Dungeoncraft - 4th edition style

[Flynn]

I have a slightly different idea for you. The zombie plague has come because the dead cannot rest. The real secret is that the Underworld, or Nirvana, or Valhalla, or whereever it is that souls go to when people die cannot be breached, and so they are stuck in the Plane Prime animating corpses, being ghosts, etc. Everyone on the Plane Prime thinks it's because of a plague or something, but the real problem lies beyond the Plane Prime.

It's up to you what that problem is...

* Maybe the god(s) of the Underworld are mourning the loss of their daughter, who is wandering the Plane Prime not knowing who she is or what she is capable of, and because of another god's interference, they cannot find her.

* Maybe the devils have succeeded in a major battle on the Manors Divine and have not figured out how to bring souls over in the same manner that the gods do, so there's a holy war going on as the gods work to take the Underworld back.

* Maybe the world's most powerful archmage crafted a spell that allows him to be immortal, but he messes it up and binds all souls to the Plane Prime for a century and a day, or until a specific task is completed (such as he is slain).

Feel free to run with one of these, or create your own. Either way, I think it'll be a great revelation to spring on the players who think the whole thing is due to a zombie plague or something of that ilk. Surprises them, and then offers a lot of adventure possibilities they hadn't considered before.

Hope This Helps,
Flynn

 

[Delgar]

It is for a new 4th edition game.

First off, those Dungeoncraft articles are like my personal gaming Bible. I have the Rules of Dungeoncraft written in permanent Sharpie marker on the inside cover of my DMG. So thumbs up, I already like what your doing.



It's not really clear. I'm assuming this game is planned for 4E or are you just taking the Turn Undead rules from 4E and porting them to a 3E game? I mean, this is the 4E boards so I'm assuming its for a 4E game....
If it was for a 3E game an undead were such a prevalent enemy type how would you handle rogues and critical hits being severely negated?

 

[Delgar]

Well I'm definately glad I posted on here now, lots of great ideas for me. I'll try to hone in on what I plan on using and continue moving forward tomorrow. Keep the good ideas flowing.

 

[DeathMutant]

The zombies took over the world.

Powerful lords were able to create points of light in the sea of undead - fortified towns, that sort of thing.

The secret is: these lords are vampires - they're immune to the zombie plauge. They hunt and feed on those who survived. What a great time to be undead!

A twist on this one is zombies didn't take over the world -- just the area around the fortified town the PC's start in. All communication has been (mysteriously) cutoff with the outside world and the (vampire) lord wants everyone to believe they are the last survivors. This could be a setting for a short Heroic-level campaign; not Paragon or Epic.

 

[Vayden]

Hmm. In 4E, the dead go to the Shadowfell, right? Maybe the Raven Queen has pulled the land the heroes live on wholesale into the Fell, like the way the Demon Lords used to pull prime material planes into the Abyss. The mortals haven't been destroyed or turned into zombies or anything like that, and their kingdoms still stand under varying degrees of siege from the denizens of the Shadowfell, but all that die in the fight only swell the numbers of the besieging dead. In addition, since the land is now part of the Shadowfell, without its connection to the life and energy of the prime, births have ceased. Within a generation, even if the mortals hold their ground, they will be swept away simply by old age.

Villains can be various generals and spies of the Fell, leading attacks on the remnant of mortals, and at higher levels, unexpected help could come from Vecna or some other rival of the Raven Queen's. Promises of great power in undeath breed traitors among the mortals.

How's that?

**edit - perhaps there are pockets of areas that are still in the prime - portals to them are guarded by the best and the bravest of the mortals, and are subject to constant attack**

 

[Irda Ranger]

Maybe the Raven Queen has pulled the land the heroes live on wholesale into the Fell, like the way the Demon Lords used to pull prime material planes into the Abyss.

Darn! That's exactly what I was going to say. At some point in history there was a "shift" in the planar boundaries and the Shadowfell became the reality of the world your PCs are in. Whether the world "fell" into the Shadowfell, or the Shadowfell "expanded" to encompass the world is really just a difference in point of view.

Since I think planar travel to and from the Shadowfell is relatively easy in 4E, you'll probably need some house rules.

The Easy Choices
But the real world still exists! There's a non-Shadowy mirror of the world that isn't run over by undead. The PCs can spend some time at the Heroic Tier fighting off undead plots to over-take their town. At the Paragon Tier they can found a new city in the Sunlit World and start transporting people out of it. Naturally someone will oppose this. In the Epic Tier they find out what caused "shift" in the first place and can undo it in a final showdown with the Arch-Lich Simon Marrikar, the Unmaker. Success means that the Shadowfell's boundary returns to its original position and the cities of the setting bask in the Sunlit World once more.

The Hard Choices
Also, some towns are kept safe from the Undead Hordes by the Auroral Barriers. They're fake though. The Church says that a daily sacrifice is necessary to keep up "the Auroral Barriers strong", but the Church is really a coven of Vampire who use the human towns as a farm, and the Auroral Barriers are nothing more than a permanent phantasm spell. The undead hordes stay out of the towns because of an ancient pact between the vampires and the liches (a pact enforced by dark oaths to Vecna - whoever breaks it will have their animus snuffed out as irrevocably as a candle flame thrown into the sea). The PCs can slay the vampires (and free the towns of their predation), but that will unleash the Liches (and their zombie hordes and ghoul lieutenants) from the obligations of the pact. What to do?

 

[JohnSnow]

Okay now that I’ve decided to go with a Post-Apocalyptic setting with lots of undead running around I’ll need to follow the 2nd rule of Dungeoncraft and come up with some secret surrounding what I’ve outlined. This is where I always get stuck, trying to come up with some secret for the campaign world. The obvious one is of course the cause of the undead rise, this secret alone could be the focus of the entire campaign so it has to be good and juicy and of course this where I’m drawing a blank.

Well, this has been done in another setting, but its one of my favorite ever conceptions of Undead - Fantasy Flight's Midnight.

In Midnight, whenever a character DIES, for any reason, there's a chance that they'll come back as flesh-craving, undead monsters. In Midnight, these creatures are called "the Fell" and they make ordinary D&D undead seem like they come from Sesame Street. Fell start as cunning, predatory creatures similar to ghouls. If they fail to feed for a certain period of time, they slowly descend to become zombies. And if they don't feed often enough as zombies, they degrade even further, becoming skeletons.

If you're into cool undead, the Fell ROCK.

In Midnight, the event that caused this state of affairs was "The Sundering," a long-ago event in which the world was cut off from the outer planes (Midnight used standard 3e cosmology, but was cut off from it). The sundering happened when a dark god was cast from the heavens by his brethren. As his final revenge, he cut the world off from the rest of the cosmos, and he now reigns as the only god in the setting.

Not saying you have to steal all of Midnight's conceits, but there's some pretty juicy stuff if you're after post-apocalyptic undead fun. Try this:

World Hook: The world is dominated by undead. In fact, the corrupting influence is so high that there's a chance that anyone who dies will come back to life. The people of the world know this and have adopted special burial rituals to prevent the dead from rising. Of course, the measures weren't always known, don't always succeed, and tend to get overlooked when there are masses of bodies (like during wars), so undead are reasonably common. In addition, sufficiently powerful necromancers can create undead. Special undead for the setting include creatures based on "the Fell" from Midnight.

Secret: The dead keep rising because someone (necromancer/demon lord/evil god) has interfered with the natural order, preventing the dead from escaping to their final resting place. Restoring that nautral order may be a long-term campaign goal.

So, it draws on Midnight for inspiration, but it's not a straight copy.

 

[physics_ninja]

Stealing an idea from the Matrix

The first one or three adventures are your normal adventures, but they were set up by the PCs patron to see how well they do. At the end of the final adventure the PCs are offered a red potion and a blue potion.

Those taking the red potion find out what the real world is. A long time ago there was some sort of undead invaison and the undead were winning. The living survivors, desprate to do something, sundered magic so that the undead couldn’t survive. But the undead were clever enough to create an artifical mana field from the only source of magic left in the world – living beings.

So when the PCs take the red potion, they find out the real world is completely non-magical, (and they are all commoners, experts, what-have-you) and every intelligent living being is plugged into an arcane device that sucks out whatever spark of magical energy there is.

In the matrix, the PCs have all sorts of cool powers and equipment (as per the rules) and can have whatever kind of adventure you want ( the more fantastical, the better). But outside they have to make do with what they find. Just finding food can be an adventure, or protecting the farms that feed the survivors. They can also quest for real magic items that can use both inside and outside the matrix. The undead are weaker in the real world too.

Of course, if you want to maintain the illusion longer, you can save the red/blue potion scene until later in the game and then have an epic conlusion.

 

[xjermx]

Wow. This is the best thread ever. I totally plan to do a Points of Light campaign based on undead in the world, for all of, and perhaps only one of- the reasons that you all have listed here. This is completely fantastic stuff. THANKS.

 

[FireLance]

One of my standard campaign seeds is a slow weakening of the barriers between the world and the evil outer planes/plane of shadow/negative energy plane. This is caused by a group of evil cultists (demon-worshippers or other humanoids with links to shadowy or evil powers) who build gates and portals linking the planes. This causes the levels of negative energy and the amount of ambient evil in the world to increase. At the initial stages, the effect is not so noticable - a few corpses spontaneously animate into low-level undead creatures (especially if they were killed by necromantic spells), and summoned fiendish animals and evil outsiders sometimes do not return when the spell that summoned them expired (becoming free-willed and often turning on the summoner). As more and more gates get built, corpses animate more often and become more powerful undead, summoned fiendish animals and evil outsiders stay more often, and natural animals and plants slowly become corrupted (and acquire many nasty templates).

Of course, in my campaigns, the PCs' job is to stop the cult and find and destroy all the gates. However, in a world where the original band of PCs failed, you might get the points of light in a world of undead mentioned in the OP. The new PCs will have to discover the secret of the gates, find out where they are, and destroy them while fending off attacks from the orginal cultists, many of whom are now powerful undead creatures.