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View Full Version : DM Help Swapping people back into their bodies



Kafana
2018-07-02, 01:25 AM
My party ventured into the Sea of Madness (realm of the Chaos god) and decided to take a "short-cut" back to the material plane, which resulted in a lot of weird things happening.

This included one party member swapping bodies with another one, while a 3rd party member swapped bodies with a dog-sized cockroach that was in the void. Once they reached the material plane, the roach fled to look for food, in its now human body, while the rest of the party gathered themselves to try to explain what happened and where they are now.

They managed to survive the island, but never found the roach-minded body and are currently sailing to a city where they hope to find help.

Now, the city has a magic academy, that while weak has a few outstanding individuals, one of which actually has ties to the chaos realm. My question is what would be a good story to revert the changes caused by the chaos realm, especially without the body?

My idea is that the archivist that has contact with the chaos realm knows how to manipulate the mind transferring magic given the proper ritual, but it would need to be in a dangerous and secluded place (far from the eyes of the law, as it is forbidden magic), while the guy without a body to transfer to (as his is far away and dead by now) would need to choose a new body - be it another human being (an obviously evil act), a mechanical construct (i.e., warforged or golem) or something else. The idea is to make a session long adventure where they gather the new body, any ingredients for the ritual, and clear out the location where the ritual shall take place.

Do you guys have any alternative stories that would fit this premise, and do you have any additional ideas for what something else might be?

Cespenar
2018-07-02, 03:17 AM
A rather tame "something else" could be something like a Reincarnation spell, creating a random body, or Raise Dead, reconstituting the dead body (assuming its dead).

I think the mechanical construct is the funnest idea, but your call.

An odd but fun sidestory would be that the roach-minded body ended up being slowly uplifted due to being in a much advanced body/brain, and get in all sorts of trouble. If it was in a wilderness and the body was high enough of a level, he could have survived and sort of became like a Tarzan, carving out a space in the area for his own. Maybe even grow stronger.

LordCdrMilitant
2018-07-02, 04:29 PM
That depends: was the player on board with losing his/her character's body? If the player didn't ask for it, I'd definitely avoid having any new body that isn't identical to the original one. While it may seem cool to have the party build a new warforged body to implant the spirit and mind into like a wraithguard, if that isn't and wasn't the goal of the player playing the character, that's still a really bad thing to do, and is functionally identical to having a bolt of lightning from the sky fry their character, no resurrection allowed, and telling them to roll up a new one [even worse, a new one they don't get any say in.]

In addition, the cockroachified player effectively can't participate in adventures while in cockroach form, so the solution should be quick and definitely not a session long. It can be complicated, but I'd say at most a third of the session. I wouldn't want to have a player sidelined for longer than that, much less a whole session. Especially if they've already had a session or more as a cockroach on the island.


What I might do is have the mage tell them he needs the body, locate it with a divination spell, teleport them to retrieve it, then recall them to perform the correction spell. To retrieve it, there might be a fight for the two other party members, and maybe a trap or skill challenge that a human can't do but a dog-sized cockroach can do [IE, it fell victim to a trap that wouldn't hit a tiny creature, so the cockroach can slip through and disable it for the humanoids to pass], so the player can feel like they were an essential participant in fixing their condition.

Alternatively, the wizards may outright have a solution [ie, able to reshape the dog-sized cockroach into a human body with True Polymorph], but the challenge is bringing the dog-sized chaos cockroach through the city without raising suspicion and alarm. This could lead to some humorous interactions with citizens and also lead them them eventually meeting their cockroach-brained evil-twin in the wilds somewhere.

Alternatively, a dispel magic might undo the mind-swap, and lead to a short split-party scenario where one player is on the island, alone, with the other party members travelling to reunite with him, and he, aware of the island's traps and hazards since he survived them once as a cockroach, has to survive a short highlights reel of them again to meet his friends at the ship landing.