How would a Demon Queen defend her palace?

[seasong]

Sacrifice Queen For Checkmate

The Demon Queen of Lust has captured the Goddess of Love, and intends to supplant Love. Should She succeed, Love in the world will gradually die, and Lust will become the driving force for procreation (the Fertility Goddess will continue to handle the actual procreative energies themselves). While this may not seem like a major change, think about a world where all marriages are loveless, and sex can never be anything but a brutish, animalistic act.

In order to achieve this, however, certain Conditions must be met. The first, that Love be captured and held while the ritual is completed, has so far been met successfully. The second, however, (and in truly mythic fashion) is an immense sacrifice - the Demon Queen must give her own life force into the sacrifice, and be reborn into Love. Regardless, the Demon Queen can not take her own life, and her subjects are even less capable of the act. She needs some adventurers...

Feel free to insert any of the horrific possibilities from the rest of the discussion regarding getting to the Demon Queen.

The Demon Queen will be in the altar room, with Love upon the altar. She will make a great show of fighting the PCs (and will harshly stop any attempts to remove Love from the altar). However, She will have left herself vulnerable in some fashion, perhaps even leaving a Demon-Goddess-killing weapon lying around the fortress. When She dies, She dies horribly, screaming imprecations and blasphemies (and, specifically, that wonderful blasphemy spell that stuns all good creatures, no save).

Then she's gone, and all that's left is to free Love from the altar and get her back to the Celestial Courts.

Option 1, Slow: The Demon Queen of Lust has now been re-conceived in Love's womb. Love is unaware of this... and parthenogenesis is not that uncommon among the gods. The Demon Queen's rebirth (gestation of which will occur at a dramatically appropriate time) will kill the mother, thus bringing about that which she desires. A kind GM will either provide hints of what is to come (perhaps mentioning the pregnancy a game or two later) or allow Love to be brought back to life with a sacrifice of similarly epic scope.

Option 2, Fast: The Demon Queen has now become Love, and although Love has not yet fully absorbed the impact of that final blasphemy, she will change over the following days, becoming Lust. Changing her back can be another epic quest... and will likely be a much harder battle, since Lust will not be trying to die.

 

[seasong]

As a side note, and depending on your mythoi's relations between Demon Kings/Queens and Gods/Goddesses, you could also make the Demon Queen of Lust a necessary part of the cosmic balance. Love may need Lust more than Lust needs Love, after all...

And truly killing Lust may be more horrific than letting Her win.

 

[Lordnightshade]

Q: Why hasn't the goddess of love done something about this already? You'd think she would have found a way to prevent this situation from happening.

A: In my world the gods are at war. The god of hate and fear started the war by destroying the god of bravery. His next target was the Goddess of love and she would have been destroyed by him if the Queen of Lust hadn’t saved the goddess (who was severely weakened). The Queen of lust took the goddess of love to the abyss and hid her away. The God of hate thinking he had succeeded in destroying the goddess of love has moved on to focus on the other gods in my pantheon and has not thought about the goddess of love since.

The goddess of love and the Queen of Lust were once friends, and that is why the goddess of love was willing to let the Queen of Lust rescue her, however, she never expected to be betrayed.

It is still not clear in my mind whether or not the Queen of Lust is really betraying the Goddess of Love since the Queen of Lust wishes for the destruction of the God of hate just as much as everyone else.

To make things more interesting, the Queen of Lust is the God of Hate’s daughter.

 

[Lordnightshade]

Option 1, Slow: The Demon Queen of Lust has now been re-conceived in Love's womb. Love is unaware of this... and parthenogenesis is not that uncommon among the gods. The Demon Queen's rebirth (gestation of which will occur at a dramatically appropriate time) will kill the mother, thus bringing about that which she desires. A kind GM will either provide hints of what is to come (perhaps mentioning the pregnancy a game or two later) or allow Love to be brought back to life with a sacrifice of similarly epic scope.

In my pantheon the gods receive their power from the emotions of the mortals; they do not give the mortals their emotions. So if the goddess of Love died, there would still be love, and the power that is love would not be used by any being unless that being knew the secrets of love. In my world all emotion is power, the more abundant emotions like hate, lust, and love are some of the more powerful emotions. The god of hate gets his power from hatred and anger so even if you don’t want to worship him, you do every time you get angry or every time you hate, it makes him stronger.

The secrets of how to gain power from each emotion is known only by the gods. To become a god/goddess you must learn these secrets.

Perhaps the only way to truly learn these secrets is to be born from a god. Otherwise you can only manage to use the slightest fraction of the power that these emotions can provide. Thus, Anomaly has devised a way to be born from her favorite goddess, and she just needs the adventurers to kill her.

This just keeps getting better, keep them ideas coming!!

 

[Lela]

Does she think of it as betrayal? She's the incarnation of Lust after all. She may think of Love as the perversion and want to stamp it out.

Hmmmm, train of thought's a rolling. . . Lust wants Hate dead but isn't powerful enough. She wants Love to help her but she's currently (or always has been) too weak to do so. Lust sees an opportunity to combine their powers in order to defeat Hate. She plans to expend the full force of Love's Might into destroying Hate. It just so happens that this would destroy Love in the process (the two Powers/Entities/Energies/etc canceling each other out). Now, Love is unwilling to do this (unsurprisingly). Lust has decided to do it for her by taking over her lifeforce (such as in the way seasong mentioned) and expending the power herself.

Happy Ending: Once she has the power and actually sees what it is, she decides to keep it and repent of her evil deeds. She becomes both Lust and Love, perminantlly combining the forces so that one cannot exist without the other. She makes Hate fall in love with her and, since Love is greater than Hate, he decides not to kill her (he's still evil dude though, it's not that happy of an ending).

Moderate Ending: Lust takes over Love and the PCs must fight to free her before she destroys both Love and Hate. PCs win and somehow free Love from someplace deep within Lust.

RBDM ENDING: Lust succeds in destroying both Love and Hate (while the PCs look on). They are to know that they helped Lust do so as they watch. When they return to the Prime they find first that Hate is gone from the world and see all the good because of it. Then, they start to notice that mother's stop taking care of their children and clergy begin to fall away from their gods. They see the elements of comfort and caring begin to drop away. People aren't being Hateful, but nor are they looking out for others (helping others is an element of Love after all--at least here). Babies die, children starve, gods loose their worshipers. And carnal Lust is everywhere.

The PCs were given a small measure of Love and Hate (which they should RP) when the two powers died. This allows them to continue caring about others (at least for a while). They must find a way to either bring Love back (likely along with Hate) or find others to replace them (possibly the PCs). The replacment for each must personally know the full power of one, turn from it, and reach out fully to the other. Try to convince the party Paladin that the only way to save Love is for him to become Hate. . .



And, to think, I didn't make it into the RBDM Club.

 

[Lordnightshade]

And, to think, I didn't make it into the RBDM Club.

Ahhh Lela, but you show much promise, I would love to see you in the Public RBC forum and I would love to help you with your game issues there as well.

Think of that forum as the proving ground for aspiring Rat Bastard DMs.

The URL for that forum is here: http://pub56.ezboard.com/baquerra

 

[seasong]

A Lemon Twist (if you'll pardon the pun)

Anomaly (Lust) is madly in love with the Goddess of Love. She's not going to kill Her, She's really and truly just hiding Her. Of course, this is in her own demented fashion, by kidnapping her, dragging her down into the abyss, and chaining her up for a millenia or two.

The God of Hate thinks Love is dead, which is according to plan... and then the PCs come along, trying to restore Love, thereby possibly bringing Hate down upon all their heads.

So Lust creates an elaborate game for the PCs, and a dramatic, heart-rending performance of her own defeat and a Pyrhic victory in which Love dies anyway.

The PCs leave, the God of Hate still thinks Love is dead, and Lust can get back to mooning over a Goddess that doesn't want her.

Edit: Additional thought: In this scenario, Anomoly would be strongly opposed to any quests by someone to become the "new Goddess of Love". Might be interesting to have Her fake defeat in this scenario, and then really cut loose when her true love's power base is threatened.

 

[Lordnightshade]

Anomaly (for those who didn’t know, is the name of the Queen of Lust).

So I like this lemon twist Seasong, Anomaly actually is madly in love with the Goddess of love… hmmm….

Though I think I will combine it with the pregnancy thing. The party will only find out about the love of Anomaly and the fact that Anomaly was actually hiding her after they kill her and free Love. She will tell them. Unfortunately Love is sapped of her powers from her fight with Hate and so the party must help her get her powers back.

 

[seasong]

For the lemon twist, and in tune with Anomaly's demented sense of protectiveness... She could be stealing Love's power so that Anomaly can take on Hate Herself. (This would tie in with some other suggestions, above).

I also have a room that I'll be posting momentarily.

 

[seasong]

A room that isn't a trap, but could be.

The Aesthete's Room

Lust is not strictly limited to physical contact, as voyeur wizards, leering priests and roving eyes everywhere can attest. This room is devoted to those poor souls whose lecherous aesthetic has brought them to hell, and into Anomaly's clutches.

The room is filled with eyeballs mounted on thin spikes. Each pair of eyeballs is actually a soul, just without a body or a mouth. The eyes can rotate on the spikes, and will do so to look at anything or anyone that comes in... after all, anything's better than looking at each other.

They can't speak, but could tell their tales if someone used a telepathic effect. Although small (about 1 inch diameter), they are fully sentient entities.

The room itself would be warm and moist, so they would be reasonably comfortable. There's nothing particularly dangerous about the room, and the party might even use it as a rest stop... if they can get over being watched (and were I running this, I'd make sure they felt like they were being mentally undressed).

Attacking the eyes is certainly an option - you can have them reform wherever the jellies landed, and rotate up to continue staring, only now from a vantage on the floor.

The main point, of course, is just a creepy sideshow in the castle.

Twist #1: The eyes can talk. Have one or two of them give a sob story that is likely to tug at a PC's heart strings, and then beg to be taken with the PCs - if they can just be taken out of hell, they claim that they will discorporate and be free at last. Of course, a proper RBDM will have a ringer demon, shapeshifted, in the batch to spy.

Twist #2: The eyes are as above, but they can teleport when they aren't being watched. One or two take advantage of the PC distraction to teleport out of the room while the other eyes are leering. Then, since nothing is quite so interesting as the PCs, they begin following the PCs, always staying just out of sight, but indefinably present. Or maybe they can all teleport, and were just conferencing in the room. Now, everywhere the PCs go, there are walls sitting on tables, hiding in cracks in the walls, hiding in their clothes... When the PCs snap and start smashing every eyeball they see, you win.

Twist #3: If the PCs do decide to use the room as a resting place, wait until the majority of them are asleep. Then attack the watch with gaze attacks.