Huge stormclouds, rain like bullets, gusting wind, and thunder & lightning, very, very frightening, indeed.
What kind of monsters would use the cover of a storm to attack? What sort of tactics would they use? Are they in the storm or on the ground and use it strategically? Perhaps they summoned it.
Any wierd and wonderful ideas?
2000AD's Nemesis had an excellent idea of this. The humans have used the black hole to go forwards in time to the end of earth as the sun is almost nova. Humanity has becom peaceful and returned to the oceans, their physical forms becoming a kind of liquid, with their mental forms conducting all interactions.
The Torquemada humans find that this sludge has useful properties as fuel and set up refineries that seperate the physical and mental components and send the former back to their time for fuel. The latter get bled into the atmosphere where their collected horror and anger become vast psychic and physical storms manifested as variations on racial memories. These demons rampage around the earth trying to destroy the refineries
I wrote and ran a Rifts adventure years ago that involved a massive storm, a blizzard, a hostile environment indeed.
The only antagonist was a creature that was composed the elements of the storm - wind for a body and ice for teeth and claws. It hunted the players alternately, providing tense scenes as an unseen foe tried repeatedly to get inside the shelter - and nabbing up innocents who strayed too far in the meantime.
I vaguely hinted that the creature was from the Rifts, having forced its way into our world, but in the end the players never knew - because as the storm abated they all suited up in their mondomegabattlearmor and wasted it.
I find that storms are very confusing for players even in game because of the real life experience of it. They know exactly how to imagine the weather and it's easy as a GM to play off their primal fears - in this case, fear of mother nature.
However, I live in Oklahoma, and storms like that are sometimes tornados - so the sense of danger my players felt was very satisfying to me as a writer and a gm.
Thanks guys!
How depressing that non-"your game sucks", "no it doesn't" threads sink with nary a whimper. :(
Good, fast, or low-noise. Pick two. :cool:
Anyway a couple of options spring to mind. First is an even less personified version from Blackhands where it is simple a mundane malestorm itself that "attacks". Not exactly what your OP is looking for but I think has some merit.
On the otherhand "elemental" type creatures of air and cold and such would certainly be quite at home and blend well into storms. They could even be the storms themselves with a diverse magical property. More disruptions of our plane as their main being residing on another plane brushes with ours.
Past that? Anything that massive, sturdy, and flys (ok, dragons aren't exactly creative but that's an example) would like storms and such as cover for their movements.
"Trees" that walk only in storms to disguse their movement and cover the record of their passing?
Depending on the control of the storm it could be used as shock and awe type weapon. In a WW1 fantasy analogue, improved control over the storms allows for a barrage effect pinning down the enemy while, if your control is sufficient your own troops are able to approach their lines
Quote from: NiallSDepending on the control of the storm it could be used as shock and awe type weapon. In a WW1 fantasy analogue, improved control over the storms allows for a barrage effect pinning down the enemy while, if your control is sufficient your own troops are able to approach their lines
Ooh, nice idea for my long put-aside WFRP WWI hack! :)
- The Giants of ice and storm on the march, with bristling beards, horned helmets, cleaving axes and stout shields. Little does the shivering opposing army know that the elders of the race ride their great horses in the dark sky, arcs of power running through their beards, wrought lightning jumping forth from every strike of their hammers on the clouds.
- A swarm of silvery black bugs, creeping, crawling, buzzing, all-consuming, leading the storm by invisible strands of aether. Who knows what alien hell, dimension or planet has spawned them?
- A dread necromancer leading is unholy army. Behold skeletons with lead-covered bones, zombies with spinning steel orbs in their chest cavities, lean giant carcasses stuck through by great metal poles and animated by electricity! Fighters and eldritch machines, powering the storm and also powered by it.
- A single fallen angel, crying in distraught agony.
[STRIKE]Oh, woe to him who writes poetry by moonlight and has jaded homoerotic sex with vampires![/STRIKE] Goddamit, what's the strikethrough tag?
- Nicola Tesla.
The myth of The Wild Hunt could be a good starting point for interesting ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Hunt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Hunt)
A nanotech storm. Devised as a weather control function/planetary heat sink, this is a wave of, perhaps billions of nanomachines. Their purpose is to help make it rain by travelling the planet, picking up water molecules from bodies of water and then dumping them where needed. In this way they also increase the planet's albedo as the water creates clouds. Although wind helps drive the cloud, the bots have tiny rotors to help their own propulsion. To counter the effects of natural wastage, a certain number of the bots are replicators. When the storm lands to pick up water, they also pick up anything else that can be used to create more bots. Occasionally when planned by their creators, the bots would descend on land to access a wider range of raw materials. [At the far end of sci-fi, the bots communicate and retain cohesion through pulses of static electricity. When very busy this has the effect of creating a lightning nimbus around the cloud]
That was before the war/invasion/hackers. Then the cloud was used for other purposes. Being so diffuse it was impossible to stop with conventional weapons and was used to dump literally tons of water onto enemy terrain, disrupting logistics, causing dams to fail, cities to flood. Worse still, when in their reproductive phase, the cloud no longer settles on empty areas but on populated areas, manufacturing or resource areas literally stripping them bare. Although the replicator bots don't need to take a lot of material, there are enough of them that those small amounts can be fatal. The widespread panic the cloud creates is even more damaging.
In a post-apocalypse/fall of technology scenario, the storm is a natural effect, a object lesson of the dangers of humanity's pride. It either wanders the world inflicting random disasters (or if you are in need of rain goodness) or perhaps its a permanent storm, that gradually growing in size having stripped the land below to the bedrock.