Undead are rising!

[DeweyA]

I'm running a homebrew campaign where the dead, all the dead, are rising from the graves. Most bodies deteriorate after a couple centuries, so only any of the bodies from the past 200 years are rising.
What I am stumped on is... why? Why are all the dead, across the whole planet, rising from the graves?

My plan is for the players to travel, survive, and combat the undead until around level 5-7. Then a friendly NPC (based loosely on Santa Clause) will present a possible solution: traveling to several of the planes for... something. I'm thinking pieces of an artifact, or charging an artifact with planar energy.

TLDR
1. What or who would cause all the dead on the planet to become undead?
2. What solution could the players undertake that requires traveling to multiple different planes?

[JNAProductions]

Undead are rising!

Well ****. Abandon everything! :P

You could look at the Elder Evils from 3.5. Some of them have stuff similar to that, I believe. About to head into work, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

Good luck on running your campaign!

[PhantomSoul]

Random half-baked thoughts:
- A god of undeath is responsible (and maybe dealing with the associated worshipers could help)
- A god of death is responsible by being absent or dead (maybe a new one is needed or the god of death needs to be brought back "to duty" from whatever distraction caused the absence)
- A god of death is trying to expand into undeath
- A god of life/souls is trying to expand into undeath
- The weave is damaged (and depending on your conception, maybe it has to do with positive or negative energy in the weave)
- Souls can no longer be hosted in the previous domains
- Wish gone wrong (e.g. "no one dies")
- Wish gone wrong (e.g. demanding reincarnation, but poorly phrased)
- Big push of a revolt or show of force (lady of pain, depending on lore?)
- Change to the weave; these undead are basically puppets or marionettes

[KCWONDER99]

Perhaps a previously unknown plane of judgement, visited by all mortal souls before being divided into their finals resting places has been invaded/destroyed, casting the dead back to their bodies.

A new God manifesting itself into a plane with no followers has found the closest thing to its worshippers from its previous worlds.

Ragnarock has started, but a preemptive strike by the forces of Evil have trapped the souls to fight on the celestial side in their afterlife. They only have one option left to them if the wish to join the fight.

[Greywander]

You could look at the Elder Evils from 3.5. Some of them have stuff similar to that, I believe. About to head into work, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.
I can't vouch for this, as I haven't looked it over, but someone has already done a conversion of Elder Evils to 5e: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mj3tPITlm6XduSCc7oyaxEYu68sSQyfp/view

This also sounds like it's about step 4 in the 7 steps of the apocalypse. Maybe you could start the campaign before the dead begin rising, sending the PCs to deal with something else that at first appears to be a local and minor inconvenience, but turns out to be a global phenomenon and is largely unfixable. As they keep looking for solutions to the current problem, a new one pops up. The undead rising would probably be several iterations in. The longer they take to find the solution, the more bad things begin happening.

Related/alternatively, perhaps some great evil is approaching (perhaps literally, from space). IIRC, there's a creature that is basically the aborted fetus of a god, and is a powerful moon-sized undead that floats around in space. So maybe something like that.

Glancing through the link, they even have "restless dead" as one of the signs of the apocalypse, and it is associated with an Elder Evil called Atropus, which I think is the moon-sized undead I was just referencing. So maybe look at those sections and see if you can find something useful.

[PhantomSoul]

Hm, maybe the prime material plane by clerical error (in the bureaucratic and perhaps also class-base sense) is now the realm to which souls go... And those souls might as well occupy a body. Oops!


IIRC, there's a creature that is basically the aborted fetus of a god, and is a powerful moon-sized undead that floats around in space. So maybe something like that.


The atropal (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Atropal)-- good thought!

[Fable Wright]

Let's see. It's the previously dead rising from their graves? All of them, or only some?

SilverClawShift's First Journal (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?116836-The-SilverClawShift-Campaign-Archives) contained this very scenario, with a few extra elements to it. In that universe, the dead are rising because spirits from outside reality—usually non-sentient ones—are inhabiting their bodies. Some used to live in our reality, including Tenebrous—the God that Orcus briefly became, once upon a time. When Orcus, Demon Prince of Undeath, began to agitate the rifts between worlds, the dead began to pour through, so that he could try to punch a hole and reclaim his Godhood.

From a generic planar standpoint, what's happening would most likely be best described as a massive influx from the Negative Energy Plane causing dead spirits to begin to inhabit every viable corpse—IE, dead ones. One possible reason is because some kind of vast, artificial pipeline through the Ethereal plane piping Negative spirits into the world. Why? Well, it could be that this would prompt an immune response from the Positive Energy Plane, and whoever set this up wanted to siphon off all the extra Positive Energy to create a paradise demiplane, or even an alternate material, and he needed a lot of creational energy for it. The PCs are going to have to track down the Negative and Positive Energy Pipes and deactivate them in tandem if they want to avoid causing more problems than they solve—an overload of positive energy can cause vast mutations, people becoming so healthy they explode, and for people to lose all desire to do anything ever again and just bask in the positive energy.

Or I guess it could be the Undead Moon of Elder Evils, too.

[Greywander]

Interesting, is there any relation between atropals and Atropus? Or are they completely separate entities, possibly invented by different authors independently and derived from the same etymology?

Edit: Here's another idea you could use: The undead are rising because spirits/souls from another world are crossing over and looking for bodies to inhabit. They might be fleeing from their own world to escape destruction, or they might be an invading force trying to expand their control over the multiverse. Perhaps the process of taking over a body is going wrong, causing them to become mindless undead, or perhaps that's just how the creatures are, or maybe they're actually not mindless at all.

[gloryblaze]

Interesting, is there any relation between atropals and Atropus? Or are they completely separate entities, possibly invented by different authors independently and derived from the same etymology?

According to the Realms wiki, "Atropals were said to be cast-off detritus from Atropus's substance."

[quinron]

Perhaps a previously unknown plane of judgement, visited by all mortal souls before being divided into their finals resting places has been invaded/destroyed, casting the dead back to their bodies.

This could also serve as the hook to get them cruising the planes: the PCs need to visit a number of otherwise-disinterested planar supreme beings (maybe elemental lords?) or collect a few artifact-level objects so they can create a new demi-plane of judgment.

[MaxWilson]

I'm running a homebrew campaign where the dead, all the dead, are rising from the graves. Most bodies deteriorate after a couple centuries, so only any of the bodies from the past 200 years are rising.
What I am stumped on is... why? Why are all the dead, across the whole planet, rising from the graves?

My plan is for the players to travel, survive, and combat the undead until around level 5-7. Then a friendly NPC (based loosely on Santa Clause) will present a possible solution: traveling to several of the planes for... something. I'm thinking pieces of an artifact, or charging an artifact with planar energy.

TLDR
1. What or who would cause all the dead on the planet to become undead?
2. What solution could the players undertake that requires traveling to multiple different planes?

Maybe it's just me and how much I love the Nice Job Breaking It Hero trope, but I'd make the undead a planetary defense system which has been activated (e.g. by Gatekeeper druids) to protect the world against an even larger threat, like a Mind Flayer invasion galaxy (dozens of battleglobes). Undead provide no sustenance to mind flayers so this contingency was created long ago and now it's needed.

Early levels consist of PCs trying to stop the undead with the help of their patron, whom they may or may not realize is a cutout for mind flayers. Eventually they find the center of the infection (planetary defense center), kill the ancient, feeble remaining Gatekeepers in a surprisingly anti-climactic "final battle", and burn the twisted tree which is the source of the infection. Hooray! time to celebrate, right?

A week later the first battleglobe drops a hundred thousand aberrations right on top of the capital of most militarily dominant kingdom in the gameworld (e.g. the Elven Imperial Ascendancy). PCs are at a celebration banquet when they get the news that the whole Elvish Imperial Army is just... gone. Devoured overnight by aberrations from the stars, nothing but scattered and shell-shocked individual remnants left. A little while later, after player and NPC dialogue and emotional reactions are over and they've started to speculate about what happened and what to do next, they are contacted by a representative of the mind flayers with initial instructions to their new subjects on how the transfer of power will proceed. The messenger is none other than their old patron!

Build in some ways for the PCs to gain info and start fighting back (e.g. kidnap and interrogate the patron; or hijack the spelljamming vessel which they were "supposed" to use to go surrender to the mind flayers; go back to the planetary defense center and translate all the writings there) but now the next part of the campaign is trying to find a way to shut down the battleglobes now that the undead army isn't around to fight them head-to-head. Spelljamming or planar travel may be involved, for seeking artifacts or allies.

Hat tip to John Ringo's Gust Front for the plot.

[Veldrenor]

A war veteran, traumatized by the horrors they saw, has decided that the mortal races are too evil and corrupt to persist. They've created a cult and built a disguised temple to a forgotten deity of destruction. The temple is a focus, drawing in and concentrating massive amounts of psychokinetic energy. The rising dead are a side effect as some of that buildup radiates out into the world. The temple is acting as a beacon for two undying servants of the deity. They'll be drawn to the temple, where they'll use the gathered energy to open a gateway so that the deity may come through and end the world. The party has to travel the planes to keep the servants separate and away from the temple, while also figuring out how to disrupt it.

And a bonus 500xp to the first player who realizes that the evil plot is basically the backstory of the 1984 classic, Ghostbusters.

[Composer99]

Maybe it's just me and how much I love the Nice Job Breaking It Hero trope, but I'd make the undead a planetary defense system which has been activated (e.g. by Gatekeeper druids) to protect the world against an even larger threat, like a Mind Flayer invasion galaxy (dozens of battleglobes). Undead provide no sustenance to mind flayers so this contingency was created long ago and now it's needed.

Early levels consist of PCs trying to stop the undead with the help of their patron, whom they may or may not realize is a cutout for mind flayers. Eventually they find the center of the infection (planetary defense center), kill the ancient, feeble remaining Gatekeepers in a surprisingly anti-climactic "final battle", and burn the twisted tree which is the source of the infection. Hooray! time to celebrate, right?

A week later the first battleglobe drops a hundred thousand aberrations right on top of the capital of most militarily dominant kingdom in the gameworld (e.g. the Elven Imperial Ascendancy). PCs are at a celebration banquet when they get the news that the whole Elvish Imperial Army is just... gone. Devoured overnight by aberrations from the stars, nothing but scattered and shell-shocked individual remnants left. A little while later, after player and NPC dialogue and emotional reactions are over and they've started to speculate about what happened and what to do next, they are contacted by a representative of the mind flayers with initial instructions to their new subjects on how the transfer of power will proceed. The messenger is none other than their old patron!

Build in some ways for the PCs to gain info and start fighting back (e.g. kidnap and interrogate the patron; or hijack the spelljamming vessel which they were "supposed" to use to go surrender to the mind flayers; go back to the planetary defense center and translate all the writings there) but now the next part of the campaign is trying to find a way to shut down the battleglobes now that the undead army isn't around to fight them head-to-head. Spelljamming or planar travel may be involved, for seeking artifacts or allies.

Hat tip to John Ringo's Gust Front for the plot.

Reminds me of the defence the mythical Forerunners of the Halo games set up to defeat the Flood: starve it by wiping out intelligent life from the galaxy.

[smrvl]

So many good ideas already in this thread. Here's my suggestion: They're rising from the dead because Something Is Coming. Something terrible. And the dead are rising not to fight the living, but to fight the awful thing that's on its way. Perhaps a powerful good necromancer has raised them, or the gods of life and death have made a pact to bring the dead back to fight the all-consuming horror from the far realm.

The dead will still attack your party because there are too many of them to be fully under the control of whatever force brought them back. But the party is incidental—they've been resurrected as an army against That Which Would Destroy All.

[hifidelity2]

Maybe it's just me and how much I love the Nice Job Breaking It Hero trope, but I'd make the undead a planetary defense system which has been activated (e.g. by Gatekeeper druids) to protect the world against an even larger threat, like a Mind Flayer invasion galaxy (dozens of battleglobes). Undead provide no sustenance to mind flayers so this contingency was created long ago and now it's needed.

Early levels consist of PCs trying to stop the undead with the help of their patron, whom they may or may not realize is a cutout for mind flayers. Eventually they find the center of the infection (planetary defense center), kill the ancient, feeble remaining Gatekeepers in a surprisingly anti-climactic "final battle", and burn the twisted tree which is the source of the infection. Hooray! time to celebrate, right?

A week later the first battleglobe drops a hundred thousand aberrations right on top of the capital of most militarily dominant kingdom in the gameworld (e.g. the Elven Imperial Ascendancy). PCs are at a celebration banquet when they get the news that the whole Elvish Imperial Army is just... gone. Devoured overnight by aberrations from the stars, nothing but scattered and shell-shocked individual remnants left. A little while later, after player and NPC dialogue and emotional reactions are over and they've started to speculate about what happened and what to do next, they are contacted by a representative of the mind flayers with initial instructions to their new subjects on how the transfer of power will proceed. The messenger is none other than their old patron!

Build in some ways for the PCs to gain info and start fighting back (e.g. kidnap and interrogate the patron; or hijack the spelljamming vessel which they were "supposed" to use to go surrender to the mind flayers; go back to the planetary defense center and translate all the writings there) but now the next part of the campaign is trying to find a way to shut down the battleglobes now that the undead army isn't around to fight them head-to-head. Spelljamming or planar travel may be involved, for seeking artifacts or allies.

Hat tip to John Ringo's Gust Front for the plot.

Going to have to go and read the book (series) now

[Cikomyr2]

The reason behind the dead are rising is central to the theme you want to impart in your game. Even if it has no material impact on the actual story, it will help you tint your world and your mindset. Here are a few themes idea, and then the sub-idea that could be derived out of it.


Theme: Darkness is Coming

Idea: the Dead are a deliberate scouting/destabilizing force by the invaders
Idea: the dead are actually spirits fleeing the afterlife because they are scared of the invader

Theme: Unforeseen Consequences

Idea: the Dead are animating because of a runaway buggy magical process that was meant to heal everyone is badly restoring all bodies (idea taken from Dr Who's The Silent Child)
Idea: A powerful artifacts was unhearted

Theme: Inevitability

Idea: This is part of a gigantic cosmic cycle, actually part of the world's design

[Contrast]

1. What or who would cause all the dead on the planet to become undead?
2. What solution could the players undertake that requires traveling to multiple different planes?

I'm slightly confused by the premise here - you've decided that the planet is full of undead but don't have any sort of reason why you decided for that to be a thing? If you do have a reason, that would be useful to know to inform responses.

My immediate thought if you have no particular idea for what the cause or solution to be would be to not have there be one. That is just how this world is and how existance in this reality always has been and will always be. The planar 'solution' is simply 'lets get everyone out of this goddamn plane thats full of undead and go live somewhere else'.


Alternatively, you made find the Dark Souls games a source of interesting ideas.

[Cikomyr2]

I'm slightly confused by the premise here - you've decided that the planet is full of undead but don't have any sort of reason why you decided for that to be a thing? If you do have a reason, that would be useful to know to inform responses.

My immediate thought if you have no particular idea for what the cause or solution to be would be to not have there be one. That is just how this world is and how existance in this reality always has been and will always be. The planar 'solution' is simply 'lets get everyone out of this goddamn plane thats full of undead and go live somewhere else'.


Alternatively, you made find the Dark Souls games a source of interesting ideas.

I can see why someone would like to base their game on mechanic and gameplayloops at the encounter level first, and muddle the story through after they figured the nuts and bolts of the actual gameplay.

In this case, "Travel around the world is dangerous because of undeads" is a perfectly acceptable starting premise.

[MaxWilson]

Going to have to go and read the book (series) now

What I learned from John Ringo: fictional heroes are the most interesting when you start the story off with a huge military disaster.

Also, don't be afraid to kill most of planet Earth.

[Ettina]

In my homebrew setting, a couple thousand years ago, a cabal of wizards (most of them elves) invented lichdom (and their leader ascended to Godhood) by doing a massive Curse that broke the afterlife. The dead rising would be a plausible side effect of something like that. You could have the BBEG be trying to do a similar ritual.

As for the assembling a planar artifact, both me and Matt Mercer independently came up with the idea of having an artificial barrier that stops the gods from directly manifesting on the Material Plane, forcing them to act through mortal proxies instead. If your setting has something similar, maybe the artifact they're assembling will bypass that and cause an allied God to manifest to destroy the BBEG. (In my setting, the chromatic dragons did it to stop the gods from turning them all into metallic dragons, and accidentally created the orbs of dragonkind in the process, so if I was doing this campaign in my setting, the orbs would be necessary to bypass the barrier.)

[Tvtyrant]

I'm running a homebrew campaign where the dead, all the dead, are rising from the graves. Most bodies deteriorate after a couple centuries, so only any of the bodies from the past 200 years are rising.
What I am stumped on is... why? Why are all the dead, across the whole planet, rising from the graves?

My plan is for the players to travel, survive, and combat the undead until around level 5-7. Then a friendly NPC (based loosely on Santa Clause) will present a possible solution: traveling to several of the planes for... something. I'm thinking pieces of an artifact, or charging an artifact with planar energy.

TLDR
1. What or who would cause all the dead on the planet to become undead?
2. What solution could the players undertake that requires traveling to multiple different planes?

The afterlife is literally full, and killing the undead just causes ghosts to appear everywhere. The party has to go make a new outer plane to house the excess dead.

[Admael]

This was one of the campaigns from 3.5 Elder Evils, it was caused by the approach of Atropus, the World Born Dead, which was a colossal undead the size of a moon that was created/born from the afterbirth of creation.

[PhantomSoul]

This was one of the campaigns from 3.5 Elder Evils, it was caused by the approach of Atropus, the World Born Dead, which was a colossal undead the size of a moon that was created/born from the afterbirth of creation.

...Getting some flashbacks from Majora's Mask, which could be a fun thing to play into if the players would enjoy that (and it fits the table's tone).

[MrStabby]

1) It is an ancient curse by a long dead god. In punishment for the offences of the population the god cursed the dead to rise. One prophet promised the god that the people would repent and reform and the god gave the prophet 1000 years to make good on his end of the bargain. Unfortunately the prophet ate some bean soup past its use-by date and died before they could reform the land. He was forgotten and now, 1000 years later the curse is manifest.

2) A wizard did it.

[Greywander]

I thought of another possibility. Here's two different possible results from the catastrophic wild magic surge table for my homebrew wild magic system:

"You cast raise dead on all corpses in a 1d4 mile radius. Seems like a good thing until you realize where most corpses that aren’t expecting a resurrection are likely to be."

"You cast animate dead on all corpses in a 1d4 mile radius. The resulting undead are not under your control."

An effect like animating all the dead everywhere in the world could also fit as an effect of a catastrophic wild magic surge (I mean one of the other results literally wakes up Cthulhu, so why not?). The two effects listed here are actually some of the less potent catastrophic surge effects (I broadly describe catastrophic surges as "roll a new character", though not all are quite that severe).

[DeweyA]

I'm slightly confused by the premise here - you've decided that the planet is full of undead but don't have any sort of reason why you decided for that to be a thing? If you do have a reason, that would be useful to know to inform responses.

My immediate thought if you have no particular idea for what the cause or solution to be would be to not have there be one. That is just how this world is and how existance in this reality always has been and will always be. The planar 'solution' is simply 'lets get everyone out of this goddamn plane thats full of undead and go live somewhere else'.


Alternatively, you made find the Dark Souls games a source of interesting ideas.

I wanted them so start out in an undead apocalyptical world (they actually started rising first session after a starter quest) and then around level 5-8 they get to go travel the planes. I started the apocalypse before figuring out why it was happening.

[Teklese]

I have two ideas for this. First go the route of the walking dead. Nobody knows what caused it or how to stop it. You could have your players trying to figure this out, but they could be sidetracked by trying to save as many people as they can. Turn it into more of a survival game, you could have them following clues that don't pan out to anything and by the end its just this is what life is now.

My other idea is that Magic is the problem, The use of magic has become too much in this world and now it is effecting the dead bringing them back to life. As a way to fix it, they could go a couple of different routes. The easiest would to be to make a deal with the devil type of thing where he fixes the problem, but makes the party do something horrible for him. A type of do something bad to prevent something worse type of deal. Then have the "Devil" take away all magic in the world. now the players need to save the world from the undead that are already there without any magic.

the second easiest would be to make them quest for a wish item. Once they get the item they get one wish to try and fix everything. depending on their wish you could change the world to fit.

The third and maybe the hardest would be for them to create a magic artifact that could draw in the extra magical energy and send it to another plane. First the party would have to hear of a rumor about such a thing. then they would need to hunt down a wizard powerful enough to do it. Then they would have to search for a lost grimoire that has the riturals and designs. then they would need to forge the artifact. and if you wanted one last Big bad to fight at the end when the artifact is used it opens a door to another plane and you big bad comes out and now your players need to face it.

[Keltest]

The main temple to [god of Nature] has been defiled. The priests were slaughtered and their altars were contaminated with fragments of an artifact to [god of (un)death]. This is allowing [god of death] limited access to the nature god's domain, and he is actually using rain to distribute his magic to reanimate corpses. This can be delayed by removing the existing artifact, but will only be fixed when the party collects the pieces of an artifact of [god of Nature] and return them to the temple to purify it and remove the influence of Death.

[noob]

Possibility: The blood war was ended successfully in the best outcome possible for the majority: all the evil afterlives destroyed each other and all the souls escaped safely.
Sadly due to some problems such as nearly all the outsiders fighting at the last battle the souls had to escape on their own and without help they could not exactly get to places where they never have been so they went to the material plane.
You can not banish those evil dead back to the evil planes because those places just no longer exists.
So the varied outsiders recovers and reorganize to start getting the souls on the material plane to redeem in order to fit whichever afterlife they want to bring the soul to but while the good outsiders agree it does not matters much which good outsider grabs a soul and redeems it there is an issue with the neutral outsiders such as the slaads and the mordrons which started fighting each other in the material plane and the good outsiders find themselves travelling in really huge groups back and forth to specific places to grab souls because they want to avoid losses(of outsiders) to the neutral outsiders.
Most evil souls wants to reach those specific places because good afterlives are usually quite great but a significant portion of the evil souls simply wants to experience life again and possess corpses to do so.
Also mordrons and slaads fights at random places in the material places either for souls or random reasons.

[Magicspook]

The whole world rising in undeath sounds like the goal of a bbeg. Therefore I propose: somewhere in the world, a bbeg succeeded in his evil plans. The heroic party that was tasked with opposing them were defeated and tpk'ed, and now the world is ending. It is up to the heroes to continue where others failed and stop the apocalypse.

[Clistenes]

In several parts of the real world it is believed that evil spirits can possess dead bodies and raise them as undead (can't say more, moderators are being very strict lately...). Sorta the same way the High Priest of Hel possessed and controlled dead Durkon...

Let say some evil individual or group has opened a gate to an evil plane, and evil spirits are pouring out, they take hold of dead bodies and animate them as undead...