Supernatural Survival

[Stormonu]

The world has gone to hell. Society as we know has been destroyed. The few remaining survivors are nomads, always on the move, trying to stay one step ahead of the things that want them dead. And zombies? They're just the remnants of those who didn't make it this far. They're not the primary enemy.

What is?

 

[samursus]

Oddly enough I have had a similar idea percolating in my head for a couple years. The PCs are citizens of a dying population living in a giant ziggurat in the middle of a wasteland/desert filled with bones. There used to be many of these ziggurat cities, but contact with the others has been lost for generations. And those who have embarked to find the others, have never returned.

Every night, when the sun goes down, the bones stir, and a skeletal army led by spectres and wraiths form and assault the walls until sunrise, when they fall back into the sand.

The city is maintained through magical/mechanical sciences a long-time forgotten, and is slowly falling apart. And the population has been dwindling for decades. There are many parts of the huge city that have been empty for generations, and other things have moved in.

The PC's are members of an elite cadre of squads used to shore up breaks in the defenses during the attacks, relying on the advanced training techniques of their people.

But things are really getting bad... until a mysterious message/vision/phenomena occurs, and the desperate elders have no choice but to check it out, sending the best of the expendable defenders to follow this thin hope.



My idea would be to run adventures in and near the city for a few levels (maybe 5) and then have them sent out to investigate the unlikely chance of salvation (a 2nd city, a weapon, a portal out of the wastes, etc). After that, its all open to whatever I want, with the dying city always in the back of the characters mind. Kind of grimdark to start, with aspects of the fantastical to come later, as contrast.

I know this doesn't answer your post, but it reminded me so much of this concept that is bursting to get out, I had to share.

 

[Nagol]

DEadland-style Reckoners Deadlands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Dausuul]

The world has gone to hell. Society as we know has been destroyed. The few remaining survivors are nomads, always on the move, trying to stay one step ahead of the things that want them dead. And zombies? They're just the remnants of those who didn't make it this far. They're not the primary enemy.

What is?

Medusae.

A cult has arisen among the medusae devoted to the worship of a goddess called the Coiling Empress. The priestesses of this cult give the souls of their petrified victims to the Empress, and in exchange a demon is sent to animate the stone body. (If you get petrified by a priestess, reversing the process is quite difficult and requires a special ritual.) The demons usually fall asleep when the sun rises, reverting to motionless statues. Attacking the statues will wake them up, however.

The cult of the Empress now commands armies of petrified soldiers, and they are bent on subjugating the world. No army can stand against them; whenever humans mustered enough troops to overcome the stone warriors, the medusae came forth and petrified them all. Victims of the petrified legions meet various fates. Some are killed and served to the medusae as food. The most attractive men are blinded and made into harem slaves. The rest are petrified and join the legions of stone.

The Coiling Empress herself is clearly a great power in the Abyss. She might be an arch-marilith, or perhaps Demogorgon under another name, but she rules at least one layer and probably several.

Edit: I've been assuming you're talking about a D&D world. If we're talking modern Earth, see next post...

 

[Dausuul]

Gremlins.

We're not talking about the little green guys from the 1984 movie, although there are some resemblances. Gremlins are evil spirits that possess machines and draw power from suffering and death. They began to manifest in the 1930s, but at the time they seldom lasted long and accomplished only minor mischief. But the growth and increasing complexity of the Internet created a gremlin paradise, and they began to spread rapidly through the world's computers.

As long as bandwidth and processing power continued to increase, humans were able to keep pace with the gremlins. But at some point, perhaps due to economic crisis, perhaps due to simple technological limitations, that growth slowed down. The gremlin population continued to grow, and the Internet became more and more unreliable. Major ISPs failed, one after another, in an accelerating catastrophe that finally brought down the whole network.

Now we live in a world where a billion angry gremlins have been cast out of paradise. Not content to sit docilely in laptops and desktops until the Internet was restored, they soon reverted to their old habits--wreaking physical havoc rather than digital. Every car, every tank, every toy robot, now plays host to a gremlin.

And it gets worse. The collapse of the Internet and the sudden unreliability of all other machines meant that fuel and electricity soon became scarce. The gremlins had to use their own power to keep the machines running... which meant ordinary mischief was no longer enough. The machines are now engaged in nonstop slaughter. They like humans best, but animals will do and even plants in a pinch. All over the world, the sight of any kind of machine is now cause for terror, and the surviving humans must make do with sticks and stones.

 

[Diamond Cross]

A powerful alien intelligence that can split itself off and inhabit a human being. The problem is inhabiting a human being is like passing electricity through non-conductive metals, so it tends to mess up the human body.

Oddly enough there was a galactic alignment in the year 2012. But instead of destroying the earth, it brought this alien entity through the great pyramids of Gaza, where it now resides and hides it presence.

When you find this entity, and destroy it, you end the Zombies.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sounds a bit like the premise fir Terry Brooks' Knight of the Word and Genesis of Shannara series.

...which would make Demons the hidden threat.

 

[DogBackward]

I worked up a setting for d20 Modern based on the concept of the Final Battle between Good and Evil, when the armies of heaven and hell would meet on earth to decide the fate of the universe. At the appointed time, the demon hordes tore free from beneath the earth, arraying themselves on the field of battle, awaiting the destined moment.

Only problem is, the good guys never showed up...

Basically a classic post-apocalyptic world with demons running amok, tearing down whatever they can, and normal people trying to live through it all. The game never got off the ground, but a main point of the game was going to be the PC's finding out why the heavenly hosts never made it to the battlefield.