Chad Hooper
First Post
Howdy, all.
I'm a bit of a fan of some of the work of the metal band Iced Earth. Any of you who are familiar with the band probably are aware of the "Something Wicked" story line. For those who are not familiar with the band, a brief synopsis with minimum spoilers is that songwriter Jon Schaffer combined the theory that Man evolved somewhere else in the galaxy and colonized earth with the Christian concept of the Anti-Christ in a science fiction story line. The general gist of how the story plays out can be gathered from the tracks Prophecy, Birth of the Wicked, and The Coming Curse, all from the album Something Wicked This Way Comes. The story line is further fleshed out over the course of the two full length albums Framing Armageddon and The Crucible of Man, and, and some tracks from Plagues of Babylon belong to this story line as well.
Those of you who aren't into thrash and/or power metal can find track lists for the above albums on icedearth.com/discography and can likely find the actual lyrics on that domain or elsewhere via a search engine to read the story rather than listen to it.
The Something Wicked Campaign Setting, in my mind, would work well for a modern or near future dystopian setting, wherein the so-called Illuminati are the direct descendants of The 10,000 Elder who were morphed "in the likeness of Man". The rest of us are descendants of the invading race whose memories were wiped thousands of years ago by the magic of that original 10,000. Every disaster in human history, every assassination of a great leader, were really acts engineered by the descendants of the Elder to prevent us ever gaining enough knowledge and cohesion to learn our true nature or history.
That said, it could work in Medieval times as well (who brought plague rats to Europe?), 20th Century (was Hitler a descendant of the 10,000, a survivor of the original 10,000, or a human corrupted by an Elder agent?).
I could see using this background for an Ars Magica Modern campaign but it's likely a couple of years before I move my players over to that system, so if anybody likes this idea, please feel free to flesh it out and run with it. I may want to copy your notes in a couple of years, though!
I'm a bit of a fan of some of the work of the metal band Iced Earth. Any of you who are familiar with the band probably are aware of the "Something Wicked" story line. For those who are not familiar with the band, a brief synopsis with minimum spoilers is that songwriter Jon Schaffer combined the theory that Man evolved somewhere else in the galaxy and colonized earth with the Christian concept of the Anti-Christ in a science fiction story line. The general gist of how the story plays out can be gathered from the tracks Prophecy, Birth of the Wicked, and The Coming Curse, all from the album Something Wicked This Way Comes. The story line is further fleshed out over the course of the two full length albums Framing Armageddon and The Crucible of Man, and, and some tracks from Plagues of Babylon belong to this story line as well.
Those of you who aren't into thrash and/or power metal can find track lists for the above albums on icedearth.com/discography and can likely find the actual lyrics on that domain or elsewhere via a search engine to read the story rather than listen to it.
The Something Wicked Campaign Setting, in my mind, would work well for a modern or near future dystopian setting, wherein the so-called Illuminati are the direct descendants of The 10,000 Elder who were morphed "in the likeness of Man". The rest of us are descendants of the invading race whose memories were wiped thousands of years ago by the magic of that original 10,000. Every disaster in human history, every assassination of a great leader, were really acts engineered by the descendants of the Elder to prevent us ever gaining enough knowledge and cohesion to learn our true nature or history.
That said, it could work in Medieval times as well (who brought plague rats to Europe?), 20th Century (was Hitler a descendant of the 10,000, a survivor of the original 10,000, or a human corrupted by an Elder agent?).
I could see using this background for an Ars Magica Modern campaign but it's likely a couple of years before I move my players over to that system, so if anybody likes this idea, please feel free to flesh it out and run with it. I may want to copy your notes in a couple of years, though!
