Campaign limit for wraith (etc) ability to create thralls?

[Dr A Gon]

What is the limit on the Wraith's ability to create thralls? Rules as written, if one of them gets loose in a village, it'll convert the whole village about as fast as it can catch the peasants (quite fast, with flying 40 incorporeal) and then spread to everywhere else within 1 night's travel.

I'm thinking of imposing some kind of "no more than X per day" or "no more than Y at once" limitation, just so that I don't have to justify to players how there's a wraith in catacombs but there's still a village on top of it.

I'm not the first person to think of this so there must be published guidelines, even if it's on random GM's blog?

At least vampires have rules about this! You need a permit from the prince to create a thrall!

Nethys Wraith page.

Yes we removed that magic seal. We had to get into the tomb. Wraith you say? Incorporeal? Straight through the ground? Nah, that's just an urban legend!

[Ascalaphus]

If you look for things like "shadowpocalypse" you'll see people asking this question for at least the past 20 years.

The best reason I'd say is that these creatures aren't rational and out to multiply. They became undead due to dying tragically and tend to just stick in the spot where they spawned. Just because they could go out there and convert the whole world, doesn't mean they're motivated.

Of course, that's the base case. You can have some variants, like:

- The tomb with way too many hopeful adventurers who went in and got wraithified.

- That one wraith that had its roaming parameters poorly initialized and is now wandering around causing a wraithpocalypse. These things also sometimes happen in open-world CRPGs and can be pretty interesting unintended plots. A massive wraith-spreading event might make for a sort of "walking dead, but actually scary for mid-level PCs" kind of plot. If it gets big enough it could even be a real challenge for high-level PCs - not that they can't handle individual wraiths, but dealing with it on this massive scale and herding panicked civilian populations, that can be pretty tricky.

[Captain Morgan]

I ran an adventure with a ghost medusa disguise master, who had to stay within a certain radius of one of her statues. She could also perfectly impersonate anyone she petirifed, creating a dmfalss impression she could propogate similar to what the OP describes.

One PC was petrified in the initial encounter, and in pulling him out of the dungeon and back to town the players unknowingly brought the ghost with them. When it started petrifying random civilians, they thought they had started the end of the world. And they probably would have ended that city if I hadn't ruled that the ghost couldn't cross planar boundaries, so shoving the statues in a bag of holding contained them.

The terror and uncertainty of what they were fighting made for a a very fun set of encounters.

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

In carrion crown there is a very minor shadowpocalypse

Trial of the Beast:

In one of the villages near Lepidstadt, where the eponymous Beast is said to have murdered a bunch of children, the true culprit is a wraith. If I remember correctly the wraith, Brother Swarm, was a man driven out of town much earlier and whose body can be found in a cave on the hill. The wraith hides in this cave during the day. I don't remember how it started, but he used the wraith spawn children to lure other children. He only managed to kill like 7 of them before the village called it quits and left, averting further shadowpocalypse. When the PCs get there each child wraith haunts an area around their house.

[Perpdepog]

One limiting factor to consider is that, by the rules at least, only the initial wraith can actually make spawn. None of the other wraiths get that ability, so anyone the other wraiths kill end up as regular ol' corpses rather than more wraiths. Whether or not your wraith baddie is self-aware enough to realize this and to have their spawn herd people toward them to turn is something you can adjust as fits the story.

I personally would also create some useful but not damaging ward or the like that keeps wraiths out, or at least disinclines them to visit, like spreading salt around a property or something along those lines. Naturally not everyone will, or not everyone will be inside at night when wraiths feel more comfortable, so you can still get more wraiths, but it does at least keep the population down.

[Castilliano]

I could see a perverse adventure where that Alpha Wraith must be protected at all costs so that its Wraith Spawn cannot mature and make spawn.

Perhaps AW had been used by a higher force to transform hundreds of prisoners or a city, but the higher force now just wants mayhem, is nearly complete with the transformations, or even worse, some naive do-gooders have set out to destroy AW and the heroes must fight other heroes to save the region.

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Separately, I think people would hole up in consecrated areas at night and only travel by day. The Warded Man (or Painted Man in UK) deals with such a demon-calypse where demons cannot survive sunlight and citizens are forced to retreat behind wards at night. Naturally, it's grimdark and might be hard to translate into high fantasy w/o warning one's players.

But yeah, the existence of such creatures implies either they're rare or like in most RPG settings there are counteracting forces. I could see "Sunlight Crusades" being a thing and wonder how much Tar-Baphon might be willing to unleash such a threat. That could make for an extreme 5th book in an AP, defeat/contain this army of incorporeal undead before penetrating the final lair for book 6.

[The Gleeful Grognard]

-shrugs- it isn't a simulationist system, I wouldn't worry about it as it is akin to debating economics of golarion with the player facing rules, crafting, or even how guards/armies work in the system as presented given level scaling and how disgusting something like chain lightning would be.

Remember combat stats are for players, if players aren't there the wraith can choose how often it kills or not narratively freely. If the GM wants a wraith plague sure, if they don't it doesn't happen.

(Also, even though 3.x systems tried to go half simulaionist they failed pretty heavily on that front too. PF1e and PF2e are both high fantasy, high power games at their core and built with supporting those goals first and foremost)

[Perpdepog]

Castilliano wrote:

I could see a perverse adventure where that Alpha Wraith must be protected at all costs so that its Wraith Spawn cannot mature and make spawn.

Perhaps AW had been used by a higher force to transform hundreds of prisoners or a city, but the higher force now just wants mayhem, is nearly complete with the transformations, or even worse, some naive do-gooders have set out to destroy AW and the heroes must fight other heroes to save the region.

Or the heroes are contacted by a mysterious patron who is hiring them, only to find out it's the alpha wraith who is now concerned that their usefulness to the bigger, badder organization has ended and they are going to be destroyed soon, so it reaches out to the only ones who seem to be giving this organization trouble, the PCs.