Having been reading a LOT of Stross I have been stealing with arms and legs from his Laundry book especially when ever it came to anything dealing with deamons and tech, lets face it giant squid man horrors from beyond are cool. Preordering the Fuller Memorandum I came across another company doing a game based on this world and I plan to buy it,m if for nothing else some good inspiration as to how byzantine secret organizations work and computational demonology.

What I was wondering is this... Where do you guys get your deamon mythos from, do you just use the "vanilla" wh40k stuff or do you add your own cultural twists? Either from folklore, books and so on.

UncleArkie said:

My short answer would be "yes." I source just about everything I have read or watched in some way towards a more pungent and diabolical Warp. Every world is different, every culture has its own myths. To some degree these all factor in to it all. The Warp is fickle; even to Its children.

-=Brother Praetus=-

I recently finished a campaign in which I based the daemon summoned in the finale loosely from Arthur C Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Billion_Names_of_God

The summoning site was the (thought abandoned) chapel dedicated to the sect transcribing an ancient code thought to be "The Nine Billion Names of the God-Emperor". When all but the final name were revealed The Emperor would descend from the stars before judging and ascending mankind.

"The Emperor" of their cult turned out to be nothing more (and nothing less!) than a Tzeentchian daemon of unparalleled power. The reason the party was involved in the first place was due to their Inquisitor (ordo hereticus with heavy ordo xenos ties) uncovering the tools of the summoning amongst the ruins of an ancient civilisation. The alien race had fallen into the same messiah trap that was unfolding now, and sacrificed themselves entirely to prevent the sector being destroyed. The party had to stop it this second time round.

It was a rather nasty finale, with our melee assassin duking it out with a rank 8 cleric who was the leader of the cult, our techpriest and other assassin demolishing the masonry around them to stop the tide of angry yellow-robed cultists, and our psyker finishing off the destruction of the ritual by casting Spasm on a Chrono, at the behest of the daemon inside him who wanted revenge on the BBEG. All while a massive daemon is coming into existence before them and gifting everyone with lots of nice CPs during the fight (1 CP each at the beginning of each full round).

A year-long game, from a single short story. I'm just happy I get to play a PC again now that it's all over.

Sounds awesome, wonder what a good source would be for some not so run of the mill deamons and belief systems would be, for the moment I am turning my eyes to Bali and Indonesia, some of their original myhos have some nasty hell pits and horrors in them, but more posts on that later, planning on doing a cultural writup for something ala Ankur Hat or Jambi ect. For some reason I was listening to Last Night in Bankok on the radio the other night and remembering my own visit there I wanted to invoke that feeling of cultural clash while putting in some elements of "Death of a Red Heroine" by Qui Xianlong.

Basic plot starts with the murder of a young talented adept in a strange city planet far away (jungle and city merges), while fairly low key she had important patrons who calls in a favour, the inqusistion gets involved not as an official investigation but becasue the inquisitor owes one of the patrons a favour. This means that our heros are there under the radar and can't call on all their normal resources, all while also being dogged by the local arbites who they have to work with, but also be wary of as it seems that there might be someone controling the local law enforcement (who are lazy and corrupt - sorry to offencemeant to any one from bankok, it just fits my story). Also the players interest in the case should be a little below zero, they are =I= and this is just a murder, kind of like having the FBI investigate a drunk hit and run.

Now I'm ranting again, I'll post a proper writeup later.

As many others, I kinda like steeling from what has been pulished under the name of "Chtullu" (and thereby I am one of the many who brings about the downfall of Chtullu by turning it into "vanilla" itself).

Most anime with occult elements have pretty twisted daemon-things. The old Movies "Wicked City" , "Monster City " and "BioHunter " have many examples. Some quiet corny/cheesy, some quiet good. Althoug I have to admit, they are more about "manifest daemon monsters" or "being possesed".

With chaos, it is a good thing to to simply heighten the size, put some subtle bodyparts into the wrong place and add something nasty.

Lately, I came up with a Daemon with Tzeentch-Affilation looking the following.

A well build human male man (but without sexual organs) but twice the size and the upper half of the head (above nose) head similiar to a "hammer head shark" (what is the engl. term?). Along the row of the head weren´t eyes but nine different human mouthes. The nose wasn´t present and if it opend it´s "mouth" a huge eyeball on a stalk would appear.

Well I go by the "if it slithers or have tentacles it must be cool". Lots of CoC references, among them the basement being bad and be wary of old ladies and little children, they are never what they seem.