Reworking Cult of Undeath

The final EBERRON REMIXED post can come after I've had some time to review the campaign setting and figure out exactly what I need to include (Dragonmarked Houses, plus tattoos?  Some other power groups?  Not even sure yet.)  In the meantime, I've been looking over my "5x5" for the CULT OF UNDEATH campaign, and am more unhappy with it than ever; so much so that I'm finally motivated to admit that it needs to be tossed out and replaced.

Specifically, two things just don't work for me.  1) Each "adventure" that I'm trying to convert is very chimney-like, and it has been difficult, if not impossible, to interweave them very well—at least not without putting them in a geographically much smaller place.  The whole point was to seriously prune the adventure path into being more of a single "mega-module" rather than six discrete yet linked modules.  The problem, of course, is that Adventure Paths by their very nature are quite railroady and come with a pre-programmed plot.  Somehow I need to divorce myself from this "plot" which means that I'm not going to resemble the AP nearly as much when it's done.  But that's OK, and in fact desirable.  2) The run-around looking for several McGuffins that all combine into a single Voltron-like McGuffin is just stupid, over-used, and I just don't really like anything about it anymore.  This second point marries well to the first one; it's the plot, and the locomotive that continues to drive it along the rails that creates this problem.  Solving both problems becomes the work of a single solution.

But if I'm completely yanking out the plot, and much of the premise of the AP, what in the world am I left with?  Well, that's what I need to figure out.  I have some scenarios, encounters, etc. that I can figure out what to do with, and make much more open world and hexcrawl-like in design... assuming I can find a way to make them pull together in some way at all.  So, let's see how I can rebuild a series of events in such a way that it is just stuff that's happening that the PCs can get involved with, rather than a rather silly "rush all over collecting McGuffins" railroad.

First, let's dispense entirely with Ialomita.  This can happen in Mittermarkt, mostly.

• A well-loved professor, Alpon Lechfeld has died in what appears to be an accident—although there are some suspicious clues that cannot rule out foul play.  For the sake of getting the game going, I'm going to tell the PCs that they've all been asked to be pallbearers and are named as (minor) heirs in his will.  He'll give them a few things, but most of his fortune is left to his daughter Revecca.
• Ghosts are appearing in town, threatening (or at least frightening) many residents, that can be traced to a haunted and abandoned ruin of a former prison.  Why are they leaving their normal territory? (linked to the murder above.)
• A rampaging Frankenstein-monster is blamed for some more townsfolk murders.  This, and the ghosts, are probably happening at the same time, so nobody knows which is responsible.
• A mob of townsfolk wants to exhume Lechfeld and "put down his corpse"—of course, it turns out that someone has already exhumed him and dismembered his corpse, as well as apparently eaten some other recently dead in the graveyard.  Notably, an amulet that he was buried with is missing.  Revecca suggests that this amulet kept the ghosts in check in some way; if it's gone, that explains their extraordinary aggressiveness.
• The Frankenstein monster was a creation of Lechfeld himself in an extremely foolhardy experiment years ago, and it has come into town looking for him when he stopped visiting.  It really is a monster, though, not some misunderstood something or other—he's killed numerous townsfolk viciously.
• The ghosts have to be put down (salt and burn their remains) in their haunted house.
• The professor's beautiful and friendly and otherwise hopefully quite sympathetic daughter, is missing.  Gigantic wolf-paw prints and other hints of that nature surround the area she was last seen.
• Her kidnappers are, indeed, werewolves from the Bitterwood, and they've taken her to Innsburough.
• To follow up, the werewolves may have to be confronted in the Bitterwood, though.  They're too good at covering their tracks to be followed to Innsborough.
• The Black Path has Revecca in their grasp, and want to sacrifice her on the Devil's Reef by Otto von Szell, the manorial lord of the Innsborough territory.
• Revecca knows enough about her father's amulet to use it as a key to enter the sealed tomb of Grozavest.  This ability is related to its ability to suppress undead activity in some way.  But Otto von Szell had his own ideas, and wanted to call up some undersea daemon (Typhon?) to destroy his rivals in the Black Path.  Namely, Grigore Stefanescu.
• Stefanescu steals Revecca and her father's amulet, either from the PCs if they've rescued her, or from von Szell if for some reason they don't.  Maybe it's a ghoul group that actually carries out the abduction?  Ghouls from Dragomiresti seems like a good way to bring that into play.
• The ghouls take Revecca to Grozavest, where Stefanescu foolishly intends to "rescue" a Primogenitor sealed in with Melek Taus, thinking that by so doing, he will gain a champion capable of dealing with any of the other noble houses.

If you note; these bullet points aren't about what the PC's will do; they're about what various NPC's will do, and situations that arise because of their actions.  It's up to the PCs to determine what (if anything) they'll do about any of this.  I presume that most PCs will in fact take an interest in these developments and attempt to intervene, or plan their own counter-measures, or something.  It's entirely possible that they won't.  They may simply take an interest in farming, or hunting werewolves in the Bitterwood, or deciding that they think Lechfeld is a lost cause and his daughter is probably as corrupt as he was, or who knows what.  Maybe they get so caught up in rumors of the Nameless City of the Eltdown Fens that they abandon the rest of the country and go see if they can find it.  I dunno.  

If so, let them do what they like.  But keep track of the list of things that are meant to happen.  If Revecca is not rescued from von Szell, maybe he does manage to lure a Typhon daemon from the sea, who rampages across the countryside.  If they don't put down the ghosts, maybe Mittermarkt becomes so haunted that it is evacuated.  Maybe some other group of NPC adventurers show up and start solving problems.  Maybe the PCs even fall under suspicion as being involved somehow with all this nastiness.  

This isn't meant to be punitive really—although it can seem that way.  This is just what happens if the PCs don't do their job and rise to the occasion to save the kingdom.

And that's how you convert Carrion Crown into something that I could run.  I've got a setting; adapted from some prior development of mine, it serves reasonably well enough as an ersatz Ustalav—and why wouldn't it; it was developed under very similar design constraints.  I've got a system that feels sufficiently D&D-like, while serving my needs as a quick and easy to use swashbuckling system.  I've gotten rid of the worst railroad-like elements, I've pruned the AP of all of the (surprisingly, many) instances in which it betrayed the tone that it was meant to evoke.  It still feels like a module, but it focuses more on what will happen around the PCs (with the assumption that they'll intervene) rather than a plotline that they must follow.  Granted, if the PCs don't bite on the hooks you're dangling, then you've got your work a little bit more cut out for you than if they do, but that's not the purpose of module design to factor into account all of the things that the PCs might do instead.  The setting does include a hex map, so they can just ignore all of this and hexcrawl their way over the setting if they'd rather do that.

So, as the final leg of my CULT OF UNDEATH project, I'm going to flesh out the map a bit more, build a real D&D-style hex map (about 20x30 or so) in a very traditional sense, and key it up a bit.  That way, I've got all kinds of material available for you to potentially use.  Of course, like I said, it's not my intention that the PCs ignore these hooks, and as conditions get worse the more that they do ignore them, they will hopefully be prodded into taking some kind of preventative or mitigating action.  If they just don't, though—well, their negligence may indirectly be responsible for "blowing up" the setting.  Stefanescu is a fool to think he can control a Primogenitor.  I don't have Primogenitor stats, of course, but they'd be really nasty.  Not only that, opening up the seal to free one Primogenitor probably leaves an avenue for all of them to escape.  Twenty Primogenitors is a disaster on the order of getting hit by a Yellowstone supervolcano style eruption combined with being hit by a Biblical scale flood.  It just really sucks for everyone.  And to make matters worse; if the Primogenitors are free, why not Melek Taus himself?  

While there's some amount of ironic entertainment in thinking that the PCs allowed the Apocalypse to happen, I'm going to assume that such a result would be so statistically unlikely as to be a moot point.

EDIT: Well; I've got two more legs to the project, actually.  I want to flesh out that outline above with more of what I need.  Stats for antagonists, and whatnot, specifically.  Some more detailed location material in the cities and villages through which the game would presumably pass, etc.  Random encounter tables.  I dunno what else.  Anyway, it gives me plenty more CULT OF UNDEATH posts yet to make, I suppose...