Seeking adventure seeds for life-undeath-life campaign

[FrancisBean]

After 3 margaritas and a lot of conversation this evening, I got the wild idea to run a campaign with the following general idea. The characters start out as normal, at least into second tier. Somewhere in second-third tier, they hit that unbeatable encounter and come back to themselves as undead. (We can't really call that "waking up," can we?) A tier or so down the line, they find a way to restore themselves, with a mandate to save some other group of undead from their fate.

This is a tough sell in any D&D system, and harder in 5e than most. What sort of mechanics will come up? Can the mechanics be balanced?

And for the big question, what plot seeds would y'all suggest? I know this forum.... There ought to be half a dozen suggestions which would all be worth a publishable module. What have you got for me?

[Deox]

Interesting concept; definitely would want player "buy-in" at a session zero on over-all theme. As a player, I would give the benefit of the doubt and be all in.

As far as mechanics, in the UA - Gothic Heroes, there is a Revenant subrace which would be appropriate.

[Vogie]

You could make it a Time travel story.

Start in the present, discover and try to stop a plot that would be utterly destructive. The party fail to stop the destructive plot, and TPK. This could be a something like a boss battle, a bomb, an all out war, or a Ragnarok-level event. Whatever it is, it cannot be completed by them, regardless of rolls.
The Party is then raised as undead and could be played as a post-apocalyptic or the war being over. This could be from a Necromancer just looking for extra hands, not knowing they were a powerful adventuring party; could be from a divine being or mysterious order who NOW want to start to help. The now-undead party has to find out a way to get artifacts or other McGuffins to a certain location to stop that event from happening again.
The ritual is complete, and the party is restored to their living selves, in the past, but with all of the skills and abilities they acquired in the future. They now have the ability to actually defeat that boss or stop that event.

[nickl_2000]

What about the need to infiltrate some evil necromatic cult and stop them from releasing a death magic ritual over the entire world. The PCs have to volunteer to become undead so that they will fit into the cult and be able to get into it. Then you don't even need to have some fight that is unbeatable, it gives the PCs buy in.

If they won't do it, you can always have them run into the situation anyways.

[FrancisBean]

You could make it a Time travel story.

Start in the present, discover and try to stop a plot that would be utterly destructive. The party fail to stop the destructive plot, and TPK. This could be a something like a boss battle, a bomb, an all out war, or a Ragnarok-level event. Whatever it is, it cannot be completed by them, regardless of rolls.
The Party is then raised as undead and could be played as a post-apocalyptic or the war being over. This could be from a Necromancer just looking for extra hands, not knowing they were a powerful adventuring party; could be from a divine being or mysterious order who NOW want to start to help. The now-undead party has to find out a way to get artifacts or other McGuffins to a certain location to stop that event from happening again.
The ritual is complete, and the party is restored to their living selves, in the past, but with all of the skills and abilities they acquired in the future. They now have the ability to actually defeat that boss or stop that event.


You've got me hooked. I should bring a notebook with me to my demo tomorrow so I can start scribbling details on this one while I wait for the forge to cool down!

[iTreeby]

Some sort of shadows of mordor type thing where they get ritually bound to a spirit monster mid game perhaps? Everyone gets graphed to a different spirit (remake the characters as gestalt characters)?

[Ganymede]

Both Dark Souls and Kingdoms of Amalur played with this concept. It might be worth checking them out.