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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2427218" data-attributes="member: 3051">Again, I'll reiterate: EVIL!!!!  Okay, that's out of the way, on to the suggestions.  (And I could spoiler tag this whole thing, I suppose, but this entire thread is one giant spoiler, so why bother?)That's a huge thing to spring on the players; I don't think it's enough to rely on direct visions (no matter how vague) for that one.  One thing you might use, based on a 3E Psion (Shaper) I had:Long, long ago (say a few hundred years back), a seer foresaw the upcoming apocalypse, and attempted to divine more detail.  He went a bit too far, and it drove him mad.  He spent the rest of his (somewhat short) life wandering the wilderness in a daze, teleporting from region to region (and possibly even plane to plane) with no set pattern.  But, he retained just enough to know it was important to preserve this information, so he did so in the most permanent way he knew: he used spells like Fabricate (or Stone Shape, or whatever) to turn random trees, rocks, etc. into statues that would tell the story of what was to come.  He was an excellent craftsman, so the level of detail on the statues went way beyond "disturbing".Since he travelled all over the place, few people ever saw more than one or two of the statues, and in time they've weathered/grown/etc into unrecognizability (plus some were destroyed by people for purely aesthetic reasons... when some lunatic magically changes the tree in your yard into a giant worm statue, you'll use it for firewood).  Most of the smaller ones have been utterly destroyed, but in a few cases he carved scenes into mountains and such, and there much has still survived, especially the ones located in deserts.  As a result, no one alive has ever bothered trying to figure out what the statues were for, and they've just been written off as the disturbing artwork of a madman.But, a diviner like Agar COULD use spells to see what the statues originally looked like, and piece together enough information to know what was coming.  A mage like Ioun might help for this, too, especially if it happened long enough ago that he had firsthand knowledge of the seer.  And all it takes to start the process is one person who realizes that Elder looked a lot like an old carving he saw.I like the idea of the worms not surviving the process, if only because it removes the need for a big fight that the players shouldn't ever win.  On the other had, it removes the barrier that would keep them from trying to win by brute force, and the Elder-Stone Bear deserves more resolution.  So maybe it's the other worm that's sacrificed, but Elder lives on to guard the eggs.  Better yet: maybe both worms are still living, solely because the hatchlings will need a food source... so the moment they are born, the existing two die horribly.  This not only prevents the players from interfering pre-birth, it removes the need to fight Elder later.  (Or maybe only Elder's mate sacrifices herself that way, and he survives... it's adjustable.)The "bad omens" are fun to come up with.  Tremors in the earth, Stone Bear hearing whispers of Elder's thoughts (and feeling the loss when he dies), seers start to go mad when confronted with the lack of a future... and some could be more metaphysical, like making healing magic suddenly less effective (as the heart of the world goes rotten), or plants animals start getting unexplainably sick.Also, depending on how much warning you give the world, you could have all sorts of other fun.  Magical evacuations to the planes.  Looting raids from various planar races (what, they'll fight over Mechanus, but won't grab stuff from a world about to be destroyed?).  Doomsday cults.Oh, and the Citadel of Kodali's Retreat (or whatever it was called) should show up in the sky above Spira.  It always orbits a dying world, right?  The players would realize what this meant, even if no one else did.</blockquote>

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