Old Drew Id
First Post
A couple of thoughts:
The Rapture - I think this could a great "end/new beginning" to some of the published settings like FR. In one instant, the gods decide to call it quits on this plane and start over. In a flash, every NPC of interest to at least one of the gods, say everyone over 5th level, just up and vanishes. Plus every cleric is gone (as in Krynn). Probably the dragons as well. The last god out the door seals the plane from any interplanar travel and drops the zombie bomb on their way out, to clean the place out like a bug bomb in an old apartment building.
Now the PC's enter the picture. Low-level mooks, struggling to figure out where all of their mentors and leaders and heroes went, as well as their enemy's leaders. And why are they slowing losing contact with the outlying areas?
In the power vacuum that follows, the first few adventures deal with upstart brigands and low-level artistocrats declaring wars on each other and trying to establish themselves as the new boss in town. Crime goes through the roof, and trade breaks down. Monster sightings increase as their natural enemies have vanished. And still, no word from the outlying areas.
Then the first zombies start to appear. At first the PC's think they can keep it under control, but zombies just keep on multiplying. There are still some clerics left, but just the variant ones dedicated to ideals and not directly to deities. But they just got a LOT more popular.
Detect Undead - this would be the first new line of defense. Every remaining mage would be churning out Lanterns of Detect Undead or something similar while the clerics spend all of their slots on Remove Disease if they had it, or food spells and Hide from Undead if they didn't. Healing spells wouldn't be much use, because once you take even 1 point of bite damage from the zombies, you're too late.
Assuming you can establish a secure area somewhere, you keep the detection spells going as an early warning system, and you establish kill zones (as in 28 days later at the military house). Islands would seem like good bases, but the zombies can walk across the ocean floor to reach you. Mountain bases and walled cities would be better but food would be scarce. The only truly safe spots would be flying bases with an internal magic food source, or maybe a similar situation in a ship at sea that just never goes into port.
Eventually, though, any safe area is just a zombie target. If the zombies take over an entire region and there are no survivors left there, then what do the zombies do? They might just stand around indefinitely, or they might migrate towards the next possible source of victims.
If they just stand around, then you might be able to rebuild safely. You just clear the zombies out of your area, set up a good border system, and pick off any zombies that happen to accidentally wander too close. Plus any really isolated areas might never even get hit at all.
If they do migrate, it's a lot harder. Now, any area that does get cleared out is eventually going to get hit with all of the zombies from every surrounding area. If you have a walled city, every morning there will be even more zombies outside the wall than there were the day before. In that case, you are setting up a pretty much permanent environmental hazard.
I like the face-mask idea and I could see that being used across all intelligent races. Pretty much everyone goes around with the face mask at all times except when eating. It's the only way to be sure.
Non-deity-specific paladins would probably spring up pretty quickly, once the population is reminded that a 3rd level paladin is immune to the disease. I imagine a lot of NPC warriors would swear the necessary oaths and such, regardless of their original alignment, if it were the difference between life and death. As clerics gained levels, they would probably aim for Contemplative or other prestige classes which offered similar abilities.
Eventually, the PC's will reach higher levels, if they survive. Then they will, in true D&D fashion, want to know what happened and how they can reverse the effects. That's the point when the campaign could break for a lot of groups. If there is no ultimate victory or at least escape possible, then many players will feel cheated. But if there is a clearly possible fix, then it is not horrific, it's just challenging. One of the keys to good horror is that there is no known way to deal with the threat.
Something I might consider in a campaign like that would be divine ascensions (since I had already basically trashed the whole campaign world anyway). Basically, with the whole plane open and no gods around to block up the works, the process of becoming divine just got a lot easier. You just need a lot of followers willing to worship you. High level PC's protecting a city of commoners would find that pretty easy. Get access to some wish or miracle spells that let you blast 500 zombies at a time or set up some permanent defenses, and the commoners will smile as they put your image on the front of their now-abandoned temples. Once that starts, you start picking up on the prayers of your faithful and discover you've got some minor salient divine abilities. Then you can really clean out the entire zombie horde world-wide. Plus, you get to team up with or do battle with the similarly-divine leaders of the other surviving areas. Eventually the zombies are all destroyed and you establish a whole new pantheon of young gods. Hmmm...maybe that's what the old gods had intended to happen all along?
The Rapture - I think this could a great "end/new beginning" to some of the published settings like FR. In one instant, the gods decide to call it quits on this plane and start over. In a flash, every NPC of interest to at least one of the gods, say everyone over 5th level, just up and vanishes. Plus every cleric is gone (as in Krynn). Probably the dragons as well. The last god out the door seals the plane from any interplanar travel and drops the zombie bomb on their way out, to clean the place out like a bug bomb in an old apartment building.
Now the PC's enter the picture. Low-level mooks, struggling to figure out where all of their mentors and leaders and heroes went, as well as their enemy's leaders. And why are they slowing losing contact with the outlying areas?
In the power vacuum that follows, the first few adventures deal with upstart brigands and low-level artistocrats declaring wars on each other and trying to establish themselves as the new boss in town. Crime goes through the roof, and trade breaks down. Monster sightings increase as their natural enemies have vanished. And still, no word from the outlying areas.
Then the first zombies start to appear. At first the PC's think they can keep it under control, but zombies just keep on multiplying. There are still some clerics left, but just the variant ones dedicated to ideals and not directly to deities. But they just got a LOT more popular.
Detect Undead - this would be the first new line of defense. Every remaining mage would be churning out Lanterns of Detect Undead or something similar while the clerics spend all of their slots on Remove Disease if they had it, or food spells and Hide from Undead if they didn't. Healing spells wouldn't be much use, because once you take even 1 point of bite damage from the zombies, you're too late.
Assuming you can establish a secure area somewhere, you keep the detection spells going as an early warning system, and you establish kill zones (as in 28 days later at the military house). Islands would seem like good bases, but the zombies can walk across the ocean floor to reach you. Mountain bases and walled cities would be better but food would be scarce. The only truly safe spots would be flying bases with an internal magic food source, or maybe a similar situation in a ship at sea that just never goes into port.
Eventually, though, any safe area is just a zombie target. If the zombies take over an entire region and there are no survivors left there, then what do the zombies do? They might just stand around indefinitely, or they might migrate towards the next possible source of victims.
If they just stand around, then you might be able to rebuild safely. You just clear the zombies out of your area, set up a good border system, and pick off any zombies that happen to accidentally wander too close. Plus any really isolated areas might never even get hit at all.
If they do migrate, it's a lot harder. Now, any area that does get cleared out is eventually going to get hit with all of the zombies from every surrounding area. If you have a walled city, every morning there will be even more zombies outside the wall than there were the day before. In that case, you are setting up a pretty much permanent environmental hazard.
I like the face-mask idea and I could see that being used across all intelligent races. Pretty much everyone goes around with the face mask at all times except when eating. It's the only way to be sure.
Non-deity-specific paladins would probably spring up pretty quickly, once the population is reminded that a 3rd level paladin is immune to the disease. I imagine a lot of NPC warriors would swear the necessary oaths and such, regardless of their original alignment, if it were the difference between life and death. As clerics gained levels, they would probably aim for Contemplative or other prestige classes which offered similar abilities.
Eventually, the PC's will reach higher levels, if they survive. Then they will, in true D&D fashion, want to know what happened and how they can reverse the effects. That's the point when the campaign could break for a lot of groups. If there is no ultimate victory or at least escape possible, then many players will feel cheated. But if there is a clearly possible fix, then it is not horrific, it's just challenging. One of the keys to good horror is that there is no known way to deal with the threat.
Something I might consider in a campaign like that would be divine ascensions (since I had already basically trashed the whole campaign world anyway). Basically, with the whole plane open and no gods around to block up the works, the process of becoming divine just got a lot easier. You just need a lot of followers willing to worship you. High level PC's protecting a city of commoners would find that pretty easy. Get access to some wish or miracle spells that let you blast 500 zombies at a time or set up some permanent defenses, and the commoners will smile as they put your image on the front of their now-abandoned temples. Once that starts, you start picking up on the prayers of your faithful and discover you've got some minor salient divine abilities. Then you can really clean out the entire zombie horde world-wide. Plus, you get to team up with or do battle with the similarly-divine leaders of the other surviving areas. Eventually the zombies are all destroyed and you establish a whole new pantheon of young gods. Hmmm...maybe that's what the old gods had intended to happen all along?
