Campaign Concept: Soul Trap
Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 8:28 am
So I promised to run a game where people could make whatever they wanted as characters (so long as they were rules-legal and could work together), and then I would build a campaign tailored to the party. What I got was a guy riding a velociraptor who summons more dinosaurs to aid him in battle, a virtuous yet highly murderous clown, and a devotee of supreme evil who eats souls. And not much in the way of backstory. But in the course of wrestling with the idea of how I'd put together a campaign setting where the guy who runs around with his reaper scythe openly proclaiming the glory of Charon was not going to get the party shot, I think I might have come up with something pretty cool I'd like some help refining.
The setting is generic D&D fantasyland, and all of the PCs are dead. Their souls passed on towards their respective afterlives, but were intercepted on the way and funneled into an unexpected realm. Now their souls have incarnated as petitioners of this plane, and things look pretty wack. Good news first, all fallen petitioners merely grow new bodies from the raw substance of the plane sometime after losing their old ones. That means free rezzes after every party wipe, and they'll even have some functional equipment form along with their new bodies. The catch is the fact that this place is home to a number of horrible monsters that feed upon the essence of wayward souls (maybe just call it essentia), and as incarnated petitioners, not even death can provide escape from them. Souls adrift without proper bodies are most vulnerable to the hunger of the soul eaters, but even corporeal petitioners can be metaphysically hollowed out if they spend long enough around soul eater auras without taking protective measures. Drained sufficiently, a petitioner will go full zombie and attack others with whole souls in the hopes of tearing up theirs to patch up its own. And these Hollows still benefit from planar reincarnation, so people wearing PC shirts can expect to face the same shrieking spirit ghoul repeatedly.
I'm basically doing the Dark Souls thing, with a lot of stuff more coherently explained. But there's also going to be an element of tower defense strategy games, as survivors need to build ever-more formidable layers of defenses to hold off increasingly massive waves of not-zombies in between exploration and adventuring sessions. Player Characters will link up with other groups of survivors, and could have the power to either broker alliances or side with one over the others and consolidate a lot of power in a few hands. There will also be opportunities to make alterations to the plane that make things more hospitable to the PCs (I'm specifically thinking of throwing in some kind of great artificer's forge that the PCs could reactivate if they clear the dungeon guardians. Then they can churn out friendly warforged or something).
I'm still not sure of a few things though:
1. How recently should the PCs have shown up on the scene? Should there be whole fortified villages, or just a handful of named NPCs that gradually expands with time (and/or shrinks as some go Hollow from too many deaths or plain despair).
2. Should there be some kind of ticking clock towards doomsday other than the fact that more hollows will know to attack the PCs with time, possibly using better tactics?
3. Should I represent soul degradation / theft of essence from other petitioners mechanically, or just leave it to flavor? I really don't want to go back to using XP for tabletop games.
4. What kind of ultimate antagonists would best serve a game like this? I could do a few megadaemons or make the biggest obstacle be named NPC faction leaders, but I'm still uncertain what kind of final showdown I ought to gear up for if any.
The setting is generic D&D fantasyland, and all of the PCs are dead. Their souls passed on towards their respective afterlives, but were intercepted on the way and funneled into an unexpected realm. Now their souls have incarnated as petitioners of this plane, and things look pretty wack. Good news first, all fallen petitioners merely grow new bodies from the raw substance of the plane sometime after losing their old ones. That means free rezzes after every party wipe, and they'll even have some functional equipment form along with their new bodies. The catch is the fact that this place is home to a number of horrible monsters that feed upon the essence of wayward souls (maybe just call it essentia), and as incarnated petitioners, not even death can provide escape from them. Souls adrift without proper bodies are most vulnerable to the hunger of the soul eaters, but even corporeal petitioners can be metaphysically hollowed out if they spend long enough around soul eater auras without taking protective measures. Drained sufficiently, a petitioner will go full zombie and attack others with whole souls in the hopes of tearing up theirs to patch up its own. And these Hollows still benefit from planar reincarnation, so people wearing PC shirts can expect to face the same shrieking spirit ghoul repeatedly.
I'm basically doing the Dark Souls thing, with a lot of stuff more coherently explained. But there's also going to be an element of tower defense strategy games, as survivors need to build ever-more formidable layers of defenses to hold off increasingly massive waves of not-zombies in between exploration and adventuring sessions. Player Characters will link up with other groups of survivors, and could have the power to either broker alliances or side with one over the others and consolidate a lot of power in a few hands. There will also be opportunities to make alterations to the plane that make things more hospitable to the PCs (I'm specifically thinking of throwing in some kind of great artificer's forge that the PCs could reactivate if they clear the dungeon guardians. Then they can churn out friendly warforged or something).
I'm still not sure of a few things though:
1. How recently should the PCs have shown up on the scene? Should there be whole fortified villages, or just a handful of named NPCs that gradually expands with time (and/or shrinks as some go Hollow from too many deaths or plain despair).
2. Should there be some kind of ticking clock towards doomsday other than the fact that more hollows will know to attack the PCs with time, possibly using better tactics?
3. Should I represent soul degradation / theft of essence from other petitioners mechanically, or just leave it to flavor? I really don't want to go back to using XP for tabletop games.
4. What kind of ultimate antagonists would best serve a game like this? I could do a few megadaemons or make the biggest obstacle be named NPC faction leaders, but I'm still uncertain what kind of final showdown I ought to gear up for if any.