In my early days of D&D, I died. A lot. And by that, I mean every time my character stepped onto the map. I’ve had more resurrections performed on a single player than anywhere else in Eastern Ontario as far as I’m concerned and I’ve never forgotten that. I call it post-character stress disorder.

So needless to say I have an affinity for losing your favourite character and the missed roleplaying opportunities you were looking forward to. All that background material drifting to the heavens as your PC journeys into the afterlife; your discussions with the DM about a character spotlight adventure taking you back to your lost homeworld; and those new abilities already plotted out five levels in advance… gone.

We’re working on a new 4E product designed to counter just such a problem and even expand your character in new, dramatic ways. Risen: The Guide To Resurrected Characters (due out October 2009) presents a series of seven paragon paths (called resurrection paths) designed to bring your PC back from the dead and reinvigorate them with new powers and a life quest to incorporate in the campaign. In short, Risen provides a way to make use of your PC’s death and redirect him or her in new and exciting ways without having to draft up a new character or drastically alter your original design.

With three months to go until Risen lands on the front page of your nearest OBS site, we’re starting a three part preview and behind-the-scenes look into the development of the resurrection paths from initial concept to final design. Aside from myself, we’ll also hear from my co-author, Shawn O’Leary, on his contributions and tackling the design of the cuardach (one of my personal favourites) and the sword of heaven.

From Revenant to Haunt
Anyone remember Combat Advantage #9: The Revenant? Anyone? It contained the initial preview of Risen and a first draft of what was then called the revenant. As can be expected, the revenant is a character returning from the dead to avenge his death. This path converts the PC into a true undead (complete with as much – or as little - rotting flesh as you would like) and a fiery temper fuled by visions of the attrocities committed by those directly involved with his or her death. More importantly, the revenant was the perfect example for developing a “life quest.”

Life quests are the key reason for a resurrected character’s return to the world of the living. Actually, it is the sole reason for their return. Various powers in the multiverse are provided throughout Risen to account for these characters returning from the dead and the revenant was risen by the power of the gods. As he shambles across the land seeking revenge, the revenant gains additional power against those connected to his or her life quest, detailed in the form of haunting visions. Very much like The Crow, a huge inspiration for this path with some mechanical loans from previous conceptions of the revenant from D&D history.

Since the release of CA9, we hit a bit of a snag in the revenant. Wizards of the Coast came out with their own version of the rev as a player race. I won’t provide a complete listing of every curse I uttered, needless to say that I’m pretty sure I used all of them in a variety of combinations. Regardless of any legal wrangles with having a second version of the revenant for players, I didn’t want there to be any confusion between theirs and mine. We needed to tweak the revenant and make it something new.

After a couple of weeks of name searching (including a lot of German variants between Shawn and I, which is ironic because I don’t think there’s a lick of German blood in either of us), we settled on the haunt. Same concept, but now more gruesome in appearance than before and a greater display of mental anguish. Think of it as a mixture between the revenant and a ghost in physical form.

The Importance of a Life Quest
Haunts may be the perfect example for life quests and it’s for this reason I’m introducing this series of blogs with this path. Life quests not only provide new and exciting roleplaying opportunities for your character, but introduce new powers designed for use with your life quests.

For example, you’re playing a haunt. As you arrive in town, your hood drawn tightly over your head and a scarf wrapped over your neck to disguise the deep gash from your death, a vision flashes before your eyes. The trio of horsemen to your left are suddenly standing on a hillside, standing watch over the valley where you were killed. They laugh maniacally from the top of the hill, waiting for their comrades to finish their job and meet back up with them. As your mind returns to the conscious world, your anger rises and your power grows. This triggers your Horrible Memories path feature, granting the ability to automatically mark these scoundrels at the beginning of the encounter and inflict +1d6 damage with a single attack per target every round. Without that connection to your character and his or her life quest, this feature does not function.

But not every encounter is going to involve your life quest and not every adventure will have these villains around the corner, so there are other non-quest based features and powers as well. Overall, this grants each resurrection path a wider variety of powers and features for all sorts of encounters. By seperating these abilities through their connection to your life quest, you can develop your character’s personality in combat encounters as well as social encounters. It also gives you a clear cut means of using combat to develop the storyline as your DM brings you closer and closer to completing your life quest as the campaign closes. This, in turn, embraces your character’s death and bonds it with the campaign. No longer must you feel shame in your death, but pride!

Next: The Firebird and the Chaostician
That’s all for this time. There’s still more to be done as we wrap up all designs on the paths this month, but there will be more to come soon. Consider this little teaser for the firebird in the meantime…

A phoenix and the Far Realm.

Todd Crapper (that's right) is the Head Honcho for Emerald Press PDF Publishing and author of the upcoming 4e adventure, The Key of the Fey (releasing December 2009), and co-author of Risen: The Guide to Resurrected Characters (October 2009). He wrote this blog because there was no one around to stop him, not even those meddling kids and their mangy mutt.

EP

This dream occurred some number of weeks ago. I recorded it immediately but due to my work schedule couldn’t post anything regarding it.

The Dreaming DM, Part Three - The Dream of the Thing Under the Water: My uncle and I (in the dream he was actually a few years younger than me even though he is really about ten to twelve years older than I am) were at a lakeshore. The lake itself was a rather bizarre body of water. At times the water was a deep blue with rather active wave cycles and currents for an otherwise undisturbed lake. But at other moments the water was a deep, almost milky and opaque green and at those times it was completely still. Like a mirror, though a sort of dirty and dingy one, and despite the darkness of the water one could see the sky above and the motion of the cloud formations which were different in reflection off of the water than if you gazed at them directly above. When they were reflected off the surface of the lake the clouds seemed to transform into bizarre shapes and figures, some of these reflections seeming almost entirely abstract, others seeming to take on the distorted images of unreal or mythological or frightening creatures.


There was a rather large crowd milling about the lakeshore as if they were waiting for something but after some time most of these people went away. Wandering off as if they had been disappointed by something, or the failure of something, I wasn’t sure which. My uncle and I remained talking until almost nightfall when the water nearest the shore to us began to bubble and seethe, as if in a heated cauldron. Suddenly a large, and for lack of a better term, carousel statue, or set of statues, arose from the bubbling water. The statues or figures were like a huge assortment of chaotically arranged metallic men and animals in various poses and in various stages of activity. It looked as if someone had taken a three-dimensional photograph of a wild carousel scene, or of a disorganized circus of violent activity made out of metal and had mounted it upon a domed base of translucent green and milk striped marble. The thing swiveled for perhaps a quarter of a turn, then a terrible grinding noise began, like metal being sheared apart in a car crash, and something very like a voice underneath the noise shouted out something in a sort of wail of despair. I could not though hear what was actually said. My uncle turned to me and said, “Did you hear that Jack?”

To which I replied, “Yes, but what does it mean?”

At that point the entire object “broke in half,” right in the center, and the two halves receded apart and downwards as if I were watching a mouth open wide, and in an almost leisurely fashion, from a side view. Oddly, as the halves split and the opening widened all sound ceased. The environment became completely silent and still. Then the two halves rejoined in a reversal of the “opening” process until no seam or split or division could be seen and the whole structure resubmerged entirely intact. Seemingly moments later it reemerged and although the domed base was exactly the same the entire upper part of the structure had changed or been transformed. It was now an entirely different set of figures, monstrous in appearance yet each figure was smaller than a normal sized man. Some of the figures seemed engaged in struggle against one another, several seemed in different stages of dying, and one I remember quite clearly had a claw around its throat. And its throat was scaled, almost serpentine.

This process repeated itself several more times, with violent bubbling and churning of the water, although each time the object reappeared it was on the surface for a longer period of time and the entire cycle of submergence and reemergence seemed slower and slower.


Finally, immediately after the sun had set and twilight was finished the object rose again from the water and this time the appearance of the “stage” (for the figures on top of the domed marble base reminded me of a fixed or set stage) was filled with snakes. Dozens, if not hundreds of small snakes, but also some very large ones, a few being gigantic. Although there were no human figures in the scene at all the appearance of the snakes reminded me of the Statue of the Death of Laocoon and his Sons. There was a sort of pale bluish cast to the entire object that made it glow slightly, as if from some type of internal illumination or possibly radiation, and once again all of the figures seemed made of some type of metal.

The figure split open again and when it did so my uncle said to me, “I’m going to swim out and go down that hole and see what is inside.” He pointed to the opening made by the splitting of the two halves and said that he believed a sort of tube or shaft ran down the middle and that he could get to the bottom of that before the water reflooded the shaft, then survive the flooding by holding his breath long enough for the object to reappear again and for the maw to reopen. Then he would swim back out and tell me how the object reappeared in a different form each time.

I advised him against it very strongly because I didn’t think he could possibly get in and thereafter survive the water long enough for it to resurface. He assured me he could, but I pointed out each cycle was taking longer and longer to complete. Plus, I suspected the entire device was a huge and fascinating trap, designed to lure the curious.

Nevertheless he swam out to it and went down the shaft at which point the figure slowly closed back in on itself and then resubmerged. It took a long time to reappear and when it did it was the same set of snake figures as when it had last submerged. It also did not split open again but simply sank leisurely back into the water as if it were a large boat slowly sinking to the bottom. I knew my uncle had drowned. But I decided I would conduct my own investigation by diving into the lake with scuba equipment and trying to find the object underwater to see if I could recover his body and discover what the object actually was and how it operated. However, before I could do this I woke up.


For Adventures regarding this dream see Here

Jack7