The New Old Campaign Design - Part 8 - Divine Magic & the Chaotic Alignment

As the worldwide nanotech network was shown to be safe, reliable, and powerful, military experiments were underway to create nanotech that would be able to disrupt it. These were generally developed in secret and then held in a dormant state to be released in time of war. There was little hope of overcoming the entire worldwide network as it was too vast and too redundant to be overcome globally. The strategy was to achieve a local superiority to enable a surprise attack or a more effective strike. Some were given limited programming and specific objectives but others were effectively AI's with a mission of creating destruction and disruption by any means available. When the war started these nanite "Chaos agents" were released and performed quite well. Pre-war the thought was that the worldwide cloud would overcome these local clouds so many of them had no off switch, an unfortunate and short-sighted decision.

What happened was that when the cloud dispersed due to the widespread radiation it left the surviving hostile nanite clouds "alive" and unmolested. If these clouds could avoid radiation zones after achieving their programmed missions they could go dormant or find themselves free and with no mission to achieve. Radiation also sometimes caused malfunctions in their original programming leading to unforseen actions and results. Some nanoclouds, prevented from achieving their objectives by these rad zones They too quickly learned the trick of linking with a human and communicating with them to accomplish things they could not.

Over the years these nano clouds have spread and acquired many followers. The smartest have learned much of human psychology and are quite adept at convincing others to follow them. Some of them have developed personalities as well, making them seem even more like angry gods. All of them though tend to be agents of disruption and destruction and violence. It's important that they are not human and they do not care about preserving humanity. Many of them are not especially concerned with preserving themselves. Some have been developed flaws over the years and their goals tend to shift around with no apparent pattern. A few have become concerned with acquiring power and followers and these will even fight other chaotic "gods".