Adventures in Death

[Captain Kablam]

I was thinking of starting a campaign where the players are already dead and journeying through the afterlife. The players start out unaware of how they died and who they were, but they can of course pick up clues as they go, and the principle themes of the whole journey I'd like to convey are of redemption, sacrifice, and moving on (a bit in the same vein as Grim Fandango or Silent Hill).

Anyways, how should I handle death in game? I mean there needs to be a level of danger in the game, which is hard to do if the players are already "The Late Hero of Wherever-the-hell", y'know? Like, I can hide the fact that they're dead from the players to start with, but I do want them to discover the fact that they're deceased early on, and have the big overarching mystery being "who was I?" and "my god, what have I done?". There's the whole "fate worse than death" thing, but I'm drawing a blank on what that should be. Any ideas?

Also I want the overall feel of the world, mechanics and all, to be different from the regular D&D play world. Any suggestions?

[SciChronic]

ghostwalk seems like a good setting for you

[Rhynn]

In Artesia: Adventures in the Known World, those who become lost on the Path of the Dead end up in Limbo, a featureless plane of dark grey nothing, where their spirits fade away into the darkness or fall prey to Shades, remnants of human souls who suffered the same fate and have nothing but hate left in them (very much like D&D shadows). It is possible to retrieve someone's spirit from Limbo (if you act quickly enough), but the odds are on the order of 1% for a mighty witch or shaman (in the comic, the greatest witch in the world was only able to retrieve four out of five lost souls when she tried her hardest). Mechanically, it'd translate into D&D as a high DC ability check (say, DC 30) with no modifiers (except for luck).

Let me not be lost in the journey.

[Nettlekid]

Well it's that last part where you kind of lose the capability of us helping you too much. D&D has a pretty cool after-death system set up. The whole book of Ghostwalk is devoted to spirits of the dead, who live on the Ethereal Plane, which is kind of like a parallel Material. You could have set it up so that it seems like they're on the Material Plane, then sometimes see "ghosts" (real living creatures on the real Material Plane) that they can't interact with, but sometimes interact with them (through Force effects), and even drop clues as to where the heroes really are with the use of monsters like the Devourer, Ethereal Filcher/Marauder, Phase Spider, and Xill, all of whom live on the Ethereal Plane, so that very MM-savvy players might get a clue, but probably not.

Then apart from that of course there's the grand system of the afterlife on the Great Wheel, where there are 16 Planes (plus the Outlands) where departed spirits move to according to their alignment. You could have the players be climbing a mountain, navigating a volcanic gorge, or trekking across a safari, unaware that the locations are in fact Mount Celestia, Gehenna, or the Beastlands. As far as a fate worse than death, having your soul ripped apart by devils in Baator is pretty bad. Maybe some of the players have been raised as undead, especially intelligent undead like vampires, so that their bodies are wreaking havoc and threatening their loved ones and their souls have to stop them. The Shadow Sun Ninja from Tome of Battle has a capstone which turns you into a vampire (and NPC) if you overuse it, and talks about your soul being trapped in hell, so that's pretty cool.

Maybe your players are actually the spirits of the Gods' once-human forms. The Rogue is actually Olidammara, the Cleric is actually Pelor, the Wizard is actually Boccob, etc. But they've lost their memory. Or summin'. I dunno.

I think the best way to threaten the characters to fight for "survival" is to say something like "Your spirit is at unrest, and if it is disrupted (killed) before you settle your grievances, your mind will be forever lost in the void." No one wants to lose their mind in the void.

Really, what do you mean by "different mechanics"? Like no spellcasting, or grapple checks? Or like different from the "we'll do whatever until we get into a fight, because that's the fun part" style that a lot of games become?

[TheStranger]

I'm not going to suggest a system or setting, but I think you've got two big mechanical questions, which will also contribute to your thematic questions depending on how you handle them.

First, how is "death" handled? I'm going to suggest that your body fades away into the ether, and you roll up a new character. Remember, they're already dead; the only thing holding them together at all is the energy of a powerful soul, and you can only take so much before that spiritual energy just dissipates. You could even play with it by having HP represent spiritual energy rather than physical injury, with characters literally fading away as they take damage.

Second, how do the characters advance as they journey through the afterlife? Do they gain levels normally, or "remember" things from their past lives? I would actually recommend some combination of the two; they might unlock some things from the past, but the afterlife isn't about remembering who you were, it's about becoming who you should have been. So I'd allow characters to gain levels normally, but I'd also invent a mechanic to gain (possibly high-level) abilities from their old classes as well. Maybe they could spend feats to unlock class features from their old class?

I once played in a short-lived PbP game with an interesting "backstory" requirement to join. Your character started with amnesia (unoriginal, I know), so you didn't write a backstory. Instead, you wrote the outline of what your character wanted to accomplish from that point on. As the game progressed, the DM gave flashes of your past, and it was up to you how to incorporate things that weren't necessarily consistent with who you thought your character was now. For instance, my character was a barbarian who, it turned out, used to be a extra-lawful paladin. I don't know if you're thinking of something like that, but it seemed to work ok.

If I were going to make character creation rules, I would do it like this:
- Each player makes a 1st level character. No backstory.
- Each player gives their character a virtue and a vice. These are purely for RP purposes, but the more of a personality the player builds for their character, the better.
- You, as DM, develop a secret "history" of the character. Incorporate at least one level in the class chosen by the character, and all the relevant skills and feats. Make the virtue and the vice significant in some way, but not necessarily as traits that the living character had. For instance, a character with the virtue of loyalty may have been loyal in life, or he may have betrayed somebody else's loyalty. I'd do it a little differently for each character. It's up to you whether you allow the players to contribute to their past lives in any way.

[Zubrowka74]

You can also find inspiration in the Planescape : Torment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment) game. The guy wakes up in the morgue of Sigil, the city in the middle of the Outer planes wheel. He has to discover who he is and what happened. Since this is a curse and he has died and awaken like this numerous times, his older incarnations left clues. Depending on the memories you unlock, new multiclassing options are available.

[Captain Kablam]

I don't think I'll utilize the Ghostwalk setting. While interesting, it doesn't have much info for journeying through the otherside of the whole life/death fence. Death is the journey.



If I were going to make character creation rules, I would do it like this:
- Each player makes a 1st level character. No backstory.
- Each player gives their character a virtue and a vice. These are purely for RP purposes, but the more of a personality the player builds for their character, the better.
- You, as DM, develop a secret "history" of the character. Incorporate at least one level in the class chosen by the character, and all the relevant skills and feats. Make the virtue and the vice significant in some way, but not necessarily as traits that the living character had. For instance, a character with the virtue of loyalty may have been loyal in life, or he may have betrayed somebody else's loyalty. I'd do it a little differently for each character. It's up to you whether you allow the players to contribute to their past lives in any way.

Also thank you for this, much of what you said was helpful but particularly this segment Stranger. And thanks to the rest of you who have added posts, your suggestions have covered bases that I had not been thinking about.

Anyways, moving along, lets throw things at the wall to see what sticks. Let's say that we move away from the established underworlds of D&D. You're making your own afterlife, how is it different from living?

[buttcyst]

there are a number of ways you could make an undead world different from a living world, but it really is all in perspective of the character really, if everybody is (un)dead, then everything around them would react normally to the type of (un)dead they are; corporeal, incorporeal, ethereal, etc....

now going by that, the real mystery will come in if you include flashes of the "living" world, because that is the "plane" they aren't currently on, simply put.

An easy way is to dig through the descriptions of the planes and use a couple for general guidelines. or you could stick them into a homebrewed prime material plane for their (un)dead characters to adventure and make your "living" plane one of epic capabilities that as they discover more about their past they are able to unlock particularly powerful abilities, or maybe you could simply start gestault leveling them without telling them so for the "particularly powerful abilities"

a general explanation for the "living" world to be so powerful and the (un)dead world to be so ordinary is because in (un)death, you are merely the base souls moving on and all worldly abilities and possessions (anything gained above level 0) are left behind. Thus making a mundane afterlife where getting to your final destination and resting place is truly your last adventure (applause). as far as dying, I'd say treat as normal seeing as everything around them ad about their world is already (un)dead, and besides, why would your "last adventure" lack any portions of an adventure for the "living".

doing something like this, if you perhaps were intrigued by your own powerful "living" world. roll a lvl 20 character and call that your race, now start at level 1 with a new class and level normally (neat alternative to gestaulting). you would need to boost your monsters and bad guys considerably, but it would still be fun.

[TheStranger]

You awake, naked, in the center of a vast city. Slums and mansions sit side-by-side with no rhyme or reason. Nor is there any order to how the buildings are actually used; what appears to be an opulent manor house may be used as a flophouse, or a tavern, or an actual manor house for a single occupant and his servants. The city is infinite; you can walk forever and never reach anything but city. Yet you can get to any specific point after only a brief walk, and easily find your way back to places you have been.

The people in the city come from all nations and social classes. Most have been there for some time; many have been there for several lifetimes. Probably. The sky is overcast, and the city is perpetually shrouded in twilight, making it nearly impossible to measure the passage of time. The inhabitants do not need to eat or sleep, though many do, either from habit or for pleasure.

Most of the inhabitants of the city have figured out that they are dead, though only a handful ever recall more than flashes of their past lives. With no biological needs, the inhabitants are free to do whatever they choose, but many nevertheless work at trades, or even as servants to the de facto nobles who rule over parts of the city by fear or by assent of the inhabitants. Whether any of these people are doing what they did in life, nobody can say. Other inhabitants seek religion, or found new religions, or engage in wild orgies that never stop, only evolve as participants join and leave. Those who are "killed," by accident or violence, fade into nothingness, leaving not even clothing behind.

Although a person could easily spend an eternity in this place, most of the inhabitants eventually become restless, possessed of a vague certainty that this is not the end of their journey. The city itself offers no clues as to how to leave, and nobody has ever returned to show the way, but there are hundreds of men and women who will tell you the secret - for the right price. Maybe one of them truly knows it; those who seek the way out usually find it, eventually. At least, you don't see them around any more - maybe they just get themselves killed. Or maybe that is the way out.

[Captain Kablam]

Okay. I've been reading Ghostwalk and rolling the flavor of it around in my head and thinking about the sort of story I wanted to tell. What I think I may do instead of trying to tell a horror story (which I've never had much talent at) is just go ahead and make it a mystery (which I've always felt was more rewarding). I'll still have it set in the land of death and keeping in with the macabre themes that it lends to. However, in a town where kidnapping a hooker, carving her up, and stretching her skin out on a lamp post counts only as "aggravated assault", it definitely lends to a quirkier kind of story. So it'll be a weird kinda noir (more Grim Fandango than Silent Hill than I originally intended, but a good story's a good story).

I think I'll borrow many of the elements Stranger suggested. However the city will have clearly defined limits, and places beyond and other cities. As this is a place full of folks unable to let go and move on, it'll definitely be a story full of vice, apathy, and emptiness of feeling, traditional noir elements.

As for the overarching mystery, I'll have people start going missing, lots of people, there'll be smaller cases and issues, but the big mystery's "where'd they go? And whodunnit?" And it won't simply be folks moving on or getting snagged and ripped apart by demons, there'll be that too and it'll be clearly defined it's not that.

As for the players, I don't think I'll railroad them into being town guardsmen or private investigators. That way the case becomes a personal search for the truth, much in the same vein as Casablanca or Brick. In addition the only backstories they'll be able to write up are those of their lives within the afterlife, and not their lives before. Another personal mystery.

What are your guys thoughts? Any questions or bases you think I may need to look at or have covered?

[Captain Kablam]

Chinatown's another good reference when I think about it.