PDA

View Full Version : The Dead and the Deathless: Ramifications for the Dead and Newly Risen (Ideas?)



Maerok
2008-12-10, 12:04 AM
I am currently planning on planning a campaign that I want to run in the not-too-distant future. I'll show what I have so far but the problem is that I don't know where to take it next.

The system is a Cook's World of Darkness, but it could be imagined within d20 Modern with the Urban Arcana supplement. The setting might be the Chicago one provided in the book.

Anyway, the status quo of magic for this setting is that it is moderately regulated by guilds. Resurrection magic is lethally forbidden unless you deal with the impossible in order to work out an agreement with Necromantic League. Now is the time to note that the PCs start out dead. They begin play with their secondary characters (much lower level) who they would switch perspectives with throughout the story to tell different perspectives ("meanwhile...").

Their first action is to resurrect the actual PCs through an illegal procedure conducted by a 'crooked' necromancer seeking to make some cash under the table. Think of it kind of like the eye-surgery part of Minority Report. The PCs are brought back to life, but there are widespread mystic wards against the procedure. Everyone in the party is brought together because even if they didn't have ties to each other before, the necromancer uses less supplies to do several resurrections in one go. The 'authorities' are alerted to the act and soon the necromancer guild is mobilized to quell the PCs' existence (The Legion of the Broken Circle).

The PCs were previously in some sort of afterlife. When you get brought back, you lose all memory from about the time you died to when you come back so no one has really been able to prove it exists.

But they had unfinished business in the Afterlife (depending on the characters it could be a heaven, or hell, or limbo) as well as their purpose to be resurrected for (this could either be to continue some past work or because their secondary character just wanted them back). They soon find that there is someone else after them; he dresses in black fur, drives a pale convertible, and wields a razor sharp sawed-off shotgun but isn't affiliated with the guild, hmm.

Now I don't really know where to take this. Running from the Reaper (maybe his dedicated presence in the world prevents him from doing his job across the world), overcoming necromantic assassination attempts, figuring out whatever they still had to do in the Afterlife, and probably dying in order to do so are all possibilities. If fact, the 'second act' could very well be a trip through the Afterlife and all the strange things that happen there Divine Comedy-style. Everyone would be sure to know them there and they'd have to pick up the pieces.

One option is taking down suitable replacements for their demise. The Reaper could be bribed like this with some finesse and the guild might accept it as payment. Specifically, their replacements would be the Four Kings of the magical underworld that opposes the guilds. These are four beings summoned into the world through the Nightmare Wave from the annuls of human stories.

The Red King - Dracula (Vampire)
The Yellow King - Hastur (Mage)
The Gray King - Professor Moriarty (Awakened)
The Black King - Pinhead (Demon)

Each character will have to kill one of the kings that is closest associated to them (the vampire must slay Dracula, etc.; for duplicates within a party, then it'll have to be another king). These guys run the higher order criminal and supernatural badness that is running beneath the skin of the city.