Making Wrath of the Righteous more Wrathful and Righteous

[whisperwind1]

Hey all, I had a thought

So I've been reading Wrath of the Righteous and its not bad, as far as mythic struggles between good and evil go. But for some reason, the fact that the PCs are part of a crusade never really hit home, at least as far as I've read. It feels mostly like a regular D&D adventure but with the trappings of a holy war. Furthermore, I feel that the beats it hits are somewhat predictable, such as the society of misunderstood mongrelmen who are ready to fight for the crusades, despite generations of abuse.

My point is a game set in this Crusade should feel far closer to Warhammer 40,000, not your traditional heroic story. I was thinking the AP would benefit from playing up the zealousness of the Crusade, the monstrous warping evil of the Abyss and the general decisive fanaticism that comes from 100 years of unremitting Holy War. I'm not saying go balls to the wall and portray the Crusade as being just as evil as the demons, but to portray the adventure as the sort of place where its justifiable to burn heretics at the stake. Like its still a fight of good versus evil, but when evil is as bad as the demons, then its conceivable that the AP should take a more merciless tack to defend good. If only to give the adventure more flavor.

My question is, what's the best way to implement that? How do I turn Wrath of the Righteous into something like Warhammer 40k, without going over the top?

Thanks in Advance!

[Elder_Basilisk]

This is a bit general, but you could start by making things more black and white (or grey). Eliminate things that look bad but aren't. If there are "misunderstood" mongrelmen in the caverns below the city, chop off the "misunderstood" part. Make the disagreement between the mongrelmen tribes as to whether they worship demons or devils or something similar. One group may be willing to work with the PCs, but their cooperative "misunderstood" aspect is just a front and is discarded as soon as the PCs help them defeat their rivals. From reading the story hours, I'm given to understand that there is a redeemed succubus running around somewhere. Eliminate her, or if she is essential to the plot, change her to some kind of angel or eladrin.

Now, I have the distinct impression that the campaign assumes that some of the "misunderstood" NPCs like the mongrelmen will form parts of your army. The campaign has a reputation of being overly easy if players make intelligent choices for their mythic powers and if that extends to the army level portion, just having fewer resources available could be a good thing. If it doesn't, you might need to add some more recruitment possibilities.

If you wanted to get more of the 40k vibe without "the same as the bad guys", you might also add an element of salting the earth and cleansing everything with fire, exterminatus style (only with a lot fewer civilian casualties). Even the soil and plants in the worldwound are corrupted by the abyss and the only way to deal with that is to enact rituals in various hexes. These rituals scour the entire hex (or an even larger area) with holy fire, destroying every living thing and preventing the taint from spreading. The players have to do this as periodic side quests. As an alternative, they might need to destroy shrines to Deskari that have been seeded throughout the land and erect and consecrate (and perhaps defend) shrines to Iomedae designed to contain the taint.

[whisperwind1]

This is a bit general, but you could start by making things more black and white (or grey). Eliminate things that look bad but aren't. If there are "misunderstood" mongrelmen in the caverns below the city, chop off the "misunderstood" part. Make the disagreement between the mongrelmen tribes as to whether they worship demons or devils or something similar. One group may be willing to work with the PCs, but their cooperative "misunderstood" aspect is just a front and is discarded as soon as the PCs help them defeat their rivals. From reading the story hours, I'm given to understand that there is a redeemed succubus running around somewhere. Eliminate her, or if she is essential to the plot, change her to some kind of angel or eladrin.

Now, I have the distinct impression that the campaign assumes that some of the "misunderstood" NPCs like the mongrelmen will form parts of your army. The campaign has a reputation of being overly easy if players make intelligent choices for their mythic powers and if that extends to the army level portion, just having fewer resources available could be a good thing. If it doesn't, you might need to add some more recruitment possibilities.

If you wanted to get more of the 40k vibe without "the same as the bad guys", you might also add an element of salting the earth and cleansing everything with fire, exterminatus style (only with a lot fewer civilian casualties). Even the soil and plants in the worldwound are corrupted by the abyss and the only way to deal with that is to enact rituals in various hexes. These rituals scour the entire hex (or an even larger area) with holy fire, destroying every living thing and preventing the taint from spreading. The players have to do this as periodic side quests. As an alternative, they might need to destroy shrines to Deskari that have been seeded throughout the land and erect and consecrate (and perhaps defend) shrines to Iomedae designed to contain the taint.

This is jolly good advice, because I was looking to make this campaign less easy from a moral standpoint.

In my view, a struggle between good and evil is less interesting if everything can be easily divided and wrapped up in a shiny bow (despite my innate optimism). Like this AP could really shine in my book if things weren't as simple as kick demon butt and everything is ok. That's the compelling part of the struggle, evil rarely leaves you with good options. The measure of a "good" person is taking the path that to them will cause the least suffering, even if it requires considerable sacrifice.

[Elder_Basilisk]

One other thing you might want to do is look into the 3.5 Taint rules from Unearthed Arcana/Heroes of Horror. It would significantly change the tone of the adventure path, but if the PCs and their armies picked up taint for being in the worldwound, for witnessing the shrines of Deskari, and possibly for fighting some of the mythic foes or touching evil items, you could pick up a bit more of the WH40k vibe complete with purity seals, rituals, etc.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/taint.htm

Now that would be a dramatic change in tone for the adventure and by the SRD rules, the entire army would probably be dead after two weeks in the Worldwound, so you will want to seriously look at ways to mitigate or remove Taint.

Starting with the SRD methods:
Taint absorbing items are likely to be the most basic method of survival. The SRD lists pure rods of jade (more appropriate for an Oriental Adventures style game), strips of vellum prepared from a year old lamb (write the Deeds of Iomedae on them and seal them to the characters and their armies' armor with wax and you have Warhammer Purity seals), intricately carved pieces of lightning struck oak (sounds like an Aesir thing), etc. You might also add ornate holy symbols to the list. Perhaps some relic of the heroes who fell guarding the city at the start of the campaign would work as well. As I understand it, the characters all get dragonscales at the start of the campaign, but I think they're supposed to be permanent items. If not, they could have a taint absorbing effect too to encourage players to use them and because they're basically relics of the silver dragon.

You might need to reduce or mitigate the cost when considering the armies. Outfitting an entire army with 300gp each of taint absorbing items every two weeks is going to get expensive.

Having 3 taint absorbing items--a purity seal, a relic, and perhaps holy symbol will absorb taint for two weeks.

Cleansing Taint
Magic: Most of the various magical ways to remove taint--heal, remove curse, remove disease, restoration, etc will either tend to trivialize it for PCs (remove disease every two days) or be impractical in a campaign featuring armies. If the armies need spells to remove taint, they won't survive the adventure so you probably will want to make some adjustments to the taint rules and engineer them so that the army is likely to survive if things are done correctly.

Good Deeds: These are not terribly well defined but the two examples are wearing special garments (1 point for a week) and quests. It seems that it would be highly appropriate for the crusader armies to be wearing hair shirts or performing Iomedae's deific obedience every day to purify themselves of the taint, so that might be one way that the army preserves themselves from the taint. That seems like it would encourage the kind of WH40k style devotions that you are probably going for. If you do go with the Exterminatus style rituals, you might say that they cleanse the hex and the army has to spend a week or a day or whatever there, doing the rituals to cleanse themselves of the taint and preparing fresh purity seals for the journey ahead.

Quests are another option--the entire campaign is a kind of quest and Iomedae or her servants take a fairly direct hand at several points. You could use those moments to cure the PCs and their armies of any remaining taint or perhaps of a limited amount of taint if the PCs have been deliberately picking up taint by handling an unholy sword or generally being naughty.

Sacred Springs: If the adventure doesn't have any sacred locations that have somehow resisted the taint of the worldwound already, you might want to introduce a couple. They could even be strategic objectives: capture the sacred shrine of XYZ so that we can pray there and remove the taint.

Some non-SRD suggestions
A. Difficulty of Taint saving throws.
SRD has them start at 10 and increase by 5 every 24 hours the character is in contact with the tainted location or item. Depending upon how many purity seals they tack on, they may be able to gut this out, but those DCs will scale very very rapidly, so you may consider scaling them up more slowly--perhaps 1 per day. That would let the soldiers with the PCs go longer before they died and you wouldn't need to have them constantly stopping to enact exterminatus rituals or do special devotions for purification. Check the adventure's timeline, decide how often you want exterminatus, and set DCs accordingly. You might run with the standard +5 per 24 hours for PCs fooling around with tainted items though. That's more than just crusading in the worldwound.

B. Alignment and taint.
SRD makes creatures with the evil subtype immune to taint. That makes sense because they live in the tainted areas. However, a lot of the source material for this kind of adventure would suggest that holy or good characters should also be immune to or at least resistant to taint. In Tennyson's poem, Galahad had the strength of ten because his heart was pure, etc. In Three Hearts and Three Lions, the faerie need to wait for Holger to think impure thoughts before he is vulnerable to their magics. You might want to call it Iomedae's protection or just say that a pure character is immune or highly resistant to the taint. Perhaps a character can be Lawful Good or keep Iomedae's paladin code for a +5 to saves vs taint or perhaps even outright immunity, but he has to make a saving throw any time he breaks the smallest particular of the code.

C. Taint and Treachery
If the PCs take taint seriously and manage it into non-existence, it can still have a genre appropriate effect. There should be a few scoffers and hypocrites in the army who sicken under the taint of the worldwound--either because they treated it lightly, did not ward themselves with purity seals, did not keep themselves pure, and did not pray at the shrines, keep the fasts, and wear the hair shirts like the rest of the army who Iomedae keeps from the taint, or because they hide an evil in their hearts and do not truly follow Iomedae. Perhaps they secretly take tainted items thinking to sell them for gold later or read tomes of forbidden lore and willingly taint themselves with secrets mortals were not meant to know. Perhaps they pick up a mighty but tainted weapon and wield it against the foe, even as it slowly corrupts their mind and body. Regardless of how they become tainted, they become increasingly erratic and insane and eventually betray the crusade or die from the taint.

D. Along the lines of the tainted weapon, you might consider rewriting unholy weapons for the adventure (or in general). Rather than being the opposite of a holy weapon and dealing extra damage to good creatures, perhaps they deal extra damage to any creature but are tainted. Or perhaps there are no "unholy" weapons per se. The foes that would otherwise wield unholy weapons wield tainted vicious or wounding weapons instead. The PCs could use them against the demons, but carrying the taint would corrupt their body and soul. Obviously, using them is a bad idea since Taint is so nasty, but maybe just one battle wouldn't hurt too much.... Even if no PCs go for the bait, an NPC traveling with them might do so (see C) so as to provide the genre appropriate object lesson.

[Necromancy]

Write your own campaign, throw WoR in the round file. While you're at it, add the mythic rule book too.

I played through wrath. The main NPCs are a lesbian Orc paladin and her girlfriend who was a guy that sold his family legacy weapon to buy a magical sex change. Why the hell the writer felt the need to stress this crap other than pandering, I don't know. I do know I find it irritating.

The adventure was written to showcase mythic rules but the end boss and most of the encounters were horribly underpowered. One hit kill on final boss from a T5 class? Let's classify that under "anti-climatic". This wasn't even a technically combat optimized character. I optimized this character around the ability to destroy inanimate objects.

Mythic rules are not well thought out by any means. Many of them are broken powerful and others are incredibly stupid or not even functional.

[Florian]

My question is, what's the best way to implement that? How do I turn Wrath of the Righteous into something like Warhammer 40k, without going over the top?

Read up on some unbiased source material on pre WW1/WW2 Germany, try to understand the underlying mentality and transport that over to the setting.

I think it is important that every individual sees himself as part of the larger group, as a fundamental building block of society. It is as once unique and extremely expendable.

*Laugh* It´s really hard to explain that kind of dynamic to non-germans, as they don´t know the effects of living in one of the most over-crowded countries on earth and don´t have a clue about our underlying socialist tendencies.