Welcome to the 11th post in a series of Design Diaries for Rangers of a Broken World by the creator Leon Richardson:
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This is another one of those things that’s just shamelessly my brand, I’m afraid. I have a lifelong interest in demonology.
In Amylte, there exist creatures that are terrifyingly close to being gods, endowed with enormous power. They are the Noble Demons, and they exist on a level so far beyond humans that they have no need to care about us or our lives. The only thing holding them back is a powerful obsession: every Noble Demon is so obsessed with something that nothing else matters to them. By leveraging these obsessions, humans can deal with Demons, survive them, and even sometimes get the better of them.
As the game grew, Noble Demons developed independent of my own interests into a metaphor for the wealthy, the elite, and the noble. Their wants are beyond human, almost incomprehensible, and they do not see average people as equals or even as valuable. So, if you don’t want to portray a world where people oppress one another (I don’t believe that is the default in Amylte), you can engage with those ideas through the lens of the Noble Demons instead.
Like many of the other monstrous challenges players may face in Rangers of a Broken World, Noble Demons are a chance to be surreal, symbolic, and metaphorical. They don’t need to be comprehensible to humans – why would they?
The Ambassador in Pearl is a tall huntress whose entire figure is shining white pearl, including her bristling cloak of javelins – the very javelins she uses to cleanse her territory of anything she deems “impure”.
The Flowering Baronet is an enormous reptilian creature that dwells in a beautiful grove of flowers, at one with the plants in the environment (not a reference to Final Fantasy 12’s Earth Wyrm, or the Pokemon Venusaur, probably, I promise). His obsession with beauty – both the beauty of nature and his own beauty – makes him vain on a staggering scale.
The Princess of the Southern Isles is the subject of countless sailors’ horror stories, a fierce predator living alone in a rocky archipelago. Her obsession is unknown, but it might just be the sensation of tearing and devouring human flesh. No one passes near her lair and expects to live.
What kind of Noble Demons will you create? Rangers of a Broken World has a robust encounter creation chapter, so you can fearlessly channel your own ancient demonic text and create something terrifying, alien, and worst of all, Noble.