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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 1040008" data-attributes="member: 3887">A few years back I hit on the idea of a necromantically-powered Industrial Revolution for a homebrew that never got off the ground.Picture a blasted landscape dotted with "factories" when the motive power for machinery came from toiling legions of the living dead. Huge crank-wheels turned by clanking skeletons. Tireless zombies spinning scads of bright fabrics out of silent looms. The idea was that this world had recently undergone a cataclysm that caused the ocean levels to rise dramatically --the planet was slapped out of its original orbit by an angry God. A once prosperous island trade nation had almost all of its coastal and low-lying areas drowned. Resources were now submerged, the workforce decimated. So the pragmatic survivors used the only plentiful resource left; the dead, along with black magic, to rebuild their nation.Within a century they had regained much of the former economic power on the strength of --relatively, if we're not talking the added cost of their mortal souls-- undead labor. They importanted vast quantities of raw materials and exported equally vast quantities of worked goods. Use of undead labor also led to a premature interchangable parts and assembly-line manufacturing revolution.The line between the living and dead got pretty blurred, the surving living beings inevitably slid into decadence through the combined effect of enormous wealth and reliance on the dark arts. Eventually they became a necrocracy, where only free-willed undead landowners could vote...I just loved the idea of hordes of undead being used for economic dominance. Plus I loved some of the flavor details: names like The Industrial Necropolis at Nezzan, and slogans for their trade goods like Gauranteed untouched by living hands!</blockquote>

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