The Day After.. D&D style

[Dagger75]

Here is what happened in a nut shell

Heres the backround story...

1000 or so years ago, there was a great battle in the sky above this untamed world. Spelljammer ships from the Elves and Mind Flayer worlds battled over this young world. There was a major flayer city underground. The elves needed to destroy this city or isolate it somehow from the rest of the Illithids. They came up with an radical plan.

First they convinced Embishi, a powerful wizard to attack the illithids with his fleet of spelljammer ships. When Embishi was fighting the illithid above this world the elves moved in.

They constructed 2 huge rings that would harness the power of the Positive and the negative energy planes and use that power to isolate the Crystal sphere from the rest of the multi-verse. It worked but had some flaws.

First Embishi's spelljammer fleet was unable to leave the sphere after the 2 rings were in place, same with the illithids. Also a large force of elves where also trapped on the planet, they where the ones who activated the rings. Now that the rings active anything extrplaner that was not summoned to this world was stuck there. Demons, devils, elementals, celestials were all trapped unable to go home.

This world was not very advanced, humans where living in huts, dwarves are like vickings on this world, farming in small villages and occasionsally raiding the human lands. No native elves, and you standard mix of orcs and such. Also introduced was a powerful group wizards trapped on this planet unable to return home.

Well the elves basically got the humans together, taught them magic and used them to help beat the illithid stronghold on this world. The humans then began to advance very fast. Well Embishi was pretty pissed at the elves. They began to help the humans out as well. Also they were helping out the orcs. Embishi also began teaching the orc the art of magic and warfare and after a hundred or so years the Humans and Orcs united and began to fight the elves. Instead of fighting the orcs, humans and The Embishi (what the wizards are now called), the elves exiled themselves from the human world and let them live there own lives. The humans broke up into kingdoms and The Embishi ruled in the backround.

Note: The elves destroyed all but one spelljamming helm durning this time. The Embishi are not happy about this. The party found the one helm, gave it to the Embishi, they flew up to a ring and destroyed it, causing a surge of negative and postive energy to combine in the center of the planet causing the cataclysm.

The wave of undead is from an unintended side effect of the Negative Energy Ring. When a person died there soul travels breifly through the negative plane, but on this planet they where trapped by the ring. So all the dead for the last 1000 years have been shot back down to the planet. Most are the weak type, skeletons and zombies, enough will be Vampires, liches and what not.

I hope that makes sense. Sorry for the novel.

 

[F5]

There are millions of directions you can go with a post-apocalyptic world in the long-term, many of them incredibly cool, but I get the impression you were looking for more immediate consequences. Immediately after a disaster of that magnitude is the time for heroics. Fires are still burning, orphans are still trapped under the ruins of churches, villages are building up levees to hold back rising floodwaters...that kind of thing. I don't know if your group tends toward the heroic side of the spectrum (given that they allowed the apocalypse to happen without acing to stop it, I'd guess no...), but this is the perfect opportunity for superheroics.
All the political ramifications will happen with time. Right NOW they've got peasants to save. At least, that's how I'd play it.

 

[BOZ]

The Day After

i remember seeing this movie as a little kid. scared the hell out of me. i remember drawing black skeletons in sunday school.

 

[herald]

It sounds to me that you have grim and gritty D&D here, Dawn of the Dead style, or perhaps Army of Dead style.

My suggestion for an over arching plot. New Clerics and Paladins start popping out of the populace in unexpecting ways. Ghosts of earlier Clerics appear to help the survivors. And holy artifact that can not only prevent the undead from entering the lands of the living, but make that land furtle (end of champaign.)

 

[Dagger75]

The party is all high level, 18 Cleric, 18 Druid, 17 Barbarian fighter. They are looking at this as an opprotunity to build an army and begin taking over. The druid will probably make the crops grow, the cleric is a worships God of building so he can help rebuild and the Fighter is the lord of the land.

For the party, they really didn't know the world was going to be destroyed. They didn't really care why the Embishi wanted the helm. They now hate the Embishi for leaving them behind, but they can now plane shift home if they want to.

My group wants epic adventures, so here is there chance to rebuild and concoure the world

 

[DaemonBolo]

Dagger,

I recommend you read the novel, Nightfall , by Isaac Asimov. A whole civilization was destroyed and you get to read about the after effects of the image. It may help you get a feel for how things should read.

One thing that will be happening, is that every evil warlord, or brigand will be out establishing a fiefdom. They want a piece of the pie and they will carve it from the corpse of the fallen. This is their perfect opportunity.

People of renown before the cataclysm should probably be in hiding. Well-known/famous people can be blamed for the end of the world. After all, wouldn't a true hero have stopped it?

Normal people will be hostile. Even once friendly neighbors may become dire enemies. Everyone will be thinking about how to provide for their personal families. People will kill someone over a chicken, a sword or a plow. Nothing will be sacred because it is a fight for survival.....

Bolo's rock!