6 PCs APL 4 will be charged by a king to find whatever is responsible for killing livestock and kidnapping people. They follow footprints from a farm to a mountain face, find the secret button to press and then see some of the kidnapped people in a locked cage, so they need to get the key.
The final boss is a Burning Skeleton Mythic Troll, and undead will be roaming the corridors, but I'm not sure how to turn it into something other than a "let's kill everything we see" sort of deal.
Any advice? Thank you!
Remember that undead do not need food or air, so they could emerge from some very unhospitable area, like underneath the surface of a pool or literally buried in soil or dirt.
That means that they can easilly create an ambush situation. Very good for bleeding of some recources, before the come to the 'throneroom' to defeat the end boss.
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Go look up images of ossuaries. This is where skulls and bones are used to create designs on dungeon walls. Here are some things I did after seeing those images:
1. assembling skeletons: bits and bobs detatch from the walls to form a 4-armed mudra skeleton but you could also have multiple, smaller skeletons
2. beheaded swarm: the skulls are alive and hurl from the walls to create a swirling mass of biting heads all around
3. bone caltrops: jagged bits of bone protrude from the floor creating the effect of caltrops
I combined all three of the above in one area. A four-armed, headless mudra skeleton formed in the midst of a beheaded swarm. It ignored the movement penalties because the piercing damage couldn't get through it's DR. I waited until the party had picked their way til about halfway down the ossuary hall and then unleashed hell. They couldn't charge the skeleton, couldn't retreat very fast and had reduced visibility due to the swarm all around.
Adding to Snowleo above, imagine filling your underground with a slow-acting poison gas. Call for constant Fort saves. The undead don't notice it but the PCs certainly do. Extreme temps work for this too; hot, toxic fumes venting up from magma vents keeping the atmosphere oppressive and deadly or perhaps ice caverns cut through a glacier where the undead don't notice until they freeze in place.
Finally you can have fun with esoteric atmosphere and evil set dressing. Brown mold waiting dormant for warmbloods to make it "bloom"; necrotic cysts creating areas of darkness or enervating radiations; haunts where the undead have dragged their victims in the past. Don't forget to add some creatures that might live symbiotically with the restless dead: vermin, oozes, some scavenger animals.
The party could run into a group of vampire spawn (because full vampires would probably be too powerful) playing a game that describes a mad, fantastical world where great steel structures tower over mortal throngs and inhuman constructs soar overhead and roar in great numbers along the streets (it's d20 modern).
Thanks for all the ideas! Definitely using them!
Humans were to turn into more undead, good point about pigs, I'll remove that from the plot. No "ready" supply because the rising is happening quite slowly.
God of Death is making them rise, the troll is basically like their general and has been given special powers by the god.
What's special about that location? Why does that particular place matter to a god?
Does the god have mortal followers in the area? Are there cultists running around? Are they townsfolk under cover? Are they monsters living near by Did they have anything to do with the creation of the undead? What are their goals?
Who else might seek to profit from dealing with/taking advantage of the ride of the undead? Would zealous and unreasonable witch hunters or undead slayers show up to try to help, but be thorns in the PCs sides? Would mortal necromancer wizards show up to try to siphon off the power being released by the god working his will on the land?
What happens to the ground when a death god raises a general on it? What blight follows? What happens to livestock and crops, or the groundwater? What happens to the people who rely on the land to live?
Don't make the undead mindless. Make them like the Pirates movies where they still had hopes and dreams, just stuck in skelie bodies that are stuck performing as their master says.
Imagine them apologizing for attacking the PCs while in the middle of doing it. Pcs might look for a cure rather than just the best way to defeat them.
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I'm seconding Bacon. Story's key here.
The mechanics are nice and all, but undead places should have a bit of a history feel to them as well. The creepy, dusty aspect of it. I mean its always fun for some skeleton-smashing zombie-whacking adventuring, but sometimes its good to up the creep factor. Another thing with the undead is the 'mockery of life' angle.
TO use an Elder Scroll's reference, I've always been a little confused and dismayed when I break into a draugr ruin, make it past the dusty traps and find fresh wine, meat and cheese on the tables in the depths of the tomb complex.
You could have the group come across troll skeletons wolfing down a cow, ad infinitum, they keep picking up the gorey bits and swallowing them again, and again, unable to sate their hunger. Or maybe they're around the table, rythmnically pounding their utensils but never actually beginning the meal because as skeletons none can say the troll equivalent of grace (yeah, its tricky since they're trolls, trolls kind of have no society aside from eating).
Have them encounter innocuous undead too. Stuff that literally presents no threat, but behaves in oddly familiar ways.
Am I the only one here who was hoping that the dungeon was undead? Now that could make a great story.
Chemlak ... no, not the only one :-)
I was imagining some huge beast whose skeletal remains became undead, but buried in the ground. Some of the rooms of the dungeon could be the inside of its skull, its mouth and its chest cavity. Damage to the bones could awaken it. (Maybe you can kill it more easily by attacking it from *inside* its brain cavity).
Back to the flaming troll skeleton, why would a skeleton be kidnapping people?
Skeletal mage might be interesting as they still have intelligence: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/skeletal-mage (A 'lich-lite'?), though maybe make him high-enough level (7) to cast animate dead - that gives him a use for those people he kidnapped.
If it's the site to an unoly god, well, pigs were used as a sacrifice by some real-world religions. Or perhaps the slain bodies of the livestock are being left to rot, as the breeding grounds for some foul plague. Perhaps the master of the undead is simply draining the local farmlands of resources.
I kind of want to suggest leaving the pig stealing in--it plays with the party's expectations. And played well, it creates truly horrible window dressing to a dungeon room, and helps set up the true body horror that is the mindless undead. Imagine, early on, as the party is hunting for these pig-thieves and kidnappers. Sounds like the work of slavers or bandits, no doubt. Then they find the first, odious whiff of stench. A nauseating, lung-choking, invisible wall of reek that covers the hallway to the next room, where they find... meat. The unpreserved corpses of dozens of swine, ripped into pieces, gnashed up, and raked into piles, like rotten meat slurries. By this point, the odor is so bad it's a dungeon hazard. Give perceptive or knowledgable characters the chance to notice, too, that the mounds of flesh, despite the oldest ones being rotten by several weeks now, show no obvious signs of vermin. No maggots, no carrion beetles or worms.
And right when the party is just about done with this awful, foul-smelling room, and suddenly uncertain and terrified for the fates of those kidnapped humans, the mounds begin to twitch and squirm. And a small cadre of skeletons, now ridden with plague and rot, pull themselves out of their filth-baths to attack.
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Now the creature lives anew, it's bones wreathed in blackened flames.
His name was once Galthrock. Now he is known only as The Scorching Tyrant. When he returned the Lady of Undeath stole his soul from the depths of the abyss and imprisoned it inside this burning shell. Now armed with her profane gifts and his tortured sentience the Scorching Tyrant has only one goal: to consume all the land in cleansing fire.
But Urgathoa was not done with him yet. The Tyrant was imparted secret knowledge of how to use the very walls of his home to conduct the power of undeath. It is to here he drags the squirming meatsacks of the living so that they may enjoy his mistress' kiss and rise as a minion of her power.
And so the Scorching Tyrant has been busy. He scours the land by night, claiming the living and dragging them back to Blackfire Caves. He is not alone in this; he has slowly been building an army of zombies, skeletons and worse in this hellish underscape.
Blackfire Caves ebb with the power at their heart. Here and there it ripples and roils along the walls; the weird radiations have warped and twisted the flora and fauna within and around the bedrock creating monstrous horrors; life itself is repulsed from this place.
This is no dust-filled necropolis or ancient crypt. Blackfire Caves are rough-hewn tunnels gouged from the living rock by bony claws and unholy power. The floor is slick with slime and the air is filled with the mingling scents of blood and sulphur. The sounds of tortured screams and rattling chains echo through the dead halls. And somewhere inside, the Scorching Tyrant sits on a throne of skulls, laughing.
So the undead hunt the living because the unique way the undead are created here is ritualized process requiring them to be slowly tortured to death in the heart of the lair, in the presence of the Scorching Lord. The livestock, well... its a stretch, but you could either say he's experimenting with bones and the transmuting properties of the place to make minotaur-like undead or you could say the troll is using them to lure in the living and make his hunting easier.
This is a recent occurrence but because of this you might have an old adventurer with nightmares about the troll he helped slay a while ago. He knows the basic layout of the place but he doesn't know what happened nor does he know of certain extra rooms/chambers the dead have added. Why would the undead be creating new spaces? This place is meant to be more of a charnel, living place of torture and horror, not a static old undead location.
Could be that Urgathoa (or whatever undeath god you choose) is secretly seeking something here; maybe she's just venting; possibly the whole thing is meant to craft some greater undead thing like the "undead dungeon" you guys were talking about so the troll and his minions are slowly creating a body. I'm a fan of grimy horror though, so imagine instead of it being a skeleton, it's a zombie, and you're on the INSIDE of this gargantuan, rotting corpse!
OP, feel free to steal, ignore, or embellish on the above ideas.
Ghosts moving through the walls. Or better yet: illusions of ghosts.
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If it's the site to an unoly god, well, pigs were used as a sacrifice by some real-world religions. Or perhaps the slain bodies of the livestock are being left to rot, as the breeding grounds for some foul plague. Perhaps the master of the undead is simply draining the local farmlands of resources.
I kind of want to suggest leaving the pig stealing in--it plays with the party's expectations. And played well, it creates truly horrible window dressing to a dungeon room, and helps set up the true body horror that is the mindless undead. Imagine, early on, as the party is hunting for these pig-thieves and kidnappers. Sounds like the work of slavers or bandits, no doubt. Then they find the first, odious whiff of stench. A nauseating, lung-choking, invisible wall of reek that covers the hallway to the next room, where they find... meat. The unpreserved corpses of dozens of swine, ripped into pieces, gnashed up, and raked into piles, like rotten meat slurries. By this point, the odor is so bad it's a dungeon hazard. Give perceptive or knowledgable characters the chance to notice, too, that the mounds of flesh, despite the oldest ones being rotten by several weeks now, show no obvious signs of vermin. No maggots, no carrion beetles or worms.
And right when the party is just about done with this awful, foul-smelling room, and suddenly uncertain and terrified for the fates of those kidnapped humans, the mounds begin to twitch and squirm. And a small cadre of skeletons, now ridden with plague and rot, pull themselves out of their filth-baths to attack.
OMG that's so awesome! Fort saves all around as the pile is disturbed; failure = Sickened. The pigs might be fast zombies and they charge to gore with tusks; if they hit you've got plague (Fort save). That's what I'm talkin 'bout...
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Haunts, haunts, haunts.
Depending on your resources, check out "Skeletons of Scarwall" from Curse of the Crimson Throne or the section on The Misgivings from "The Skinsaw Murders" from Rise of the Runelords for ideas. "Haunting of Harrowstone" from Carrion Crown has some really awesome ideas for non-creature haunts and traps for low-level PCs.
In short, not all undead encounters have to be fights.
The bloody footprints of a woman leading to an abandoned torture chamber/undertaker's preparation room/other place where said woman's body might have been prepared.
The hallucination of animated chains binding a PC to the wall and then a wonderful trap closing on them. Say an iron maiden or some such.
The translucent image of a child beckoning to them and running away, only to lead them across a covered pit.
As many others have said, add flavor as well as creatures and traps. Make it FEEL creepy.
Haunts don't have to do damage. They can just mess with the PCs' minds.
Ghosts moving through the walls. Or better yet: illusions of ghosts.
That reminds me: another thing I did in an old adventure was have skeletons that could disassemble/reassemble as part of a move action that allowed them to treat barred grates as Difficult Terrain instead of a solid obstacle. Essentially the PCs were walking down a hall with grates leading into crypts on either side. The skeletons would move out, attack, then flee through other grates allowing them to use hit-and-run tactics. That was an APL 1 module though so these were just normal 1/3 skellies with this power ratcheted on and adding a minor difficulty to an otherwise straightforward ambush.
... but I'm not sure how to turn it into something other than a "let's kill everything we see" sort of deal. ...
For this I like the undead that keep coming back until laid to rest. In order to lay them to rest they probably have to figure out the story behind the thing that became the undead thing to find what 'laid to rest' means for that creature.
Though occasionally the players have inadvertently done the right thing.
I had an isolated haunted inn in the middle of no place along the road. Metagaming, the players knew something was going to happen but they played along. Fought the same ghost-ish 2 nights in a row.
Rather than search (didn't find the body stuffed into the cabinet in the attic) and investigate the deceased innkeeper (clan that burns honored relatives like the Vikings), they decided to just make it not a problem. If there was no inn, no one would stop there to get attacked by the ghost. So they burned the place to the ground.
Which just happened to burn the body and lay the spirit to rest.
I was annoyed and laughing at the same time. I gave them full XP.
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The entire dungeon is undead? How can it not be interesting?
Why would they need the key to the cage? Don't they have lockpicks/crowbars/knock spells?
I'd suggest placing the dungeon in the catacombs of a good-aligned church. The church used to be a front for an evil cult that tried to raise a villain as a Skeletal Champion. The cult never finished the ritual, but the current clergy of the church has accidently finished the ritual by placing more corpses in the catacombs.
The entire city becomes haunted, and nobody knows why as the priest have already sealed the catacombs. This all happens while the Skeletal Champion is preparing his invasion of the town.
The players will have to find clues to figure out what is going on. Perhaps they recognize an old friend who was buried in the catacombs, or maybe a priest or noble who died centuries ago.
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This is something that I've seen mentioned on these forums. Have them go through a door. After going through the door, a skeleton raises on the other side of the room. Here's the kicker: it's not animated or anything. It's just a normal skeleton being held up by ropes or something and tell them "would you like to roll initiative?". Of course their answer will be to immediately roll initiative. Let them swing/cast away at it until they realize something is off (probably because it isn't attacking back). It'll give them (or at the very least, you) a good laugh. Use your GM powers to make it have a pretty high HP so even if they don't catch on it will eventually fall apart.
I have done a-lot of undead dungeons. What is great about undead is the fun of bashing away without having to worry about the moral ramifications.
I like ghost story/ghost encounters where dealing with moral ramifications is part of the story. Since ghosts are often tragic undead, and the real point is laying ghosts to rest, more than just combating them. I think the moral ramifications surrounding ghosts is the point.
Though do not always expect your player's to have them (brains and/or heart strings).
I don't expect them to have them heart strings, so I build the mechanics that force the issue. In my Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House product for the Rite Publishing Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG), that I wrote, designed and did the cartography, features a multi-CR ghost of a bath house attendant named Kana who was murdered on the site and now seeks vengeance against an unknown perpetrator (her eyes were covered when she drowned, so she doesn't know her assailant.)
In addition to several associated haunts, I created the Ju-on (grudge) curse, which when an adventure party first encounters her, must make a difficult saving throw are become victim to the curse. All ghosts are anchored to a specific location, usually the site of their untimely demise and the same is true for Kana. However, if anyone fails their saving throw when encountering her are conferred the Ju-on curse, which moves the ghost's anchor from the bath house to the cursed PCs. So whenever she rejuvinates, she appears whereever the cursed PCs exist - even if on a different plane of existence or opposite side of the world. With a -10 DC to lift the curse via Remove Curse, the only normal means of lifting the curse is laying the ghost to rest. Which means returning to the bath house, investigate for clues and resolve the situation. Combat won't fix the problem.
So if a given adventure party has no heart strings, it doesn't prevent ongoing consequences applied to them for not laying her to rest.
Like any good ghost story shows - it isn't about the ghost and its scares. It's about history, its past.
Give your undead personalities. Make them vicious and aggressive. Make them weep and whimper. Make them cowardly till cornered. Mindless undead aside, many undead are victims and I've always felt they should have remnants of that past perceptively obvious.
Make it less about building a unified undead force intent on domination and more a collection of varied psychos who for whatever unique reasons are just caught up in the story.
Hell. Maybe one of them doesn't even want to be there and can help in some way...
for a price of course.
Or there are factions within playing one another.
You can butcher any number of monsters and piece a creature together but if you give it LIFE, that's what will make it memorable I bet!
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Everyone keeps talking ghost=connection. Other monsters work just as well. Take the burning skeleton troll.
What makes a troll not regenerate? Fire. What's something trolls might grow to hate and fear? Fire. What is this undead troll's skeleton wreathed in? FIRE.
Imagine you're deathly afraid of fire. Now imagine you're finally slain by a bunch of adventurers...only to re-awaken as an unholy skeleton, your body constantly aflame. Even if you don't feel the fire, what's to stop you from screaming? Oh right; no lungs...
So now go back to the OP. Want to make this a tragic tale? The troll isn't the BBEG; he's the VICTIM. He's begging to be released from this unliving hell. He feels nothing but the void of undeath but every time his skeletal sight focuses it is from within the balefire that sustains him.
He goes on a rampage, killing everything at first. He realizes that all he's doing is creating more undead (I haven't gotten this worked out yet; maybe its a curse or a gift of his lair). He also can't find a way to just kill himself. He launches one last shot; killng a bunch of livestock to sucker some adventurers to come to him. His undeath also makes him the puppet of some deity so he can't just sit there and let them destroy him; he is compulsed to fight.
But every round a hissing whisper crackles among the balefire: "kill me...please, kill me... I beg of you..."
Well tragic curses and undead creation goes hand-in-hand with most types of undead (or at least they can be). Vampire spawn are almost always victims, most sentient undead even, as are most lycanthropes and many other monsters. I pick ghost, simply because its my favorite kind of undead, and generally not used a lot in published adventures. You see far more vampires, liches, ghouls and werewolves than you see ghosts. I've always loved ghost stories, hence my infatuation with them.
Make sure to put in skeletons of people they know.
With regards to traps, you may be interested in this article.
Traps fall into two basic categories: zap traps and interactive traps. The difference isn’t the kind of danger, it’s how they work in play.
Along comes the rogue. Rogues are supposed to be the guy that finds all the traps and helps the party avoid all that damage. Lo and behold, the rogue can make a roll to find the trap and a roll to turn the whole thing off. Crap.
Welcome to Bad Trap Syndrome.
There's a link at the end to what to do about it.
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Make sure to put in skeletons of people they know.
Skeletons don't work as well as other undead for this purpose, generally. I mean if the heroes are osteopaths they might be able to do stuff like..
"Oh no! I recognize that cheekbone structure!"
"Only my Cousin has a zyphoid process like that!"
"That femur, I know that femur!!"
But in general people need more stuff to go off of.
Although the 'suspiciously small skeletons' are always good for that.
"...they're just halflings, they're just halflings... Right?"
Undermountain had creatures that mimic sound of women or children screaming, crying, or begging for help(lots of time in another language)
Things like that could turn it into a psychological thriller type dungeon.
Here's something I did, but it's a bit of a Kingmaker spoiler:
At the Stag Lord's fort at the end of this module, there are "underground zombies" that pop up and attack the PCs if they don't stay on the path.
I turned it into a "living hill" of several dozen zombies, and anything that went off the path had a churning, swarming mass of undead burrow up and pull them under.
It creeped the living daylights out of my party, and was technically a CR 8 encounter (24 zombies at CR 1/2 = 4800 XP) but wasn't lethal to anyone except the druid's animal companion (who went ahead to scout out the situation), so it was a lot of fun.