Necropolitans: about the campaign

It started, as so many things do, with Nathan's character dying.

I think this was where the idea first came to me. It's a little hazy now. Perhaps it came in a dream, a midnight whisper from some half-forgotten god. Perhaps Gef the Mongoose, or his successor, paid a visit from the ancestral Isle to bring this fragment of madness.

Preamble

The premise of the campaign is simple. What if you ran a classic Pathfinder adventure path, and killed the entire party at 1st level… then raised them as friendly, well-meaning undead and continued the adventure? This would definitely be a simple exercise, and was entirely appropriate for my very first attempt to run a campaign in any RPG.

That was almost four years ago. We're still going.

Overview

A classic band of mismatched heroes travel to a long-abandoned dungeon for reasons of their own. They expect a short journey, a few hapless goblins, and a fistful of coin. They definitely don’t expect to be caught up in a sinister web of global evil. Shadowy villains conspire to revive a long-dead god. Ancient secrets are buried in forgotten cities. Undead walk the land. Alien forces hunger beyond the sight of mortals. Wizards seek to perform rituals of terrible power. You can’t move for incongruous talking animals. And only some of those things are the player characters.

Welcome to Necropolitans

For quite a while, after Arthur kindly got me a signed copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, I'd been wanting to do something with it in D&D. It was only after much, painful effort that I discovered someone had already done a D&D conversion of it! Perfect. This would make for a decent introductory segment, the kind of basic adventure that hapless beginners jovially embark on. Plus it canonically had a good chance of killing you! Just what I needed.

So the plan was simple. The players would put together characters designed specifically to come to a gruesome end in Firetop Mountain. Through the evil machinations of Zagor (who must surely be a necromancer, given the number of undead in that gamebook) they will be raised as unliving servitors to his will. Mwahaha, haha, ha.

After their crushing defeat in Firetop Mountain, they would go on to one of Paizo's published adventure paths, as Nathan suggested. There was a lot of debate about this (the others had played, and still have played, many more than I have) but in the end we settled on Serpent's Skull. People mentioned it was rather linear in places, but that didn't seem too bad a choice for my first campaign - plus, we decided that the added interest of being undead would potentially perk up the weaker parts.

Now, obviously fusing together two completely unrelated games - not merely different systems, but different game worlds entirely - meant some adaptation was needed. There would now be a necromancer involved in Serpent's Skull, specifically, joining the passengers on board the ship. What is he doing there and what is his connection to the serpent folk? Surely a powerful necromancer and a powerful cleric would have some suspicion of each other. A logical idea is that there’s an agreement of some kind between them, though probably a treacherous one.

Also, reading through online sources, it sounds as though the first book of the campaign doesn’t have very strong connections to the overall arc, and mostly serves as a sandbox which is supposed to give PCs the name of a lost city. The intention is that they go to investigate it, but it’s not a particularly strong motivation, to be honest. I mean, it’s an adventure and they’ll get money from it, but it’s not very strongly tied to what’s already happened.

But our party are unwilling undead. And Zura is a demon of vampirism. Ydersius is a deity of snakes and war, chaotic evil, who lives on despite his beheading.

Anubis, on the other hand, is a lawful deity of death and protection. The Osirion nation also has particular talents for necromantic and anti-necromantic magic… He is probably opposed to chaotic evil not-properly-dead snake gods, who offend his sense of morality, order, and thanatological tidiness.

So let’s say our necromancer has been approached by another mage, and informed of a plan to seek out an island where there is a lost Azlanti temple to Zura. Naturally, this is of interest, and even more so when she hints that the temple may point the way to other places of hidden and forbidden secrets. They don’t particularly trust each other though. She, meanwhile, thinks the necromancer will be useful in dealing with the powerful undead she knows to haunt the island; she’s fairly confident of her ability to cope, but an ally is still useful.

A convenient deus ex machina linked to Anubis will shipwreck them all on the island, free them from Zagor's necromantic control, and give them a reason to set about adventuring and embark on the first stages of the Serpent's Skull campaign. From there on, we can run it as a pretty straightforward adventure path with the twist of being undead.

Oh young and foolish Past Me... how naive.

That was three years ago, we're still going, and they just hit 11th level. They have encountered a species extinct for millennia, travelled inside the mind of an insane wizard and met time travellers. I have changed the way undead PCs work twice (sorry folks).

Soon I hope to start releasing audio from the early sessions. They are, I have to warn you, rougher than the Hell's Rebels - I had less practice recording, and the early games were on Vent which recorded a lot less smoothly than Discord has been.