++++++Forgotten Gods Spoilers++++++++

I felt recently that Thaur somewhat lacked character between Port Restful and Final Battle. Finding a city where people eat 'Mindshade' and think they are dead seemed a little improbable even for a messed up Shrine world. I therefore present my chapter. Afterlife - 'The Farm'.

The players leave Port Restful. On the way they may take a wrong turn. This leads to an attack by corpse crawlers, which drive them using overwhelming numbers into Afterlife. Afterlife, being a town where the people eat only Mindshade a plant that confuses them and in this case makes them think they have passed on and are just ghosts. The truth of what his happening in Afterlife though is much more monsterous.

The party can find only very acid soil around Afterlife and the only crop that grows is Mindshade, which weirdly enough thrives in acid soil. There is a symbiotic relationship between the humans in Afterlife and corpse crawlers. The corpse crawlers provide the village of Afterlife with protection from the outside world. They also provide perfect the soil conditions for one crop, Mindshade. When a human dies the corpse crawlers use it to reproduce. The corpse crawlers are effectively farming humans.

This puts the players in a bad place. The townsfolk are Imperial citizens being farmed by native fauna. Does the party try and fight it's way out or do they start killing townsfolk to get an opening. It seems like an interesting chapter. Let me know your thoughts guys.

The idea is nice, but I see one problem with it "logistically":

if the characters are attacked by enough crawlers to drive them into "Afterlife", how are they expected to break out of Afterlife? The numbers waiting for them outside will not have dwindeld, in fact the Crawlers are likely to pull in some more as they know they have fresh intruders that will need to be kept for days to be "affected".

Thereby, if the situation was bad enough to make FLEE THE ATTACKER into an option the characters even think about (they tend to be stubborn), there needs to be something inside of "Afterlife" that helps them to even the odds. And there is not, is it?

The cheesy option would be something like an old, unused utilitycar or truck, in bad repair and lacking fuel. The characters might only find the spare parts for the truck and need to question the villagers for the whereabouts of the truck itself or turn the whole village upside down to find it (perhaps in a shed or partly overgrown at the edge of the woods, near a field). If put back into working order, the characters could try to dash outwards, fending off corpse crawlers that try to climb onto it while they dash away.

The cheesy option would be something like an old, unused utilitycar or truck, in bad repair and lacking fuel. The characters might only find the spare parts for the truck and need to question the villagers for the whereabouts of the truck itself or turn the whole village upside down to find it (perhaps in a shed or partly overgrown at the edge of the woods, near a field). If put back into working order, the characters could try to dash outwards, fending off corpse crawlers that try to climb onto it while they dash away.

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I like the idea for a truck.

I like the idea for a truck.

Thanks If you want add some additional flavour to Thaur and the journey, add some Encounters that are no threat at all. Just local People doing local stuff. That way, you avoid to turn the cemetry planet of tour into something that feels no different from a deathworld.

I ran the session today. The main highlight was one of the players being executed for apostasy after being betrayed.

http://imgur.com/a/d3t40

The farm the players basically just ignored. They were ambushed by corpse crawlers trying to drive them back into Afterlife with blasts of acid right in front of them. The concept worked, but the execution was a little sloppy on my part. People liked the idea, but I didn't carry it off as well as I feel I could. It's a cool idea though for an additional Thaur chapter.

Here is a shot of them running past the corpse crawlers as the crawlers are trying to drive them back into the Afterlife

http://i.imgur.com/JiXYjr1.png?4

I calibrated the number of corpse crawlers to the number of shots the party fired. Effectively penalizing them for being aggressive. The next turn the total number of shots fired would be the number of crawlers.