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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5203009" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'd do one of two things.The first is to just keep it out. The gods are long dead. There is no one out there to save you. The most powerful things are evil Sorcerer-Kings. This keeps the hopelessness and struggle of Dark Sun pretty intact.The second is to use an apocalyptic pantheon, like the Norse, or the Mayan, Aztec, or Incan. Ragnarok and the bak'tun cycles are ripe for use on a dying world, and I think if you go with the Meso/South American stuff, it will jibe with Dark Sun weirdness very well. Blood sacrifices and hummingbird war-gods and feathered dragons are very evocative (though, honestly, I'm a bit partial to that whole mythscape <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). I'd even be a little tempted to use the Book of Revelations from the Bible or the Qur'an's apocalyptic entires, but I'm a dork about that stuff. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Well, since you're already playing around with the idea of a "return of the gods," I might make it about that. Sacrifice, worship, and potential salvation at the End of Days. So, through sacrifice of some sort, the divine power source is being unlocked, creating gods out of lords out of mortals.And this is where the PC's come in. They may be characters in service to one of these "lords." Or they may be from a traditional city-state, perhaps even agents of a jealous Sorcerer-King. Or they might even be looking to become "lords" themselves, puzzling out the mystery of where this power is coming from, and how to give their own followers this.The secret that they should discover, by the end of the campaign, is that this relates to the End Times that are near. Those whose souls are dedicated to a Lord might find life after the End of the World, in an Afterlife, something no one has ever heard of before. Perhaps in the sand-filled, steel-barred ruins of the Ancients, they find a Codex relating to the End of Days (perhaps they stumble on a ruined museum, or even a destroyed chapel with a Bible inside). Their enemies include sorcerer-kings trying to quash this new source of power, and rival lords, and, of course, the horrible creatures of the wastes themselves, where the clues to this ancient secret lie buried. This means that their final adventures will be a central question: with this knowledge, do they try to save the people of the world? And are they willing to be the cause of sacrifice, if it means giving people an Afterlife? Which ones get Saved? And how?They may have the capacity to become gods themselves (or to advance the cause of their own god), but this should be a bit of a moral dilemma for them, a question that is reflected in the world. Everything is going to die some day soon. Do you let nature take its course, or do you let people harm themselves through fasting, through human sacrifice, through various abstinences, in order to have a shot at an Afterlife that even you (even as a god) are not entirely sure of the nature of?You can bring hope to a hopeless world. You can give people a reason to live. You can save souls. You can become a god yourself.</blockquote>

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