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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 5016369" data-attributes="member: 508">Our 3E/3.5 campaign took a completely different turn as a result of a TPK - the first TPK we'd ever experienced.  To explain any further, I'll have to mention a few SPOILERS about the adventure which caused the TPK, the Dungeon adventure "Headless" by James Jacobs.[SPOILER]In the adventure, a disciple of Orcus has created a device that sucks up the souls of everyone who dies in a 200-mile radius.  The PCs died fighting off the forces that were defending the device that the PCs were trying to destroy.  So, since the device was still active, the PCs' souls were sucked into Orcus's realm.I opted to take the opportunity to try something a little different.  The next adventure, the PCs all wake up in Orcus's realm, naked, with their memories wiped.  They're informed by Orcus that they had been his trusted demonic lieutenants who had attempted to overthrow him.  As a punishment, they had been placed into these puny human and elven bodies and would have to earn their way back to full demonhood.  So, the next few adventures had the PCs believing they were demons working for Orcus, and accomplishing missions for him.  Their first adventure had them killing two paladins just for their gear (since they had been gated to Oerth naked and with no equipment), and taking custody of a wizard's tower which blinked back and forth between Oerth and the Ethereal Plane - a nice, handy backdoor to the Prime Material Plane.  They stole powerful weapons for Orcus, killed celestials for him, and so on.  And then, they ran into a celestial who was the PC sorcerer's father (who had been slain dozens of adventures earlier and become a celestial after his mortal death) - when he called his daughter by name, her memory was instantly returned (that had been part of the curse Orcus had laid upon the PCs), and she in turn called out the name of the cleric PC and restored his memory as well.So, the next few adventures after that had those two PCs going back and trying to undo the damage they had done as "demons" (including destroying the soul-sucking device that had set them on this path).  And now, the entire campaign goal is to take down Orcus as revenge for what he did to the PCs.  To that end, the PCs have cast their lot in with a disgraced devil who has been cursed with incorporeality (after having been caught "poaching" in an Archduke's personal harem), whose only way to have his curse removed is by taking down Orcus himself.  (The Archduke figured that would be a suitably impossible task.)  So now it's Justaine the pissed-off cleric, Tiatianna the pissed-off sorceress, and Benny the incorporeal devil out to permanently destroy Orcus.  To achieve this goal, they're gathering up items of power to negate a bunch of Orcus's abilities, so that he'll be weak enough that they might actually have a chance to slay him.  Unfortunately, the other two original members of the PC party (a druid and her awakened dire wolf) are still under the belief that they're Orcus's trusted lieutenants, and are doing their best to stop the PCs.  Right now they PCs are at 16th level, and I'm trying to line things up so that they'll have their final showdown with Orcus when they're both at 20th level.  Whether they succeed in slaying Orcus or go down in a blaze of glory, they're both psyched about the upcoming battle.  And whichever way the battle goes, it will be the final adventure of this campaign.[/SPOILER]It's been a completely different campaign than the one I had originally envisioned, but it's been a blast to run (even if I've had to come up with a whole lot of adventures on my own rather than running them through published adventures).Johnathan</blockquote>

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