Design: Awakenings (2)

Story thoughts:

-Before the game starts, you kill yourself for some reason, or die because of something you did. My current thought is that you get involved in a cult in life, but as you learn more about it, you disagree with their nihilist ideals. However, something happens to change your mind – perhaps your family gets killed, or something roughly as traumatic. Basically, enough to turn you initially to the dark side, but still have a believable possibility of light inside. You then decide to go through with an elaborate cult ritual which ends in your death.

-You are then, as expected, raised by your cosmic horror master, and your latent necromantic powers are awakened by him. You are told by him that you are now bound to his will, and will be his agent on earth. He needs you to free him from his bonds that keep him trapped beneath the earth, as he only has very limited influence on the events on earth from his current situation.

-Your form is that of a being made of magic. Your body and soul have been absorbed and merged by magic, rather than being any conventional sort of undead. Your appearance would be something like a multicolored (mostly dark colors), pseudocorporeal human.

-You are told by your cosmic horror master that you are simply one of many that have taken the ritual – however, this isn’t true. You are special. He only awakened your untapped necromancy potential – usually, he has to imbue the victim with some of his own power – and having done that, your power can grow greatly on its own.

-You make choose to make different moral choices as you progress, controlled by how you have your undead defeat people. Sure, at first you think that the world should be destroyed by your master, but how much pain do you need to inflict on people in the meantime? As the story progresses, you begin to question your feelings more and more as you see some goodness in humanity (at least if you are leaning towards good), and you begin to doubt your mission. Ultimately, you could choose to continue to do his will, because you like the power and like the mayhem. Or, you could choose to defy him, and make him your enemy, and ultimately redeem yourself.

-You master cannot directly see what you’re doing, but you report to him, and other, loyal cultists also report to him behind your back – thus, he can get some sense of whether you’re lying to him or not, but can’t know for sure.

-The gameplay is changed somewhat by how you choose to play morally. First, you can still have your undead fight with you, but you have to tell them to disable, not kill, your enemies – they deal slightly less damage this way, and you don’t get very many resources from the bodies, however, you also attract less attention from other enemies (For example, if this was GTA, your star rating would go up less) – and thus you have to fight less enemies. Certain undead might have certain moves that make this easier than others – creatures that can shock enemies into unconsciousness, for example. You also have undead that can be stealthy, and favoring them could make going “good” easier.

-As you progress in the story, in addition to changing the way that you play the game somewhat, the story also begins to change as you make your choices. You do missions in different ways, obviously, but you can also choose to do different missions – if you want to destroy your master, you can do a quest to get more information from a former cult site in some mountains, for example, which in turn leads to a hunt for an artifact to destroy him. If you want to simply release him, as he’d like, you have to collect a different artifact to complete the relic that could free him. If you want to destroy him and absorb his power, then you could do a mix of the two, but neither would require quite as much effort – the idea is for all four paths to be roughly the same difficulty. If you want to prevent his raising but not take the risk of trying to destroy him, then you hunt down what would be used to raise him and hide it better or try to destroy it.

-Obviously, you can harvest your resources from people, but you can also get corpses and souls from graveyards and the like (morgues?) The alternate resources, such as plants and magical stone, could also be harvested in other, murder-neutral ways.


-Using souls isn’t as evil as it initially sounds. Souls outside of bodies can’t be destroyed, and are by default unconscious in this world – they usually only remain in the world for a short time after their body’s death by default, though they can persist for some time, especially near graveyards and the like. Thus, while you do keep them from going on to the afterlife with your magic, they are not conscious for it, and if they “fall” in your service, the magic binding them releases, and they depart to the afterlife.

-You have to recover some mysterious artifact in order to free your master, the pieces to which are scattered around the world.

-A mysterious (and ultimately very powerful, though that part is hidden) counter/foil to the cosmic horror appears (perhaps a love-interestish female?), and tries to draw you back into the light, or at least, to deny your master. He or she probably appears at the end of certain missions, at least to start with, and just points out the goodness of humanity to you and the like. S/he is the agent of some other force, and in the end, you accept that person’s ideas, or you kill (or at least reject) him or her.

Possible endings:
- You summon forth your horror master to take over the world, as its servant. You become absorbed into its being, and it does its stuff. World ends, everyone dies – or something like that. Final Boss: Mysterious other character.
- You summon forth your master, in order to destroy it. You do so, and save the world. Possibly involving a heroic sacrifice. Final Boss: Cosmic Horror
- You re-seal (or don’t unseal, and perhaps make it harder for the next guy to try to unseal) the monster, so it remains, but so do you, at least in theory. Final Boss: Mysterious other character
- You summon forth your master in order to destroy it, and take its place. Final Boss: Cosmic Horror