EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Well, it wasn't D&D, but I was a player in a Dungeon World game and we ended up killing effectively wizard demigods. The TL;DR: different schools of magic had special Towers, which had to be constructed over places of power, usually intersections of underground (visible) ley line energy conduits. Each Tower had its own Avatar, chosen by whatever method the Tower's originally establishing wizards preferred. All told, there were five towers to start with, but the number changed a bit over time due to our interventions:The Religion in D&D thread made me think about how much I enjoy the RPG storyline of killing a god. It could be a minor god, a big animal like in Princess Mononoke, a tentacled thing from beyond the world worshiped by a cult, or facing off against a major god in their own plane. These stories are always so epic to me, and something I really enjoy.
When have you or your group faced off against a god in a D&D game?
- The Black Tower of Necromancy: We destroyed it down to its very foundation, which released a huge amount of evil magic into the world, much of which was absorbed by other Avatars. This was...not good, so we had some cleanup work to do. I'm afraid I don't remember what its Avatar was called, as he/they didn't deign to appear at Avatar gatherings.
- The Red Tower of Evocation: Survived, but temporarily went on the warpath as a result of the above evil-magic stuff. Led by the Incendiary. She temporarily became the "Inferno" after absorbing the evil magic, and tried to assault another Tower. We never actually visited this tower, but we did defeat the "Inferno" and strip away the evil magic, restoring her to being the Incendiary.
- The Gold Tower of Enchantment: We erased its magic, but not the physical Tower itself, allowing a new one to replace it (see below). Led by the Allmind, a psycho-enchantment hive mind of many different wizards. He was (or perhaps "they were") even more screwed up by the evil magic, and basically went full Borg, but we took them down and eventually persuaded them to let go of the magic (hence why the tower went dormant rather than being destroyed).
- The Rose Tower of Song: Bard magic! The TL;DR here is that a White Tower wizard (see below) entered the tower from its base, while the "Inferno" tried to lay claim to the tower from its apex. This resulted in a new Tower that blended Gold, Red, and White magic: illusions and beguilement, energy and passion, and precision and words, blended together. She became the Novelist, and was relatively cooperative.
- The Green Tower of Conjuration: Another affected by the evil magic. Led by Summoner Prime Starmaster, whom we defeated as she/they were trying to found their own new Black Tower but under the Summoner Prime's control. By using the Tower's magic, we instead inverted the evil necromantic energy, and used it to bring back a race of rabbit-people that had nearly gone extinct. All of them were green-furred as a result, and probably natural Conjurers. The Tower still stood, but we did defeat its Avatar and stripped them of their power; a new one would need to be chosen.
- The White Tower of Artifice: My personal contribution to the mix. The White Tower was among the oldest towers, and had weathered problems like this before. Its Avatar, the Archivist, was a genuinely good sort. She worked to make the world a better place through magical tools that anyone, not just wizards, could use. Bit stuffy though, very by-the-book. She essentially allied with our party.
The game ended about two or three sessions before we would have hit the true final conclusion, where my character would have attempted to become the Avatar of a new Tower of divine magic, filling the void left by the Black Tower's destruction (since that would have remained a problem no matter what). He would use a place of power belonging to Bahamut, his deity, to invoke a Platinum Tower of Life: a place of healing and succor, but also one that demands respect for Death (whom my character had a...complicated relationship with), hunting undead things and allowing people a safe, sanctioned way to commune with the dead. The act of magic that I intended to establish the Tower was that we had recovered a whole caravan load of captured souls--souls that couldn't go to Death's realm, but that weren't technically alive either, among them my character's wife. The idea was to call on Bahamut, use the special artifact sword I had assembled, and parley with Death one final time to give these lost souls a chance to die properly, as they were supposed to, rather than being stolen away from both life and Death himself. This would have been the origin of the dragonborn race in this world: my character, and all the people brought back by the ritual, would be remade as dragonborn.