Where do campaign ideas come from? Sometimes their plots are ripped from the pages of books or are inspired by That Movie (that movie, all too often, being Star Wars). There’s a lot to be said for transplanting plots across different genres – imagine, for example – playing a scenario based on Speed, using Eberron’s Lightning Rail system. Or running The Matrix in the Forgotten Realms (“There is no wand,” muttered Elminster under his breath).

Many campaigns have no over-arching plot, and that’s not a Bad Thing. Our own superhero sessions are all based in the same multiversal reality and is a shared setting with no particular long-term thread running through it. Some storylines can take many sessions to resolve (if at all), but there’s nothing particularly to tie them all together, by design.

Endday is different. There’s a campaign plotline running through it from beginning to all too destructive end.

And it all began with me asking myself two questions.

Where do Demons come from? and Where do Angels come from?

The answer to the first question is easy: Demons are Fallen Angels who rebelled against the heavens and were cast out. So: Demons are Angels with a difference of opinion.

It’s the answer to the next question which shakes things up. Where do Angels come from? According to one theory all the major religions have subsumed the beliefs of faiths they’ve conquered, adapting their ceremonies and holy days into themselves to better convert the people to their way of thinking. Hence Christmas and Easter, among others.

Also – and here’s the important bit – the major religions have often taken the gods of the other religions and demoted them, making them lesser beings but subservient to the True god or gods (whichever gods that happened to be at the time). This is how Ra rose to supreme power in Ancient Egypt and how the Cult of Zeus afforded him the title of Father over all the other gods.

This is where Angels come from. They are gods, demoted. They are the ancient spirits of the wood and tree and brook and forest and glade. They are the gods of the early winter frost and the garden pond. They are the spirits of the hearth and home, of the harvest, love and hate. They are animism, ancestor worship and the mythos of countless forgotten peoples.

Which means that Demons, by extension, are also gods, demoted then cast out for wanting their power back.

Truth be told, who can blame them?

1 person likes this post.
Unlike