PCs as undead campaign idea

Hi everyone,

I'm planning a short D&D campaign with a twist: the players are undead creatures who cannot be permanently killed, and they're not happy about it. The party gradually discovers the only way to break their curse is to find and kill the necromancer responsible for raising them. I want them to arrive at this conclusion organically through investigation, not handwaved into it.

I'm stuck on early-game hooks and intermediate adventures. I'm open to different twisty directions for the necromancer (unaware or innocent, sympathetic, already dead, etc.), but struggling to build out the journey.

The vibe would be dark fantasy, with room for emotional beats or horror depending on the table's preference.

Any adventure seeds or NPC ideas would be appreciated!

Perhaps they could visit a wizard or demon who reveals to them the nature of their existence in exchange for a favor (being a quest or something). If you make the necromancer already dead, you could have them go to the underworld or something and bargain for his life so they can stop the curse. It would be kind of fun if you didn’t tell them they were undead (if they don’t know already) and when one of them naturally dies (or has a forced death at a high level encounter) they discover that fact and eventually learned that they all are under the same curse. You could also have it where certain temples and holy grounds are impassable to them since they’re undead, and certain beings would probably be able to be able to notice their cursed nature. The necromancer could also be secretly their old friend, who after their original deaths, brought them back to life with the exception of their memories. Have them go through processes that would naturally arouse suspicion to their origins, like a cult who recognizes the kind of magic n that was used on them, or an alchemist who sold the necromancer the components. Noble groups probably were trying to stop the necromancer, and could lead to them trying to hunt down the players whilst also giving them vague clues to the identity of the necromancer. There’s various ways you could do this but that is a rather creative campaign. Let us know if you need help with anything else (or want more ideas)

Sounds like they're all Revenants. Look it up in the monster manual, might give you some inspo

Quote from Gnomarchy >>

I'm planning a short D&D campaign with a twist: the players are undead creatures who cannot be permanently killed, and they're not happy about it. The party gradually discovers the only way to break their curse is to find and kill the necromancer responsible for raising them. I want them to arrive at this conclusion organically through investigation, not handwaved into it.

Investigation plots are hard to do well in an RPG, and that particular plot point is really academic research, which typically means one of the following:

• A PC figures it out, probably with a arcana check.
• An NPC tells them the problem.
• They have a research montage in a library or similar and figure it out.
• They get someone to perform a spell of some sort to determine an answer.
• Some combination, such as needing to do research to find the person who can give them the answer/cast the spell.

I think it might be a fun or annoying aspect on how the NPCs react to the fact that they are undead, making things more difficult to figure out but also opening up some roleplay potential.

Maybe they have to find a hag or a famed oracle to tell them, but again, their undead nature might make things a tad bit more difficult for them. 

Also, do you have rules for their undead nature yet? It's the main focus of the game, so it shouldn't be handwaved.

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

Investigation plots are hard to do well in an RPG, and that particular plot point is really academic research, which typically means one of the following:

• A PC figures it out, probably with a arcana check.
• An NPC tells them the problem.
• They have a research montage in a library or similar and figure it out.
• They get someone to perform a spell of some sort to determine an answer.
• Some combination, such as needing to do research to find the person who can give them the answer/cast the spell.

 
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean investigation in the sense of a noir detective. I more meant that information would come up organically during adventures.

Quote from WolfeCriedPup >>

I think it might be a fun or annoying aspect on how the NPCs react to the fact that they are undead, making things more difficult to figure out but also opening up some roleplay potential.

Maybe they have to find a hag or a famed oracle to tell them, but again, their undead nature might make things a tad bit more difficult for them. 

Also, do you have rules for their undead nature yet? It's the main focus of the game, so it shouldn't be handwaved.

 
No rules specifically, because in principle the PCs could choose to be different types of undead. The only common thread should be that PC deaths are painful and set the party back, but otherwise can't resolve the problem.

Quote from Gnomarchy >>

Hi everyone,

I'm planning a short D&D campaign with a twist: the players are undead creatures who cannot be permanently killed, and they're not happy about it. ...

 Have a conversation with your players before you get too attached to this setup to make sure everybody is on board with the central conceit, or at least with there being a major plot twist. If you're going to do something like have certain spells or healing magic in general not work on the player characters now is the time to let them know. It's best not to ascribe feelings or state of mind to the characters/players. Instead of telling them "you aren't happy about this" I would recommend creating a ticking clock tied to their condition. As they investigate they'll discover they can't die because they're already dead, but the longer this goes on the greater the risk they become trapped as unwilling passengers who can only bear witness as their bodies are used to commit unspeakable evils. Because if you don't attach something like that to it, some players are going to love the Twilight of it all and say "nah, I'm good being undead" or find some similar reason to not be invested in curing their affliction. Give them stakes and they'll have a reason to be unhappy about it versus just being told "so this happened and you don't like it." 

You might want to plan ahead for spells and other effects that treat undead differently than other creature types.  Hallow, Antilife Shell, and a paladin's Divine Sense come to mind, but there are probably others.  The 2014 rules also prevented healing spells from being used on undead, but that appears to have been removed from the 2024 rules.  So the classes chosen by the PCs, the rule set you're using, and the type of adventure they get into, would all affect how many "in-world clues" get thrown at them right away.  If somebody's playing a paladin, their first use of Divine Sense would just reveal it right away.

I think you might also want to plan in advance, whether the undead PCs would still get hungry or tired the way they normally would.  Are they still susceptible to poisons and disease?   And does there always seem to be vultures lurking around wherever they go?  Can they still enter holy ground?  These aren't really story or NPC ideas like you asked, but some of them would be important clues, and I also think they would affect the adventures you'd want to use.

I wrote a few-shot campaign fairly similar to this. The premise is that the party wake up in a castle, in the bodies of various undead (zombies, ghouls, etc). Slowly, their memories return. They remember they were an adventuring party who came to this castle to kill a necromancer, but they must have gotten TPK'd and the necromancer turned them into undead servants. Now the necromancer is laying on the floor dead (heart attack, he was old), and the characters' minds and class abilities have returned to them. But they are still stuck in undead bodies and have to find a way to fix that, and soon, because there's another party of clerics and paladins at the gate who have come to destroy the necromancer and all his undead minions.  Also, they don't know how much time has passed! 

So it feels like you're having difficulty working through the problem because you're starting in the middle rather than at the beginning. The party are undead and they want to fix that. That's the middle. The beginning is, "a necromancer turned the party into undead". That's where we need to start. How did that happen? Once you know the circumstances of the "becoming undead" part you'll better understand the "un-becoming undead" part. You also need to decide how long it has been since they were turned. And what were they doing in that time? Necromancers don't generally create undead and then just shuffle them off into the wilds to roam free. They create undead to be servants. So why are the party not still doing that? How did they escape? How long has it been since they escaped?

You'll need to figure out the past so that you can accurately describe the present to the players so that they can effectively plan their future course of actions. There's a limit to how much they can discover "organically through investigation". It's not like a pack of ghouls can walk into a library and ask for books on necromancy and curse removal. Anywhere that might have the answers they seek will be a place that would hunt down and try to destroy a wandering pack of undead. Also, if you want this to be a short, or even a short-ish campaign, then you don't want your players just searching aimlessly for clues. You want the path from Start to Finish to have as few dots to connect as possible, or that babbling gaggle of cats at your table will spend hour after hour doing perception checks on doors and insight checks on furniture. 

So here's an idea: The party attacked the necromancers castle, got TPK'd, and got turned into undead servants. An indeterminate number of months or years later, the undead party was doing some chores maybe in the basement or maybe out behind the castle or wherever, when a bunch of clerics and soldiers showed up, arrested the necromancer, and hauled him off to face a very quick trial that will most likely end with him tied to a bunch of firewood doing a Johnny Storm impersonation. So the party return to the castle and realize they are no longer bound to the necromancer's service because he's no longer there to maintain that control. Now they have two choices: they can run away and try to find a cure to the undead condition themselves, or they can track the soldiers and clerics who arrested the necromancer and try to find a way to convince them not to kill the necromancer until he has cured the party. I don't know how they would do that, but I'm sure the players at my table would be able to think of a few ideas that range from terrible to plausible to hilarious. 

Anyways, that my 2 c.p. Good luck.