Death Metal Gaming, Part 1

*This article will be presented in two parts, with Part 1 describing the construction of the adventure and Part 2 providing a report of how the adventure played out.*

PART 1

When three members of a death metal band come looking for a 4E Dungeons & Dragons game, you’d better be ready to deliver.  Sure, one of them was my son, but that didn’t leave me feeling any less intimidated, since they were each several feet taller than me and could have easily moshed me into a chunky paste of flesh, blood, and dice.  Their band, Orgy of the Damned, plays songs like Feces Fiend, Awakening That Which is Dead, and Reanimator, so I decided to build an adventure that was gritty, deadly, and hardcore, one that creaked and moaned and dripped with the darkest parts of the mortal spirit.  Thus, I had to reluctantly discard my Mr. Hoppy’s Hopland game.

Given the players’ experience, I elected to create the characters myself and avoid wading through dozens of races, classes, powers, and feats and fielding questions like, “Okay, tell me about this Scions of Zarak Initiate again.”  I decided the party would be soldiers who had deserted their military unit and were fleeing across the land, looking for a place to rest:  a dwarf shock-priest of Abbathor, an elf ranger and sniper, and a warforged fighter inhabited by the ghost of a dead human commander.  The dwarf and elf were easy picks, total fantasy standards, and the warforged would stand in as my human, since I find the concept just so ineffably cool.

For the game, I wanted to keep the complexity low but the action high to engage their attention, and also I wanted a situation that they would immediately comprehend.  I found myself thinking about a village and about zombies.  The village would be a classic medieval one:  muddy roads, a cluster of tumble-down buildings, simple folk, little defense.  And the zombies?  They would come in the form of an apocalypse – mindless, bloody, and infectious.  Additionally, I figured I’d set it at night and during a downpour, since many games take place under sunny blue skies.

My first question:  Why would there be so many zombies?  Generally speaking, a zombie apocalypse requires more than a couple dozen bodies.  The village would need a graveyard, but not just a typical, modest one.  No, it would have to be enormous to account for all the shambling dead.  So why was this particular graveyard so enormous?  Because… there was a battle.  Yeah, a battle, long ago, hundreds of years, there was a huge battle at this very spot, with thousands of lives lost, marking the place as a historic site.  And because the party had a dwarf, an elf, and a kinda-sorta human, this long-ago battle would have been between an army of dwarves, elves, and humans against a faceless demonic horde.

And the second question:  What caused the zombie apocalypse?  Naturally, I thought of a shooting star event, as in “Night of the Comet.”  I imagined this blue skyfire slamming into the historic graveyard north of the village, causing the villagers, led by their mayor, to come investigate.  They would find something, this artifact – the Tear of Orcus!  I saw it as a perfectly smooth, glowing blue sphere, three feet in diameter.  The villagers screw around with it, just like they always do, and there’s this huge blast of necrotic energy that transforms the people around it and raises the long dead underneath it.  This is what the characters walk into, staggering through a heavy, soaking rain to a dark and seemingly deserted village.

At this point, I had a story but not an adventure.  Because I can only see a thing when I see it, I went online and hunted up (AKA stole) a village map which met my requirements, and then figured out six encounter set pieces based on several GameMastery Flip-Mats  I had:

1. Approaching. Through the sheeting rain, the characters see a figure in the road, and they realize most of its head is missing.  Other minions claw up from the mud around them and attack.
2. Entering Village. After entering the village, minions and a few brutes attack the party.
3. Exploring Village. A little while after that, minions, brutes, and an artillery zombie attack the party.  The difficulty increases with this battle.
4. Survivors. Introduce a handful of uninfected villagers, hiding from the undead and fighting where they can.  This scene can be used for exposition and an extended rest, and also provide a couple magic items for the heroes.  Instead of wasting time and space writing up the NPCs, I named them and, for characterization, noted a person I knew from my life, from sports, or from celebrity.  For example, I named one Aldua, and wrote “Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island.”
5. Tear of Orcus. North of the village, the glowing Tear of Orcus rests in the middle of a ruined landscape, surrounded by undead minions.  Upon examination, the party will find evidence of all the traffic here and also a teardrop shaped cavity in the sphere.  When the mayor led the villagers here, he took a teardrop shaped piece of the sphere back to the meeting hall.
6. Village Meeting Hall. The town mayor, transformed into an undead controller, resides with several zombie guards inside the fortified meeting hall.  The characters must get into the meeting hall, defeat the mayor, and return the teardrop piece to the sphere to lift the curse.  Of course, when they put the piece in, the sphere dilates open into a pair of iron cobras that must be destroyed.

I wanted to keep the adventure freeform and sandboxy, allowing the players to move around and investigate as they wanted.  It’s a fairly scary thing for me, since I tend to be an “on the rails” DM, but I thought I’d give this a try.  I didn’t know if they’d just wander around obliterating zombies, try to solve the problem and lift the curse, or even say, “This village sucks,” and turn around and leave.  As it happened, they dipped into all three options.

Read Part 2…