I made my wife tear up her character sheet. Ph33r me.

[blackshirt5]

Really!?
You mean, you really aren't a wacky anime character?

No but he's got all the directional sense of Ryoga Hibiki.

As for me, I look pretty close to Harry Potter, actually. Just longer and lighter colored hair.

 

[barsoomcore]

Heck, *I* ripped it off from an old Ravenloft module.

Basically, after scrambling for four hours trying to make up the BBG's tomb on the fly, I ended the session with, "And as you come towards the entrance, you see a figure standing there." Everybody made Will Saves, freaked out and I said, "Okay, we'll carry this on next session," making for a lovely cliff-hanger ending

Which I then frantically tried to come up with a conclusion to more interesting than, "And then he kills you all."

Came across a Ravenloft download and hey, "And then he decapitates you and taunts your disembodied heads," is MUCH more fun.

 

[Psion]

Which adventure was it from?

 

[Voadam]

Which adventure was it from?

Its the Azalin Conjunction one, "From the Shadows" or something like that.

There is another similar one with flesh golem bodies, Adam's Wrath.

I didn't like them for my campaign, I didn't want to do that to the PCs. Heavy railroading and manipulations of the essence of characters without their input.

 

[barsoomcore]

Yeah, I totally agree. I stole the decapitation idea (which worked well with the existing setup), and I'm using the castle map but throwing out almost everything else.

Reads well enough, but I wouldn't want to play it.

 

[Voadam]

Yeah, I totally agree. I stole the decapitation idea (which worked well with the existing setup), and I'm using the castle map but throwing out almost everything else.

Reads well enough, but I wouldn't want to play it.

I don't even like time travel in my games, in my world you can see the past and go to the future but not the other way around. Although I love time related spells and magic that fits within my limits (haste, contingency, spells to look back from a victim's dying moments perspective, etc.).

 

[barsoomcore]

Cool.

I actually worked the time travel into both my campaign history and metaphysics.

The bad guy thought he'd killed the heir to the throne 200 years ago and so had made himself undead and taken over, secure that the mystical right of kingship was forever broken. So when the heroes show up with said heir he needs to find out what REALLY happened all that time ago.

So he cuts off their heads, keeps them alive and sends their souls back in time. Bodies can't travel in time (well, they can, but they age -- BAD), so you have to send incorporeal souls. Now as an undead monstrosity, the bad guy's soul is magically tied to his body with immense power, which means giving up his body would release huge amounts of energy, oh, and kill him in the process. So he sends the goofs back and then reads their memories, then bails on them while he goes to solve this little problem.

 

[Psion]

I'm not a big fan of time travel myself.

In considering how to adapt this plot, however, I have a few angles:
- I just finished reading Portals & Planes, so I have a plane thing on the brain right now. Barsoomcore metioned the idea of sending the character's souls to do some dirty work; you could make their souls go to a prison plane of some sort where it is impossible to get physical access instead of time travel.
- Also, I am thinking about using the same idea in a different form. I was thinking about using a Jewel Mage from Bastion's Spells & Magic. They can trap characters in gems, and call them forth to do their bidding, but only the jewel mage or his designated lackeys can use this ability. I could opt for a more mundane evil vs. evil plot, and send the PCs to accompany the lackey on a mission... a lackey that they couldn't kill because he is the only way to get them out of the gem. As a side effect, characters summoned forth from gems get this nifty crystaline template, so it'd be a cool toy for players unfortunate enough to fall victim to the soul gem thing.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm just curious how you get out of the Talking Heads club once you join it, especially in a setting like Barsoom that doesn't have normal magic.

 

[barsoomcore]

You use abnormal means. In this case, a topical cream provides reattaching ability -- and once they had access to their bodies (which bad guy was using as compliant servants), that was pretty simple.

There were some classic moments before the heads got reattached but after they got control of their bodies again -- the psion far handing her own head with glowing eyeballs down a narrow tunnel to look for rats...