Remember that campaign setting idea I had? The one where a rift created by invading lawful ant-folk outsiders bent on enslaving all of the prime material, messed up the magic system? I decided to run a game set several centuries after a successful resistance victory.
Opening post:
The Ruins of Mirafar
Before the great invasion, Mirafar was the grandest and most prosperous of all the cities in the world, and the largest necropolis of all time. Ruled by a lich and policed by vampires, it's economic power and military might formed an unstoppable engine of destruction, rebirth and prosperity, despite the setbacks of having a necroticaly tainted populous. It was also the home of the second largest center of magical knowledge and power. Many large stone towers house the living populants, while the graveborn slumbered in the tombs dug beneath the city. The sight from outside it's stone walls evoked a mixture of awe and despair. But walking the obsidian streets was known to be the most relaxing most people would ever encounter. Even the sight of a shambling zombie would not bother the residents.
Mirafar was known for it's military genius. Each shambling warrior was expertly animated and well preserved by liches, led by gifted tacticains and supplimented with vampire ninjas and living warriors. Since Mirafar gained a living population of 10,000, the kindom never lost a war.
None, save for the Formian Invasion. The outsiders were swift and tactful in attacking Mirafar first. They took in a year, with support from Mirafar's greatest rival kingdom, whose name has since been forgotten. Without the great necrotic empire, the Formians took the rest of the world with ease. Very few citizens, living and unliving, left the kingdom before it's fall, and only a handfull were able to escape the collaspe of the empire.
Though most of the outsiders have since been banished, and the kingdom's lands retaken, the world will never see the dark and beautiful splendor that was Mirafar. Unless the founding Lich King Mirafar himself is still animate.
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Thru the laws of heritage and decendance, you and your companions are of the few people who have the right to reclaim the land for your own. Your military commander has accepted your request to have the sole honour taking the city back.
[ic=General Edward Duke]"Remanants of the Formians are still in the city capital itself, though were speculating that remanant undeath energy should still cause much trouble to any living intruders. Reasoning that's why the Formians used this place as a prison. I'll leave you a small camp of warriors to hold off guerillas while you cleanse your ancient homeland."[/ic]
Across the open dirt field sits the city. A few towers are missing from the paintings you have viewed in your youth, and a half-built formian mound has sprung up. This hollow husk is your birthright, and you can feel your home calling to you.
It's a strait forward quest, spelled out and handed to the adventurers. My dillema is how to keep the party interested for play from levels 5 thru 13 or so while only encountering corporeal undead, formians, and the rare POW (living and unliving).
My advice would be to not merely have the aforementioned encounters. I'm doing a "reclamation"-type campaign of my own, and faced the same problem. To counter that, I decided that the invaders continued to use humans for labour (and perhaps sustenance), permitting them to dwell in their own resource-depleted cities where they would have to compete merely to survive, let alone to mount a resistance.
It makes sense for the formians to do something to that effect, and it will provide the players with some respite from the constant city-crawling.
Resource-depeleted city? Sounds like my retrofitted metro-necropolis prison. There's so much death energy lingering in the place that only hardy concentrations of positive energy can survive. So that means plants, food, only grows in the 'hallowed' areas while the few ghouls feed off those that wander out looking for water or a new stick to fend off the other prisoners. This also means that the undead can stay and be encountered.
Staked vampires are abound, if only as piles of ash in their coffins. Removing the stake and dropping a few CON points of blood will revive them.
Lots of shinnies to be found. The formians looted for usefull items, not lucretive items. No magic weapons, just gems and coins.
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Mirafar architechture: An interesting design was developed during the first expansion of the outside walls. Families built a very large stone house directly atop a shallow tomb. As the years passed, the family built the house up, adding new floors and rooms for new members, while digging more tunnels into the tomb. Tombs eventualy interconnected to ease flooding.
During the second expansion, the process was refined. A very deep hole was dug benath the home, and from there the city's newwest seweres were installed first. Then the tombs and sarcophegie were built.
One should note that the tomb and home combo was only used after the first expansion, the orriginal city kept it's residents and dead in seperate sections. The dead in the Graveyard Garden sorounding the palace to be exact.
How about Zelda style dungeon quests? The PCs need to aquire 3 keys to eneter the inner city, from outside the city. Then they need 4 keys from the Vampire lords inside the inner city to enter the old distric and the palace. Then within the palace is one final key to enter the Lich King's tomb.
The PCs should aquire 1 lvl per dungeon, then there's the formian mound for bonus points.
Each of the four Vampire Lords' Manors could have an elemental theme to it as well.
Sounds cool. Are the vampires and liches the good side (from the pc's PoV at least)? That sounds really cool. i may have read it wrong though.
Is this a game to play at the cbg of elsewhere? If here, i'd love to join, but then i should prolly not read further in this thread.
The dead ones seem to be on the good side. Taken speaks so highly of them in the first post.
The point is that the liches and vampires were the masters of the once greatest empire on the face of the planet. Wether they were/are of good alignment or not is irrelevant.
In any case, I'm using the concept of negative energy as evil energy. Wether the Vampire Lord Molok was a good guy that pet kittens and gave money to the poor, and never created a vampire spawn or other undead creature while the city was in it's glory days doesn't mean he decided to sit in his coffin and waste away instead of hunting for necks to suck dry after the formians passed thru. Assuming he wasn't staked, the negative energy drove him mad and caused him to turn to the pitch black side. Negative energy in it's purest form is more evil than a rabid balor, and no matter what you are, it's going to make you more and more evil as time goes by, without powerful magic or intense psycological help.
This also means that uncontrolled mindless undead will wander about to do evil.
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Would it be more interesting if my zombies spewed some sort of black mist every time you cut them? Instead of blood, they gush clouds of black death energy! That would probably be cool if this was an animated TV show or a video game.
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If you're latest question is whether or not those PrC's would make good encounters, I say go for it. They seem to fit the theme that you're going for and seem like they'd make fun villains.
As for zombies that spew clouds of negative energy, that sounds like a good way to freak your players out. They'd probably think that the clouds of negative energy have some sort of game effect they've never heard of before.
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The pressure is on. I'm typing up the PM I'm sending to Leaping Shark over on the WotC forumns for permission to start a PbP game. When that thread is given the go, I'm going to start a PbP pregame thread here with a few twists.
Two games at once, seperate score sheets, same goal. I should have the first few adventures ready to go by the time LP says "go".