“His “holy” sites are bloodstained rocks in dark corners of the wilderness. Some include a single, jagged chunk of rock thrusting from the ground and scrawled with crude paintings and blistering curses smeared in blood and feces.”

– Demonomicon of Iggwilv: Yeenoghu, Demon Prince of the Gnolls by Rocert J. Schwalb, art by JAson A. Engle and Brian Hagan

To the east, murderous blood cults have been on the rise in many of the cities, one lord and lady ate their children in bloody rites to a hyena headed murder god. In the country, long dormant rocks that were once altars are once again covered in blood.

The gnolls stormed through the gates soon after the 666th altar was used in a ritual murder.

“The mightiest of Orcus’s servants are his exarchs, undead demons imbued with shards of his semidivine power. Dorsaine, the Ghoul King, is foremost among these servitors.”

– Dungeons and Dragons: Monster Manual by Mike Mearls, Stephen Schubert and James Wyatt

To the west, several caravan of merchants became lost in an off-season storm and each had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Anyone who travels, knights errant, merchants, messengers and tax-collectors have had run-ins with the ghouls, all smelling of the sea’s salt.

The ghouls rose out of the sea, as if they had walked on the bottom of the ocean from a far-away continent over the horizon or lost gates hidden deep under the ocean.

The barons of the east and the city-states of the west had no idea, no inkling that they were caught in the midst of an inter-planar blood feud between the Ghoul King, exarch of Orcus and the Demon Prince of the Gnolls, Yeenoghu.

Once, long ago, Yeenoghu had held reign over the ghouls but Orcus took the hungry throne for his own exarch, taking the Hungry Legions for his own Abyssal Layers. The only ghouls left in Yeenoghu’s realm are pitiful rabble, masterless rogue packs.

The gnolls invaded the east through gates directly linked to Yeenoghu’s Realm in the abyss. They pour through, hoping to link the gates together and allow one of the rolling fortresses, a rolling city-fort built on blood and murder, into the prime continent.

The ghouls invaded through the White Kingdom, Doresain’s domain in Thanatos, an abyssal kingdom where the cities are all made of white bone and is peopled only with beasts that eat raw flesh.

Player Characters could be:

• A crack troop of soldiers sent across the worlds by the Raven Queen to oppose Orcus’s exarch and weaken the Demon Lord of the Dead’s hold on the world.
• A pack of gnolls who have rebelled against their Demon Prince and wish to see him fall.
• Adventurers from a town directly in the middle of the conflict, a flickering Point of Light in real danger of being snuffed out by these demonic invaders and their petty feud that is being waged on an epic scale.

Originally posted on ENworld