Hi guys!
I'm throwing together a campaign idea, and I wanted the crux of the game to be that death has stopped. I plan on revealing this to the characters relatively early (If we were comparing this to an adventure path, I'd say the end of book one), and I have a great endgame for solving the problem, but I'm looking for ideas or concepts that I could flesh out into entire arcs. Oh, and I had plans to lean heavily into comedy whenever possible!
Some idea's I've had:
- A typical "go kill the goblins" but instead they have to somehow keep them from "procreation".
- A cult of necromancers who have to make do with whatever corpses are left after all the good ones are used. Run from the 20-chickens-stapled-together zombie!
Any other ideas would be much appreciated!
I think you have to consider things like what happens if someone's head is cut off?
Does the head remain alive? Can it be "reattached" to the body?
What happens if the whole body is turned into a puree?
Is this effect basically like a permanent regeneration effect that can't be suppressed?
Yeah, these sort of ideas are interesting to think about but running a campaign based on them is difficult when the players start asking "what if". A guy i played with started a game where no females got pregnant, babies were delivered by an airship. Sex caused the 2 involved to be connected on a mental/spiritual level or something but did not result in the usual baby. It was 10+ years ago and my memory is hazy on details. But the group started asking questions to which the dm had no immediate answers.
Have you read any of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman"? There's some good stuff early on that might help.
Also, the old story...I think it's just called "Death and the Magic Pack"? Absolutely read that one, if you can. Pretty great material.
If you can't kill people but you can horribly maim and mutilate them you're going to go somewhere you don't want to with this game I think. At the very least you're going to want to include a full-on, fast regenerate effect to stop such effects being permanent or long-lasting. You may want even more than that.
This is beginning to make me think of an old RPG, Toon, where you played cartoon characters and death (or similar fates) wasn't a thing. I read it but didn't play it and the details didn't stick in my mind. You could probably dig it up from sonewhere though.
Maybe the PCs get told of a job and when they get to the relevant village it's gone. Some goblins have moved in, but the original inhabitants have all gone on a religious pilgrimage caused by the sudden lack of death. Not that the goblins - or the frustrated lycanthropes who the original villagers called for adventurers to deal with - will tell the PCs that willingly.
This kind of story has been told many times, but I'm reminded of Torchwood's Miracle Day. There was also an episode of Xena, titled Death in Chains, where the same things happens.
You need to decide if you are going to magically gloss over the logical problems of this. Are only humanoids effected? If bugs suddenly stopped dying then we'd be in trouble very quickly.
Somewhat off topic but didn't the First World originally have no death in it until the gnomes smuggled some in some how in order to make it more exciting? And that's why they were exiled?
You could go with the Walking Dead comics / show as a starting point: Every human who dies raises as a mindless zombie shortly after. Given their numbers and self-propagation (people killed by a zombie raise as additional zombies) the unprepared worldwide civilization is overrun quickly. You can kill these zombies by stabbing their heads, but they have numbers on their side and there are precious few humans left. Who make it worse by infighting.
Such an approach has some advantages:
1) Players who are familiar with the comics / show will understand the setting faster.
2) You don't have to explain how someone stays alive despite being maimed, cut in little pieces, entombed etc..
3) There are natural story ties to undead cults, Urgathoa, Negative Energy plane etc.. This makes it easier to create the setting and also easier to understand it.
Of course you can vary the premise as needed: Different undead type, they raise again and again, some puppet master in the background, any creature raises after death, a few humanoids are immune etc..
There's an SCP series called "End of Death" that might have some ideas for you. The hub for it is here: http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub
Ooo, this is some great advice! My group is pretty fine with gore and dark humor. I've decided to use Golarion as the setting (as it's what my group knows and is comfortable with) so I might as well let you in on the endgame to better help you help me. If you are part of my group, STOP READING!
I'm planning on Pharasma having gone on vacation, and with the souls so backed up in the judgement line they simply stop leaving there bodies. While Pharasma should have returned a while ago, it turns out she's trapped by Yog-Sathoth in a time loop at a Caribbean style resort in Elysium.
I'm on the fence about regeneration. On one hand, dismemberment and permanent damage can be useful to replace the threat of death. But on the other it causes issues with things like total mutilation and disintegration. I'm thinking that a slow form of regeneration might be the way to go, possibly even setting hp thresholds that can only heal naturally over time to keep track of it. I'll have to work on it and see if I like it.