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Adventuring within the body of a dead god...


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Severion

First Post
DrNilesCrane said:
blargney the second: Evil god with a snake motiff, party is 9th - 10th level (five primary characters plus a capable NPC or two)




More suggestions and ideas welcome!

:)
Get some aberations and make them snake like, i'm thinking "Aboleth" as anti-bodies. Thier transformation touch could be delivered with a tail slap, replace illusion generation with some sort of general confusion effect, and give them the poisonous bite of a monstrous snake, at that level the party should be able to take out 2d4 of these at a time.
 

Shemeska

Adventurer
I've had my PCs atop several dead gods, and inside another. Now all of those occasions were on the Astral, but the general situation should be similar enough.

Dead gods don't go into their twilight oblivion quietly, and every so often they might have memories, or bits of the former deific power spontaneously manifest on or around the petrified corpse. Gods of nature might sprout forests, or possibly carnivorous animals who want to use outsiders as mulch for said forests. They might manifest aasimon (angels) who might be unaware that their patron is already dead, and that they're just a hollow echo of that patron's power. Such deific servitors might be aware of it, and they might mourn and lament their passing, or seek to convert anyone they find, knowing that an influx of true belief is their only chance at independant survival, because at any moment the dead god's manifestations could vanish for years or millennia, and them with it.

It depends on the flavor, alignment, and nature of the dead god in question, but it might be surrounded by proud visions of past glories, a sad reflection of what has passed and been forgotten, or bloodthirsty madness as bits of the god's mind seek to clamber free of the grave.

And then there are the parasites who might come to worship the deific husk, or desecrate it, or feed on those who come to do either.
 

avigor

First Post
Parasites might be a good idea. I'm thinking plant or fungus things growing inside it somewhere; you might even have a battle between these settled parasites and the reviving anti-bodies occur somewhere where the players could see it (or even take advantage of the distraction of the anti-bodies).

You want a flexible internal structure? How about the movies Cube, Cube 2: Hypercube, or Cube Zero? Similar messing with their minds might be fun.

Is the god actually coming back to normal life, or is he being raised? If it's the latter, undead critters would make sense.

Depending on how you want to work it, the intense magical energies required to bring a god back to life could easily cause creatures to get back up instead of dying, or weird pseudonatural mutations (that'll die if they leave or the spells stop; those energies are keeping them alive) to occur to critters that had been taking refuge within before this point. Even better: Anything that dies while this is going on is raised as a weird pseudonatural mutation of it's former self thanks to those energies. Can you say, "dead party member turns on party?"

Mua ha ha ha ha.
 

Jim Hague

First Post
Crust said:
Dungeon #100, in fact:

http://paizo.com/dungeon/products/issues/2003/100

SPOILERS

Most of the module takes place on the surface of a dead god, and as Vlaakith attempts to awaken its power with her wish spells, the surface shakes with tremors every so often. The portions within the dead god's body are interesting, granting PCs inherent bonuses to initiative, wisdom, and others. I highly recommend this issue. "The Lich Queen's Beloved" is a fantastic module for higher level PCs, and it has an interesting, alien feel to it.

I still have the awesome map/poster for that on my wall. That was a rough adventure, man, but well worth it. Challenging, but not stupidly deadly, and interesting.
 

Cool idea. Requiem for a God is indeed the Malhavoc Event Book that covers a great deal of ground on the subject of dead deities. I recommend it.

Now, as to ideas, how about:

*petrified or fossilized dogmas, ideas and religious credes. Break them apart and you get attacked by a really strong idea. (Effect can be as per spell or the PC gets dominated to accomplish one ideal of the dead god.)

*Ghostly worshippers who could not abandon their faith, and turned into shells and husks of themselves. They guard the body - especially the heart and mind.

*Scavengers that have come to feed over the centuries. Huge, ponderous organisms (use oozes) like bacteria that feed upon the stoney flesh of the corpus dei.

*The god's death spasm - a mental event that happens every day at the moment of death - a psychic shriek of pain and loss with the remains of a power of a god behind it. Think a massive subdual attack, Will save for half.

*Godswort. The exterior has many small blooms of a particular flower that only flourishes upon the corpse of a deity. The smell can be intoxicating or poisonous or uplifting. Choose an effect, any effect.

*Alignment mold - like yellow mold but worse. This is a colorful mold growing in places that holds the essence of the god's alignment. Any of an opposed alignment that come near it get attacked a la yellow mold, save that the DC is epic. (This is the body of a god after all.)

*Logic traps. The god, like all others, had his or her moments where the faithful argued about finer points of the theology. The remains of these arguments manifest as logic traps - triggered anywhere within the body, whenever someone says something antithetical or in opposition to the teachings. (Example: within the body of a god of war, someone who advocated for kindness to hostages would find one of these springing on them.) This can be a physical trap or a mental one that suddenly sucks the target into a labyrinthine argument manifested as a series of caves complete with crazed scholars who do nothing but argue.

*Domain Demons - These are creatures that embody the domain of the deity. Take any demon, solar, demodand, etc. and give them access to the domain of the dead god, the abilities thereof, and the power to cast one each of every domain spell on the list. The max spell level is equal to 1/2 the creature's HD.

And so on.
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
There's a novel EXACTLY like this, Blameless in Abaddon. The god in question is Jehovah, so it's not for everyone (although it's more of a theological discussion than the sort of parody or satire some might fear), but it goes through all of these issues in detail and is quite interesting. The previous novel, Towing Jehovah, is also quite good.
 

Whimsical

Explorer
If you have access to the Dungeon Master's Guide II, this would be a great place for using the Archetypical Locations: Evil Crypt (pg. 50) and Restrictive Tunnels (pg. 55), along with Magical Locations as Treasure (pg. 235) and possibly Magic Events (pg. 109). This will help make the adventure unlike anything they have experienced before.
 


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