Got your soul!

I segued into Assault on Nightworm Fortress, from Revenge of the Giants, by having the party's mentor's soul not reach its final rest, at the end of the module. An Exarch of Moradin appeared to them, to tell them that his soul had not appeared before The Raven Queen to earn his final reward.

Souls are power and particularly rare, and influential people's souls could be presumed to carry more relative power. Was just one soul required, to fuel some sort of dark ritual or produce a powerful artifact, or is someone diverting a veritable swarm of souls in order to try and garner power over death, itself?

In this way you can make the soul just another MacGuffin, to drive the adventure you choose.
 

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[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] that sounds about right - the terrain and environment were things I was going to play up, along with the atmosphere. I figure being Alive in the Shadowfell is like walking at night with a beacon. Creatures that want to steal their life or trade experiences/sensations of the living (the sense of taste for a while, the feel of warm blood etc) or memories.

So I think I've narrowed down what happened to the soul to:

1) Something powerful snagged it while it was en-route, and seeks to feast on that power/drain the power for itself.

2) Group seeks to harness the soul for some ritual/item/bla.

3) Group seeks to recruit/convert soul to their cause as a powerful asset.

As it stands, I think #3 would be easier for PCs to track down what happened. #2 is too predictable/parallel to adventures in the real world, and #1 is workable, but perhaps a little boring.

Necromantic seepage is another danger, a black 'fluid' which can issue forth, collect in pools etc. Exposure is nasty. There obviously could be other similar things.
This reminds me of an idea I had. There's a naturally occurring material in the Shadowfell which is entropy trapped in physical form. Necrotic energy acts as a catalyst to release the trapped entropy, decaying anything it's touching. The degree of decay depends on how much is applied - a handfull of dust would act like it had been aged for years; a pound would apply a century's worth of weathering. A table would fall apart into rotten wood, a body would become dust, a castle wall would chip, crack and might even tumble in a few places.
 

Corruption of the soul. Even after the group finds it, it is not 'useable' until purified or restored and possibly a danger to them. This could be in the form of a 'disease' or possession by evil, where the souls corruption is contagious or treacherous, but could also be due to a horrible attack or event that shattered the soul leaving it incoherent and weakened, difficult to communicate with or corral in the desired direction.
 

The adventure background is that the Prophesized Chosen One - the General of the kingdom who has the silver bullet power to wipe out the oncoming army of monsters - was just assassinated, and the assassin has prevented the Raise Dead ritual from working. But they can Raise him if they grab the soul and put it in manually. Without the General and his power, the Kingdom is doomed. The PCs are the General's commanding officers and the most qualified to rescue the soul and complete the Prophecy.

Perhaps the General took the initiative to be brought back to life and struck a deal with the Raven Queen. She would turn him into a revenant so he could save the Kingdom but he would have to do a job for her before she would let him lleave the Shadowfell. The PCs would aid him in completing the Raven Queen's task so he could get back to the real world.
 

A (dead) body in motion tends to stay in motion. What if the General is skating dangerously close to becoming undead? This could tie into your #1 or #3, or it could just be the General's unfinished business and uncanny stuborness. So with the looming deadline it might be worse than just "he's gone beyond all ken", it might be he returns as a vindictive ghost! The PCs would encounter the General's soul in a series of tests in which he is pursuing roughly the same course of action that he would have when alive - only in a spectral situation - and it's up to the PCs to get the General to change. If they can, they'll avert his spiral toward undeadism.

It might be fun to have the PCs need to act as other recognizable faces from the General's past, to "play along with the specters" so to speak.
 

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