Sword of Ruin (+3 greatsword): Until recently, the Orc Lord’s personal executioner carried the sword of ruin, but she and the blade vanished mysteriously, and the dread weapon’s current whereabouts are unknown – which means no Icon or ruler in the land can sleep soundly. The sword of ruin is the bane of kings and the unraveller of empires. If it’s used to kill someone with authority over or ownership of a domain of any kind, it curses that domain. Armies lose their courage; castle walls lose their strength; places of magic lose their power; people lose their faith and even the land loses its vitality and becomes desolate and barren.

For example, if the sword of ruin killed the Imperial Governor of a seaport, then that town’s walls might crumble. Its defenders might lose heart, its ships might sink or its fishing fleets might find the seas unaccountably empty. The precise manifestation of the sword’s curse varies, but it always brings ruin and destruction. Any domain, no matter how large or small, is vulnerable to ruin. If it killed a peasant, it blight only that peasant’s field and leave the rest of the farmland nearby untouched. If it killed the Emperor... well, that would be one way to end a campaign.

The sword of ruin only works if it kills with a critical hit or a coup de grace. Quirk: Hates to be given orders.

That last part is important. Short of a lucky critical hit, the target needs to be knocked out first and then finished off. This creates a window of opportunity for a desperate ally of the target to kill said target to prevent calamity.

How would you use the sword in your game? It does not necessarily have to start off at +3; perhaps it has lost some of its direct combat power, while retaining its domain-shattering properties. What sort of antagonist would you give the sword to? Once the PCs acquire the sword, what sort of obstacles would stand in their way, trying to claim it for themselves?

Let us say that in one specific nation, people are sometimes natural-born magicians. Half of these have magic whose special effects come with powerful, unmistakable whiffs of X scent. The other half's special effects come in Y scent. The specific smells do not matter; maybe one is citrusy while the other is floral, or perhaps it is spicy versus woody. These scents have no actual ramifications whatsoever on the magic... but they cause division.

Maybe the divide is limited to the natural-born magicians themselves; those with X scent decry those of Y scent and vice versa. Perhaps, instead, the masses of the nation believe that magic of X smell is holy and beneficent, while magic of Y smell is profane and curses. Either way, it divides the natural-born magicians into two groups that are seldom seen mingling with one another.

Is the idea an unbelievable one?

Let us say that the GM is setting up a campaign where the PCs are alliance forgers and war heroes. There is this big, brutal, expansionist empire in the middle of the continent, surrounded by five relatively smaller nations. Each of the four PCs is royalty of one of the five lesser kingdoms, leaving the fifth as a wild card. The PCs' job is to fend off the merciless empire.

The GM stops to think. Maybe it would be interesting if the five smaller nations all had an animal motif? Okay, they will be the kingdoms of the Eagle, the Hare, the Lion, the Serpent, and the Wolf, and their knights could be themed after such. Hmmm. This sounds a little generic, though...

Why not make the setting Japanese-themed? Then they could be the kingdoms of Taka, Usagi, Tora (tigers are close enough to lions, right?), Hebi, and Ōkami. Then, there could be samurai and ninja and such. Maybe it would be a little trite, though...

What about something Mesoamerican? Right, then we could name the nations Cuauhtlan, Tochtlan, Ocelotlan (still close enough, right?), Coatlan, and Coyotlan (coyotes and wolves are also close enough). The knights could be analogous to those historical eagle and jaguar warriors! But these names are a little too close to one another...

Oh, what about doing what every other setting does, namely, making the world a cultural kitchen sink? The five smaller nations might be called Adler, Usagi, Ocelotlan, Thuban, and Lang. Eh... maybe this would be too much of a mishmash... back to generic Western European fantasy, then?

The above is merely an example. I am not actually making such a setting. I still wonder: where does one draw the line on what to "skin" as a specific culture and what to leave generic?

A certain RPG (Pathfinder 2e, specifically) recently introduced a group of creatures called "palinthanoi." I find their concept to be very cool. They are powerful undead resulting from a disagreement between time and death.

Supernatural events and powers can disturb the flow of time. Sometimes, this results in death being undone. A little time reversal or time travel prevents a person from dying, and all is hunky-dory, right? Not so fast.

Time and death are two separate cosmic forces, each with its own discrete perspective. Time has been tricked into thinking that the person is alive, but death is not so easily deceived. "That person is alive!" says time. "No, that person has already perished," death insists. (This anthropomorphization is purely metaphorical, to be clear.)

This disagreement, this paradox, produces an undead creature known as a "palinthanos." They are accursed beings of fractured moments, who distort time wherever they roam. What happens when the deaths of a great many people are prevented through temporal tomfoolery? Who can say.

What do you think of this concept? I find it to be a fascinating way to highlight the perils of temporal disturbances, whether manmade or otherwise.

I'm running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight and I'm slowly adding in lore about Tasha for my players to learn. I can't seem to find much of anything on this topic other than the fact that they're frenemies and sometimes play chess.

A relatively well-known D&D example is the Blood War between demons of chaos and devils of law. There are many other possibilities. Maybe an important bulwark that defends the land from a demonic invasion is the undead army of some lich king, who would prefer to dominate the world rather than see it fall into fiendish hands. Perhaps the primordial titans have shattered their bindings and are devastating the planet with flames, storms, quakes, and waves, but eldritch hierophants and cultists call down alien horrors from beyond the stars to defend civilization: for elemental annihilation is not, in fact, the "correct" eschaton. On a much smaller scale, perhaps the shady criminals in town can be convinced to steel themselves and help hunt down the man-eating werewolf terrorizing said town.

What are some memorable examples that you have seen or created, and how did the PCs get involved?

I have been considering a setting where one of the main quirks and threats, maybe the biggest, is that rulers who attain a certain threshold of glory, renown, adoration, etc. apotheosize into minor gods. With their vastly superhuman abilities, they can lead their people to greater heights.

But a minor god can still die, whether in battle, to assassination, to mystical cataclysms, or to the most pernicious of poisons and curses. The ruler becomes a malice- and resentment-driven undead overlord. Some cling to their people maniacally and overprotectively, while others turn on their subjects due to some perceived slight, such as failure to prevent the ruler's death. This is always a dark time: wars ignite, plagues and famine strike, lesser undead rise, and reality-rifts disgorge horrors.

They vary in form: skeletons, zombies, vampires, ghosts, some in between. Twice, an apotheosized ruler entombed themselves deep beneath the earth, all "king asleep in mountain" style. One was assassinated regardless, rising up as a wraith. The other still lives, fearful of death, yet willing to aid their nation in a dire time.

Legends hold that a few of these overlords, for whatever reason, elected to simply leave the mortal world. They gathered in the Negative Energy Plane. This small circle of long-undead rulers has been concocting some scheme through which they may optimally reclaim the world that they departed from. Do they also plan on backstabbing one another? Probably.

What would you do with such a setting? Would you have the PCs start in a nation whose ruler just became one such undead? Would you have them start in a nation externally imperiled by an undead overlord: perhaps while their own nation's ruler is a still-living minor god, worried about dying? Whatever the case, I imagine that PCs could be the ones to finally unearth the source of this phenomenon and break the curse once and for all. (Of course, even a still-living great ruler can be a conquest-minded villain...)

I find the recent Genshin quest about a memory-artificer and her daughter to be very memorable, and I would like to import it into my ongoing game.

Let us start with a warning, first off: the quest involves child abuse and gaslighting. Any players will have to be vetted to see if they are fine with this.

To significantly simplify the quest into its most basic form (and taking a few liberties with the order of events), the party meets a talented artificer. Her specialty is crafting items that record memories, and the party has some sort of pragmatic or personal interest in this.

The artificer happens to have a daughter. The artificer explains that the daughter is sickly, suffers from memory loss and delusions, and sometimes says strange things (#1, #2, #3).

The party gets suspicious and investigates. The inquiry is complicated by the people in the surrounding community having only spotty, hazy memories of the artificer's daughter. The party is resourceful, though, and manages to reconstruct a disturbing sequence of events.

The artificer's biological daughter died years ago. Shortly afterwards, the grieving mother adopted an orphan with a similar appearance, and renamed that orphan to match her original daughter's name. The artificer mundanely groomed the orphan to pretend to be her original daughter. Eventually, this escalated into the artificer drugging the orphan towards greater pliability. This further escalated into the artificer lining the orphan's bedroom with crystals containing copies of her original daughter's memories and personality, designed to gradually overwrite the orphan's own memories and personality. Between the drugs and the crystals, the orphan's physical and mental health declined, thus doubling as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. All this unfolded over years.

The people in the surrounding community have cloudy memories of the artificer's daughter (and therefore have a hard time realizing discrepancies) because the artificer was distributing her crafts amongst them. They were secretly designed to absorb memories of the original daughter.

The party confronts the artificer and her "daughter," but the artificer is ready. Using some sort of doohicky, the artificer and her "daughter" are whisked away to some secret lair. The party fights their way through the workshop, where they see the artificer ready to undertake the most extreme step possible. With the help of a large cache of memory crystals, the artificer's ritual will fully rewrite the orphan's memory and personality with those of her original daughter. The party has come all this way; they might as well stop the ritual, save the kid, and apprehend or kill the grieving mother.

I find this compelling. I think it would make for an interesting scenario in a tabletop RPG. Do you think it could work well? How would you try to get the party invested in this scenario?

Some extra thoughts: This quest has an inherent degree of resistance against unexpected action, mostly because the artificer and her "daughter" can contingently poof away.

For example, if the party were to aggressively accuse the artificer on their first meeting, she and her "daughter" could feasibly poof away. Then the party would have to track down the lair regardless, reconstructing what had happened regardless.

There is also a degree of resistance against lie detection abilities. Namely, the grieving mother's mental state is such that she sincerely believes her own fabrications to an extent.