Advanced beings for other settings and races

[DMH]

With the article on Dark Sun dragons in the near future, I have been tinkering around with varients of them. The biggest difficulty is determining what kinds of psionic enchantments (similar to quest spells) they should have since those are the key ability of advanced beings. Opinions on the following are requested:

Sahuagen clerics of the greatest power are allowed access to a spell that will change them into an advanced being, the megladon. As they level, they gain abilities to sink land into the sea, summon all scaled aquatic animals and magical beasts to their side, to summon unusually destructive weather and tsunammi, and gate in devils. They physically become giant sharks.

Sorcerers who gain the power to advance themselves become a dragon of the species whose blood they carry. This can be made interesting if the sorcerer doesn't know that he has a linnorm or lung wang for an ancestor. It can also be used for epic kobolds.

Necromancers (wizards) find there is a third existance, one between life and undeath. I have absolutely no idea what to call it, but it allows power over both. They gain their amazing powers by being one of the few things in the multiverse that contains both raw positive and negative energy. The ultimate aberration, both life and undeath slowly are destroyed in the presence of such a being.

Diviners (wizards) almost entirely fade from existance because they are almost in the whole timeline. They have four forms of sight- past, present, future and planar. Oracles used by the brave, these being cause insanity to those who look upon their multidimentional forms. I would use a stronger version of the mindbender template. They are limited to a certain geographical location, however (which can be as large as a nation).

Abjurers (wizards) form a almost stagnant spot in the multiverse. Except for gods, they dictate who or what can or can not enter or leave an area (which can be very large). Gods about to die sometimes ask these people for a place to hide that is outside the timeline, but only when other divine beings refuse them. Advanced abjurers also can dispel all gates and planar rifts from non-divine sources. This can be a bad thing depending on where the ocean comes from, if volcanos provide fertile soil, and the sun is a rift itself.

Artificers (Morningstar version) become machines powered by all the elements. They create artifacts that change the face of Thraxsis with very little effort. They gain power over all constructs and can convert any being to essential salts to power more. Such a being could be a threat to the Strangers or even the elven Empress.

Transmuters (wizards) become much more than a phasm. They can change everything around them, even mountain ranges and oceans with time. It maybe the first chaos beast was a failed attempt to advance by a transmuter. Treated as upstarts moreso than the others by the gods, these being have to tread lightly or face divine wrath.

Any suggestions for more versions?

 

[Aaron L]

Thats a really neat idea! I dont like the sorceror/dragon angle, maybe include an outsider heritage option as well. The necromancer advanced being makes me think of dilithium from Star Trek, what with the positive/negative energy thing Call it a Dichotomite.

How about:
Evokers, after uncovering the most powerful secrets of energy and matter, may transform thier material bodies into forms of pure conscious energy, becoming incorporeal beings composed of conscious magical energy, mental forms composed of the very fabric of the universe, empowering thier spells with thier own substance, and absorbing energies to heal wounds, becoming Quantumentals!


Conjurers, finally fully breaching the veils between all planes, locations, and ultimately times, ascend to a state of multiple existance, inhabiting all coterminous planes at once, and extending thier existence into the future and past as well as the present, a shimmering being who seems to occupy more space than his size would indicate, and can reach beyond what his hand can touch, see what is hidden from his eyes. Mastering time, space, and planar boundaries, they become living conduits between all areas of the multiverse, able to pluck beings out of one place and deposit them in another with little effort, shield themsleves from undesired movement, or be in another place or time with but a thought, becoming Transcendines.


Lets get some more ideas, I really like this.

 

[Shemeska]

Necromancers (wizards) find there is a third existance, one between life and undeath. I have absolutely no idea what to call it, but it allows power over both. They gain their amazing powers by being one of the few things in the multiverse that contains both raw positive and negative energy. The ultimate aberration, both life and undeath slowly are destroyed in the presence of such a being.

I have a cleric/necromancer in my own campaign who might be something like that. He and Factol Skall of the Dustmen (of Planescape fame) were collaborators very early on during the mortal life of them both, but ideological differences gradually saw them drift apart once Skall embraced lichdom and fully defined his philosophy of the 'True Death'. This other person, eventually referring to himself simply as 'Death', migrated to the Astral where he took a path not altogether unlike that taken by the entity once known as Anubis (before his transformation into the Guardian of Dead Gods). Currently he isn't 'alive' but he isn't 'undead' either, appearing as a softly glowing, robed humanoid figure that constantly sheds streams of insubstantial, gossamer silvery light. I've left him fairly undefined as to what he actually has become, though I know just what he wants and where he's going.


And I had something else involving members of the Planescape faction known as the Bleak Cabal. This group feels that there is no purpose to the multiverse. There is no underlying structure, and there is no grand scheme or purpose to anything. In the absence of meaning, you must find and define a meaning for existance within yourself. They tend to be a dour lot, and eventually a good number of them go completely insane, unable to cope with the idea of a meaningless world. This madness and mental collapse, known as the Grim Retreat, has claimed three of the past Factols of the Faction, and two of them have developed a strange, frightening level of innate psionic ability since their incarcertation. Esmus and Tollysalmon, a human and a githyanki respectively, are more or less a drastic reversal of the typical Bleaker Mindset. Look at the bleakers as Existentialists taken to the extreme. On one hand you can be overwhelmed by the lonely, purposeless world around you, or you can suddenly come to the realization that there are no external rules. There is nothing holding you down, and the universe is there for you and you along to work to your will. Out of the ashes of their own mental collapse in the Grim Retreat, they have become something else entirely.

Tollysalmon has escaped on one occasion, and eventually returned to her cell willingly. It seems increasingly obvious that her incarceration in the Cabal's Criminally and Irretreivably Insane Ward is entirety willing on her part, and she could leave at any time she wished, but doesn't for reasons unknown.

Here's a brief little episode of what happened when one of the PCs in that game encountered her last week.


"Don't listen to L'har, he's insane." She said, narrowing her eyes and glancing to the other Factol's cell where he huddled, moaning and whimpering.

"They locked him away because he's barmy, in the grips of The Retreat." Tollysalmon continued. "Me? They lock me away because they fear me."

The air around her head wavered and distorted, like the lines of force emenating from the pole of a magnet. They drifted it and out of focus, extending from her body and into the cell around her, glowing white in the darkness, casting her into shadow except for her eyes. Ever potent, ever piercing, they cut like a knife out of the gloom.

"Do you fear me?"

She curled her lips into a thin smile. Back in his cell, L'Har began to cry.

"Everything is meaningless." She said, sitting down on the cold stone of her cell. "Nothing has a purpose you know. Imagine it. Imagine that fully and come to believe it, because it is true. When your mind can encompass that, it is a harrowing, terrible realization, that your mind cannot accept, does not wish to accept. And then, you break."

The light in the hallway outside of her cell was growing dim, and the mad factol was smiling as it did.

"You break utterly and completely. You are not unlike a larvae set upon the Gray Waste. The Waste slowly devours the petitioner, saps at its will, consumes its passion and emotions, sucking it dry and ultimately leaving nothing behind."

She was still sitting there, but she seemed closer. It must have been a trick of the light and nothing more. But it was unnerving, and with every word dropped from her lips the distance seemed to close like the space of the cell was constricting in upon itself.

"But," She said. "Some refuse this fate. A scant few transcend their agony, the hollow nothingness around them, and they embrace their pain and their misery. We, in the depths of the Grim Retreat, in some odd parallel to the Waste, meaningless as that is, we allow the void of nothingness that is this universe to devour us, consume us, destroy every bit of what we were."

She was definately closer. It was no trick of the light. He eyes and the lines of force that rippled away from her head like a perverse halo of a saint or the corona of a dying star, they were glowing fiercely in the darkness, even as the gloom only increased in starker contrast.

"Please..." L'har whispered plaintively. "Make it stop. Get it out of my head... telling me things... none of it is real... Get.Out...please..."

The surface of Tollysalmon's cell door was cold. He hadn't noticed that he had approached so closely to her. His hands were reaching out, gripping the bars. He didn't remember consciously doing that. The Factol looked up at him and smiled, an expression just as cold as the iron in his hands.

"Most never recover." She said. "They kill themselves in the cold quiet of the night, alone in every way both metaphysical and literal, and they die. Some of us react differently, just like those few larvae that transcend their agony to become Hordelings. And for us of the Cabal, then what do we have left?"

Without having appeared to move, she was directly in front of him, standing, gazing into his eyes.

"We have become that void, and it hungers." She said. "I hunger, for that is what I have..."

 

[DMH]

I was thinking about this and I believe the best method of dealing with clerics is via their god (some should want champions in the form of advanced beings). Since all sahuagen worship Sekola, my previous post still applies. It also applies to many humanoid races since they were given the shaft and only one god.

Kobolds become the ultimate trap and dungeon makers. Their advanced form is similar to a millipede the size of a purple worm.

Kuo-toa are only in existance because of their advanced clerics, otherwise the aboleths would have destroyed them eons ago. Their advanced form is similar to a lobster and gains massively damaging physical attacks. They shrink in size and thus can travel in aquatic cities unnoticed.

Lizard men clerics have a very unusual advanced form that relates directly to their god's will. They become a huge ooze with two functions- protect and produce lizard men. Unlike the grand old masters of the neogi, they gain in intelligence and magical might (mostly protective abjuration magic).

Illithid advanced beings are extremely rare as they are hated by their kin (they bypassed joining an elder brain). Treated by their god as soldiers in the fight against the sun, they gain the ability to blot it out for longer and longer periods of time and larger areas. They become immune to sunlight and look like terrestrial anemones.

 

[DMH]

Call it a Dichotomite.

Thank you.

How about:
Evokers,
snip
Conjurers,
snip

I like the evokers, but the conjurers are way too powerful. Advanced beings are not gods, just epic in scope. I can see them becoming living gates to several "nearby" planes and can move just about any non-divine being from one to another (wether or not the beings like it is another thing). I have to go back and edit some of the descriptions.

 

[Corbert]

Conjurers, finally fully breaching the veils between all planes, locations, and ultimately times, ascend to a state of multiple existance, inhabiting all coterminous planes at once, and extending thier existence into the future and past as well as the present, a shimmering being who seems to occupy more space than his size would indicate, and can reach beyond what his hand can touch, see what is hidden from his eyes. Mastering time, space, and planar boundaries, they become living conduits between all areas of the multiverse, able to pluck beings out of one place and deposit them in another with little effort, shield themsleves from undesired movement, or be in another place or time with but a thought, becoming Transcendines.


Lets get some more ideas, I really like this.

(Emphasis mine) Its been done. Its known as Cthulhu .

 

[DMH]

No, that would be Yog-sothoth. Big C is just a high priest of Azathoth.

Drow have an unsuprising form of clerical advanced being- a black widow spider. Only females can make the change and their powers revolve around inflicting pain and controlling arachnids and arachnid demons. Since they are directly under the thumb of Lolth, they are at the centers of worship.

Ogres are generally not smart enough to advance themselves, but on whim (usually every 3-5 generations) a single ogre is selected by their god to have the potential of becoming an advanced being. They are engines of destruction and are called juggernauts. I envision them as similar to the ogres of Xanth, but can not raise a mountain range with just a little tussle.

Advanced gnolls have power over the undead. They revert and become more hyena like but without a size change. Places conquered by one are necropoli that produce dead flesh for living gnolls to consume.

Storm giants become living weather that trounces evil and provides rain when needed to good lands.

Troglodytes are another race that just doesn't have the brains for advancement. Those sports that succeed gain control over odor and reptiles. An invasion led by one is usually over quickly as the defenders retch to death.

 

[Clueless]

What about advanced wizards - who *aren't* willing to become undead? Personally i'd like to see something other than the stereotypical lich.

 

[Turjan]

What about advanced wizards - who *aren't* willing to become undead? Personally i'd like to see something other than the stereotypical lich.

I use mojh. They also get much older than ordinary humans, but are still alive.

 

[DMH]

What about advanced wizards - who *aren't* willing to become undead? Personally i'd like to see something other than the stereotypical lich.

There are several options in existance- shades, inserting one's soul into a construct, making a healer's stone (Alchemy and Herbalists), get friendly with a group of druids you can reincarnate you and each other forever, moving to a plane with funky time effects (does the Astral still prolong life?), have a gleaner remove the bits of your soul that remain in your body after death and become a spirit entity (Occult Lore), and I am sure there are others. I like the idea of the construct and rules for that can be found in AEG's Magic, Atlas' Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary and Goodman's Morningstar.

One thing I am going to avoid, but may be of use to others, is the idea of advanced beings helping others to go through the transformation.