The motives of evil cultists

[wargear]

Several thoughts:

1. By presenting themselves as the good guys, the cult could seize entire families legally and with the approval of the ruler, simply by declaring them plague infested. By presenting their diety as an opponent of plague, undeath and as a merciful bringer of death, they could easily gain the ability to operate openly, thus improving their gods worshipper base.

2. No matter where you are, greed rules the day. Particularly with some of the more unscrupulous Guildmasters in the BR setting. Selling animated skeletons and zombies to work in the mines and lumbercamps, as cheap untiring workers, will gain the cult not only additional funding, but blackmail on some of the most powerful men and women in the realms...if not additional converts.

3. A few years ago, there was an article in Dragon magazine about halfbreed undead. The children born from women turned to undeath while pregnant. What better end than to infuse the living with the essence of undeath.

4. If your players are unfamiliar with the Warcraft storyline, you could easily run the Arthas/Scourge plot. It's fun, I hit my group with a modified Scourge storyline a few years ago and it was the source of much angst.

5. A really nasty toy I used was the Thrall Mark. It is as subtle or blatant as you choose, and if the victim knows what it does, they are sure to be very very loyal. Basically, it is a brand that causes the victim to rise as a zombie when they die...and gives the master the option to will their death at any time. Blacksway.NET - Homebrew Creature Site - Thrall-marked

 

[Mesh Hong]

Quick Thought:

If they are taking whole families then what is happening to the real estate that is now vacant?

Maybe there a little scope for something interesting there? Maybe the cult need access to property at certain locations in the city as focus points for some big ritual later on.....or maybe a more ancient cult left certain items hidden at those locations that the cult are looking for to use themselves?

Maybe an ancient demigod or previous leader was defeated but his dismembered body parts were hidden by sympathisers and that is what the cultists are looking for?

 

[Tamlyn]

It's all evil cult R&D.

The evil cult is being sponsored by some neighboring, ambitious kingdom to spread a plague and force Ghoere into submission. Families are kidnapped and forced into a "control environment" - a mock village where they're forced/drugged/hypnotized to interract as they normally would. One person is infected with a newly engineered, magic-resistant disease and the cultists are studying how it spreads during normal interaction. They have to pull families from various parts of the kingdom to see if any geneologies, diet, etc... affect the transmission and development of the disease. Once perfected it can be released into the general population.

If you were part of an evil cult, it's the scientifically sound way to conduct research and development!

 

[Lord Zardoz]

It has been a while since I was last in this thread (life kind of got ahead from me for a while). Here are some more thoughts on the subject.

I said in my initial post "Given that no civilized society would actually have a direct use for an established church of that sort, they exist primarily as a very very secretive cult and as a very wide ranging conspiracy." Someone then asked why he has any worshipers at all.

I would say that while a society has no use for Morgion, some individuals may. Among the reasons for people to join him are the following:

For anyone who is dying of any sort of disease, Morgion will allow a worshipper to act as a "carrier only", spreading the disease, but not necessarily dying of it. As a god of death, Morgion will grant high ranking followers protection from the ravages of old age. Anyone who also has enemies that they want to suffer greatly is also likely to worship Morgion (though in that Morgion competes with every other god and demon out there).

The reasons for the abductions I think fit best into one of the following:
- Collection of Raw Material. (warm bodies and / or souls)
- Creation of Sleeper Agents or "Reavers" (as in Firefly / Serenity).
- Trying to find something (Fragment of a reincarnated soul?).

I like Mesh Hong's idea of trying to recreate / resurrect a high level servant of Morgion.

I have lots of time to work out the details.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[TarionzCousin]

1. By presenting themselves as the good guys, the cult could seize entire families legally and with the approval of the ruler, simply by declaring them plague infested. By presenting their diety as an opponent of plague, undeath and as a merciful bringer of death, they could easily gain the ability to operate openly, thus improving their gods worshipper base.

I like this. By making the bad guys pretend to be good guys, you open up all kinds of potential adventures for the PC's. It always drives players crazy when the obvious bad guy is beloved by everyone.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I might be able to create a situation where the Cult is using a publicly popular front organization to do things that they might not be able to do directly. But given that we are talking about a god of Disease, Death and Suffering, I am not convinced I can have the cult ever act openly and be accepted by a functioning society.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Twichyboy]

I might be able to create a situation where the Cult is using a publicly popular front organization to do things that they might not be able to do directly. But given that we are talking about a god of Disease, Death and Suffering, I am not convinced I can have the cult ever act openly and be accepted by a functioning society.

END COMMUNICATION

It could be openly accepted if the people only accepted the religion out of fear, or/and ignorance, For example the people must bring sacrifices to the temple of that god monthly lest they bring his wrath upon them, but little do they know their sacrifices are actually being used to further the cults goals,

 

[Lord Zardoz]

That does not quite fit this specific situation

Not a bad idea Twichy, but it wont fit what I have in mind for Morgion.

The notion I have in mind for Morgion is that admitting to worshiping him to any sort of even marginally civilized person is about as likely to be accepted as introducing yourself as a convicted sex offender is today.

Anyone who gets any benefit from worshiping Morgion does so by causing the slow and agonizing deaths of their neighbors. Morgion himself holds life in contempt and wants all living things to suffer. Morgion is not interested in having a single life sacrificed to him in order to hold back from harming a villiage. Morgion's way of doing things is to spare 2 or 3 lives of his cultists in exchange for that cultist infecting an entire village with a disease.

While Forgotten Realms introduced the trope of having gods require worshipers to gain power, that is not necessarily the way I am going here. Morgion does not need to be actively worshipped to be powerful in the world.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Set]

At the present, the cultists are abducting entire families who simply appear to go missing with no explanation. There are rumors about the disappearances, but no one seems to know the cause.

A few years back, there was a pernicious flu. Very few died, but it affected almost everyone in the kingdom. The cultists spread this custom-tailored contagion as a test, but it lacked the potency that they would need for their end goal, of 'sacrificing' the entire land to Morgion with a plague of biblical proportions. They have refined the contagion to the potency they desire, and plan to unleash it again, but this time, they are starting by kidnapping the families that proved resistant / immune to their last plague (who would likely be immune to this one as well) for two reasons, one, to get rid of them, so that nobody survives the plague, and two, to extract / duplicate whatever makes them immune to the plague, to protect themselves and those who pay them extravagant sums for protection when the plague 'goes viral.' (The 'harvesting' process might involve blood transfusions and transmutation spells, strange alchemical mixtures or even simple necromantic soul-transfer into the bodies of those kidnapped through a higher level permanant version of magic jar, placing the souls of the priests and cultists into the bodies of the kidnapped plague-resistant folk.)

The plague was harvested from an extraplanar creature, and so has spell resistance, making it require twice the expected resources to heal magically, and greatly frustrating any clerical efforts to 'get ahead of it.'

The enhanced plague, once the 'sacrifice' is great enough, is intended to fuel a great magical working, like an Incantation that requires thousands of deaths to power, that will cause those who have died to the plague to rise as undead under the control of the priests of Morgion who sent the plague, consecrating the entire kingdom into a new realm of disease and the undead, under the black banner of the god of death.

 

[superflatiron]

I like this. By making the bad guys pretend to be good guys, you open up all kinds of potential adventures for the PC's. It always drives players crazy when the obvious bad guy is beloved by everyone.

It has been a while since I was last in this thread

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