During our last game, I tossed out what I thought was a minor plot hook to one of the PCs. It was a sending message with the gist of "Your brother has kidnapped your sister and the city has been overrun by undead." However, like all good -smirk- players, they've taken this and run with it. So now I'm asking the PFRPG collective for suggestions, ideas, and/or even modules that might fit the theme of an undead-controlled city. Maybe some sort of zombiepocalypse? Did a necromancer (or necro-cult) trigger some sort of ritual?
Any thoughts?
You might look up the 3P Hollowfaust book for the Scarred Lands. It's not a city run by the undead (well, OK, some undead), but since the PCs know that the target city is "overrun by undead" it'd come as a surprise when they find the undead are guarding the city and running the Watch patrols!
Sounds like a great opportunity for some "French Resistance" type gaming, with the PCs as members or leaders of a "living" resistance fighting the Man, or at least the Undead Man. We did somethign similar once, only it was orcs that had overrun the entire kingdom, rather than undead. It was a blast.
Party Level?
Powerful necromancer attacks city with army of (mostly mindless) undead. Local heroes fall one by one in valiant attempts to stop our boy, and finally, the necro falls, but hero dies from lingering spell effects, poison, whatever. Now city is broken up into enclaves by more intelligent undead (ghouls, ghasts, mummy lords, etc) who use hordes of skele's and zombies to terrorize the city. They have no desire to work together, and really don't work against each other, each group has it's own goals (return to life, return to death, establish ghoul city, BRAINS!!!!, etc). Most powerful of course inhabit city center, make urban terrain very 3D- lots of stories, narrow alleys, zombies attacking by leaping from rooftop, sewer critters, possibly some 3.5 era "big" undead (the one that added corpses to itself, there was an undead ooze, etc).
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There was an epic thread on the WotC forum (it was titled something like "Gaming with my Girlfriend") where a guy ran a zombipocalypse game with level 1 characters - you're in an inn, and are attacked by zombies...when you run outside for help...more zombies. It's an epidemic that'd been growing in the slums for a couple days, and now the infection has reached a critical mass.
If you can find it, it's a great read and might give you some fun ideas. I've used the basic idea for one offs on weeks where we had to interrupt normal campaign progress for one reason or another, but never have had a chance to run a fully fledged mini-campaign on the idea.
The obvious one is trying to stop the undead plague.
First couple of things to decide is the type and scale of the undead. Do they control the whole city? Are their pockets of living resistance (town hall, city guard barracks, certain noble estates etc may still be defended by living folk). Or is it completely overun, and any living being are hiding in the sewers and trying to flee? Is it spreading to other towns? Or is it local.
Part of the above will also relate to it's type. Is it a necromancer raising the dead, or is it more along some of the modern ideas with it being a disease borne by infection? troll in the corner is working on his idea of the world araneus which is in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in a high fantasy setting. Searching the forums for it would direct you to his site, and more info. I also think he has a couple products on drive thru rpg.
But anyway, first decide how big you want this to be and how it spreads. Once you have that in place hooks are obvious. Save the city, kill the necromancer, find a cure for the disease, organize the populace to fight back, or...run. Run for your pitiful still breathing lives as you are chased by an assortment of fast blood hungry disease spreading spawn of undeath.
The undead sealed in their homes possibly idea is good you can probly add to it in having the players need to look for survivors.. which forces them to have to open up homes.
In a game a long time ago our Dm did the invading zombie army thing the bad guys filled the full of ships then just rammed them intot he docks ship breaks open zombies spill out.
The nobles retreated to their castle and our Pcs had to do the 'defend the poor quarter guard pos' thing you can send in waves and stages while they keep the innocents within safe.
If that was a "minor" plot hook, then I don't want to know what constitutes a major plot hook in your games. Anyway, assuming you don't want to create something entirely new, there are a few basic frameworks you can use for "undead have taken over the city" that can be mixed and matched.
1 - The infestation. Plague zombies, wights, or any of the other self-replicating undead (adjust for party level) have gotten loose.
2 - Partytime. Vampires (usually, other supernaturals will also work) have descended on the town and are taking it over with spawn. This one is nice because, while technically correct, it's not what a player generally expects when they hear "undead swarm" since nearly everything is intelligent.
3 - The takeover. A necromancer or cult of necromancers is actively raising the dead in order to take over the town for some even more nefarious purpose.
4 - The ritual. Much like #3, except that the instigators of the ritual are long gone, possibly even consumed by the powers they unleashed. You can also tweak this so that the ritual was entirely unrelated to the undead and was just magical experimentation gone wrong, which allows you to have the original caster show up as a helpful NPC.
The last zombie town I ran was the result of a powerful necromancer trying to subtly destabilize a nearby kingdom. He put a ritual into place that was spontaneously creating wights all over the place. When the PCs finally located the ritual and disrupted it, they discovered that it had been powered by phoenix ashes. With the area no longer deconsecrated, the phoenix immediately resurrected and helped them with another problem in gratitude.
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I've ran 3 or 4 of these kind of campaigns.
I tend to make the main villain an ancient green orb thats a psionic artifact(loc-nar from the movie "heavy metal"), it turns people chaotic evil and animates dead (casts spells as a 20th level sorc)
have the group realize they cant take it on, but have something to counter it. i use the annullus from psionics handbook as the stopper
Contributor
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Although it doesn't give you a specific adventure to borrow from, you might try looking at the GameMastery Guide. There's an excellent article in there on running an Undead Uprising type of campaign.
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One of the cool concepts I've been sitting on is the Ghost City. Basically the city was wiped out in a magical holocaust. Every soul in the city died off in a instant. When the players arrive they walk into what looks like a bustling town. At first glance everyone is going about their daily lives, until you look a little closer.
People tend to fields and have grain silos stocked full (overly so) but none of the food eaten. Families go through the motions of making meals and just sit there not eating. Strangers are greated friendly enough, but everyone is distant and doesn't 'quite' see you. Two old biddies sit out in front of the Inn having the same conversation about their grandchildren over and over again. Like the city is on 'pause'.
And it stays that way so long as the players DO NOT disturb the facade. But as soon as they force one of the spirits to acknoledge it's dead the whole city turns against them. (Imagine invasion of the body snatchers, suddenly all these people turn into poltergeits, zombies, skeletons.) This goes on until sunrise when the entire town is filled with a blind white light, all the spirits fall to the ground screaming in pain...and vanish. If the PCs leave the town it slowly reforms behind them, but reset to a time before the magic blast killed them all. They don't want to remember, or move on.
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The claims of the city being overrun are exaggerated. What has happened, in truth, is that some level appropriate intelligent undead are holed up with hostages (including someone close to a PC) in a secure location in town.
The undead have been used by the city as slave labour (or pit fighters or some other degrading and dangerous occupation) and finally rebelled. All they want is to go free and maybe seek reparations for thier treatment.
The PC's are stuck with a sticky hostage situation, a moral problem (do the undead have the right to be free?), and the potential for a lot of role play.
The PC's are stuck with a sticky hostage situation, a moral problem (do the undead have the right to be free?), and the potential for a lot of role play.
Interesting point. Would the undead be covered by the Bill of Rights? Or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? :)
Party Level?
The party is made up of 6 PCs and 1 NPC, with an APL of 8.
stuff
I've read that enormous thread and enjoyed it immensely. But he brought up the problem of running that same type of game with higher-level PCs. But I like the thought.
If that was a "minor" plot hook, then I don't want to know what constitutes a major plot hook in your games.
The current plot circles around the end of the multiverse and all of divinity via one of the baddies from the Elder Evils splatbook. The characters are currently on the Isle of Dread (a combination of the OD&D Expert Set and the Adventure Path (Savage Tide?) version found in Dungeon Mag #142-143). They are piecing together a multi-part artifact (a la the Rod of Seven Parts) and figuring out exactly what is beginning to transpire. And soon the party will go through a fast-paced Legacy of Fire mini-arc. So, a single city overrun by undead doesn't seem all that . . . significant. :evilgrin
Although it doesn't give you a specific adventure to borrow from, you might try looking at the GameMastery Guide. There's an excellent article in there on running an Undead Uprising type of campaign.
I have the GMG, but I guess I haven't read far enough to encounter that section yet. Thanks for pointing that out!
And in actuality, I had flippantly tossed this sending in without expecting the group to follow up on it. I was trying to take a lesson from the Sagiro Story Hour over at ENWorld and weave several mid-level plot lines together, with the players picking and choosing which to follow. And each un-followed plot line continues on, oftentimes to the detriment of the characters.
And thanks for the ideas so far! I heart the Paizo Messageboards
Its a clever ruse to get the ever adventuring, never returning home, character back into town for some other reasons...
Many reasons work, but the one that works best...
SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PARTY!!!
Fire.
The city catches fire during the outbreak and the PC's have to flee the fire through the undead filled streets.
So now I'm asking the PFRPG collective for suggestions, ideas, and/or even modules that might fit the theme of an undead-controlled city. Maybe some sort of zombiepocalypse? Did a necromancer (or necro-cult) trigger some sort of ritual?
Any thoughts?
In a game-world a friend and I worked on, the big baddy demonic presence crystallized chunks of negative energy (think basketball sized crystals) and started dropping about a dozen or so on a city to destroy it.
The closer to the crystals you got, the worse the effects were. In theory over time they would evaporate into nothing on the prime material plane, but until then they sickened and killed people and then raised them as zombies (with various templates from libre mortis) and/or ghouls. They also had the habit of granting fast healing to nearby undead, granting turn resistance, animating entire gravyeards, etc. Lots of ways to destroy the chunks, but first you had to get close enough to figure out what they were and fight the undead and city inhabitants (depending whether they were fleeing, trying to board up a district like they used to do to plague victims and their families, or trying to prevent any more undead from showing up via dead PCs.)
In the long run we eventually did a couple of sessions where the PC's were evacuating the surivors through the sewers to a planar gate in a warehouse and helping the surviving order of paladins with their work (which involved a Paladin who used a gelatinous cube for his "mount"... which in hindsight sounds goofy, but made for a very interesting NPC.)
Just to toss in a monky wrench...perhaps the Sending was a *lie*. The sender was tricked/coerced/charmed into sending the message for the express purpose of luring the party to the city by one of their enemies.
Depending on how much your players are given to analyzing a situation, and assuming you can keep a straight face while doing so, convince them (via further Sendings, perhaps?) that the head of the undead has cleaned everything up to look normal, and so if the party enters the city acting as if they suspect nothing, they will probably be unmolested by the disguised undead, and should be able to get in close enough to kill the head vampire/necromancer/lich...who has currently taken on the appearance of the Lord Mayor (or equivalent).
If they buy it, the waltz in to the city, and attempt an assassination...much wackiness ensues...