Dawn of the Dead in DnD?

[Kristivas]

Instead of (or in addition to) having the other gods are losing power, I'd have the god of the dead be growing in power exponentially. Heck, maybe cleric spells stop working entirely because the other gods are using all their powers to slow his rise to supreme deific status.

The premise of the story is the god of death/undeath has just had a vast majority of his followers/creations slaughtered in a Grand Crusade by the forces of light. Beaten, he makes one last stab of revenge on the world. He kills himself on the prime material plane, cutting off the way to the afterlife and causing the dead to rise.

I'm thinking of the campaign starting out with the PCs at first level, and involve them in a TOTALLY different kind of campaign. Some political intrigue mixed with recovering lost relics and such. It'll be around 3rd level or so, when the PCs are basking in the inn after a successful mission that this evil god does his thing and the world is engulfed by the living dead.

I think it would be kinda amusing to leave clues that their original mission of finding these relics had something to do with this catastrophy and that it's their responsibility to 'save the world', when at the end (if they live), they'll discover it had nothing to do with them what-so-ever.

I have some pretty fantastic encounters planned out for this, so I really don't want to nerf magic to a point where it's almost useless. then again, I don't want the zombie/ghoul bites to be harmless in the wave of remove disease/curse spells. I guess I could just throw in a lot of encounters per day. That would not only run out the group's resources, add in that "we gotta keep fighting/moving!" aspect of zombie flicks, but also take care of the surplus of spells.

 

[Nuclear Platypus]

Bit of a late comer but if its a zombie virus, why not let it mutate like Cap'n Trips from The Stand? That's what made it so dangerous in the novel. Well, that and the high fatality rate. It's more of a handwave as to why a cure disease doesn't work as well as it did before. Hey, its one reason that SARS and the bird flu are so scary.

 

[Tsillanabor]

The thread in my sig chronicles the D&D Zombie Apocalypse I put my gaming group through.

 

[The_Old_one]

And the easy way to do that?

When an evil god commits suicide, he does so in a way to strike out against the multiverse. He kills himself by pure immersion in the borders between the positive and negative planes but his own dark energies blow open the gates and allow the negative plane to contaminate the positive energy plane making all things that rely on it, like turning and healing, into their opposites and since good clerics can't turn, their abilities dry up.

Of course the real point here would be no clerics.

Which you could just tell the players at the start of the game.

Reminds me of City of the Living Dead, where the old priest commits suicide...thereby opening the gates of Hell and unleashing zombies.
Ooohh...there's a thought. Those buggers could teleport all over the place, now that would make things nasty in D&D eh?

 

[Solarious]

I like the idea of a curse. What about the idea of a legendary necromancer who made the very first stab at lichdom... which went horribly wrong. Instead of raising her as a super-spellcasting skeleton, everything else rose up around the necromancer, tying her soul to the necromatic curse forevermore. Nowadays, all cemeteries for miles around, encompassing a country and parts of a few more, are either hermetically sealed (in the case of old or extremely large ones), or protected with special seals to supress the curse. Naturally, these seals are hardly foolproof, and with millenia of time spent ensnaring the dead, the curse has gotten stronger...

 

[Mark Plemmons]

I like the idea of a curse. What about the idea of a legendary necromancer who made the very first stab at lichdom... which went horribly wrong. Instead of raising her as a super-spellcasting skeleton, everything else rose up around the necromancer, tying her soul to the necromatic curse forevermore. Nowadays, all cemeteries for miles around, encompassing a country and parts of a few more, are either hermetically sealed (in the case of old or extremely large ones), or protected with special seals to supress the curse. Naturally, these seals are hardly foolproof, and with millenia of time spent ensnaring the dead, the curse has gotten stronger...

Interestingly, that's very similar to our older Deathright adventure for the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting. Lich queen sealed beneath the ground in her old dungeon complex, but the seal's been broken and the dead are rising, just like they did when she was in power hundreds of years ago.