Right now the voting in my group is has an all-undead party in the lead. The obvious choice is to have the PCs be former inhabitants of Kelmarane who want to restore their home town, but seeing as how this will be accomplished in the first chapter of the AP I'd prefer something more complex.
Maybe former soldiers of Nefeshti, killed in the war against Jhavul? Any other thoughts?
Right now the voting in my group is has an all-undead party in the lead. The obvious choice is to have the PCs be former inhabitants of Kelmarane who want to restore their home town, but seeing as how this will be accomplished in the first chapter of the AP I'd prefer something more complex.
Maybe former soldiers of Nefeshti, killed in the war against Jhavul? Any other thoughts?
Oooh, what about having them all be members of the family that owned Onyx Hall? (p54, House of the Beast). With how you enjoy tweaking your adventures for your players (based on the things I read about your Crimson Throne group <G>) perhaps the party is seeking out Jhavhul and/or the Firebleeder as the only being(s) with the possible power to burn the stones of the ancestral hall and free them from the ancient curse?
And I wanna read what you do :)
NICE! Thank-you for the suggestion. :) I'll work up some character creation guidelines based on this.
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May I suggest the Necropolitan? It's a good template for PC undead. I used it when I played an Archivist of Jergal once and it was a great way to play an undead without being evil or having any crazy powers.
The LA is built into the template to equal 0 (death means lose a level plus it costs 1000 xp to change from living to the template, so you could essentially write it off if you're playing Beta).
I think it's in Libris Mortis if you're interested.
I'll check it out. Thanks, Xuttah!
NICE! Thank-you for the suggestion. :) I'll work up some character creation guidelines based on this.
Hope you'll post what you come up with :)
NICE! Thank-you for the suggestion. :) I'll work up some character creation guidelines based on this.Hope you'll post what you come up with :)
Of course! :D
There are more votes to come in yet. The all-azer party is in second place.
Hey, no problem. Hope it's useful.
I checked it out, but it mostly looks like a generic undead that's hard to turn or command. I think I'll go with wights and dread skeletons and such, to make things a bit more interesting. Thanks for the thought, though!
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Hey, no problem. Hope it's useful.I checked it out, but it mostly looks like a generic undead that's hard to turn or command. I think I'll go with wights and dread skeletons and such, to make things a bit more interesting. Thanks for the thought, though!
Some sort of Savage Species progression or are you going to boost the EL's of the AP to match the higher ECL's?
Some sort of Savage Species progression or are you going to boost the EL's of the AP to match the higher ECL's?
I'm going to start people out with undead hit dice (which really suck). The stronger types of undead (such as wights) will start with more hit dice (probably four), and it'll be a long time before they get any class levels.
Then I'm going to add a bunch of backstory and related conflicts that will add challenges more appropriate to their power levels.
I know that there are level adjustments provided for the various kinds of undead, but my players are sick of LA and racial hit dice will keep it simpler. Hopefully we can keep it fun while they drag themselves through the necessary encounters to finally gain a class level.
(Note to anyone else considering doing this: Libris Mortis has class progressions for many types of undead, such that when they work their way up to whatever ECL that kind of undead would be they've finally earned all the stuff that kind of undead has. I just think that this is more work than necessary so I'm skipping it.)
tbug, I want you to be my DM :) Kudos to you for what you do for your PCs.
What about Dread Zombies? It'd be killer to have PC's shuffling about, moaning "Brainnnnsss..." :)
Dread zombies are a go. :)
The vote was just finalized, and we're playing an all-undead party for LoF. I'm definitely allowed dread skeletons, dread zombies, and wights. The first two will start with two undead racial hit dice and wights will start with four. This gives them a level adjustment of zero, but I may also allow a choice of templates that would increase that (though I haven't decided for sure yet).
I'm going to use numeric values (from the Advanced Player's Manual) for the good-evil alignment, and start people off as evil as they can be and still be neutral. They're going to be trying for redemption. I'll come up with a (non-comprehensive) list of things that will move their alignments one way or another.
I'll post the character creation guidelines once I've finalized them.
tbug, I want you to be my DM :) Kudos to you for what you do for your PCs.
Thank-you so much for the kind words! We might be moving the Birdcrunchers campaign on-line, in which case we might be open to adding new characters. Which time zone are you in? (We're Pacific.) Are you already playing or GMing Rise of the Runelords?
tbug, I want you to be my DM :) Kudos to you for what you do for your PCs.Thank-you so much for the kind words! We might be moving the Birdcrunchers campaign on-line, in which case we might be open to adding new characters. Which time zone are you in? (We're Pacific.) Are you already playing or GMing Rise of the Runelords?
I'm currently GMing RotRL. I appreciate the offer though! If something else opens up down the road, shout out. My schedule is pretty tight atm, but who knows what the future may hold.
I'm currently GMing RotRL. I appreciate the offer though! If something else opens up down the road, shout out. My schedule is pretty tight atm, but who knows what the future may hold.
I'll keep you in mind. :) It could be fun!
Here's the first draft of the character creation guidelines. I'll have handouts for the six kinds of undead by the time we start character creation on Friday.
I've put this behind a cut for space purposes.
Everything came to an end over two hundred years ago. A woman of the highlands somehow invoked the power of a wish after she, her husband, and their children were sold to separate owners in distant lands, never to see each other again. According to her curse, all inhabitants of Onyx Hall would "dwell in bondage until the stones themselves burn like a pyre." The Chumazuka liches were transformed into lesser forms of undead, and any evil they perpetuated caused them distress.
A couple of weeks ago a man approached Onyx Hall. He introduced himself as Garavel, a servant of a powerful merchant princess named Almah Roveshki. He said that there was a way for the ownership of the Chumazuka bondage to be transferred to the princess. If they would serve her for five years then she would undertake to help the family break the curse. Many family members spurned the offer, but several of you saw that this was the best opportunity for freedom that you had seen in two centuries and accepted. You have been accompanying Garavel on his journey through the desert to meet Princess Almah.
You are all humans who chose to become liches. As part of the curse, you are no longer liches but neither have you regained your lives. You have all pulled yourselves out of your Evil alignment and worked off the penalties that the curse assigned to you as a result of it. You still have your phylacteries, which are small objects worth many thousands of gold coins. The phylacteries have been damaged due to the curse magics that wrenched your undead natures away from being liches, but they still mostly work to preserve your existence after you're destroyed.
For this campaign, the law-chaos alignment axis will be treated as per the standard rules but the good-evil axis will use the numerical value rule from The Advanced Player's Manual. In essence, you have a Good score and an Evil score, which always total 21. Any time one is at least double the other you no longer count as neutral and instead have the alignment of the higher number. As the game begins you each have a Good score of 8 and an Evil score of 13. Various actions will require you to do a check to see if you numbers change. Any time your Good score falls below 8 you will be subject to a penalty from the curse. These penalties can be bought off at any time by a ritual that also lowers your Good score by 2. To sum up: being bad hurts.
Characters are built using the point buy system in the DMG. You each have 25 points to use for your ability scores other than Constitution (since undead have no Constitution score). You begin play with no action points, but will accrue then at the usual rate. Since you were born human you get the extra feat, as well as the skill points as you advance. You may begin with two traits (as per Paizo's trait rules), assuming that they fit your backstory.
Permissible kinds of undead are: dread skeleton, dread zombie, festrog, huecuva, Osirian mummy, and wight.
Hope you'll post what you come up with :)