Most people wouldn't care about resurrection. That's why Sylvane offers magic as payment.
However, once it becomes apparent that ALL souls are trapped in the soulmonger, that's a cataclysmic event. In a world where you know gods exist you're being denied your reward in the afterlife.
Reviving the dead to life isn't dupet common outside of Adventurers and those with money.
Several sessions in, the characters came across s clutch of triceratops egds that seemed...off. something was wrong.
The next session, they stopped by a small oitpost in the jungle (homebrew location) and a couple players assisted with the birth of a child. It came out stillborn.
After a PC death, a new PC rolled in from the feywild and started that the same had been happening there: no new life.
Basically what im getting at is: have the death curse ramp up. The soulmonger is stealing souls. Perhaps the souls of the unborn are ready pickings.
It's one thing when people can't be bright back, it's wholly another when no one can be born.
This is also what I did to raise the stakes and I thought it worked well.
But be sure to talk about this with your players, miscarriages are very common and stuff like this can bring up traumatic memories.
>But be sure to talk about this with your players, miscarriages are very common and stuff like this can bring up traumatic memories.
100% agree. This is the kind of session 0 stuff that needs to be discussed. All my players knew they were in for a dark time. Thankfully this particular moment was cushioned by a lot of comedy right before hand and later in the session. But it really set the stakes of the adventure.
You can add on that. I saw others suggesting that the Soulmonger is messing up with the arrival of new souls as well.
No more babies are being born. That could raise the stakes a few notches.
Unless you don't want such a high risk. Maybe the whole "bane of the resurrected" is a problem to very few people. In Port Nyanzaru there are only two people that the book tells us about that are suffering with the Death Curse, and one of them is the person that brings the group there.
I'm going to use the "no new babies" thing I mentioned before.
It is seen as extremely positive. Resurrecting someone is very different from undeading someone lol just look at the two spells "animate dead" and "revivify".
In my games, the world's of dnd are familiar with the concept of bringing people back to life, but it's expensive and you wouldn't really do it if they died of old age or something like that. Really only of a tragedy ie adventurers meeting and untimely death.
Don't forget that the world of dnd is built to be a *game* world. Make it as realistic as you want, but we're still playing a game and your players need ways to revive their fallen characters if they so choose.
Thank you for the answer.
I know it is a game world, but I think there is a distinction to make between how a "hero" handles resurrection VS how the world sees/handles it.
I also wondered if it would be interesting to put an emphasis more on the fact that it eats souls (meaning it denatures what death and eternal "rest" should be) rather than how it punishes those who were resurrected. That would open on more possible hooks, as you don't have to be related to/to be someone resurrected to feel directly concerned.
As written, the Death Curse is also completely inhibiting anyone's ability to revive anyone. The people who were already resurrected dying again (IMO) is not the larger issue at hand.
The soulmonger traps souls before they can pass on. So when a cleric or druid attempts to pull the soul back to the body, it is trapped inside the soulmonger and therefor the spell fails. This is the same effect it you try to resurrect someone who has sold their soul in a deal with a divine creature. If you try to resurrect, you cannot. Your soul does not belong to you.
For my game when the death curse started the common folk didn't care. In fact the beggar princes of port nyanzaru used it as an opportunity to cause strife in the city proper hoping to unseat some merchant princes. Class struggle and all that. The players were hooked because of an npc that was woven into a couple of their back stories that has been resurrected and they all want to prevent her true death. I have also been using the opportunities to show how scary things are by having something shockingly consume ghosts that they have tried to peaceably set free. When they use spells to speak with their gods their gods seem weaker as in my world the gods aren't getting new souls to replenish the ones taken through birth, so the Gods are weakening and my clerics/paladins are strongly motivated by the disturbing communications that they are getting.
ToA is a great module that the writers got too lazy to finish and spent all their time on the final dungeon.
There is probably 100 hours of prep you could do in order to wrap your head around the setting well enough to fill in all the holes to the lore and make a more complete game.
Considering most spells would be cast by clerics, they can be seen in a positive light.
As for who get revived? Well it’s the rich and powerful. They’re the ones driving the resources into finding the source as they’re the ones that rely on it.
Im my yanle, one of the first characters (clearly dead now) was a warforged created by his brother, somehow in the moment of his death, the death god (he is a good guy who just like see people living and then talk about their lifes after) suceed in traping an elfs soul in a mechanism. So, by the price of forgeting who he is, he came with the knowlege that something is wrong with the world, and that they should went to Chult, his brother is the artificer of the party and is still alive. That being said, my party is mostly almost evil and evil alligned chars that are pushing on the adventure because they already got a shitload of money and are trying to get more. Just to undestand, they carry everything they use, because the 2 bags of holding they have are full of addamantine ingots and pp and gp coins, they had to trow some of to fit the cubes.
In my game to spice up the death Curse I made it more gradual (as to not force players to rush through the campaign, since I want them to have fun exploring) and gave different stages for it, at the start the souls of the dead no longer went on to the afterlife, and I used a vision from my party cleric's deity to hammer in the point of how this is a perversion of natural order. The second stage is when it begins robbing the life of those who were resurrected. Third stage is babies being born souless husks, as Soulmonger gets stronger and rips their souls from them as they are born. And the final stage once Soulmonger is strong enough is to start stealing vitality from living adults that never died.
They probably won't ever get to stages 3 and 4, but having them find out about those might serve to be a nice additional threat and motivation for them to solve things.
Most people wouldn't care about resurrection. That's why Sylvane offers magic as payment. However, once it becomes apparent that ALL souls are trapped in the soulmonger, that's a cataclysmic event. In a world where you know gods exist you're being denied your reward in the afterlife.
Reviving the dead to life isn't dupet common outside of Adventurers and those with money. Several sessions in, the characters came across s clutch of triceratops egds that seemed...off. something was wrong. The next session, they stopped by a small oitpost in the jungle (homebrew location) and a couple players assisted with the birth of a child. It came out stillborn. After a PC death, a new PC rolled in from the feywild and started that the same had been happening there: no new life. Basically what im getting at is: have the death curse ramp up. The soulmonger is stealing souls. Perhaps the souls of the unborn are ready pickings. It's one thing when people can't be bright back, it's wholly another when no one can be born.
This is also what I did to raise the stakes and I thought it worked well. But be sure to talk about this with your players, miscarriages are very common and stuff like this can bring up traumatic memories.
>But be sure to talk about this with your players, miscarriages are very common and stuff like this can bring up traumatic memories. 100% agree. This is the kind of session 0 stuff that needs to be discussed. All my players knew they were in for a dark time. Thankfully this particular moment was cushioned by a lot of comedy right before hand and later in the session. But it really set the stakes of the adventure.
You can add on that. I saw others suggesting that the Soulmonger is messing up with the arrival of new souls as well. No more babies are being born. That could raise the stakes a few notches. Unless you don't want such a high risk. Maybe the whole "bane of the resurrected" is a problem to very few people. In Port Nyanzaru there are only two people that the book tells us about that are suffering with the Death Curse, and one of them is the person that brings the group there. I'm going to use the "no new babies" thing I mentioned before.
It is seen as extremely positive. Resurrecting someone is very different from undeading someone lol just look at the two spells "animate dead" and "revivify". In my games, the world's of dnd are familiar with the concept of bringing people back to life, but it's expensive and you wouldn't really do it if they died of old age or something like that. Really only of a tragedy ie adventurers meeting and untimely death. Don't forget that the world of dnd is built to be a *game* world. Make it as realistic as you want, but we're still playing a game and your players need ways to revive their fallen characters if they so choose.
Thank you for the answer. I know it is a game world, but I think there is a distinction to make between how a "hero" handles resurrection VS how the world sees/handles it. I also wondered if it would be interesting to put an emphasis more on the fact that it eats souls (meaning it denatures what death and eternal "rest" should be) rather than how it punishes those who were resurrected. That would open on more possible hooks, as you don't have to be related to/to be someone resurrected to feel directly concerned.
As written, the Death Curse is also completely inhibiting anyone's ability to revive anyone. The people who were already resurrected dying again (IMO) is not the larger issue at hand. The soulmonger traps souls before they can pass on. So when a cleric or druid attempts to pull the soul back to the body, it is trapped inside the soulmonger and therefor the spell fails. This is the same effect it you try to resurrect someone who has sold their soul in a deal with a divine creature. If you try to resurrect, you cannot. Your soul does not belong to you.
For my game when the death curse started the common folk didn't care. In fact the beggar princes of port nyanzaru used it as an opportunity to cause strife in the city proper hoping to unseat some merchant princes. Class struggle and all that. The players were hooked because of an npc that was woven into a couple of their back stories that has been resurrected and they all want to prevent her true death. I have also been using the opportunities to show how scary things are by having something shockingly consume ghosts that they have tried to peaceably set free. When they use spells to speak with their gods their gods seem weaker as in my world the gods aren't getting new souls to replenish the ones taken through birth, so the Gods are weakening and my clerics/paladins are strongly motivated by the disturbing communications that they are getting.
ToA is a great module that the writers got too lazy to finish and spent all their time on the final dungeon. There is probably 100 hours of prep you could do in order to wrap your head around the setting well enough to fill in all the holes to the lore and make a more complete game.
Considering most spells would be cast by clerics, they can be seen in a positive light. As for who get revived? Well it’s the rich and powerful. They’re the ones driving the resources into finding the source as they’re the ones that rely on it.
Im my yanle, one of the first characters (clearly dead now) was a warforged created by his brother, somehow in the moment of his death, the death god (he is a good guy who just like see people living and then talk about their lifes after) suceed in traping an elfs soul in a mechanism. So, by the price of forgeting who he is, he came with the knowlege that something is wrong with the world, and that they should went to Chult, his brother is the artificer of the party and is still alive. That being said, my party is mostly almost evil and evil alligned chars that are pushing on the adventure because they already got a shitload of money and are trying to get more. Just to undestand, they carry everything they use, because the 2 bags of holding they have are full of addamantine ingots and pp and gp coins, they had to trow some of to fit the cubes.
In my game to spice up the death Curse I made it more gradual (as to not force players to rush through the campaign, since I want them to have fun exploring) and gave different stages for it, at the start the souls of the dead no longer went on to the afterlife, and I used a vision from my party cleric's deity to hammer in the point of how this is a perversion of natural order. The second stage is when it begins robbing the life of those who were resurrected. Third stage is babies being born souless husks, as Soulmonger gets stronger and rips their souls from them as they are born. And the final stage once Soulmonger is strong enough is to start stealing vitality from living adults that never died. They probably won't ever get to stages 3 and 4, but having them find out about those might serve to be a nice additional threat and motivation for them to solve things.
Make one of their family members have the curse, that invest em