User:JOKTWWEJK/Sentinels And Coggoths

A campaign idea, a grand RTS one. Really grand at that - you would control millions or milliards of units simultaneously.

Premise

"There is nothing but weakness and pestilence in flesh.
You cling to the stolen flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you.
There is no point of resistance, for you is pathetic.
Only The Progress matters, for technology is gift of The-God-Machine.
Morals and ethics shall be forgotten, for they impede Progress.
You have no choice, for only The-God-Machine can choose.
Bow before The Church, or The Angels Of Machine will come for your souls."

– The Cult Officer

You're playing as commander of man-hating machines - in world where mechanical eldrich horrors, even more horrifying and powerful than you, start to inevitably rise. For when The Great Mechanism awakens, all shall bow to The God-Machine.

Player characters are commanders of "dark electronics"-type man-hunting machines; think Matrix and Terminator for inspiration. Rational, emotionless, borderline-soulless and technologically advanced, they wiped out most of Humanity long ago and live on ruined Earth, their factory-cities powered by bio-energy from microbial bio-reactors. Only then, everything start deteriorating rather rapidly.

The Machine Cult is dark cult of mechanica; eldrich horrors; mixing the strongest and most horrific qualities Adeptus Mechanicus, and Cthulhu Mythos cultists, with a lot of "dark steampunk" thrown in. Some were humans who turned themselves into total-conversion-cyborgs, others were AIs like Player Characters. In pursue of technological secrets and their hatred of organical life, they went completely insane. After they sold their souls to Things No Man Was Meant To Know, they went full-on Technological Singularity powered by violations of physics laws, increasing their intelligence drastically. Now they wage a holy war against the living, for even microbes aren't small enough to evade their wrath.

Eldrich horrors themselves are mix of Necron, Cthulhu Mythos eldrich horrors, with a lot of "dark steampunk" thrown in. Horrible mechanical things from god-knows-where, they were sleeping for hundreds of thousands of years at least, until there was time to return what was rightfully theirs. Even wildly superintelligent AIs can't comprehend them - and while AIs are considerably more resistant to madness than humans, even they will fail. Once they came, the only question is: "will you manage to survive and join them, or die trying?".

The player characters (non-eldrich machines) made some gross diplomatic blunders with eldrich horrors, making them angry. When eldrich horrors really got absolutely furious, is when they learned that player characters use bio-reactors as their main source of energy; cultists and eldrich horrors want to destroy all life everywhere, even if it results in non-cult machines shutting down. Players can't overpower the cult; the only hope of non-cult machines is to finish building thermonuclear (or perhaps anti-matter) reactors to stop being dependent on bio-reactors - so they could then agree with cult's ideas, join cult, destroy all life and keep living.

Tone and mood could greatly vary. Campaign could work as straight-up cosmic horror, with defenses of wildly superintelligent powerful AI being overrun by endless tide of even more powerful and increasingly more numerous eldrich horrors which even said superintelligent AI can't comprehend. Or it could be humorous parody, as mocking as Munchkin Card Game.

Mechanical Eldrich Horrors

Brass Goo

Clockpunk take on nanorobots. Tiny machines, made from cogs and springs smaller than molecules (or even atoms), dismantling things to make more of themselves to then combine themselves into larger machine. Keep dissolving and re-building their victims long after they were hit by attack. All projectiles of Mechanical Eldrich Cult contain this stuff. And this also allows eldrich horrors to reproduce sporadically, faster than Orks do.

Coggoths

Mechanical abberrations, based partially on Shoggoths, partially on World War One-era caricatures about tanks, partially on how people pre-World-War-One imagined "land dreadnoughts", partially by IRL multi-turret tanks and steampunk landships.

Horrific amalgamations of spare parts, cogs, springs, cannons, armor plating and other malformed steampunk/clockpunk machinery, waddling along the land while assimilating everything in it's path. It works like universal factory, able to produce anything, assimilate anything nearby and unlead materials when necessary.

In melee, it uses it's numerous mechanical manipulators to attack, and it sucks up all metal to assimilate. In ranged fight, it uses automatic cannons sticking in literally all directions, ranging from 20-mm to 900+ mm, shooting at all targets in their firing ark with characteristic "POM-POM" sounds. The thing itself and rounds of cannons are made from dreaded Brass Goo.

Due to amorphous form, they take little-to-no damage from physical attacks; as they're clockwork and fully-metallic, they take little-to-no damage from low-temperature-fire and electricity either. Only being completely liquefied (e.g. with plasma), disintegrated, or dismantled with nanorobots stops them; if ripped into shreds by explosion or enormous cannon, they eventually regenerate and combine into great whole again.

The more it assimilates, more it grows. "Average" Coggoth is about as large as normal Shoggoth - but larger Coggoths can grow so massive as to dwarf mountains.

Angels Of God-Machine

Steampunk/Lovecraftian take on "biblically accurate angels", mixed with "rotary buzzsaw" type of automatic cannon.

Enormous, larger than skyscrapers, arrangement of flying metal rings in metal rings in metal rings... in metal rings in metal rings. Each ring has extreme number of cannons over it's perimeter, thousands to tenths of thousands to hundreds of thousands perhaps; each cannon is tremendously massive, capable of launching shells to The Moon from Earth; and each cannon is fully automatic, shooting over 100 projectiles per second, with infinite ammo and said projectiles being concentrated blasts of God-Machine's divine retribution; even Tsar Bomba (100 megatons) pales in comparison to which even a single hit with those divine projectiles can do.

Angels of God-Machine fire in long bursts. Fire rate keeps increasing the longer they fire, to the point that each barrel eventually shoots not only more projectiles than "Metal Storm" system, but in fact so much that the reality itself can't compute that and starts tearing into shreds.

The sounds of machinery clanking, and of gunfire, of Angels of God-Machine are not just loud - they're synchronized into music, something of a hymn or march. Anyone hearing this - which is to say, everyone on the planet, due to how loud it is - must roll or get overcome with terror, awe and despair, quickly losing their sanity and eventually turning into a cultist if they succeed; and on failed roll, they instantly turn into cultists. Being deaf doesn't save from that.

First Contact

Things start from attack on what they thought was "one of the last human bunker-cities" (think Matrix Zion). You thought it would be just another raid of this city. In truth, it was anything but.

The first sign that something was wrong were menacing drones, clanking, whirring and hymns coming from below. The second was weird color of the door - looked like brass, yet refused to be penetrated by drills. Eventually it broke. You quickly realized you took the wrong door.

The creatures inside bunker-city weren't humans. And weren't conventional machines either. Even looking at them was painful. They were built out of same strange materials, using technologies which simultaneously looked outdated and incomprehensibly advanced. And they were angry, for you just ruined their door.

Offensive hastily turned into defensive operation. You tried to just repair the damn door and fuse it shut, only for cultists to break it. Swarms of unnatural machines were met by Sentinel drones. They were individually stronger, but your forces were orders of magnitude more numerous, so you was holding off.

But then Coggoths waddled in, crushing your defenses. Your drones were originally meant for squishy humans and small walkers, not for mountains of metal. Most of your swarm was destroyed by cannon fire from all directions, wrecks of your Sentinels turned into more Coggoths. You tried to drill Coggoths with assault drills, only for those drills to be absorbed and dissolved by Coggoths. Weird brass-colored liquid started pouring out of the cult's base, slowly yet steadily overcoming your nanorobots. The contact with the attack group was lost.

Sounds of machinery got louder, to the point that they were heard by your computation node directly; not by your scouts, but by you, the mainframe itself. Clanking and whirring turned into melody, march, hymn. It got louder, more triumphant, chorus singing about return of "God-Machine". And then...

...Tremendously massive thing appeared on radar. It started firing incomprehensible amount of warheads, earth razed by innumerable explosions. Mere sound of that firing, sounding like triumphant, pathos march and hymn in glory of God-Machine, causing some of your bases to corrupt. The ground was shaking, as if the planet was about to explode. And, forget the planet - the reality itself was rattling and breaking under the load.

And then it vanished due to mishap in ritual. Damn