D&D - Grave Robbing or Grand Theft Souls
Grave Robbing
A Lich accused of soul-trafficking flees across planar lines.
An apollopunk spelljammer adventure framework for levels 1-5(?)
The Night of the Grim Star
"Your Majesty," his whisper rung out like the polishing of funeral bells, "I bring you grim news. Your new star is no blessing."
King Thalor stared back unblinking into the petitioner’s glowing green eyes. “Why should I believe you, stranger?”
“I was a King once.” Pulling back his hood, Malachor revealed his skeletal features. Among Gasps he pulled out a vial of sand from his robes he poured it on the floor. Each grain began swirling and twisting into the shape of a castle, until every parapet and arch was visible “Like you I saw the star. Our church prayed and communed, and learned of their judgment. Our most powerful witches, arcanists, and clerics worked together to plead for mercy. I had just enough time to cast a spell to save my people from this so-called retribution.” The sand formed a large sphere, and slowly, alien oceans and continents rose to the surface. A speck of white light streaked into the planet, then out the far side, and the globe fractured and drifted apart. Oceans poured into the core and the continents broke as the land fell in on itself.
“What would you have me do? What is it that you want, grim messenger?”
The Redeemer’s answer was haunting. "I seek to defy the tyranny of the heavens," he said. “Your people can become the power that defies the stars themselves."
Welcome Aboard!
This setting and framework were developed out of necessity at a community center. The goal was to make bite sized encounters or one shots that wouldn’t get bogged down in the mercurial ways that kids can experiment while role-playing. The main story helps support that.
The Hook
The players are hired by an intrepid changeling captain, Varia Swiftwind. They have a job to move a sealed, armored sarcophagus to the next star system, and drop it on any reasonably warm planet. Our characters may have a variety of reasons for wanting to be on the ship.
Acolyte: This could be a mission to spread the word of your religion to folks that need to hear it.
Charlatan: You made some enemies and/or divorces, and now you need some space.
Criminal/Spy: You have been hired to keep tabs on the whereabouts of Varia and the ship.
Gambler: You won/lost a bet, and now are desperate/rich enough to get on a ship.
Hermit: You are trying to find a new place to be alone. Everywhere has some place.
Haunted One: You have seen great destruction, and are fleeing your vanquished homeworld.
Noble: A successful interplanetary voyage will earn the respect of your peers in court.
It could also be as simple as needing the money, or getting home.
Little did they know that they would be harboring a fugitive. Inside the sarcophagus is a very powerful Lich named Malachor who is fleeing the persecution of Angels.
The Players
Varia Swiftwind - the Captain of the ship, wants to live, and do the job.
Malachor the Redeemer - Lich harboring billions of souls.
Seraphiel Stormbreaker - Angel who is hot on your trail.
The Structure
As part of the payment the Lich is making to the Captain, the entire crew has donated a drop of their blood in order to have the Clone spell cast for them. One room of the ship is filled with these waiting tube grown bodies, suspended in green liquid.
Cosmically speaking, everything is more concentrated around stars. This also includes arcane power. Ley Lines are concentrated around gravity wells, but also connect stars like drawings of constellations. Between interstellar jumps, the ship needs to recharge its FTL capacitors by soaking in energy from ley lines.
The Angelic Council has assigned Seraphiel Stormbreaker to bring in Malachor. Seraphiel is known to seedier elements across the planes as the Angel that doesn’t play by the rules. There are even rumors that he has been bribed in the past. What you know now, is that he has a bead on your ship, and is flying straight to it.
Each school of magic gives off different kinds of electromagnetic radiation. The lich is hooked into the ship systems, and is fueling the engines with damned souls from his collection. As the ship accelerates away from its pursuers, those necromantic wavelengths get redshifted and eventually look like abjuration, or even get so long as to get lost in the soup of cosmic background radiation.
Every time you stop you try to find something to give you an edge in this game of cat and mouse.
Lore Recap
The crime train makes frequent stops. Gotta shake this guy.
Lich has a bunch of souls, and needs to get them somewhere the Law can’t find him.
Seraphiel is a loose cannon that doesn’t play by the rules.
Running the Game
Each session has a fixed length. The longer everyone takes to do stuff, the less time they have to work on the objective. If you run out of time to play, Seraphiel shows up and kills everyone, and you wake up back on the ship in your clone bodies next session (after Malachor has made you a new clone) If you beat the encounter and have time left over you can hang out on the ship.
I started with everyone going around the table introducing themselves, their character and supplying me with one descriptor of the ship, and one room in it. This is how we got a sleek red freighter, with an onboard bar-mory, theater, pool, and holodeck. After that I used https://www.dungeonscrawl.com/ to draw out this ship. The pdf was sixty pages, and it was a little bit too big, but not much. Having a massive ship really gives characters with movement mechanics a time to shine. Towards the end I was having the lich exchange haste spells for loyalty to help people get around. The pool may seem frivolous, but how else would someone use their trident of fish command?
While you are on the ship, players can commit to some downtime activities, talk to the captain, the lich, and use the sensors to see what kind of encounter you’ll have next and prepare for it.
Missions
Missions have a standardized format. Each mission has:
Mission Name
Radiation Type (to be seen on sensors)
Primary Objective
Setting
Enemies
For simplicity playing with kids, I started each session with them getting teleported down to their objective, so there's no time to dawdle on the ship, or get distracted.
I will publish some different sessions I ran and planned in the coming days.
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