User:JOKTWWEJK/Sentinels And Coggoths

A campaign idea, a grand RTS one.

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?".

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.

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".

First Mission

Things start from attack on what they thought was "one of the last human bunker-cities" (think Matrix Zion). In truth, it was anything but. First sign that something was.