I noted something similar in one of posts in the Enhancing ToA thread. Connecting everything up while keeping a good narrative and keeping a careful eye on party progression vs anticipated challenge level is really a juggling act.
As for starving liches, I assume there are souls-a-plenty for the taking (or at least bargaining) in the lower planes.
Yeah, I've been slowly wading through the Enhancing ToA thread - some great ideas there
, lots of ideas for working out minor details, but I haven't yet found anything that addresses the overarching narrative issues with ToA... These are the questions I'm asking myself:
- What is Acererak's specific motivation in nurturing an atropal into an evil god? And why did he choose Chult?
- How do the players discover the significance of the Lost City Omu in way that doesn't devolve to an information dump from a Red Wizard or other NPC?
- How do these heaps upon heaps of random encounters contribute to a meaningful narrative with rising action, forehadowing, etc.?
Pauper said:
Good point in general, but mechanically, there's no reason why speak with dead wouldn't work on someone affected by the Death Curse -- the spell doesn't let you speak with a soul, but a corpse, and its description explicitly notes that "[t]his spell doesn't return the creature's soul to its body..." It's not really clear what spell, if any, you'd use to contact a specific mortal soul in the afterworld -- contact other plane specifies that the contacted entity is "a demigod, the spirit of a long-dead sage, or some other mysterious entity", and while you could probably do it with a wish, the wording of wish suggests both that such a casting is very likely to go wrong ("the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong"), as well as be very rarely used for such a purpose (not only do you take stress for casting wish in this manner, but there's a 1-in-3 chance that anyone casting wish will never be able to do so again).
Ah, I see...hmm...well, without
speak with dead being affected...that really doesn't provide the DM with a way to let the player characters know that the Death Curse prevents souls from reaching their eternal reward. And that cuts off a whole avenue of storytelling that could add much needed depth to the ToA's narrative.
One option -- Dungeon #153 published a stand-alone adventure called "
Prisoner of the Castle Perilous", in which one of Acererak's simulacra attempts to gain individual personhood by manipulating a pair of adventuring parties (one PCs, one NPCs); this adventure's narrative weirdness can be effectively short-circuited with the idea that, instead of the true Acererak, this Acererak is yet another simulacrum and that reviving the atropal is just a side-effect of the purpose of achieving full personhood.
Thanks for the idea, but regardless of a true Acererak, a simulacrum Acererak, or whatever, the question of motive still remains.
Why create an evil god? Is it some twisted need to pass on a legacy that Acererak has developed, but being a lich is unable to sire children? Is the specific atropal actually the defeated demon lord Orcus and Acererak is trying to gain control over
all undead everywhere by subverting Orcus' power as his own? Those might be motives I could actually use.
I get the impression that the reason given is nothing more than "for the LULZ".
Acererak is basically the epitome of everything. He is an almost unkillable Lich AND if you succeed in killing him he reforms where his hidden jar is and the module straight out states the Jar is so well hidden that no mortal of god can find it.
So at this point he may just exist to travel around and entertain himself across the multiverse.
AFAICT, you're right. I'm OK with Acererak being a shallow "Evil Lich Villain" who exists to antagonize the PCs. I can put on a Skeletor voice and ham up my role-play of him, no problem.
But I do need to devise something more than "Why be a god when I can be a creator of gods?" for his motive. That tells me nothing useful. I mean, after my players answer "who/what is responsible for the Death Curse?" (Acererak & the atropal), the next question they're going to ask is "Why? What's the point of making an evil god & why should we care?"
What I can glean from ToA and older adventures about Acererak...
(a) he was a half-demon child taken as an apprentice of Vecna despite warnings Vecna received to kill the half-demon,
(b) he also became a priest of Orcus in life,
(c) he doesn't seek worshippers or godhood, unlike his former master Vecna, but small villainous groups revere him all the same,
(d) he collects artifacts throughout the planes,
(e) many mages seeking lichdom turn to Orcus for knowledge of the required ritual,
(f) Acererak seems to have special hatred for –and/or hunger for – powerful adventurers,
(g) he found the atropal adrift at the edge of the Negative Energy Plane and built the Soulmonger to nourish it to godhood.
