OK, this is sort of a plotline I´ve been building up for the midseason and I´ve been discussing it with some of the other players and so far gotten positive things about it. During the midseason Hunter will obtain the Eye of St Vigeous (how I will not tell :wink: ) and begin the ritual for the ressurection of Emily. However the ritual fails and the Eye does someting else, it creates a rift to the spirit realm. All over L.A. paranormal occurences starts happening, such as statues crying blood and the like. The rift also sends the spirits of the dead through, reanimating they´re old corpses and these undead needs to drain the life of the living in order to remain in this plane of existence. The vampire population are also affected by the rift, since they are techniccally dead. This leads to many of them having their souls restored and in turn to alot of catathony and suicide dustings. However all vampires are not affected by the rift, those of some willpower and those who´s demons been around enough to getting used to their hosts is able to resist. As more time passes the rift grows bigger, from just being quite small to quite humongus and as more time passes more of the veil between the worlds of the dead and the living is destroyed and will eventually if it´s not stopped lead to a complete entropy. Well, that´s my plotline and it involves quite serious reapercussions ( for both the midseason and perhabs for more to come.) , so tell me what you thinks about it , yay or naye?
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The Eye of St Vigeous
Sounds good to me. Actually, my own midseason storyline could work quite well indeed with that. Catch me online and we'll chat (me thinks I've added you...not quite sure. It gets that way with 60+ contacts)
Edit: Duh! Of course I have...we've chatted. Brain like a seive...
The Eye of St Vigeous
Lol, seems there is an epidemic... of brain seive people. :wink:
I should look it up, though. Been using the phrase and dont know what a seive is... :oops:
The Eye of St Vigeous
Basically it is a tray that cannot retain anything becasue it has holes in it
It is an interesting idea, but I hope as part of your mid-season plotline that you plan to close that rift. Midseason is where we deal with our own storylines or we work on side-stories. I have no problem with having events occur that affect everyone, its kind of cool, but if you are planning to have everyone gang up and fix this blatant boo-boo...mid season isn't the time to do it. That is a main season big-bad scale problem.
That having been said, I would like to know if every soul is resored or is it a random sample? For example, OZ's wife and son are dead. His wife here in LA of old age...his son 25+ years ago in vietname (and again in LA in December, darnnit) would they suddenly come back to life in their graves, claw their way to the surface and start eating as a certainty? Or would it be more like a huge MAYBE they would.
I say this for the simple reason that since about 1970 more people have been born than have ever died. That's right, the population of the world is now increasing faster than people are dying (or have ever died). This means that potentially this event would restore life to everyone who had ever died and would leave room for a few people to still exist. (I said potentially)
Also, the keeper of such souls (I assume there is one) might not be so keen on allowing them to escape. Charon, Hades, Satan, or St. Peter or whomever might come looking to bring them back (and a few extra to boot).
If a vampire resists the re-soulling, does it then remain soulless? Or is it just soulled but immoral (amoral?)? If a vampire is dusted does its former soul still come back? Can it inhabit another body other than its original one?
Overall it is a good idea, but if it is to have the universal impact you propose, I'd be sure to make sure everyone understands exactly how it works.
The Eye of St Vigeous
Good questions and here´s some answers to ´em:
1) Well that depends. If Oz´s wife and son was buried in L.A. the chances are that they might join the new army of the dead. However it´s not even sure that they will claw their way back into the world of the living. But if you want´s to use them ,feel free.
2)The rift will only at first be centered over L.A. but if it´s not stopped it surely will spread and eventually bring the ultimate entropy, where no life nor death can exist and thus creating an complete void.
3)I havn´t really thought that much about it, but quite possibly the Grim Reaper/Charon/Hades or what ever it might be called will come to town.
4)The souls that are brought back usually seeks to return to the original host and in the cases of vampires that resists are banished back to beyond the veil. So is the case with dusted vamps and others of the newly risen that is killed. And a vamp that resists remains un-souled.
That´s what I was thinking, feel free to come up with ideas.
Edit: However killing all the undead will really do no good, since more would rise and take their place as the rift grows.
The Eye of St Vigeous
When Dave first posted this comment my immediate responce was "Huh? That can't be right" Now I didn't go looking for a answer but I did run across this little article in New Scientist today.
If we accept those figures then the dead outnumber the living by a factor of around 10 and if we allow possesions and such like by the returning souls then I suggest that this is potentially a cataclysmic event. Dawn of the Dead anyone?
The Eye of St Vigeous
well i think it will be great if it was dawn of teh dead style *drools* but alas that would kinda screw the whole secrate that is monsters and as such so i was thinking what if it was special souls that escpaed such as the worst of the worst from hell or just souls who had been murderd or something that limits it
The Eye of St Vigeous
Am I the only one who's thinking this is starting to sound too big for just a midseason plotline? Is there any reason it wouldn't work as a suggested plotline for next season? Is there already something lined up for next season? Am I completely clueless at times? (Don't anyone answer that last one.)
The Eye of St Vigeous
All I'll say is that there's something in outline form which will be presented in due course. I can't say more or Lou will hurt me. :)
Re: The main idea, one of the things I have a quibble with is the whole vampire-with-a-soul thing, even with the mass suicides. That and... well, hasn't the vampire population taken a big enough mass hit as it is? hehe.
But other than that... I'm not sure about this being a full season plot, it strikes me as something that really would be more subplotish, despite the implications. It wouldn't be something "out there" all the time unless we started with the ritual and ran around for several months dealing with dead bodies before figuring out what went on.
The Eye of St Vigeous
Oh yeah, me huh? I don't know if anyone else had something big lined up for Season Five, but my initial plan was to run the ministry plot to it's conclusion then.
So, I have made references to The Dark Age, The Chosen, The final battle between good and evil... I've kept it quite vague for the specific purpose that I didn't know if it would be taken up as a Season BB or just a subplot that I would write mostly on my own... and I've been figuring that if the latter occurs I may even wrap this whole thing up in midseason (hopefully not clashing with the Eye of St Vigeous thing - which, yeah I can see Adam's point that if the dead of Los Angeles start rising from their graves we're not gonna sit on our asses ignoring it for 6 months - well not without turning into a bunch of brain munching zombies at any rate).
I don't really want to elaborate too much at this point, since we've not finished season four yet hehe. But basically my plot involves the Hellmouth opening in Los Angeles and various nasties escaping terrorising the general populace... and of course, The Ministry - but I'll get to them later. Basically I kept my ideas loose on purpose but that's the bare backbone as it were, and now I'm gonna go back to fighting Delancre for a while longer. :D
The Eye of St Vigeous
....and Lou already knows this, but that's the idea I like for season five. ;)
The Eye of St Vigeous
Speaking generally, if the whole 'souls of returned dead' thing happens as a midseason thing, it really shouldn't be a huge affair. As many people have pointed out, if it becomes an all-consumning overarching plot that involves all the characters then essentially it's a Big Bad and belongs in a main season.
If it's to be run as a midseason thing it should only affect one or two, or at most a small handful of characters while the rest get on with other things. Midseason, after all, is the time where each of us can do little vignettes or short plotlines that revolve around our own characters without having to worry about the end of the world.
Well, ok, there was Proserpexa, but that was all Reah's fault for messing with temporal causality. :wink: And there were only five PCs involved. In fact, that makes a good case in point. That was a fairly large and significant Midseason plot, and it lasted all of a few days game time (if you discount the time travel) and involved only five PCs (plus a couple of NPCs). Anything the Eye of St Vigeous invokes in midseason should have no greater scope than that, really.
If you want it to have wider ramifications, it would probably be best to think about saving it for a full Season Big Bad plotline instead. It's all a matter of how big you want it to be as to where it's best suited.
The Eye of St Vigeous
OK, first of all I was thinking about using this as a season plotline, but basically since it lacks a real Big Bad (and since I can´t handle another season of nothing to do) I decided to use this as a mid-season thing.
Secondly this will hopefully not last the entire mid-season, perhabs only a month or two- three as most.
Thirdly about the zombies, it won´t be a huge organised army descending down on the mortal population of L.A. The rift will at first be quit small and mostly the recently dead will be reanimated and as the rift grows more of the Astral Plane leaks in to the physical plane and the fabric of this world starts being ripped apart. This will also lead to more and older spirits to be pulled back into the world of the living. The zombies themselves (even though some might still have their memories intact) is simply drawn by their hunger to devour life essence and will be more of shadows of their former selves. They simply sees everything that lives as food and will surely not join together in huge packs.
And really the zombies aren´t the real threat here, it´s the fact that the rift will ripp apart this plane of existence and eventually (if not stopped) will create a complete void.
The Eye of St Vigeous
Hmm, yes, another point. I have to agree very much with Adam on this one. The whole 'vampire-with-a-soul' thing is something we've been actively discouraging for some time now, and having a whole slew of them running around out there would tend to defeat the purpose. I would be inclined to say that if a soul returned to find its original body had been vampirised that it just wouldn't 'take'. Perhaps in ALL cases the inhabiting demon is too strong for the returning soul? Whatever justification we use, I'd frankly rather not see souled vampires springing up all over the place.
The Eye of St Vigeous
Hmm, ok... two or three months is a fairly long time for midseason if it involves too many characters. It's a sliding scale, I guess. Shorter time, more people can get their fingers in the pie. Longer time, only one or two should be affected, otherwise it colours too much of midseason with one plotline. (Again, remember midseason is the time for 'story-of-the-week' style writing and individual character developments.) A compromise could be reached whereby characters drop in and out of the subplot, so that at any one time there's no more than 2 or 3 PCs tied up in it.
Ok, that's fine - so long as there's a method to close this rift that Hunter can come up with by himself or with little help. We don't want to have to involve everybody in dealing with this. I can see players not knowing about the rift at all, just noticing something odd, perhaps, to add colour to their own background stories - if they like. As for the zombies, when the rift closes will they be "cut off" from their animating force and simply drop where they stand, thus eliminating the need for cleanup? Or will LA become a hunting ground for zombies for months to come? Again... as a midseason rather than a full season plot, I'd be more inclined to have it be as self-contained as possible.
Using the Proserpexa thing as a base again - the characters who weren't directly involved in the storyline had no clue that the world was about to end because Reah was hasty and broke a vase. :)
Of course, everything I'm saying is simply based on what we've found to have worked best in the past. But it's also by that same experience that we've found that most people have lots of little stories they want to tell about their characters.
The main Season is a chance to come together for a common goal and forge the bonds between characters (or test their limits severely, as we've done in this season), and develop our characters within the confines of a set plotline.
It's in midseason that the shackles come off and everyone can write their own stories - so midseason plots tend to be somewhat self-limiting in that regard. Unless something is going to be short-lived or have limited consequences, not everyone is going to be willing to tie up their PC in someone else's plot for a great length of time while their own stories sit on the back burner. :) Spending three months of midseason writing to the strictures of someone else's midseason plot would tend to be too much like a main season, I feel, for most of us to be comfortable committing our PCs to it completely.
The Eye of St Vigeous
Ok I think we can keep this to merely a mid season plot simply by never allowing it to get too established.
You have a magician specialissing in death magic floating around so once the problem becomes known. Either Marcus or possibly Tash (She's an awesome necromantic theorist) could generate a solution to the problem. I would point out that if Marcus is involved he will want to be paid ;)