| From: | Dennis Steinmeijer dv8@********.nl |
|---|---|
| Subject: | The Church and Vatican in my game |
| Date: | Sat, 15 Jul 2000 19:06:13 +0200 |
and its position in the world of 2060. I just ended a campaign that revolved
somewhat around the Vatican and an internal powerstruggle within the Church
and I thought I'd share it with you.
Before I tell the story I want you all to know that the powerlevel of this
campaign was considerably higher than normal, so beware.
Most of you know the story behind Dunkelzahn's death and Darke and the Enemy
and Thayla, etc. For those of you who are not familiar with that story, the
comming might contain spoilers. Well, I thought it was a nice tale but I
changed a couple of things to make it a sort of prophecy thing.
One of my players decided to play a ex-soldier for the Swiss army. As some
of you might know the Swiss army used to be a bunch of mercenaries way back
a coupla hundred years. Nowadays they only hire out to the Vatican when
needs be. Well, this character was assigned to the Vatican and had to run a
lot of errants all across the world.
What he didn't know that the Church was originally formed by an Immortal Elf
(yeah yeah...I said high power level!), a mage as a matter of fact, called
the Nameless (because his name was only known to those within the highest
circles of the Church). He kept behind the scenes and let his little
organization grow. Around two-thousand and sixty years ago the faith was
dwindeling but there was a man called Jesus Christ that seemed to make the
faith popular and in doing so pissed a whole range of people off. The
Nameless saw him put to death by the Romans and resurrected him using a
residual mana-spike or something to fuel his magic (haven't quite figured
out for myself how he managed but the players didn't ask any questions), and
subsequently turned JC into a martyr and an icon.
Faith was stronger than ever. There was only one problem, somehow JC got a
glimps of the future when he was resurrected (or when he died, haven't made
up my mind yet) and saw the coming of the Enemy and the dwindeling of the
faith. He also saw the coming of the Second Resurrection of one who would
battle the Enemy with godlike powers after his resurrection. He recorded all
of his words on sacred scrolls right before he died.
Skip 2000 years. In 1945 a german archaeology team dispatched by the Nazi
leaders found these scrolls in a cave at Nag Hamadi, Israel (then
Palastina). The scroll somehow ended up in the Vatican hands, and after
inspecting its content they burried the scroll deep within the archives.
They did so because the believed the information on the scrolls to be very
harmful to the church (stole a bit of story from Stigmata, the movie here :)
Skip another 60 years. Horrors seemed to be knocking at our door and Mr.
Darke is doing his best to open the door. The church is frightened and is
still waiting for the Second Resurrection to happen. Meanwhile the churches
most powerful mages have tried to forsee the future and have found someone
they think to be the one they have dubbed: Sanctus Vitae Secundus, the
second sacred life. The second Jesus Christ...may player's character.
Now there are two groups within the church, the Nameless' group, who believe
that they should force his death, execute the resurrection and in that way
force his enlightened status and the sprouting of his godlike powers. And
then there is the group led by the Pope,...nothing more than a pawn but
still one who commands a lot of power. He truly believes in good and wants
to let Sanctus Vitae Secundus reach his enlightened status all on his own,
making sure he is the one.
Nameless and his little group of mages don't give a frag about what the Pope
wants and go ahead and order the character on a mission he was unable to
complete from the start. He died and they resurrected him and changed some
memories about what happened so that he would go on unsuspecting and the
group led by the Pope would never know. The character woke and saw that he
had slaughetered a large group of innocent people and in fear of punishment
fled to Seattle (the base of most of my campaigns).
But the pope had a spy in the group of mages assisting Nameless and he took
all of the personal items they had gathered from the character and defected
to the pope's side. That mage performed ritual tracking and found the
character in Seattle and destroyed the personal ritual equipment needed to
track him. He and the Pope made contact there and had people (Dunkelzahn and
his croonies) contact the player and explain what happened.
The character and his team closely worked with Dunkelzahn to bring down Mr.
Darke and took Dunkelzahn's heart to Thayla, yada yada yada like in the
Dagonheart trilogy.
So basically the foundation of the church is an Immortal Elf who survived
the fourth world.
Taddaaaa
DV8
"Abashed the Devil stood, and felt how awful Goodness is,..."
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
