It was all going to end like this, one day or another
Hooks:
It starts out as a simple enough job, some noble or other has acquired some potentially profitable land but learned too late that it rests within the hunting grounds of some dangerous monsters lairing in a ruin in the nearby mountains. After being hired by an agent of the noble with a sizable upfront payment and the promise of more to come, the party find themselves hiking up into the foothills towards an abandoned abbey. It's your standard monster hunt... aside from the mostly devoured bodies indicating the party are not the first ones to be sent up the mountain.... or the rambling immortal corpse chained up for what seems like decades in a secret cell in the abbey's foundations.
It's a week or so later that the visions start... only rumours at first, people having bad dreams about a hateful red sun in a black sky, horrifying shapes moving about a blasted and ashen countryside... but then one of the heroes "awakens" in the burnt out ruins of the in they went to sleep in last night and are forced to fight for their life against various monstrosities before gasping awake. These visions are unpredictable and intermittent, and as speculation mounts of what they might mean further tales come creeping in about people dying in thier sleep or even rising from their beds to go on a mindless rampage after falling under the influence of whatever it is they're seeing.
Some time later the party is approached again by the noble's agent... though this time they're dishevelled, paranoid, and have obviously been running for their life for some days. They explain that their employer is up to something wicked, they don't know what, but its got something to do with the old abbey and the visions and its only going to get worse if they're not stopped.
Setup: Consigned to the dustbin of history nearly a century ago, the soothsayer Tirman Houndstongue was known in his day for producing prophecies as cryptic as they were accurate. The "Houndstongue Harkenings" were required readings for mystics of the day, until the new writings suddenly stopped as most presumed that the diviner had simply dropped dead in one of his famously fevered writing sessions. One by one the events hinted at by Tirman's writings were divined and came to pass, and the once famous fortuneteller fell into obscurity.
The truth is far stranger than what is remembered: After years of seeminly innocuous prophecies Houndstongue started predicting the end of the world, and in fear of his widely circulated ramblings causing a panic the church censored his writings and imprisoned him in an isolated monestary that only a select few knew about. For the rest of his life Tirman rambled on about all the horrors that would befall the world during the end times.. and then kept on rambling after he died, seeminly animated by the NEED to keep pronouncing the end of days, pausing only to talk about the terrible fates that would befal his captors and how their actions were all for not. Less than a decade later an outbreak of plague struck the monestary, leaving the corpse forgotten in its cell.
Forgotten, except for a certain noble by the name of Vandermyr , who's family's rise to prominence came about as party of Tirman's prophecies. Though born generations after the oracle's apparent death, Vandermyr developed an obsession with Houndstongue's writings thinking that they didn't just apply to specific events but spoke of underlying patterns in fate. After lucking into increasingly successive business ventures, Vandermyr bent his family's resources to discovering lost scraps of Tirman lore, eventually stumbling into the truth of his abduction, and his eventual resting place, buying the estate nearby.
Sending multiple groups to seek out scraps of unpublished prophecy under the guise of monsterhunting, Vandermyr was DELIGHTED to encounter the recitating cadaver of his idol once the party reported back, going so far as to visit the monastery himself before commanding servants to drag Tirman's remains back to his manor. In long hours spent listening at the corpse's feet comes to a revelation: that the apocalyptic ravings are just cryptic metaphor, misunderstood by the narrow minded churchfolk, and that surely they would lead him, and the Vandermyr family to rise to even greater heights.
Further Adventures:
Vandermyr is an idiot and he's kickstarted the end of days, which makes the party atleast partially culpable. It might take them a while to connect the auspicious signs to clues left in the dungeon, but once they figure it out they'll need to break into Vandemyr's manor for answers. Thankfully they're not alone in this task, as despite being a mouthpiece for otherworldy forces and stone dead for well over a hundred years, Tirman's been trying to prophecy AROUND the death of the world, it'll just take the party a bit of champion level bullshit decoding to figure out how.
Unbenknownsed to anyone including him, Tirman's prophecies were delivered by an extradimensional horror with power over predestination known as the Nigh-Tyrant. From its home amid the carcasses of devoured worlds this pisonic predator would weave itself into the causality of a realm it wished to devour, influencing events to allow it to travel between realms and rampage as it pleased. The problem with fighting this entity is that its consciousness is made up in-part of all the guilt and madness wracked oracles it used in the past, meaning its ability to predict the party's actions is manifold. Whats more, it commands those lesser nightmares that have come to dwell in the aftermath of its apocalypse, and can dispatch them to the party's world through various hidden means.
You can't go around subverting fate and not expect the gods to get involved. Istusis or other fate-warping gods are a lightly choice for late-game party benefactors, and the heroes may find their journey altered at several points to steer them in the needed direction before actual intervention takes place.
If you need to further up the stakes, consider having the belayed end of days get the attention of the outergod with dominon over failed apocalypses who senses the titan's death like a vulture on the wind
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Coincidentally this ask came in around the same time as I'd watched the above video and had a lot of disagreements with it (in addition to being annoyed out of my brain by the editing style).
In my opinion: the Neogi are actually a great villain monster because in their role as merchants/slavers of the cosmos they embody the most monstrous aspects of capitalism IE the willingness to reduce other living things into commodities for the sake of self enrichment.
Several lore entries on the Neogi refer to their mindset as "utterly alien" because they see all life as property. This makes me laugh because all you have to do is spend any time around Anarcho-capitalists and you'll hear people who are so far up their own profit-driven-asses that they'll not only defend the property rights of slave holders, but the "rights" of impoverished people to sell themselves and their families into slavery.
We live in a world today where people who need medicine that costs pennies to make have to go into life-ruining debt in order to afford living another month, year, etc. None of us are truly free when all of us need water, food, shelter, and yet all of these things cost money, forcing us to work to continue our existence. In this way, you can see the funhouse mirror logic of Neogi thinking it's reasonable to use magical compulsion to force others to do their bidding. What's the difference between the Spider-merchants using their mindbeams to force someone into indenture, and a grain merchant who jacks up their prices during a famine? It's just good business, and at least the Neogi are honest about it.
Conversely, their position as merchants puts them in an interesting place in the monstrous rogue's gallery. Unlike most other enemies the party is going to fight, the Neogi are willing to cut a deal. You could probably pay them to stop their villainous plan, or even outright help the heroes... it's all just a matter of whether or not the party is capable of meeting their price ( materially or ethically). Failing that, they can just show up as sketchy merchants provided you avoid any and all comparisons to Watto
They also have great utility in causing other adventures to happen, whether it be in transporting strange creatures that will inevitably escape, or kidnapping the party to sell off on a hostile world.
While I'm at it, check out my take on umberhulks, the default Neogi henchman.
