D&D 5E [Invoking the Creativity of ENWorld] What Would You Do With this Adventure Set-up?

[Mercurius]

I'm feeling fairly good about the direction of my campaign-in-preparation, but I thought I'd invoke the collective creativity of ENWorld and see what different people would do with the basic set-up I'm working with. Basically what I'm hoping out of this thread is for people to take the gist of what I'm working on and run with it. What would you do with it? How would you tweak and change it? How would you develop it? I'm only going to give you the bare-bones - and not give you the details of what I have "behind the scenes." That is, I won't explain what I see as going on or where the campaign might go, or even what the setting is like (assume relatively standard fantasy). That's for you to figure out.


Basic Set-up
The PCs start in a tavern in a very small village. Yep. They hear a scream outside and when the door opens, a terrified woman stumbles in, clutching her baby, raving about "the dead walk! the dead walk!" Assuming the PCs go outside and investigate, pretty soon they find that there are dead people (zombies) walking around, attacking whomever they can. Upon further investigation the realize that there are LOTS of them, and that a horde is converging on the village. What do they do? Do they hold up in the tavern and hope for the best? Do they try to help the villagers escape to the much better protected town five miles away?

Further questions: Why are the dead walking? Where are they coming from? Who is responsible? Is this a relatively localized occurence or is it more wide-spread? A short adventure or the beginnings of a larger story? Etc.

I look forward to seeing what people come up with!

 

[Hand of Evil]

My players look first then leap, they would check number and flow of the zombie horde and then and only then make a run for the better protected town (IF they know about it). They may try and hold up in the tavern but only if they thought it was strong enough.

Help the town folk, right, they would see them as zombies in the making and use them as human shields.

I can see it play out...

• We have zombies.
• How many.
• More than I like and they brought friends and family.
• Can we hold out here?
• Maybe, if we get some extra wood to reinforce the doors and windows.
• Don't think that is good enough, what does everyone think?
• Hey DM: Are there other creatures with the zombies?
• DM: None you see
• I think we should run for it, there is a town just five miles down the road.
• How do you know that?
• Bartender told me.
• What about the town folk?
• They can follow our lead.
• You know, I sometimes think we may be evil.
• But we are not zombies.

 

[Paraxis]

A few things to think about.

Why have the lady explain whats going? I think it is better to just show them that the dead are rising through actions.

What would you do as a player? First things that come to mind are immediate survival, so get everyone to a more defensible location than the local tavern, a temple/church or town garrison sound like ideal locations. After initial survival it would either be investigation into cause if there was a reason to care or evacuation and get the survivors out of there.

Where are all these fresh bodies coming from? Most of the dead filling the crypts and graves would be skeletal not zombie like unless there was a reason to have so many recently dead. So is there a plague ravishing the land, a war, did a natural disaster just devastate the area?

What do the player characters know of undead? What conclusions can the characters make based on their training and skills, do they know the abilities of zombies and weaknesses? Do they know about what kind of spells are used to make them? What conclusions can they draw from this information to unravel who/what is behind this zombie outbreak.

Are you telling a zombie attack story or a post apocalyptic survival story different feel depending. Look at Walking Dead for example the story is not focused on the zombies but on the situation and the characters, the zombies are like the sprinkles on top of a great survival story, while Night of the Living Dead is a zombie attack story.

If zombie attack it is more of an adventure hook and the character should be able to solve the situation or at least survive it, if it is a post apocalyptic survival thing that sounds like a campaign and they probably should never figure out exactly what caused it, but give them plenty of possibilities to investigate.

Zombie Attack story,
Have the big bad guy actually be a young girl who has lost her family and friends to a recent sickness that has swept the land. She found an old tome and used it to raise all the people who died from the sickness in the area. When they get to her she is protected by her undead family and half dozen little kid zombies. So how did the girl get the book? Is there a puppet master wanting to spread chaos and death across the land?

Survival horror, don't ever tell them what raised the dead. Have it start with someone getting up in the middle of a wake at the local tavern and attacking but quickly people realize anyone who dies rises as a zombie within seconds.
This is an ongoing campaign, have churches and kingdoms seal doors, have the zombie curse effect all living things so zombie dragons and puppies. Maybe at epic levels, there is some plot envolving the imprisonment/death/disappearance of the god of death and players have a chance to fix it at the conclusion of a long campaign.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

"Converging" indicates that the village is the epicentre, so perhaps therein dwells a necromancer who is summoning an Army of Darkness to him/herself. An ancient lich who was once the lead wizard of the better-protected town (which was then, in ages past, a grand city), but his Raistlin-like fascination with Evil Magic caused him to take a darker path and corrupted his soul. He warred with the other wizards in the city, who, after much destruction, finally subdued him and buried him alive in an underground prison some miles from the city walls, at a crossroads where they hoped he would never be free again. Over many years, the once-fine city dwindled (due in no small part to its having been blasted to a shadow of its former glory in the wizard war), and is now a bustling town with suspiciously thick walls, and the necromancer merely a fairy tale used to scare children into cleaning their teeth at bedtime.
However, as the years passed, a settlement grew up around the crossroads and as fate would have it, the blood of an innocent child was shed in anger at the centre of the crossroad underneath which Necro boy was imprisoned. This is the long forgotten only thing that could release him from the slowly ebbing magic of his enemies. The years have turned him into a dreadful lich and he now has called an army of the dead to dig him free of the prison and be his warriors in a renewed assault on the city he has never stopped dreaming of conquering...
Thus the pcs won't be annihilated as the horde has a job to do, and if they can escape and warn the city, the seers there can provide the background. Much can be made of finding the ancient spell of imprisonment again...but the secret ingredient is that to seal him in, once more an innocent child's blood must be spilled. Cue moral quandary and the sudden realisation of how important to the plot the original baby-carrying woman in the tavern might yet be...
Or something like that.

 

[Will Doyle]

I'd make the tavern surrounded pretty much right from the start. Introduce a small cast of quirky NPCs: a traveling merchant, a minstrel, a pair of eloping lovers, a quack-cure charlatan, perhaps a noble and her maid en route to a wedding. Play on all those horror movies tropes where the heroes hold out in a late-night diner, or a gas station. Perhaps the minstrel was playing a flute he found in a roadside tomb when the zombies attacked? Or the eloping daughter has a witch as a stepmother? Or the noble carries a mysterious ancestral relic as a wedding gift? In short, wrap the adventure's revelation around them - i.e. the NPCs - rather than the zombies.

 

[Gecko85]

Hole up in the tavern. Did Shaun of the Dead teach them nothing?