Familicide: A Campaign

[Tanuki Tales]

Well, I was really behind OoTS main storyline and just caught up with it recently. To not spoil anything for those who did not read it yet, have any of the DMs out there ever thought of that as being the set up for an entire campaign? Maybe even explaining the group as having banded together to discover the mystery behind the events.

And if you were a player instead of a DM, how would you feel about the game and campaign taking place in a post Familicide world?

[Gandariel]

Familicide is indeed a very cool thing and a great idea by Mr Burlew.

It would be a great addition to a campaign plot, although i don't think it would be a great idea to make The Whole Plot entirely based on it.

(Also, play this campaign only with people who don't watch oots :)

[Tanuki Tales]

Familicide is indeed a very cool thing and a great idea by Mr Burlew.

It would be a great addition to a campaign plot, although i don't think it would be a great idea to make The Whole Plot entirely based on it.

(Also, play this campaign only with people who don't watch oots :)

I don't see how a single casting of it and then dealing with the fallout is any different from any other MacGuffin.

[Gandariel]

well, yeah, i guess you can. Although your players will spend a fortune in Speak With Dead scrolls.

On a more serious note, Familicide is not like an atomic bomb. It kills, tops, 200 people. Say 500. Most of whose are accidental.
Most of the world won't even notice it.

It is a nice adventure hook, but it's not like "a enormous meteor is colliding with Earth" or " the evil guy is marching in your country with his huge army".
i was mostly disagreeing with the term "fallout"

anyway, it would be kind of difficult to properly create a plot around this.
I'm imagining that one of the PC's mentor or something dies suddenly, and he swears vengeance.
as they go from city to city to investigate dead people, they more or less recognize they're linked by family and finally manage to find the guy to whom the spell was originally cast. (Familicide doesn't actually kill the target, so it would be a cool touch to have him alive )
And finally find and kill the bad guy who cast the spell (possibly liberating the guy) and stop his plans.

My only point is, i guess the party will have to visit a few cities and places, with dead people who have nothing in common with each other.

If it was a killer who killed a few people, you would find some clues on each body.
here? they have no correlation with the original victim, it would be kinda hard to link each of them to him

[Ingus]

My suggestion (minor spoiler inside)

As for the example, put up some unintended secondary effect. Some noble family wipeout just for one extraconjugal son, or huge damage to population, or main demographic shift, or diseases (plentry of death people) and undead plagues...

As per my good ol' rule, at the beginning noone knows what happened.

Maybe some of the heroes are "strangely survived" the plague who killed all their family and they want to know why I strongly suggest to think twice on it: "your PC's a bastard" is not a good twist for most players

[Tanuki Tales]

well, yeah, i guess you can. Although your players will spend a fortune in Speak With Dead scrolls.

On a more serious note, Familicide is not like an atomic bomb. It kills, tops, 200 people. Say 500. Most of whose are accidental.
Most of the world won't even notice it.


It is a nice adventure hook, but it's not like "a enormous meteor is colliding with Earth" or " the evil guy is marching in your country with his huge army".
i was mostly disagreeing with the term "fallout"

It depends on who it was cast on though. If you cast it on a particularly long lived and promiscuous dragon and in the case of OoTS, at least one quarter of those dragons are related by blood....

That's a lot of dead creatures.

The dragons are all dead. The creatures the dragon bred with are dead. All of their blood related family is dead. All of the creatures blood related to those creatures are dead.

I think the body count would be more in the thousands than in the hundreds.


anyway, it would be kind of difficult to properly create a plot around this.

My only point is, i guess the party will have to visit a few cities and places, with dead people who have nothing in common with each other.

If it was a killer who killed a few people, you would find some clues on each body.
here? they have no correlation with the original victim, it would be kinda hard to link each of them to him

That's why this can be a campaign idea instead of an adventure idea. Because it won't be as explicitly easy to divine what happened and who was responsible and when you pile on side quests as they follow the scant bread crumbs you can fill in quite an amount of time.

Edit:


My suggestion (minor spoiler inside)

As for the example, put up some unintended secondary effect. Some noble family wipeout just for one extraconjugal son, or huge damage to population, or main demographic shift, or diseases (plentry of death people) and undead plagues...

Which is why I said "fallout". In the comic, it's safe to assume a whole kingdom at the very least was destabilized as a side-effect of Familicide going off. There's tons of ways that a single cast of this spell can greatly affect a planet.



As per my good ol' rule, at the beginning noone knows what happened.

Maybe some of the heroes are "strangely survived" the plague who killed all their family and they want to know why I strongly suggest to think twice on it: "your PC's a bastard" is not a good twist for most players

Or, you know, an orphan. Or married into the family or was artificially created. There are a lot of ways that the PCs can be affected without it being family dying instead of them.

And actually, being a bastard child still kills you off.

[Douglas]

well, yeah, i guess you can. Although your players will spend a fortune in Speak With Dead scrolls.

On a more serious note, Familicide is not like an atomic bomb. It kills, tops, 200 people. Say 500. Most of whose are accidental.
Most of the world won't even notice it.
You're rather drastically underestimating it. See here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=12856280&postcount=1034). It is potentially genocidal in scale, depending greatly on the genealogy of the target and his race in the campaign setting, and could in some circumstances exceed an atomic bomb's kill count by several orders of magnitude.

If the campaign setting has each race springing from a single progenitor pair, or simply a long enough history for lots of interbreeding, Familicide could literally wipe out an entire race. If cast on a multiracial target, it could wipe out multiple entire races. Cast it on a half-elf in such a world, and suddenly humans, elves, and all part-human or part-elf creatures are all extinct.

[Flickerdart]

In a pseudo-medieval setting, many positions of power will be filled by blood relations of someone very high up. Whacking them with a Familicide will cull a significant portion of the ruling classes, depending on how far up you go. Combined with decisive military action, you could easily take a kingdom without anyone meaningfully raising a hand against you.

[Tanuki Tales]

Cast it on a half-elf in such a world, and suddenly humans, elves, and all part-human or part-elf creatures are all extinct.

I assume you're speaking in the case of single progenitors though, yes?

Edit:

And that link brings up a good caveat. If your PC's parents are both dead and they were part of the bloodline affected by the spell, you're spared since the spell checks them and if they're dead at the casting, it skips you.

[Douglas]

I assume you're speaking in the case of single progenitors though, yes?
No, I'm talking about any setting that has a sufficient amount of interbreeding relative to the number of progenitors. The single progenitor case just happens to set the level of required interbreeding at 0.

The fewer progenitors there were and the more generations that have passed since the race's beginning, the bigger the portion Familicide would kill. In a world with thousands of generations since the beginning, the number of progenitors is almost irrelevant unless some groups have had near total isolation from each other the entire time.


Edit:

And that link brings up a good caveat. If your PC's parents are both dead and they were part of the bloodline affected by the spell, you're spared since the spell checks them and if they're dead at the casting, it skips you.
As I understand it, that caveat only applies to people targeted by step 2. Anyone who shares a common ancestor, dead or alive, with the original target in step 1 dies regardless of the status of any intervening generations.

[Slipperychicken]

The death toll really depends on the origin of life in your campaign. If the world was created, like the OotS one, fully populated with dragons, humanoids, etc. as discrete entities, you will have a much smaller death toll than one in which most organic life evolved from a common ancestor.

Either way, targeting halfbreeds would kill a lot of creatures. Any race which had a single progenitor, or a very small number of them, would be completely destroyed (except for those which passed their saves/immunities/SR).

Regardless, it would give you a fairly interesting way to kill the whole world; target someone, their whole family tree dies, then you find someone else still alive and kill it (since the only people left alive would be ones not connected by blood to the ones already killed).



To get a good idea of what percent of a species you would kill with it, you would take the smallest number of breeding pairs that species ever had (for humans, it's theorized that during one extinction event, there were only ~1,000 breeding pairs), and call that number N. There can only be N separate family lines of that species in existence, barring spontaneous generation (by magic or whatever). So, assuming all those families survived and produced equal numbers of offspring, each casting of Familicide would kill a fraction of that species roughly equal to 1/N.

[Tanuki Tales]

The death toll really depends on the origin of life in your campaign. If the world was created, like the OotS one, fully populated with dragons, humanoids, etc. as discrete entities, you will have a much smaller death toll than one in which most organic life evolved from a common ancestor.

Either way, targeting halfbreeds would kill a lot of creatures. Any race which had a single progenitor, or a very small number of them, would be completely destroyed (except for those which passed their saves/immunities/SR).

Regardless, it would give you a fairly interesting way to kill the whole world; target someone, their whole family tree dies, then you find someone else still alive and kill it (since the only people left alive would be ones not connected by blood to the ones already killed).



To get a good idea of what percent of a species you would kill with it, you would take the smallest number of breeding pairs that species ever had (for humans, it's theorized that during one extinction event, there were only ~1,000 breeding pairs), and call that number N. There can only be N separate family lines of that species in existence, barring spontaneous generation (by magic or whatever). So, assuming all those families survived and produced equal numbers of offspring, each casting of Familicide would kill a fraction of that species roughly equal to 1/N.

So there were originally 4 breeding pairs of Black Dragons?

[NM020110]

Only if the families maintained isolation, it would seem.

A useful addition would be to reduce N by one every time a descendant of two unique families comes to be (defining any pair of families that have had joint descendants to be no longer unique with respect to each other).

So in this case there would appear to be four unique families of black dragons at the time of the spell's casting.

[Dr. Yes]

Only if the families maintained isolation, it would seem.

A useful addition would be to reduce N by one every time a descendant of two unique families comes to be (defining any pair of families that have had joint descendants to be no longer unique with respect to each other).

So in this case there would appear to be four unique families of black dragons at the time of the spell's casting.

Either that, or the existing families were not equally prolific. V's target family could have been significantly smaller or larger than others; if they were particularly fecund for their species, there could be dozens of discrete lines remaining.

[Vknight]

Yeah the idea could also be that Black Dragons are very rare.
There is also that generation gap thing it does not work mostly from the fact the generations before are dead illusionist where the ones who breed with the Dragon.
It could be an interesting idea. Make the original creature have a save and any time it must skip a generation the creature it skips to must make a save.
That way the spell is still powerful, deadly but avoidable