Thinking ahead to Cult of Undeath

I said recently that I'm getting very close to finishing up the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER process—with the exception, of course, of finding a group to run it for. I'm not completely over the finish line, but the next steps are both small and few. And I don't intend to leave it hanging while I run off after the newest hot idea in my head, but I do think that as the finale of CIW is approaching, it's not a bad idea to have some early, preliminary thoughts about the next 5x5—CULT OF UNDEATH—already in my head. COU is, of course, the earliest project to adapt an existing campaign or adventure path into my game. I started it thinking that I'd hew relatively closely to the printed campaign and mostly just edit out superfluous or redundant dungeon crawling and overly long side quests. As I went through my first draft of talking about how I'd do it, I found that that wasn't going to be sufficient to give me an outcome that I actually liked. If you use the CULT OF UNDEATH tag, and go back to the beginning, you can see the whole story of how my thinking evolved on that over the course of many months of staggered development, followed by big holes, and then me revisiting the idea years afterwards. Very little is left of the original Carrion Crown adventure path that was originally meant to be the nucleus of the campaign, other than the ideas of 1) a kind of fantasy Transylvania as the setting. 2) the game starts off with a funeral, and the PCs as minor heirs in the will—including a charge to help set-up the deceased's young daughter who is now alone in the world 3) growing suspicions that he may have been murdered by a necromantic cult. 

There's some other good ideas in there too as you go through the modules, at least at a high level, but I never thought that they fit into a coherent plot structure of any kind with the main story, other than the contrivance of a multi-part MacGuffin that has to be chased. There's a poorly conceived idea of a Frankenstein monster put on trial for murder (lolwut) and the PCs becoming his defense attorneys, there's the hunter's lodge in the forest where you're supposed to save the werewolves from... even worse werewolves? And there's the vampire city adventure where you... save the vampires from a vampire serial killer?

At most a portion of the high concept can be taken out of those, but they have to be put into a completely different context in order to work. I do have a much bigger town with an Academy where professors suspiciously get up to things that they should leave alone, where a Frankenstein monster could have been made, but that's not really taking anything from the adventure path that isn't already in the novel of Frankenstein to begin with. A hunter lodge in the forest with werewolf problems is also a great setting, but saving werewolves from worse werewolves is silly beyond reason, as is saving vampires from worse vampires.

Sometimes midwits claim that Star Wars is a remake of The Hidden Fortress, which is ridiculous for the version of the film that was actually filmed. Sure, some early drafts hewed more closely to the plot of Kurosawa's film, but by the time we get to the script that actually got filmed, just about the only things left were the concepts of a princess in peril (which is so generic as to beg the question of why it should be credited to Fortress at all) and the two argumentative peasants who created a kind of framing device for the main story, represented in Artoo and Threepio. I have a funny feeling that when I actually get to the point of running COU that whatever actually came from Carrion Crown will similarly be very little other than the set-up. 

The nice thing about my 5x5 Fronts set-up is that it makes it a little bit easier to incorporate and mix together elements from completely different plot-threads in the same game; something that the adventure paths kind of sort of did, but poorly. So yeah—Professor Alpon von Lechfeld and his unfortunate orphaned daughter will still be the set-up, but the whole chase for MacGuffins to raise a powerful trapped lich Dark Lord will not be. Exactly what these necromancers wanted from von Lechfeld is TBD, but I'm quite tired of the whole "release a trapped Dark Lord" plots already, so I'm going to avoid it. 

Other fronts will be in the forest and deal with werewolves, sure—maybe. And one will be an urban vampire themed front. And I'll even have an analog to Innsmouth, as Carrion Crown does, but it'll be in the swamps rather than the seashore and have to do with reptile cultists rather than deep ones. It'll actually probably be more closely related to the first three adventures of the Age of Worms adventure path than it will with the Wake of the Watcher adventure in Carrion Crown. I doubt I'll borrow anything at all from that module. For the final of the five fronts, it might be nice if I laid off of the supernatural threats and had something to do with a band of highwaymen.

1. Necromantic cult
2. Werewolves at the forest lodge OR swamp witches stalking nobles in a forest lodge... I'm starting to like this second one better the more I think about it.
3. Vampires in a bigger city (Grozavest or Mittermarkt)
4. Reptile cultists and monsters in the Eltdown Fens
5. Highwaymen run rampant

So, sure—those aren't fleshed out even to the extent that I did on my first CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER post, but at least it points me in an actual direction as I start that one up here relatively shortly. 

I've also got my second group of iconics ready to go for this one: Ragnar Clevenger (Stefan's older brother), Cailin Clevenger, his young wife and the victim of a vampire attack that left her a dhampir, desperate to make sure she doesn't slide all the way into vampirism, Dean Bannermane the irascible former burglar, and Fredegar de Vend, who has a complicated backstory where his noble house was caught up in the fall of Audrey Hardwicke (from Stefan's backstory.) Rather than feeling resentful and bitter at the Clevengers for ultimately bringing about this family's fall, he's bitter and resentful at his family for putting themselves in a position where the Clevengers had no choice but to bring them down for the good of the people of the Hill Country. He feels he has a great debt to the Clevengers for rooting out the evil in his family, even if it upended his life of luxury and privilege.

Anyway, just to make this post more graphically interesting, here's a couple of wights followed by a few highwaymen from the fifth column. I'm even considering having those few wights be part of the bandit group, just to mix things up. But if not, they'll fit well with the necromancer cult.