Microscope RPG--Rise and Fall of an Empire: Scene: Saint Xavata invokes Destroyers name

Scene: Saint Xavata's invokes the Destroyer's name; gives herself to the Dark One as his bride.

Focus: The Destroyer

Question: Why did Saint Xavata accept the Destroyer as her patron, immortal husband, and seduce the Pure Thought Crusade to follow his evil?

Required characters:

Saint Xavata - A great hero among the Pure Thought Crusade, and one of the movement's greatest leaders. The Destroyer (Avatar) - An Avatar of the Dark One, a malevolent deity that only cares of the base instincts of men. Revels in fear, death, torture, and death. A Witch - A disciple of the Destroyer attached to Xavata's army for some reason as determined by player.

Banned Characters: Non-humans

Setting the Scene: The Pure Thought Crusade have recently suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Naga-Sar-Ti, a hybrid snake-and-man abomination. The battle had occurred due to encroachment on the Naga-Sar-Ti's ancient burial ground, filled with earthwork graves and totems of reverence. Xavata, the great general, lead the Pure Thought Crusade and foolishly discounted these creatures as she marched her army to attack an Invisible Empire holding.

Now, her army, after having lost nearly half of their number, sits camped in the burial grounds with the Naga-Sar-Ti forces closing in. Many of her men that are alive are sick from poison, or fatigued from days of fighting. The end seems near. And yet, black magic and terrible contracts are whispered in the night ...

Choose Characters

Yadal: I'll take Menmos, an advisor to Saint Xavata. Menmos, technically Duke Menmos of the now collapsed human empire, has always been an utterly pragmatic person, and an intelligent advisor but with very few morals. How Xavata has reacted to this is up to whoever plays her this time.

Glyptodont: As for me, I will reprise the role of Saint Xavata, whose identity (unbeknownst to her comrades in the Pure Thought Crusade) has been discovered by agents of the Invisible Empire. They have been subtly influencing her mind causing her to make poor strategic decisions and to lose the military gains that the Pure Thought Crusade has made so far.

Muskrat: I'm going to go for the avatar of the Destroyer.

TetNak: I'm the priest!

Reveal Thoughts

Yadal: Menmos, ever the coward, is panicking about the coming attackers. He's scrambling to try and think of a way to save the army from total destruction, and is tired and stressed. The idea that Saint Xavata has been subverted by the Pure Thought Crusade is one he has thought of, but he has no proof of that.

Glyptodont: Xavata of late is coming to realize something is wrong. She had suspected agents of the Invisible Empire had been subverting her people, but every time she had determined to take action to investigate, she found herself distracted and her mind becoming obsessed with other irrelevant tasks. She suspects what's happening, but she can't speak it, nor even think about it directly. But there are lucid moments when she feels her mind is her own. She doesn't know if this is an illusion or if the Invisible Empire fails to monitor its minions every moment. Nonetheless, she has managed to send her allies, the Jeweled Children, to work independently of her orders. She has tried to give them hints that she's falling under mind control influence. She would have prayed that they catch her clues if such a prayer wouldn't giver her away to the Invisible Empire. The only hope her people have is to eliminate all the members of the Pure Thought Crusade who are compromised--including herself. This will require her to think consciously that she's betraying the Pure Thought Crusade while pursuing an action that will paradoxically purge the Crusade of any mind-control influence.

Muskrat: The Destroyer--whose true name, if spoken by any mortal would drive them mad--had settled on his latest bride, to add to his harem in his home plane, known only as the Pit. This woman Xavata fascinated him. She was filled with righteous zeal--but she had also caused untold destruction and suffering. She and her army were a whirlwind moving across the land, bringing chaos in their path, destroying the weak and revealing the strong. Soon, thought the Destroyer, I will turn her wholly to my purposes. Soon, she will find her true calling and wreak havoc for the sake of havoc, testing all the mortals who meet her. The Destroyer had taken on an avatar that had recently joined Xavata's army as a new lieutenant. He had dazzled their minds, so no one questioned very closely how we had come to join them--everyone assumed it was on someone important's orders. His form was of a handsome young man, willowy, but agile, deadly with a rapier and a bow. He claimed to be a member of the Jurjen tribes and rode one of their war cats, great creatures bred from tigers, trained to carry their riders into battle and rend their foes with teeth and claws.

TetNak: Bharg was a thrall, a slave, to Xavata and her mighty army. He was human, if but barely. A lifetime of worshiping the Destroyer had changed him. He was impossibly skinny, with a hunch back, and oversized head, and terrible red eyes. He was all but bald, and only thirty years of age, with grey wisps of hair here and there. Bharg's village had been destroyed by Xavata and her armies, but Bharg had been spared by a dashing fellow who advised against massacring the populace. Bharg was disappointed in truth, hoping Xavata would give herself over to the Destroyer, killing the innocent, or not, it did not matter. Blood, death, destruction ... that is all that mattered. The priest felt something coming, something important, but it fell just out of his grasp ..

The Scene starts here in the IC thread.