest can dream of using them. But its because of the magic they have grown fat on that makes these weapons desired. Whether a warrior seeking to use the enhanced power the weapon holds, or an arcanist seeking to break it apart and use the stored magic in its shards, many are willing to pay a hefty fee for such a prize.

Ah yes I see you are a true patrician. You hate all the right things. Low brow things like fun or anything that appeals to many people are below you. Most writers are all hacks. Not half as good as what you've been reading. All nonsense when you're enlightened by your own intellect. You're in good company. :^)

Remains of the power of the Old Gods, who ruled the world at the dawn of time. Eventually the veil between the world and the source of magic grew stronger, and the Old Gods could no longer physically exist in the world, so they retreated deep underground and below the sea to sleep away to aeons until they could rule again. However, in some places of the world their powers leak to the surface and their dreams alter the world around them.

Ruins of the Elder Ones, who lived at the same time as the Old Gods and worshiped them. Most of their cities and temples have long ago crumbled to dust, but in some places ruins of them remain. Such ruins tend to house strange and powerful artefacts, but are guarded by still functioning constructs and the veil tends to be weak around them, allowing creatures to slip through to reality.

The campaign has a vast mysterious ocean, in which nothing lives and undead at times flock out of the depth in great numbers.

This ocean is actually an incredibly vast, mostly dormant grey goo thats trying to collect enough organic processing power to reboot itself and eat the world.

The world is a ring, each section dominated by one of the classical elements. Within the donut hole of the world, sits The Keystone City; a metropolis orbiting a moonlet locked in the middle of the ring worlds' empty center.

On the moonlet is a tree, guarded by children.

Under the tree, lies a deadly dungeon, full of tests the primordials lay long ago to ensure that the power locked within would never be awoken, except when they themselves wanted to end the charade.

Kill the guardians, and you will come upon the remains of the creator god.

"It is not yet your time. But it could be."

Do the PCs have any clues for this truth?

This. 100 times this.

How are your characters going to kill the flood?

Somewhere beneath the ground lies the Hall of Echoes. A bridge between worlds (read: parallel universes). The Hall is a constant, and as such it appears, and is the same, in every world there is. No one knows if it was created by someone/something or if it's a natural occurrence.
One thing's certain: Even for those who are aware of its existence, reaching it is a true test of strength and resolve.

(It is also a way for me to be able to have a lore-friendly way for the party to continue with the same characters in another campaign)

A whole bunch of exotic WMD from the generic ancient magitech citystates (who were dimensional immigrants from GURPS Technomancer).

Echoing tunnels sealing a sentient plague wind, a tree-looking thing that's a primordial fire demigod used for orbital strikes, a force-field sheltered asteroid stocking corpses of condemned criminals in honeycomb for ICBM fuel...

One city survives locked inside a timebarrier, slowly devolving into Lovecraftian survival horror.

>linking the fucking wikipedia article instead of the actual story
Just read it. It's way more satisfying than a plot synopsis.

gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600831h.html

A piece of a dead god that was sealed away because it gives the user too much power.

Sure, that SOUNDS like something you want. But the reality of the situation is that it latches onto your strongest wants and desires, conscious or subconscious, and goes to fucking town with that regardless of what you say or think. And once you give it that initial push, you lose all control as the power runs rampant indiscriminately.

You want the power to fly? Congratulations, you and everyone within 20 miles of you turned into birds mutants.

You want to restore your youth? You and the entire city you are in regress in age to infants that never, ever grow any older again.

Etc.

Every few hundred years, some absolute fucking genius convinces himself he can control that power with sheer will or dark magic or something. Every fucking time he is wrong, and the results are catastrophic.

Jeeze, that's a long list.

Do you want to know about out past where the sun stops working, where the skyless desert that rings creation digests anything and everything it absorbs to grey dust? There are a few most ancient objects and structures that stand despite the corruption, which offer some kind of hope for survival, but no one has figured out their secret and whoever built them is long dead.

What about whatever force it is that drives men mad, out in the twilight on the edge of civilized lands? Making them latch onto obsessions, and letting those obsessions twist their body as it twists their mind until they are yet another unique monster that stalks the land?

Or perhaps the circles of ancient standing stones, which these maddened monsters can't approach and form the only safe places out in the wild? Safe being a relative term, of course. Most of the stone circles are abandoned, but others are gardens still immaculately maintained... and protected by the terrifying inhuman Bramble Knights.

Maybe you'd rather hear about the new lands and kingdoms that show up out of nowhere, with their talk about how the sun only working in certain places is insane, and bemoaning being trapped in some cruel prison. They can spin their theories, talking about their towns or cities coming from other times or other worlds, but all that matters to me is that every time one of them shows up, everything on the map gets switched around. Roads stop leading where they used to, safe places get pushed out towards the darkness... and occasionally placed get pulled back towards the light, bringing whatever monsters are there along for the ride and dropping them in my backyard.

Nice, I like the standing stones idea, Are there more details on them and the Madlands?

(pic probably not related)

All I got is this GURPS Old West game in which the players go out into Frontier Montana. There they are fighting the angry ancestral/nature spirits that had been disturbed by the hordes of settlers that flocked into the area for gold and fur

On today's episode of Veeky Forums, user rips off Diablo.

NPCs with PCs classes.
The Horror is so devastating that party wipes are common.

An ancient drip feed that keeps your body constantly charged with liquid phoenix down. The resurrective properties make the wearer nigh-undying. This does not make the dying and reviving process any less unpleasant, nor does it protect you from the short and long term effects of directly imbibing phoenix down while alive.

Well, the general theme of the setting is being trapped in a world that is in a constant slow state of ending, having to bring in new places to replace the dying ones as everything else gets slowly subsumed into the black desert. Go out into the desert far enough, and you start going downhill. And downhill. Until you reach a dropoff point into the abyss.

The circles of stones are made by what are essentially the settings version of the Fair Folk, who are presumed dead. They are not. Even discounting the Bramble Knights, who combine body horror with plants, there are some that infiltrate human cities for their own reasons.

Its hard to tell what they want, because they either can't or won't speak. They just go to human cities, do whatever it is they went there to do, and leave. The party has actually seen one already, they just don't know what the fuck it is. They say what looked like a woman go up to an old man who traveled out in the wastes in a bar, touch his check, and within moments thorn covered vines burst out of his organs and flowers sprouted from his mouth.

The madlands are just a strange property of the plane. The interesting thing about them is the monsters that it creates are, necessarily, evil. Just obsessed tot he point of insanity.

One of them is even kind of a good guy, or at least useful. One of the monsters people call the Cartographer. He goes around making maps and leaving them places for people to find, and pounding signposts into the ground. Which is really useful, given that the layout of the land changes dramatically every couple of months. So if you are out in the twilight and see a giant, four-legged spider looking motherfucker, striding between hilltops and scratching mad notes... leave him the fuck alone. He's cool.

There are two gods which don't exist for 364 days of the year. No one knows of them, except for those directly under their domains.

The Asides, as numerous as they are ignored. The healer with herbs on her hair, serving at the gap between two warehouses. The vagabond stalking at the corner, masking grudge and angst with words gently hollowed, a gaze of predatory anxiety. The drunk praying to his empty bottles, the meek giving orders for their own shadows, the unwanted orphan, at the corner with his broken toy. They go along with the loners, blessing them with the reflux of spirits, the pain before the relief, the eroding of good manners, the damp gunpowder, the beyond-the-limit.

The wild corners are right there, where no one pays attention to, or pretends not to notice. Everything big enough will have parts ignored by most. At a village, there'll be a grove which people avoid. At a castle, a well covered and forgotten behind the wall. At a city, neighborhoods bypassed by most. The dark of the night, filthy sewers, abandoned forts, where one worships the informal gods there's no one. At least, no one worth remembering.

This is the norm for 364 days of the year, but the 365th...

For one day, they sacrifice the civilization and sanity of the whole empire. Invoking fountains of drinks, talents to dance, phallugots to satisfy those without pair. After, inebriated with adoration and other things, both gods make everybody forget what happened.

The next day, one sees the true extension of the supernatural ignorance. No one finds odd that a relative is missing, some causeless disasters, another body floating at the river. No one, except for those marked by them. The newest beggar at the main street, whose fogged memories are further blurred by the power of alcohol, by the pain following the remembrance, by the effort with which the passerby ignore his words.

>the social change
Black powder has just been invented. A couple of decades ago a model city was built with a perfectly hermetic plumbing. Ships are getting bigger and with the help of sunstone navigation can bring commodities from much further lands than before. The printing press is changing the world with publications and newspapers popping up everywhere,bringing sages ever closer.
Whoever will be able to ride the waves will gain immense power.

I really like the general premise.
Multiple dimensions being slowly sucked down a drain.
Reminds me a little of a massively ramped up version of the Shadowlands of L5R. I might put a small tainted land with Avesbury in it as a base of operations for PCs in a game. Thanks.

No problem.

Metaphysically, I came up with a couple of different possible explanations for whats really going on, and I refuse to commit to any one of them because whats really going on should always be out of the grasp of the players. This isn't a problem they can solve.

Maybe this is the stomach of some giant eldritch monstrosity, literally taking bits out of other realities and digesting them.

Maybe this is some kind of prison plane, like Ravenloft.

Maybe the world has ended, and this is the last gasps of time and space crashing together before finally winking out of existence.

Maybe this started off as its own world suffering a calamity, and the fair folk are bringing land here to stave off their final destruction. Essentially throwing wood on the fire to make sure it doesn't go out.

Its hard to say for sure.

optional super-bosses hidden within low-level areas of past adventures.
those are the keepers of tools and knowledge too dangerous to leave at the hands of humans, and too valuable to destroy

>Demon of Grit
That's awesome. If demons worked that way in my setting I would steal that.

My players are figuring this out, but the world was constructed.
>everyone suddenly woke up 500 years ago with knowledge and cities, but incomplete languages and no idea how they got there
>not even the gods know
>the world is a fucking cube
>the players recently hopped from one face to another
>the sun and moon have square orbits
>the sun and moon are just big magical gems
>the stars are a big sphere of magical metal
>only four faces are livable, the top and bottom are frozen hellscapes
>each face has a number that shows up a lot (players moved from side 4 to side 3)
>demons live deep beneath the earth, imprisoned beneath slade and adamantine, longing to cleanse the world of life
>wild magic comes from the sun, usable magic comes from gods

Anyway, for the secret that actually matters
>When the Overgod was building the world, the moon hit the sun and knocked a chip off
>He was rushed so he just smoothed over the impact crater and buried the sun chip
>The sun chip radiates wild magic like crazy and gave rise to a whole bunch of weird creatures
>An archmage is now digging for the sun chip

Wait a minute...

The Font of Creation, the item used to make the world, still exists. While the Goddess of Creation slumbered, the Font was stolen from her. Her two sons, tasked with keeping the world in balance, coveted its power.

They warred, and during their struggle the Font was broken. The suffering caused from the War of the Gods awoke the Goddess, and in her fury, she banished her sons from the plane and hid what pieces of the Font she found somewhere deep in the earth.

Her sons were each clutching a piece of the Font as they were banished. With the Font incomplete, the Goddess was forced to use her remaining energy to mend the world, and she returned to sleep.

Her sons still use the residual power of their fragments to influence the material plane, scheming to free themselves from their exile somehow.

So, Tom Bombadil.

>it's a doomsday weapon/god/creation machine
Every time.

lots of undiscovered sapient races who are remnants of the armies the gods took with them to fight Humbaba.

Magically modified for various situations of combat to boot and sometimes in very niche ways.

Fun fact: Wylde Elves are mostly the same as 'old World' wood elves except for their ability to camouflage and teleport.

>black substance
>the blood of the Demiurge's body the world is made of
Wait a sec.

In my setting, there's a holiday were once a year, a train goes trough all the stations in the world, only allowing the 10 strongest/smartest people in the planet to enter, after that it brings them to a city in the skied where all of the people that once boarded the train live forever in peak condition

the reason for this is that in the center of the city lies dormant an ancient evil god, who wakes every millennia, so the city remains to beat the god to a pulp everytime it wakes (Or to severely weaken him, if he's strong enough to actually escape)

other things

>A Shack with an old man who's the only one currently able to craft a gun

>A Not!patapon tribe

>An underground civilization that brainwashes any intruder trough high octane electronic music

>A pond that whoever drinks it, will experience 3 years of his life flash by

>The pond next to it however, will create an illusion and give the most realistically disappointing and sad life you could ever imagine (Instead of becoming a slave of never ending madness, your wife leaves you for another in front of you, you get fired from your job, and everyone seems to be having a great time when they're not hanging out with you)

Not really OC, but I have a few ideas.

A hidden order where the sole purpose is to root out an ancient threat (cliche I know, but it fits into nearly any game)

A Rogue Trader idea I had was a small room in a ship where there is an absence of everything but one chair. When they sit down, the door disappears. Treat it as it were The Warp, but a rift in reality where nothing exists.

A ruin below the sea where it appears whoever resided there merely packed their items and left (I.E: Roanoke).

Few options,

One of the moons is an ancient space station that contains a mass reactive cannon that could be used to obliterate it.

There is an artifact that has the power to produce one temporary worm hole that could be set to send it somewhere nasty like the heart of a star or after heat death.

I might provide a way to reason with it but im on the fence about this.

Few options,

One of the moons is an ancient space station that contains a mass reactive cannon that could be used to obliterate it.

There is an artifact that has the power to produce one temporary worm hole that could be set to send it somewhere nasty like the heart of a star or after heat death.

There is a memetic virus that could turn it into water.

There is also a way to create and then seal it within a pocket reality.

I might provide a way to reason with it but im on the fence about this probably leaning towards no.

None.
Ours is literally the First of All Worlds. Our people are the ancestor of Everything That Will Ever Be and thus there's nothing more ancient than us.

>mass reactive cannon
If it's powerful enough to destroy the oceans I think it's going to destroy everything else on the planet too.
>wormhole into a star
Wormholes are 2 way paths, though. Opening a hole into a star would vaporize the planet in short order.
>memetic virus
Wouldn't the players also be at risk?
>seal it within a pocket reality
This one seems okay.
>Reason with it
I don't see how you could. Its only objective is to consume the world.

Or, more accurately, the Wandering Jew: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Jew