PCs start out dead...but what now?

[RaZZer99]

I’ve started a new campaign in my homebrew world and I need help fleshing out the starting idea as I am rather stumped. Currently there are seven PCs, and they come from varying places all over the world and do not know each other. They’ve been instructed to make their characters and respective backgrounds, but with a catch. At the end of their personal history, their character is to have died in some fashion. So the campaign starts with each of the PC scattered about the world having died (tragically of course!) already. But of course they won’t be dead in order to actually play Instead they will be “brought together and resurrected” for some purpose...and this is pretty much where the idea putters out. I have been raking my brain to come up with something, but usually when you force yourself to think of things, you just can’t. Inspiration comes when you least expect it. What I am basically searching for is a how and why have the characters been resurrected which can be an ongoing theme in the campaign. In metagame terms, it needs to be a background plot that can be revisited now and then between other traditional adventures. I have thought of giving them a “Hi! I’m a god. You’ve been resurrected for this quest I need done, so hop to it!” but I don’t want it to be that blunt and directive. They should be able to find their own adventures and quest too. It also needs to be able to accommodate change in the party make up should a player quit and a new one joins the game. If I say something like “You guys are super duper special! You are all the sacred seven foretold in the prophecy!” but then if I loose original players and gain new ones, it kinda puts a kink in that. So does anyone have some friendly advice or ideas? Has anyone played a campaign similar to this and if so...details?

 

[Sir Whiskers]

Just off the top of my head...

What if someone in the campaign world really screwed up a Wish spell or something (maybe an artifact), breaking the Law of Death? You could have random people coming back to life, so there's no problem gaining/losing players as the campaign goes along.

The hook for the players should be something to do with the consequences of the Law being broken: maybe by being raised in this manner, they can never reach the afterlife (at least until the Law is restored); or with the breaking of the Law of Death, necromancers are having a field day and the Law has to be restored to keep undead from overrunning the world; or people are coming back slightly changed in some manner (and not in a positive way); or people brought back this way slowly decay in some gruesome manner.

Whatever it is, the goal is for your players to be motivated to fix the problem without the need for divine intervention or anything like that.

Also, if the players start to ignore it, consider having the problem get worse as time goes on, just to add a bit of urgency.

 

[takyris]

They don't have to be Super Duper Special: They can be the only mostly intact bodies left from the Old Age.

Years after the PCs died, something happened to the world, some holocaust or disaster or cataclysm or, you know, something bad. Life as we know it was nearly wiped out for a time, and now, as the pieces are starting to come back together, a ruthless warlord has risen up. He's got a powerful artifact that prevents him from being attacked by any creature that radiates a certain form of magic, and everyone in the world now radiates this form of magic. (This artifact can tie into a later adventure -- some of the last members of "true" humanity made these artifacts to protect themselves from the new humans -- why? How? What did they want to accomplish? How did they end up dying anyway?) The PCs were recently uncovered by an archaeology team, and a clerical order took their bodies, cleaned them up, and resurrected them, hoping that whoever they resurrected could be trained and equipped to use as a tool in killing this warlord. Other bodies can be uncovered as time goes on, should the need arise.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

You could try making the PCs work for their return. Have them all meet in some sort of afterlife or underworld, where they have to pass a variety of tests in order to return. Something like Egyptian mythology springs to mind, but needn't be that specific. Once they finally make it back to the real world, they'll be naturally inclined to work together. If you also want, you can make it so that a lot of time- like centuries- have passed while they were gone. This would also help cement the group, and could lead to cool things like protecting their descendents, etc.

As for the reasons behind it, this could be an experiment from a new god- perhaps one that is getting ready to challenge the (traditionally evil) god of death and replace his paradigm with a more balanced outlook. The PCs could have come to the new god's attention for whatever reason, and he put them on this path. Since he is new, he's still finding his place and discover his powers, so he won't be around to dicate to the PCs all that much- just give them vague goals and hits, and very rarely interfere in their new lives.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

I'd considered a marginally similar campaign using a version of the emancipated spawn class in which the PCs were some form of enslaved undead spawn. Their master undead is killed, freeing them, and of his minions, the PCs are the ones who in freedom regain some sense of self. First part of adventure, survive the other recently freed but stil evil spawn, and whatever killed your former master. Rest of campaign - quest for humanity, where by doing "good deeds", regaining peices of your past or whatnot you are able to slowly trade undead levels back for your character levels and perhaps even get to the point where you can make the jump back to humanity.

Kahuna Burger

 

[Ashrum the Black]

Hmm (puts on thinking hat) (thinks, wow, I actually work in this gray hell of florescent light?)

Does it have to be so obvious? How about the characters all wake up in a room littered with ritual doo-dad's. The room is littered with bodies and blood. The ritual doo'dad's are all broken and scattered. They lie at the the ritual center of some great circle designed to accomplish something. This is all they know.

Perhaps it was some great ritual to accomplish some dark deed. It was stop by the forces of good and brought the pc's back to life as a side effect. Now the good guy's want them dead because they're centers of darkness walking. Even though they still have their old alignments. The forces of darkness want them because they are required if they are to ever complete this ritual and bring about the return of thier god/ end of the world/ making elminster talk in a funny high voice.

On the other hand perhaps the forces of good were performing the ritual and it was interrupted by the dark powers. Now good wants their help, and darkness want's them dead/ sacrificed/ forced to watch hours of bad anime. Or good thinks they've been corrupted by the rituals failure and a new one to save the world cannot be started until the "dark stains" are removed.

The point is that they don't know much about why they're there, who brought them back, and what's going on. Through their investigations they will find out more about what is going on. You can throw side trecks in to break things up to keep things from getting repetitive. If they choose to ignore this strange "re-birth" then it can come hunting them. Hit them a few times with strange cultists out for their deaths and watch them get interested fast!

As for what's actually going on, no need to decide that all just yet. Let it grow form the campaign. All you need now is to decide who's after them and some broad reason's for what they plan to do with them once they get them. This will provide a hook to get them interested, after that as they explore more you can flesh out the motivations more and reveal that to them.

Believe me, the theories that the players come up with are oft times far more diabolical than what we design. Listen to their theories as play goes on and steal the better ones and combine them all.

(pulls off thinking cap before this hell of grey drives him mad(der) )

-Ashrum

 

[MarauderX]

You could steal the movie "the Crow" revenge story, where each of the PCs gets a familiar they MUST keep alive for them to survive...

Or you could have them all die at the same place and then flash back to when they were still alive and game from then up until the place they know they will die in, but this time they must prevent fate (or whomever) from killiing them again... could be interesting for a halloween one-shot.

edit: Almost forgot, there is an RPG computer game based on the Planescape setting where you wake up and wander around, and every time you die you are resurrected in the same place. I forget the name, but it had a kinda good story to it although I hated the setting.

 

[FrankTrollman]

I like waking up in an abandoned monastery. If you've seen Haibane (from the makers of Serial Experiments: Lain), you'll understand.

The players can wake up naked on the floor with sore spots on their bodies where their mortal wounds were inflicted. There could also be other people waking up in different parts of the building - some of them hostile.

It can dovetail nicely into a dungeon crawl through the building as they attempt to figure out why there are a bunch of ex-deadites in the building, why the dead are waking up, and perhaps why the monastery was abandoned in the first place.

Because they are all stuck together in a time-critical and dangerous situation, the players will gravitate towards each other and work as a team. Also, since equipment is relatively low and things are weird - you can get a lot more fear mileage out of relatively simple and/or weak monsters, enemies, and traps.

At some point you can reveal that the monastery has a maguffin in it - perhaps an artifact or dissease. Bonus alienation points if the players gradually come to understand that they are in fact not the people they remember being (they could be plants - like swamp thing, or worms like Shredder, or even just other people whose memories have been intruded by ghosts).

So you could, for example, have it turn out that somewhere there is an item that fills people's minds with the memories of the long-departed dead (thus indicating that the players are the clerics of the monastery), or perhaps an item that brings the dead to life and kills the living (this could be reinforced by them finding dead spiders curled up on window sills, and never hearing birds call - and eventually finding the clerics dead and dessicated huddled together in the cloister). In any case, the Maguffin should be stolen by one of the other awakened people and taken from the monastery.

This now goes into a chase scene - as it should be relatively obvious that if the item is removed too far either the players will go back to being dead, lots of innocents will die, or perhaps both.

-Frank