How Would You Run Lucifer?

#1

My Ghost Mountain game is in its final act. There’s a very good chance my PCs are going to absorb all the YOG themselves and confront Lucifer in Hell in an attempt to usurp him. This would be the Final Battle. How would you run this encounter and make it epic?

#2

See… Viking Death Squad video… great ideas in the final battle where they fight the devil! … Game On!

#3

Or based on sympathy for the Devil. https://youtu.be/f47TZePukuQ

Someone with so much confidence, they don’t need to win, just sow confusion and pain.

This is just another cosmic game. If he/she is defeated here…everyone ceases to exist…except Lucifer…if Lucifer wins he gains something, but not the war…and if no one wins, things continue as they are.

But if they don’t give proper recognition, respect and such…then ya…it gets nasty, and Lucifer will cheat.

That’s my take. So not as desperate as Viking Death Squad.
Lucifer is a story teller, a gamesman, a seducer, and a cheat. Will have interest in the accomplishments of the party. Mention their great feats, and how they foiled his/her many plans…

If given the chance, Lucifer will compliment the individual members, offer riches, appeal to the vanity of their prowess, their sacrifices, their steadfastness, their discipline…their desires…including that of vengeance or the greed to beat the devil.

#4

Or you flip the script: The Hunger is actually a manifestation of the Devourer from Warp Shell. Lucifer is actually trying to save Alfheim by havesting as much YOG as possible in an attempt to fight off the Devourer. The One God doesn’t believe that they could win in this battle and has resigned Alfheim to destruction.

#5

It’s funny. In my game, the Hunger is a sentient sand worm a la Dune. Another solution they’re considering is feeding all the YOG to it so Hell can’t have it. If they do that, the Hunger will become the Devourer :smiley:

#6

I’m about to start up some Ghost Mountain stuff myself. Any tips? I have Core, Worlds and Salvation.

#7

Yeah! Love it! Old Lucy has already done a lot of those things at The Measure (see my short story in this post.

I’m thinking grand in scale. Like, Lucifer is huge, and hellfire burns all around, and they’re not really in space/time as we’d think of it, but aloft in some cosmic Hell, and maybe there are little, shifting islands the PCs can stand on that keep getting burned up and more keep appearing from the ether, and Lucifer attacks with Five Years On The Rack and Ten Years In Isolation.

I’m getting the heebie jeebies thinking about it :smiley:

#8

Cool! Please post about how it goes!

Things I did for my game:

  1. I did my research on Wild West history, and paid special attention to black, Mexican, Chinese, Native, and LGBTQ+ considerations. The last thing I wanted was to misrepresent or appropriate any of these minorities, but I also did not want to erase them.

  2. I figured out multi-sense imagery I wanted in my game. Wind, dust, storm clouds, the smell of blood, the smell of gunpowder, etc. I made a list to drag-and-drop as needed.

  3. “You travel for a few days. Or was it hours? Time is fluid on Ghost Mountain.” I took inspiration from Neil Gaiman’s excellent short story, Other People, for this one. I dropped a line like that basically every session.

  4. When they were summoned to The Measure, a massive storm cloud shaped like Satan spoke their names into the sky and rushed toward them, struck them with lightning, and deposited them near wherever Lucifer had possessed some poor sap so they could play cards. Lucifer taunted them with Things He Ought Not Know. Also, a human body is not made to contain Lucifer for long…

  5. Life is cheap. Real cheap.

  6. Heaven wants the YOG, too, but Heaven was banished from Ghost Mountain, in accordance with the Rules. What’ll it take to get Heaven back in the game?

  7. As with all my campaigns, I wrote down unanswered questions on a sheet of paper and hung it up by the table. This kept players engaged with all the plots.

  8. ICRPG Cards pack #4 is awesome!

  9. I gave the PCs an NPC guide; a fellow who sort of knew the way around.

  10. I tracked the sun’s height / time of day on another sheet of paper, and made real-time adjustments based on their good or evil actions. No commentary was necessary.

  11. I can’t say enough good things about Ingrid’s Deck of 52. We used it for The Measure.

Does that help?

#9

My #1 tip for ghost mountain:

  • Just play Black Jack when gambling with the devil!