Unhallowed Rites, Part 6: Beyond the Veil
I’d like to take the opportunity to apologize to all our Quest Givers over on Patreon. I know you guys voted to hand Thaumaturge a hefty helping of permadeath way back when. In our defense however, he is still technically dead. That’s why I feel confident that Wicked Uncle is standing just off screen like, “I told you fools the space between worlds had grown thin! It was in the hover text, but it still counts as foreshadowing for this demon portal thing!”
Any dang way, while Magus puts all her old teacher‘s dirty fighting tricks to good use, what do you say the rest of us talk about dead PCs? I don’t mean those unfortunate souls who get stricken from the records, forgotten instantaneously by the party, and replaced by a freshly-rolled dude in the next session. I’m talking about those active phantoms and lingering souls who continue to exert influence from beyond the grave. I’m talking about Poster Boy 1 and Poster Boy 2. These guys are fascinating to me as a GM. That’s because, even though resurrection magic is part of the game, characters like these dare the undiscovered country of Homebrew, bringing their own take on the afterlife. And for my money, figuring out how to make the revolving door o’ death a little extra spicy is always a fun challenge.
Case in point, a certain paladin of my acquaintance found himself in the Boneyard not so long ago. After the eldritch Things that guard the Gates shuffled their divine paperwork, it seemed that some irregularities had cropped up. A formal petition for the paladin’s soul had been filed by an agent of Chaos, claiming him as one of their own.
Meanwhile, back on the Prime Material, the party’s resurrection spells failed to work. The diamonds were gathered, the words were spoken, but it was like the soul could not be reached. As it turned out, the Powers That Be would not permit a rez while the fate of a soul lay in bureaucratic limbo. Clearly, this shit would not stand.
One short interplanar adventure later and the party were reunited in a courtroom in Axis. In his opening statement, the paladin’s bizarre interlocutor accused him of dying for selfish and ignoble reasons. Then he produced a slew dead bad guys to prove his case. This rogue’s gallery of slain villains stepped forth to slander the paladin’s good name, referencing the profit motive of dungeon delving and insisting that they’d been killed unjustly. It was obviously a farce — the cosmic equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit — but the party had good fun arguing with all their old enemies. The paladin himself even got to meet an avatar of his goddess brought in as a character witness.
But as the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow in Axis, and as the Honorable Judge Godmind deliberated deliberately, the PCs began to notice odd goings on in the court. The stenographer didn’t register as Lawful to detect alignment. The court photographer had an unusually elaborate techno-magical camera on her person. And by the time the bailiffs revealed themselves to be disguised Chaos things as well, the piecemeal artifact they’d sneaked into the courtroom had been reassembled.
“Roll initiative!” cried yours truly. For the paladin’s soul had been a red herring; an excuse to get close to the real target. Planar partisans began to hack the Godmind, trying to change its alignment from the undefended innards of its own courtroom. Chaos had well and truly ensued there at the heart of Order.
“Go get ’em,” said character-witness-goddess. And though he remained quite dead, my buddy the paladin still remembered how to smite.
So here’s to you Magus! I hope that your surprise attack buys the rest of our heroes enough time to close that hell portal. As for the rest of you guys, why don’t you share your own best postmortem hijinks? Did you ever get the chance to explore the afterlife? Tell us all about your best temporary possessions in borrowed bodies, incorporeal malingerings on the ethereal plane, and face-palmings from heaven as you watched your partymates drag your body around. See you good little souls down in the comments!
UPDATE: The Handbook is heading out for Anime Weekend Atlanta!
We’ve got our table set up and ready to go in artist’s alley! Both the writer & illustrator of this here Handbook of Heroes will be there from Friday, October 29 – Sunday, October 31 from 10 AM – 7 PM. We’re always down to talk shop in person, and we’d love to meet any and all of you guys out there in meat space.
So come on down and buy our merch! Wear our apparel! Touch our dice for a chance to win a free curse!
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Go, Magus! 😀 This is a wonderful twist.
Now if only Thaumaturge could join in and show his star pupil the dirty tricks he didn’t have time to teach her yet…
It wouldn’t make him any less dead, but if and when a Medium shows up and uses Thaumaturge as a bound spirit, there might be less outcry. 😉
I toyed with having Wicked Uncle possess Magus during the resurrection, but like… I don’t even know where I would go with that plot, lol.
Y’know, I never realized that Order of the Stick is actually kind of a big deal until I saw your comments about Roy being a poster boy for postmortem plot hooks. You follow something for so long and you reread it several times and your brain needs a moment to register “oh shit, this thing is actually a big deal”.
The closest thing I have to talk about is one PF1e Darklands campaign where my Aasimar Ranger was thoroughly cooked; knocked unconscious, hit with a Fireball, then shot by our ally who was controlled/contracted into fighting us. Needless to say between all of that… kinda dead. As a Plumekith Aasimar, “fried chicken” jokes abounded. After that he ended up in the Boneyard, stuck and only able to observe what happened by way of a lake/portal. Turns out time in the Boneyard is a bit wonky too, given he lost track of it. Presumably to avoid hijinks as the party ended up taking several months or years to get back to the surface- I can’t remember if we were just gone for that long or if spacetime magic had fucked with things- but eventually they got back to our base of operations and got around to reviving my Ranger.
As the portal to the mortal realm opened and he stood at the threshold of returning to life, my Ranger- who, for context, takes issues with the divine because of all the expectations of greatness that tend to be thrust upon Aasimar- gave the place two birdies and a rather bold insult to whoever ran the place. (Un)fortunately the campaign petered out before he could ever face any possible consequences for that.
Then again, his eye did eventually get used as a component for some kind of magical bioweapon that cursed and wiped out an entire village. He never learned of that, but still…
Big deal, small circles. Huge in terms of indie dnd webcomics, but they definitely don’t have a PAX built around em, you know?
As far as the aasimat, it’s always a bummer when a campaign dies too early. You want to see those thumbing your nose at the gods shenanigans pay off!
I think my favorite dead PC story is great just for it’s anticlimax.
In a pathfinder campaign, my introvert alchemist had been dragged from her lab to help get a cities water flowing again, only to discover it was blocked by some kobolds who had re-engaged an old temple’s mechanism. Fiddling with it released a nameless goddess who basically let us start our own religion with us as the heads of it, and if it gained enough followers, we’d be raised to lesser gods in the afterlife. Which is how she got where she was, apparently.
So, when our min/maxed monk had several crazy-awesome moments, including ending a dungeon-boss encounter by going incorporeal and offering the stressed out specter a beer, we were well on our way.
Then we ended up at a counter-factions tower against their abomination of an alchemist bruiser, who our Monk valiantly dragged into the big bubbling pit of acid he had in the center of his lair. It was a somber looting of the tower, and we said some heartfelt goodbyes to Cizen, for though the player might roll up some new insanity, our monk was a good boy in the end and deserved better.
…This was immediately undercut when we got back to town and found out that he’d spent our travel time slumming on the Goddess’ couch, and she’d thrown him back out to the prime material (with a Celestial Template that made him MORE broken) because she was sick of him eating all the food in her fridge.
So here’s the question: Did the easy rez actually cheapen the story, or was it a so bad it’s good again sort of situation?
Oh, it was absolutely so bad it’s good! We all had a good laugh, we got to keep playing through, and the player in question got to mess around with a template he hadn’t expected and find more ways to be nutty and broken. Good times were had by all for several more sessions!
the Divine Multi-Level-Marketing Scheme has many benefits for those who can get in on the ground floor, it seems
Not mine, but the venerable and excellent SilverClawShift campaign log on the OotS forum deserves a mention. Our protagonist is a rogue trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Apparently numberless evil spirits are lurking in the border Ethereal, and anytime something dies on the Prime Material, one of these spirits slips in and takes over the fresh corpse.
The rogue is fighting a desperate battle to defend a village against some really nasty monsters but every time someone dies on either side they rise as a zombie, turning a white knuckle brawl into a 3-way slaughter. Said nasty monsters (forgot the name) can blink, using the border ethereal to pop up in unexpected places.
The rogue gets unlucky and is swatted down by one of the monsters, dying outright. She gets launched into the border ethereal, and the DM asks her what she wants to do in the one round she has before her body gets possessed. She spots a badly wounded monster blinking into the border ethereal and using her magic dagger, rips out its phase organ. Rolling a natural 20 use magic device, she manages to blink back into reality as a ghost. She then immediately repossesses her corpse and jumps back into the fray.
Ah, I remember that one! Kytons were the monsters in question, and a request for advice on the forums followed by reporting the aftermath turned into a proper campaign journal. Both of the stories posted by SCS were fantastic tales and contributed to me taking up the hobby.
Methinks I need to do some googling. Sounds like a friggin epic!
In the Spheres of Power pathfinder rules, there is a class called Wraith. My paladin died doing a sacrifice play. The cultists’s ship was about to explode and the teleporter couldn’t get to us all. He told the teleporter to get the rest of the party, as he had a plan.
The plan was to die, but they didn’t know that.
Instead, I jumped on my mount and used a feat I had to restore life to something that died in the last round to revive my mount as it died in the explosion; the poor thing didn’t deserve to die for my mistake. My body got pulled out of the ocean with the mount and that was that for the session. Resurrection was discussed, but the Aaismar in that setting reincarnated in a week after death, so they weren’t sure it would even work.
After the game GM pointed out Wraith and asked if i wanted to try it. So next session, the party began to debate what to do, only for my ghost to appear and note that step one would be to inform the King and Constable of what we knew and check for any survivors.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the Wraith class mechanics and eventually dropped the character, but it did produce some fun reactions for a bit. To quote the Giant “The Honor of a Paladin is Unbreakable even by death itself.”
Beyond that, as an ST I pulled it out once. In a Mage the Ascension game, the PCs were fighting Marauders throughout the city and had called upon all the NPC mages that could help to do so. One was Donald, a Son of Ether with a penchant for over engineering all problems (his main weapon was a toaster-gun since it turns out that using lasers to make toast also has military applications if you made the laser strong enough).
Donald was put in charge of a bunch of younger mages by dint of being older and stronger. While the PCs fought two of them, Donald and his team were getting wrecked by another Marauder. Donald was put on his last legs against the Marauder and he spent an action doing nothing as he prepared his final spell. The Marauder killed him and he died, but the younger mages managed to kill it finally.
A few hours later, as the PCs fought the last Marauder who had duplicated itself, Donald abruptly appeared behind one of them who was about to kill a PC and put the clone in a headlock. He had used the fact the Marauders had sealed everything, including ghosts, to pull an Obi-Wan. He had realized he couldn’t help after they won the fight he was in due to his injuries but swore no one else would die on his watch.
The best part was the PCs had no idea. They saw Donald abruptly appear and start meleeing the Avatar of Death and thought it was awesome. Then they started wondering why he wasn’t using any magic. Then after the fight they were shocked when Donald jut faded away with a “Good work, make sure the Man doesn’t get my gun or house.”
Not an actual campaign, but it’s a rare character design competition that doesn’t make me say “Hmm, how can I subvert these rules and expectations?”
So when Junkyard Wars had a round about playing a child of one of the rulers of the Nine Hells (featuring the Unholy Scion template, the Unholy Brand feat, and a rule against being devoted to anything but your unholy parent) I started looking for ways to make my character stand out. And what I found is that, unlike Half-Fiends, Unholy Scions explicitly can have a mortal soul buried under all that corruption. And that opened the door to some fun opportunities.
Thus was born War Child:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=24198725&postcount=50
The full story’s on the other side of the link, but here’s the cliff notes version. who started life as a black knight before against all odds falling in love with his good opposite… who he ended up killing. Wracked with guilt he had no context for coping with, he allowed the White Knight’s party members to kill him in turn, in the process coming very close to genuine repentance.
Close enough, in fact, that as his soul was on the way back to the Hells, it was intercepted by a tribunal of angels, who determined that bringing him back to life as a Hellbred was both just punishment for his sins (they forever branded him with the memory of killing his love) and an opportunity for him to truly redeem himself.
He spent his new life in Avernus, the outermost Circle. He started out as genuinely evil, still unable to overcome his taint on his own, but now determined to win the freedom to choose his own destiny. So even as he sought a more complete redemption, he pretended to be as evil as ever, and insinuated himself into Hell’s bureaucracy. Rather than focus on martial
or magical power, he learned the system, and began to twist it to his will, sowing paranoia and misinformation and death until finally he broke his oaths and acted directly against his father, arranging a coup to overthrow him, one carefully orchestrated to splinter into a full blown devil-on-devil civil war as soon as the deed was done. The story ends with him noting that he’ll stick around and keep manipulating things for as long as it takes for the whole circle to collapse into nothing but rubble and roving bands of demons and devils fighting over the scraps, at which point he’ll finally be free to return to the mortal world, track down a specific grave, and make a long overdue apology.
Whoops, that’s Brand of the Nine Hells, not Unholy Brand. (The sequel feat is Mark of Avernus).
“Ah! It’s in my hair !”
Isn’t that something said on the honeymoon not the wedding ?
Or for the HoEF ? 😉
I remember one campaign where we started off by dying and it went downhill from there…trials, tribulations, incorporeal chicanery and a pre-planned (and paid for) resurrection turned scam by a none-too-trustworthy priestess, good times for all 🙂
@Colin: A couple of pages back, you asked for some quotes from the 3e Ravenloft DMG, where it discusses the importance of not monologuing.
I’m going to paraphrase a bit, but it basically went like this:
The party has burst into the shrine of Traven, the vampiric necromancer who has been gruesomely murdering people as he struggles to restore his daughter to life. They find him standing over the little girl’s coffin.
DM: Traven speaks: “Welcome. You have come just in time. Now, you will see that I am not the evil that you would name me as. Now you will see–”
Player A: “Wait, he’s actually here? Roll initiative! I fire my bow!”
DM: “Um, wait–”
Player B: “I start casting a spell!”
Player C: “I can’t believe we get a chance to take this guy out! I draw my sword and charge! FOR HONOR!”
The DMG goes on to explain that this is not the players being jerks to the DM and blocking them from exposing the necromancer’s backstory; they’re being true to their characters’ heroic nature.
Also, Traven is a monster, even if he doesn’t see himself this way. He’s left a trail of gruesomely mutilated corpses behind him, all in an effort to restore his own child. The players should want to take him down before he can escape.
The DMG continues to display the usefulness of flashback scenes and cutscenes to expose the nature and sorrow of the big villain, rather than trying to do so at the moment of confrontation.
Used wisely, flashbacks can up the ante and rack up the tension — for instance, the players can get a glimpse of Traven speaking quite politely to one of his victims, apoligizing for what he was about to do, and asking the woman’s understanding because she’s a parent, too.
Cutscenes can also provide a sense of accomplishment, as the players get a cutscene while Traven mocks them from behind a small army of ghouls, basically asking “You and what army?” In the cutscene, the players find out the villagers living in the town Traven’s been raiding for ‘research materials’ have found their courage because of their heroic efforts, and are even now marching up the path to the castle to help them. One player gets to say: “That army, necromancer!”
In a previous story Icspoke of, a dead PC, one eaten by a giant fish, returned as a ghostie to haunt our party in Return of the Runelords – a scary outcome, as they were an optimal Swashbuckler. We had two encounters – one where the usage of light spells and his template-property to turn incorporeal in light made him unable to harm us, forcing it to flee.
The second encounter was far more dramatic, joining another perilous combatant and upgraded to have less of a glaring weakness, on top of being played by the PC himself.
As we weakened him to near-destruction, he bowed to our strength, accepting we were strong enough to survive the perils ahead… And betrayed the other combatant, turning the tide of the battle. They would strike them down in vengeance the next turn, but would find their swift end themselves by a pissed-off party of PCs. Thus we closed that PCs story in a most storytelling fashion.
Awhile back, the Cleric in the game I run met an unfortunate end against a mutant drow/scorpion/wizard. I was planning for the party to just return to town to get him resurrected at a temple, but as fate would have it two of the players couldn’t make the next session, leaving only the (dead) Cleric and the Rogue. Rather than call off the game, I decided do do a bit of improv, and ran a oneshot that found the Cleric waking up in the afterlife (specifically the Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia) and having to go through a series of trials in order to meet his deity.
And the Rogue’s player? Obviously she couldn’t play her normal character, so I arranged for her to play something of a guide. And of course, I couldn’t let an opportunity like this go to waste. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Hey, , do you… want to play as a dragon for a session?”
Her: “YES”
But I want to see the RESULTS of Team Evil’s terrifying ritual! Letting Grandma loose doesn’t sound THAT bad… she probably just wants to visit the kids.
Magus and everybody should really just chillax.
I’m still holding out for that slutty pirate costume!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/devils-night
After getting her grand(?)kids married to each other?
Yeah, that’s not going to be a fun reunion.
Do you want campaign reset? Because this is how you get campaign reset. ArcherMeme.exe
Remember Aerith? From FFVII? She dies. Even then she influences the plot. Once in a game we used the same. We killed a PC and then we got them intervening not directly but influencing things. Like some mayor healing coming in times of need and some other spells and occurrences happening just in time and always with her presence being feel 🙂
Another example is just bringing back a character. What do you men they were dead? They are not, they are just there. On Battlestar Galactica, the 2003 version, there is a character that dies and then on one season final just when a big battle is about to happen they appear back and say to have been on earth, the planet they have been looking from the begin of the series. Then when they finally arrive there that character is just standing there with everyone else. Someone pass in front of them and they are gone 😀
Or just play some ghost outright. Wraith: The Oblivion is quite good and Champions of Death for Age of Sigmar is just out, the nighthaunt are fun and good 🙂
Really hope Magus comes back since she was the character I most enjoyed in this comic.
Methinks you may like Part 8 of this series.
Get her, Magus! Yank her hair out!
BTW, I showed the pics of Lurog and Gredril to my group over Discord and they love them. We’re trying to figure out how to get Brambles the leshy into Gredril’s build as a normal cleric.
Does demon hair have special properties? Very likely, it’s what’s popularly known as “bad hair.”
Huzzah! So good to see you at the con!
Already looking forward to the next one.
Sadly, it seems that Gredril will have to take a different plant familiar in his non-gestalt build. The leshy is just for the druid archetype. At least there are plant type familiars that he can choose.
I’m honestly surprised Poster Boy 2 wasn’t Mollymauk Tealeaf. Talk about a dead PC having a HUGE impact on a campaign.
Spoilers I guess. :/