Distressing Planet
Towards the end of my third try at Running Hell’s on Fire, I found an overarching plot to apply to the game. I used the Edict of Planetary Distress from the Mechanoids sourcebook. There are seven threats and four demons whose presences are causing psychic visions the world over.
The four demons are the Apocalypse Demons, Death, Famine, Pestilence, and War. Death was the god Mot, an ancient, western Semitic deity worshiped in Ugarit. After he was cast down with the rest of his pantheon, Mot made a deal with the Angra Mainu and spread desolation everywhere he went. The party managed to stop three of the four, including Death. The Gathering of Heroes still seeks War in Africa.
The Devouring Swarm was the Mechanoids, but I changed it. The Mechanoids came as presented, but they ran afoul a Necromancer and his minions. Between a pair of Murder-Wraiths and an undead Psi-Mechanic, the Mechamoids fell to their own robotic creations. The Swarm is, instead, a vast host of zombies from another earth. The Necromancer brought the zombies to earth in Dee Sea. His minions were stopped partially by the party and partially by the efforts of the Coalition States armies. The Swarm was beaten back, but not destroyed entirely.
While the threat in a small kingdom is still Merlin (I hate the spellings used in Rifts England), he is not some alien intelligence because Rifts has far too many of those. I prefer human (or formerly so) threats. Merlin Satanson is a scorceror and Nightlord in hiding. He is slowly building his forces and the Kingdom of Camelot with a Warlord named Arthur and his Nexus Knights. Merlin even sent a contingent to Africa, led by Sir Wolfram, who is an Ashmedai. His Nexus Knights are Hounds while many knights are Namtar.
The final, twenty-years-distant threat is Chronos. His orb, carried by Anna Maria, has been setting events and minions in motion to bring his return about. Should he succeed, he will cause much destruction, starting with Atlantis and Europe. He considers the Splugorth colony intruding on his territory and Europe housed some of the descendants of Atlantis.
Random Thoughts 
Whenever I GM for my own campaigns– I’m sure I’ve mentioned it once or twice– I tend to like humanoid villains. Of course, my own system has little room for true aliens. It has extraplanar beings, but I hardly think they count. But I do enjoy the idea of human or human-like nobles to fight. Not only does it often give the nobles recourse to a court environment if they or their relatives survive attack by the players, it also gives my very human players an enemy they can understand and hate that much more intensely. A wicked human is much easier to hate than a wicked monster. Monsters HAVE to be evil, after all, while humans have the choice– and it means that in showing their ability to MAKE that choice, the players feel as if the villain really IS a total scumbag. In theory, anyway. In practice, one of my players always has to say ‘NO! Goblins can’t ever change!’ and ‘Mercy to evil characters?? Never!’
Really what helps me is the fact that I don’t subscribe to the classic alignment system. Instead I just let my players do what they want and say ‘Yup! Incidentally, that’s kinda out of character considering your player’s base personality. Just sayin’.’ Most of the time my players are good about staying in character. Others? Well, there’ve been incidents. I’m going to try not to discuss them further. x3
Anyway, pretty cool. Looks like an excellent set up for a campaign. I’m sure it has progressed considerably, but still I thought I’d drop by and give you some thoughts to encourage your own creative juices. I think it’s already apparent my own have been weak as of late.
Cheers,
Eris
It’s actually been on hiatus until this week.
We picked back up with a bit of player turnover and two Horsemen left to kill.