Zombie quest in D&D 3.5

[Sergio]

So... There is a farmer asking you for help and he tells you that there are zombies or something vicious actually killing people and stuff around. You accept the quest and...turns out it's zombies.

Now...

1) How would you make an interesting quest out of a zombie "infestation" without making it cheesy? What are your suggestions?
2) Would you be interested into having your idea actually turned into a quest for a mod for an old D&D game? If the answer is yes, could you also provide dialogues? You would do it for the glory, I guess :P

[BlackOnyx]

1) How would you make an interesting quest out of a zombie "infestation" without making it cheesy? What are your suggestions?


Actually played in a short-lived campaign that began with a similar premise.


The party had heard rumors of disappearances and livestock deaths in neighboring villages and decided to journey there at the behest of some local merchants.


Over the course of a few days travel, the party met up with a small contingent of soldiers led by a boistrous Paladin of Pelor. After a brief encounter with a swarm of undead crows, the party accompanied the soldiers to a farmstead that served as the home for a large extended family.


The first night of their stay, the farmstead was attacked by a horde of zombies, forcing the farmers, soldiers, and party to work together to defend it. (Creative use of farm equipment, livestock, and terrain/walls made for some interesting tower defense.)


After surviving the first night, the party was hired investigate an old noble's mansion (long abandoned) that the undead were rumored to be coming from. The soldiers themselves had decided to help evacuate the farmstead and secure the neighboring farms & villages from other roving hordes.


The mansion proved to be a mid-sized dungeon crawl, featuring:

- An enchanted set of outer gates and main doors (self-locking)

- A mindless undead mob in the courtyard leading to the entrance

- A decidedly flammable servant's house adjacent to the mansion

- A long line of statues in the entry hall that would explode if passed in front of (after detonating, they would slowly reform themselves, boot to helm, over the course of an hour)

- An old, dusty library featuring a refined, but seemingly confused/spacey undead caretaker (a proud servant of the household's family who didn't seem to realize a century had passed)

- A haunted parlor (complete with a poltergeist)

- A ghost mastiff (friendly, but still a bad idea to touch/pet)

- A wildly overgrown greenhouse (assassin vine feeding off old bones & deritus)

- A room full of old corpses/bodies (some fresher) inhabited by small, undead mote creatures

- A large, open sparring room room inhabited by a ghast

- A moldy, overgrown room with a giant bath filled with putrid water (draining the bath would reveal a key to the attic)

- An elegant room featuring mirrored walls, a scrying pool, and a small, skull shaped indent on one of the walls


Throughout the crawl, the party found hints of the noble family's past, including accounts/journals about a quiet young daughter and her loyal guard, a shallow, distant mother, and a secretive, greedy father whose dealings slowly grew more and more suspect.


The last stage of the crawl featured the party finding their way to a large attic, in which they found a slaymate and a haunted suit of armor sitting at a table. Neither spoke, but the slaymate would pass them notes on paper, revealing the fact that she was bound to the mansion and introducing the animated armor as her protector.


For agreeing to help free the slaymate, the party was given a small skull ring. When pressed to the indent in the scrying room, a stairwell leading underground was revealed. Following the stairwell, the party discovered a number of holding cells featuring dead prisoners (one living villager among them).


My recollection's a bit fuzzy after this point, but after distracting & fighting off the gnoll guard stationed in the prison, the party eventually came across an underground laboratory. There, they discovered a death altar, beside which stood a brain in a jar (the former noble lord) and two suits of animated armor with the death knight template.


(Liberal use of heavy bookshelves proved useful in besting at least one of the armored suits.)


Long story short, the noble lord had grown infatuated with immortality and experimented with the death god's altar, using his own family & staff as experimental fodder.


Due to some magical lunar pattern shenanigans, he had reawakened after nearly a century of paralysis, the effects of his isolation driving him to madness and prompting him to use the altar to regrow his power base by consuming nearby villages with an undead plague.


Defeating him and destroying the altar removed the curse, destroying the undead hordes and releasing the slaymate & animated armor from their bonds.

[Sergio]

Thank you ! :)

[Uncle Pine]

Actually played in a short-lived campaign that began with a similar premise.


[snip]

This sounds like a terrific adventure! It was very enjoyable to read through, too. :smallsmile:

[Tedective]

My zombie quest was a side-passage area the party went through to avoid a burning forest. It was the "Don't talk to Strangers Forest".

Easily bypassed, fighting the zombies meant more would show up. It was just a trudge through waist deep muck, with a crowd of "Strangers" gathering in the distance.

[Benoojian]

By having the zombies emanate from a source, so the closer you get the stronger and more feral the zombies get. You start off as survivors weak enough to have to hide from even the random shamblers because too much noise could attract more.

It's when you get your first non-mindless undead that it becomes clear this isn't just a zombie apocalypse. Drop hints about the days just after the zombies first appeared, about a "Source" or about heedless experiments. Maybe the Zombie using tactics and ordering the others around is wearing a laminated name tag.