Campaign Concept: Soul Trap

[Avoraciopoctules]

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.

[Dogbert]

1.- I like the idea of fortified villages and Heavy Metal landscapes, yes.
2.- If the game is about escaping the demiplane then sure, a doomsday clock will add tension. If you do so, however, have in mind that you'll need to set a minimum time budget for you game in order to make sure the PC party will be at the level you need them before the showdown.
3.- If you don't use XP then what the hell do you use? If the game doesn't reward killing monsters then the game is no longer about fighting them (after all, they have nothing to win and everything to lose) and the game turns from DnD to MGS or Thief (and then the warrior-types will feel ripped off).
4.- Some variant of Ravenloft's Dark Powers sounds like the order of the day, but then the endgame will boil down to MTP so tread carefully.

Something akin to Minecraft meets Dark City comes to my mind. Every X time the whole experiment is rebooted, so the PCs must either escape before then or figure out what the experiment is and bring it to completion, be it success or failure (and then find out what happens then).

[Vebyast]

I'm still not sure of a few things though:
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?

What kind of tone are you going for? This sounds like a great setting for a bleak, unwinnable siege, something like the last bits of Mass Effect 3, Halo ODST's Firefight or similar horde modes, or the mid-end of the Codex Alera. It'd be pretty funny to greet the players' cheerful ridiculousness with a depressing psychological horror story that grinds toward the players being inevitably drowned by a tide of mindless beasts.

[OgreBattle]

Encountering an existing fortified settlement, then having to escape as it gets thrashed by supermonsters is a way to give players an idea of the power level of things and also show them what kind of stuff they could potentially achieve too in the settlement defense portion of the game.

[Hicks]

What about 9th level clerics, or anything else with access to planeshift as a spell or SLA, who can straight up leave?

[Korgan0]

Do you plan on having the PCs end/destroy/mess with the fundamental organization of the plane, or is the endgame escaping, or just lasting as long as possible?

[Emerald]

What about 9th level clerics, or anything else with access to planeshift as a spell or SLA, who can straight up leave?

Since they're all petitioners, they can't straight-up leave due to the following special quality:

Planar Commitment (Ex): Petitioners cannot leave the plane they inhabit. They are teleported 100 miles in a random direction if an attempt is made to force them to leave.

[Avoraciopoctules]

3.- If you don't use XP then what the hell do you use? If the game doesn't reward killing monsters then the game is no longer about fighting them (after all, they have nothing to win and everything to lose) and the game turns from DnD to MGS or Thief (and then the warrior-types will feel ripped off).

I've had a little while to think about this, and here's what I'm planning on going with right now. You level up when the PCs achieve something significant. Let's sketch out a hypothetical progression to level 12 from level 4.

Level 4: Defeat a Black Knight and acquire your first soul of real power.
Level 5: Ring the Bell of Clarity, clearing away the Mist of Mara that weakens and confuses survivors while leaving Hollows and daemons unaffected.
Level 6: Defeat the Reaper Daemon that seems to be controlling the local Hollows and using them in groups to attack lone parties of survivors.
Level 7: Get proclaimed the leader of a petitioner settlement after saving it from a great danger.
Level 8: Defeat the Chaos Butterfly, ending the Storms of Vengeance that ravage the land and erode the defenses of your followers.
Level 9: Retake the Forge of Cannith from the Daemon of Despair, bolstering your followers with a stream of war-constructs.
Level 10: Open the Ghostly Gate, allowing access to the Ethereal and the possibility of directly meddling with the flow of new souls into the plane.
Level 11: Defeat the Daemon of Despair, depriving the Hollow Legion of its leader and direction.
Level 12: Save the world!

Further, since we've already established that people respawn with gear after death, why not tie that in with Tome item rules, including the 8 item limit. If you accumulate souls by defeating powerful monsters or NPCs and taking in their essence, you can use that to turn your respawn kit into magic items that scale with your power. Since you can use accumulated souls in different ways with each respawn, they offer a degree of versatility that regular items don't.

Generic monsters besides Hollows are worth a Minor item, weak daemons and survivors are worth Lesser items, heroes and Black Knights are worth Medium items, and unique boss monsters or Daemon Lords are worth Major Items.

The more powerful the soul, the more limited the range of items it can be turned into. The Daemon of Despair can turn into a Deflective Cloak of Incorporeality or a rod that casts Enervation and Crushing Despair, but a ghoul or an ogre is worth a generic enhancement bonus on any of your 8 respawn items. Souls don't degrade with time, but they can be lost or stolen. If you get your throat cut by another survivor or trapped in a pit for years, you are probably going to bleed souls. Getting mauled by Hollows is even worse.

What about 9th level clerics, or anything else with access to planeshift as a spell or SLA, who can straight up leave?

You finally acquire the power to Planeshift. It's pretty sweet! You can rescue souls by porting them onto another plane before they become petitioners, you can suplex a Reaper Daemon so hard it crashes into a Celestian ocean of holy water, and you can travel between layers of your new home without needing to use the dangerously well-guarded gates.

And who knows, maybe this could be your key to escaping this horrible place outright. After all, souls can leave the outer planes once they get promoted from petitioner to real Outsider. Maybe, just maybe, if you start devouring the essence of other petitioners before you go hollow, that will let you transcend your current state as just a part of this plane and turn into one of the Daemons. Then you will finally be free.

Sounds like we might have just gotten a pretty good hook for a BBEG.

[flare22]

sounds awesome so far definitely looking forward to it. so if the pc's are already dead do they get to decide how they died?