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Reviving a dead god
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6117847" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>In the "revive a dead god" campaign I ran, one thing that was important was that a "dead" god has many and diverse manifestations.</p><p></p><p>In that game, the physical body of the god was a giant stone "statue" standing in a harbour, the top of the head poking forth as an island (with a lighthouse on top - I ran a version of the Freeport modules as part of this). Dramatic things happened when the dead god's eyes "opened", and in one encounter which involved various planes merging together into the prime material a PC was able to interact with and "inhabit" the dead god - who came to life and leapt out of the water, dramatically diverting a falling star before resettling as an island.</p><p></p><p>At the same time as the physical body was this stone statue, the god's psyche was split into ethereal shards which the PCs would encounter from time to time - so-called "Echoes of the dead god" which were, in mechanical terms, high level ghosts/spirits, and which in story terms (i) expressed the god's madness - he had "died" when trapped in the outer void fighting against an elder evil, and been driven insane in the process - and (ii) permitted the PCs (and their players) to learn bits and pieces of the dead god's story over time.</p><p></p><p>Finally, because time in the outer void does not pass in the same way as in the prime material, there was the temporally cyclic, ever-living presence of the dead god still fighting in the void - whom the PCs, when they got powerful enough, were able to contact, rescue and restore to mental health while leaving a karmic simulacrum of the PC paladin in the dead god's place to continue the fight against the elder evil. This was how they brought the god back to life, as the culmination of the campaign. (The PC paladin, in the after-events of the campaign, went on to found a monastery on the island that was still present, now a statue of the dead god rather than his dead body.</p><p></p><p>I don't have any particularly good suggestions for how you would do this sort of thing with Lolth - other than involving spiders and demons - but I think the idea of multiple manifestations, and playing with the idea that body, spirit and even time don't mean the same thing for a god as they do for a mortal, can help generate the sense that this is something different from just bringing a PC back to dead with a Resurrection spell. And more prosaically, it also gives you multiple pegs on which to hang the various story and mechanical steps that the players will have to undertake to actually bring Lolth back to life.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6117847, member: 42582"] In the "revive a dead god" campaign I ran, one thing that was important was that a "dead" god has many and diverse manifestations. In that game, the physical body of the god was a giant stone "statue" standing in a harbour, the top of the head poking forth as an island (with a lighthouse on top - I ran a version of the Freeport modules as part of this). Dramatic things happened when the dead god's eyes "opened", and in one encounter which involved various planes merging together into the prime material a PC was able to interact with and "inhabit" the dead god - who came to life and leapt out of the water, dramatically diverting a falling star before resettling as an island. At the same time as the physical body was this stone statue, the god's psyche was split into ethereal shards which the PCs would encounter from time to time - so-called "Echoes of the dead god" which were, in mechanical terms, high level ghosts/spirits, and which in story terms (i) expressed the god's madness - he had "died" when trapped in the outer void fighting against an elder evil, and been driven insane in the process - and (ii) permitted the PCs (and their players) to learn bits and pieces of the dead god's story over time. Finally, because time in the outer void does not pass in the same way as in the prime material, there was the temporally cyclic, ever-living presence of the dead god still fighting in the void - whom the PCs, when they got powerful enough, were able to contact, rescue and restore to mental health while leaving a karmic simulacrum of the PC paladin in the dead god's place to continue the fight against the elder evil. This was how they brought the god back to life, as the culmination of the campaign. (The PC paladin, in the after-events of the campaign, went on to found a monastery on the island that was still present, now a statue of the dead god rather than his dead body. I don't have any particularly good suggestions for how you would do this sort of thing with Lolth - other than involving spiders and demons - but I think the idea of multiple manifestations, and playing with the idea that body, spirit and even time don't mean the same thing for a god as they do for a mortal, can help generate the sense that this is something different from just bringing a PC back to dead with a Resurrection spell. And more prosaically, it also gives you multiple pegs on which to hang the various story and mechanical steps that the players will have to undertake to actually bring Lolth back to life. [/QUOTE]
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