I will admit that I was always a bit wary of running Blood Lords. I've never been interested in running evil campaigns. At best my memories of evil characters have been, at their best, fine for me to run. Others have been awful and still ranks as the least comfortable I was ever running a campaign. It is to the point I don't know why I even finished running that (Kingmaker) campaign.
I was persuaded a bit to run this campaign by not only my player's request, their promise to not match my Kingmaker campaigns worst moments, and the Blood Lords player's guide which says "You won’t be tasked to commit overtly evil acts like torture or wanton arson. Most of your enemies won’t be angels and paladins—they’ll be anarchists, rival undead, and other evil creatures that good and neutral characters have a great reason to fight."
I still wasn't sure, so I read through the first few books and felt I could run it. As we were starting though, I started reading through Book 6, Ghost King's Rage. It made me uncomfortable with the idea of running that book. The majority of chapter 1 makes me feel uncomfortable (e.g. Faction Reputation for Erthrais., A8, bits of Reprieve).
I've put off the decision as to how I'm handling it, but it is now maybe a month away before they reach Book 6. At the moment I'm functionally prepared to have the party skip the bulk of Chapter 1 and move straight to Chapter 2 (and jump from level 17 to 19).
I'm looking for other advice. Are there any adventures that would fit reasonably well for this level 18 range? Are there any suggestions others might have to modify this chapter that might make it something I could run without feel gloomy about my part running a rampage through a group of survivors and through a soul clinic?
Important part is that the place where players are going is Psychopomp lair in boneyard (because that is awesome set piece). You can change the Shabti to psychopomps like Vanths or morrigna and use place as an outpost from Boneyard (keeping undercover, waiting for reply from Carters concortium that has not came.). You can replace the soul clinic as a prison or base of operations from boneyard (But while still keeping the map!), where Psychopomps aquire undead from Geb and interrogate them for information to try find out weaknesses in Geb on where to strike, find tortured soul or something similar.
Balji is an unfortunate soul that is in pieces, and they try to mend him and find information with their means about Kemnebi spesifically, unsuccessfully. But Matron Uldrula is acceptible to make a deal to kill Kemnebi... Whereas Arbiter Alcrazaal is not.
But this way you're less striking victims or a soul clinic full of unfortunate souls, but a more militant place while still keeping the plot of "grab the soul parts".
Thank you. I need to ponder that more. I know I love the set piece in theory, but not sure if I would have been fine with attacking a location on the basis they don't like undead. As a stray encounters I've found it manageable. I don't think I would want to run an encounter where the party participates on attack on Nex either.
Mulling it over, my temptation is to change the setting of the lair to Hell, but have that theme of Hell leveraging these damaged souls who can't reach judgement and using them to similarly gather information on opportunities they can exploit in Geb and elsewhere in the world. That way I'm not trying to frame the party as "good", but keep them with similarly villainous opponents.
I'll read through the chapter again with your suggestion and see how I feel about it.