Roleplay Help!

[Carrelio]

Hey Astro! As some of you might remember from the last time I posted a thread like this, I am an avid roleplayer and have created many an online roleplay and D&D setting. I am about to embark on another one and quite frankly I need a little help bringing it all together at the end. I figured one of you bright inventive people could help me come up with an idea!

Ready? Its a vast expanse of steampunk fantasy so brace yourself...

Our story takes place in your classic steampunk fantasy world; everything is going surprisingly well for our little industrial revolutionaries. They even invent flying ships!

However, when they take to the skies, their theoretical physics becomes realized, when they find a substance known as pneumaura. Pneumaura is very unique in that its raw energy that follows fluid dynamics. It flows like a liquid based on the path of least resistance, and it’s equivalent ‘mass’ changes depending on temperature, but it does not displace particles, it moves through them. It originates at the poles, and flows out across the planet’s upper atmosphere like the air currents. Machines are able to convert the raw energy into any other form of energy with a nearly 100% efficiency and at the beginning of the roleplay there are supposedly no biproducts created in the energy transfer. It’s a super fuel!

As a result, it collapses the steampunk, coal based, economy... leading to all sorts of civil unrest that players will have to deal with as the roleplay progresses. But that’s not even the half of it!

There are some who can see and use pneumaura without mechanical aid, they form an organization known as the Sky Knights, and are dedicated to the research and use of pneumaura for the betterment of society. They live aboard skyships, closer to the streams of pneumaura that fill the skys and act as peace keepers and shock troops as they go about studying pneumaura.

There’s a growing threat though; pneumaura does not burn cleanly! It produces a poison simply known as miasma (which at the beginning of the game players won’t know is linked to pneumaura at all). Miasma is like a supped up version of carbon monoxide, if anything is exposed too long it dies or becomes corrupted (by the end of the roleplay it becomes apparent that miasma is not just poisonous to life, but to reality itself). In its wake it leaves nothing but death, and twisted abominations that slip in through the cracks of a wounded plain of existence.

Further, as if their problems weren’t enough, new more virulent strains of disease have begun popping up, requiring increased quarantines of nations and even more civil unrest.

Now, one of the purposes of the Sky Knights falling under the study of pneumaura is to find others with the potential to use pneumaura and support their gift by training them to use pneumaura efficiently and responsibly. In actuality, the leader of the Sky Knights has an ulterior motive for individuals the Sky Knights locate; those that don’t become squires to the knights in the field are sent to the research laboratory at the north pole, where they supposedly dedicate their lives to the study of pneumaura... but in actuality they are used as a filter in a machine designed to capture concentrated levels of miasma to provide for some diabolical plan that the head of the Sky Knights had planned all along (at the end of part 1 in the roleplay players will realize what he’s up to and go to stop him, finding him massively pumped up on pure pneumaura, and they will learn that they’ve been looking in the wrong place the whole time, and that miasma was the important piece of the puzzle all along... just before he unleashes his plan).

And that’s where my issue comes from... what is the leader of the Sky Knights planning to do with the miasma? I’m trying to come up with something that’s not entirely cliché, but it’s quite the challenge.

I realize the best way to make the bad guy not just your average every day cliché bad guy is to make him not an evil or insane person, but an anti-hero, someone who is doing something almost right... but at a cost too dire for a hero to take. For this to be the case, whatever it is he is doing must be greater than or equal to the relative value of the entire world.

This entirely rules out motives such as world domination, revenge, or a fanatical ‘just because’ motive.

One thing I have considered is to use the concentrated miasma to break open a hole in reality in order to reach another world... but this doesn’t answer the question of why?

So what do you think?

[Carrelio]

Alright, after conferring with sources all over the internet, I've made a part of my decision. Not all my problems are solved yet... but to keep everyone posted it's time for an update!

The leader of the Sky Knights is looking for a cure to the miasma problem as a whole, not just the corrupting effect on people, but the world as well, and he's going to get that cure from the other world.

Now, I really like this idea, because it will let me create a part 2 in a whole other world (including a dragon vs skyship fight)... but it does beg some questions of its own...

Namely, how does he know the other world is any better off than his own?
Is he just gambling that it is? That's an awful big gamble.
Did he find some relic from when the world were last in contact (probably around the time the world they are in was settled in the first place)?
Did he find some technique to test the world before completing this plan?

Anyone have any ideas?

[Tallarn]

Human will invariably believe that the grass is always greener on the other side. Whether or not that is the case always remains to be seen, but 'pioneers' always think that there is something better just over that next ridge...

[Carrelio]

How about this...

It's a pretty good assumption to think that the commander is not operating alone on this project, so we can assume that there are at least a small group of the sky knights who are using him as a puppet in their overall plan. I'd even be willing to say it's a plot that is pervasive of the entire upper echelon of the organization.

The commander really is out to save the world; his chief advisers (the top ranking sky knights) see it as an opportunity to take their rightful place as the real rulers, and basically convince him that this plan is the right one and will work out to save the world (presenting him with evidence of the other world being miasma free, and proposing that it must have a solution to the problem).

So he builds his miasma cannon, and commences firing it, right as the players show up to stop him. The cannon goes off, the players kill the commander, and the world fills with miasma from the cannon's aftermath. The players flee into the other world in an attempt to find the cure the commander had been looking for in the first place. Meanwhile, back in the original world, the leaders of the Sky Knights, use their mastery over pneumaura to ward the miasma off from their own area (likely by pumping fresh air down from the sky), they declare themselves rulers, and give people the option of serve, or die in the miasma.