Limited-Resource Campaign Design

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

"Limited Resouce" campaign designing? I don't believe there is such a thing. Our imaginations are truely boundless!

Oh ye of little exposure to the Internet. Most people's imaginations are anything but.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I guess the thing is this: I could write a setting up that would have everything in the Monster Manual lurking behind a bush somewhere, right, but it's just impossible to have a coherent theme or set of related themes that way.

In another setting I wrote up, I decided that there were no incorporeal undead. This was partly because I was eliminating clerics, meaning that incorporeal undead would be that much harder to kill - I still remember the no-clerics, low-magic game where the DM had us face shadows! Wow, look, my Strength score is now my hit points!

It was also partly because I felt that it helped focus what undead in this setting symbolised: most mages were necromancers, undead were used as servants and soldiers, there was a touch of body-horror going on. It lead to the idea that the towns and cities where magic and mages were dominant had developed very dualistic, "the self is the soul, the body is a shell" religions and philosophies in order to cope with the fact that their corpses would be fair game for wizards after their deaths.

In this setting, which I need to name I suppose, I wanted to use specifically ghouls because of their association with the corruption of the living through cannibalism, and specifically wights because of their association with burial mounds - I had the idea of important burial rites in mind as soon as I got to "wight" in the book. I think I decided to use shadows because they're among the least sentient of incorporeal undead - I didn't want intelligent ghosts or spectres with their relatively comprehensible agenda.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Done right, it makes the setting seem more consistent. It's like, you've got a regular stomping ground and what frequents that stomping ground is a constant. You get to learn the sort of animals and plants. You get an idea of how everything behaves. But sooner or later, bad news like heavily-armed high-experience adventurers has got to spread, or it stops making sense.

One of the reasons that I like the idea of using the formians and the yuan-ti is the way they come with a built-in challenge progression, from workers or purebloods right up to queens or abominations.

 

[Joshua Randall]

If you like yuan-ti, Serpent Kingdoms is a great resource. Anyway...

I like the idea of grimlocks as degenerate descendants of humans. Gives 'em a nice Lovecraftian feel (cf. "The Lurking Fear").

Also, maybe the grimlocks are defiling graves for some reason? Either deliberately for their own purposes, as dupes of a demonic cult, or accidentally while looking for something else.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Serpent Kingdoms was the first Forgotten Realms product I ever owned, actually.

You're right about the grimlocks - they could easily fulfill the role of Lovecraftian ghouls, a la "Pickman's Model". In fact, remembering my favourite Lovecraft story makes me wonder if it wouldn't be fun to have the grimlocks steal children in exchange for their own offspring, the way Pickman painted his ghouls doing. Grimlock changelings . . . that's a scary thought.

I had originally envisioned grimlocks as raiding for some incomprehensible religious or ritual purpose, but perhaps part-and-parcel of their modus operandi could be abducting children, despoiling gravesites . . . it would provide a handy excuse for the PCs to have to deal with wights, since they're unlikely to disturb burial mounds themselves.

 

[Doghead Thirteen]

Ye Gods, that's a good way to get a campaign shifting - just don't be surprised if the players decide to make a full-time job of killing grimlocks.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

That could very easily be tougher than you might expect.

It could be cheating my initial premise, but I do remember the old Night Below boxed campaign module, where the first level of subterranean bad guys were controlled by the next level down, and the second level were controlled by the third, and each group passed their kidnapped victims down the chain right to the bottom.

Hmm. Without breaking the rules, perhaps the grimlocks are being manipulated by the yuan-ti as a distraction; if the yuan-ti's schemes involve taking control of and unifying the humans of the region on behalf of their infernal patron, perhaps the grimlock raids could be a pretext for their human pawns to assert control as a means of cracking down on the threat.

 

[Doghead Thirteen]

... "I had no idea how deep this goes..."

sorry, rimshot.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Disturbing!

 

[Firedancer]

That's cool!
It would be nice if there were a shadow template, as well . . . the basic shadow could represent the newly-spawned creature, and allowing it to survive and grow to full strength could lead to the appearance of a properly-templated version.

Have you got Libris Mortis? There's evolved undead template which you could apply to shadows as a means of differentiating the newly created v the substantive shadows.

As I recall there's also some monster advancement including lurking horrors or something. Essentially there's a few means of advancing the undead that would give you different levels of challenge.