Created by: Frederic Bush (fred@condor.sccs.swarthmore.edu)
I have to say, since I find the adventure ideas the best part of this list (keep 'em coming, folks!) I thought I'd chip in with another that just came to me. This one's for angels.
The situation precipitating the start of the adventure is a gradual one that has just begun to get nasty: because of a prolonged hot spell with little wind, the smog levels over much of the planet have tripled, and major companies are ignoring environmental regulations as if they don't exist. Air is unbreathable in several major cities (mostly in the third world) without oxygen masks.
Angels are trying to rectify the situation. Marc's servitors is working on persuading companies to follow ethical environmental laws, while Novalis' are putting pressure on governments through her legions of environmental activists. Yves' folk are chatting up a chemist who is soon to develop an amazing bacterium that eats smog. The PCs, however, are assigned a fairly minor role in dealing with this big crisis: they're to track down companies that are major polluters and look for demonic influence in the area they're operating in.
Sure enough, they'll find it. An environmental consultant/balseraph is meeting with top executives in the company and persuading them of a new way to burn their trash. He'll turn tail and run at the first sight of angelic influence, though he'll try to sic the company's private security force on the PCs. PCs might also pick up a "strategy note" he leaves behind, signed by "H".
About this time, characters will sense a massive disruption of the Symphony not too far away, just outside the city they're in. Upon arriving, they'll locate a scene of celestial combat, where an Ofanim has been destroyed by forces unknown. The Ofanim Nadras, Angel of Rainbows, a mid-level servant of Novalis, was "on duty" trying to coax a rainbow through the smog when he was slain. Since they're on the scene, characters will be recommended by their superiors to investigate the murder.
From this point it gets free form. Players will discover that (1)rainbows around the world are becoming rarer and rarer because (2) the chemical composition of rain is changing as certain rare and toxic chemicals are added to the mix and (3) about a dozen huge multi-national corporations are involved in producing these chemicals; several of them employ the same law firm. These multi-nationals are being otherwise very good about following environmental regs; it's just in a few key chemicals that they're falling short.They haven't been noticed been trgeted by Heaven as perhaps under demonic influence. (4) the law firm involved in advising these companies has links to several major law enforcement agencies and a wire bureau. (5) Nadras has been murdered by demons associated with this law firm
At this point, once the PCs have staked out the law firm, shock the heck out of them by having someone walk out of a meeting and proceed to a nearby angelic tether, and transmigrate to heaven! Eventually, the angel can be discovered to be one of the few servants of the enigmatic and reclusive Erakiel, angel of the Deluge...
This story begins a long time ago, with the great deluge that wiped out life on Earth (Genesis 9). God wanted to make sure the Flood was done right, so He appointed two of His finest Elohim to be in charge of determining that the Earth really was in such a bad state, and then making sure that the flood did its job. Erakiel and Edriel toured the Earth and witnessed its utter depravity in every nation, every city, every house but Noah's. Reporting to God that the world was evil, they then engineered and supervised the Deluge.
Luckily for them, God decided they wouldn't have to deal with that again:
"I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants
after you and with every living creature that was with you--the birds, the
livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with
you--every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never
again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will
there be a flood to destroy the earth. {...}
I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant
between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the
rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and
you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters
become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the
clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God
and all living creatures of every kind on the earth."
This was a great test, even for Elohim. They were responsible for murdering an entire planet. Think about that for a minute. It got even more difficult when God liked their work and used them later on to check up on Sodom and Gomorrah. There, too, they didn't find even 10 men worth saving. They managed to get Lot and his wife out of there before God's hammer fell on the towns, but once more, they were hatchetmen for the lord, and saw all the evil present there.
Edriel Fell soon after. Convinced that mankind was full of evil and should be helped along by destruction, he worked his way up from petty slayings to becoming the Demon of Pollution, a powerful servitor of Vapula who's now reaching for the top -- becoming a Prince. He renamed himself Hedorah to reflect his disaffection with God's wimpiness. Hedorah considers his job to be to convince humans to poison themselves--thus hurting themselves through their own evil.
Hedorah/Edriel and Erakiel never lost their friendship. Erakiel, Angel of the Deluge, has been growing more and more restive lately. He realizes objectively that God has authority over him and he may not destroy mortal sinners without God's word, but he grows angry at the evils he sees on the planet. Sin, licentiousness, and rampant homosexuality, the sin of Sodom, are everywhere on the earth. Erakiel dreams of God's call to once again cleanse the planet. Erakiel spends much of his time in seclusion, brooding over his past and the future of Earth. As one of God's favored servants, Erakiel is pretty much unaccountable for his odd behavior, and even Dominic fears him.
Hedorah/Edriel hopes to tempt him to once again scourge the Earth. For many years now, Hedorah/Edriel has been Erakiel's primary source of information, as Erakiel distances himself more and more from angelic society. Hedorah supplies him with news... in a way. The news that Erakiel receives is slanted in the worst posible way. He hears of horrific rapes, especially the homosexual kind, mass murders, and in general human evil. When the two of them get together they reminisce about evil people they met and destroyed in God's name. All in all, Erakiel has a very distorted and negative view of humankind. He's on the verge of using his divine gifts to flood the planet.
All that's stopping him are those blasted rainbows. Erakiel is not so far gone that he doesn't realize that he can't contravene God's covenant by flooding Earth while rainbows exist as a visible sign of said covenant. Hedorah is taking care of that by destroying Earth's rainbows by altering the chemical composition of rain. The smog is a smokescreen to divert angelic attention from the real problem. Anyway, Erakiel has been persuaded that he can flood the planet as long as there are no rainbows; at that point, the covenant will be broken. Meanwhile, Hedorah has to take care of the demon of Floods, a pesky Calabim named Uros. Uros will claim credit for the floods unless he's eliminated or discredited.
PCs will eventually, after figuring some of this out, have to chat with Erakiel and persuade him that the world really isn't in such a bad way. Erakiel is scary to talk to, even for angels: he destroyed the world! He's an "old testament" moralist who dislikes Mercurians, sex, and homosexuality; he will harp on those parts of earthly conduct, occasionally citing some skewed news statistic he has read (48% of females have been raped! And turned into lesbians because of it!) The PCs would do well to bring in an objective source of information, or even take him out and show him some nice parts of the world. Meanwhile, Hedorah will try to poison Erakiel's relationship with the PCs, and destroy them, of course. He may enlist Uros as a bullyboy to knock out the PCs.
If all goes to plan, and the PCs fail to convince or stop Erakiel, the icecap will slowly begin to melt after the last rainbow disappears, thus causing massive flooding. Just how effective the flood is is up to the GM. Hedorah will get his princedom; the deluge will be (quite rightly, from a world point of view) blamed on "Global warming brought about by smog and ozone depletion" (the only reason we haven't seen more global warming by now is because of the rainbow covenant). As for Erakiel, he won't fall: this is not dissonant for him, much though it seems to redound to evil. He's just been misled by false data. He'll be really, really angry at Hedorah, of course. Revenging himself may be his downfall.
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Elizabeth McCoy <arcangel@prismnet.com>
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