Alanik Ray wrote:Since we're on the subject... is there any wizard/sorcerer spell similar to death ward or negative energy protection? Am I crazy or only clerics get to have this kind of spells in 3.5?
In 2E it was a cleric spell too.
But Van Richten's arsenal has an arcane spell that might work: Inviolate Soul.
One Idea I had was to apply the rule that the shroud prevents healing and also causes quicker death. Every day the characters make a save vs DC 10 +1 per day in the shroud vs death, it also for this weakening of the effect makes all damage in the field of effect for those healed by positive energy or rest is unable to be healed unless the spell consecrate is cast. Similar to vile damage in BoVD.
This keeps it lethal but slowly in the outright sense, and yet combat is vicious as the cleric can only do so much if nothing at all to ease the wounds.
Other than that I would leave it mostly like it is!
A different take on the Shroud, inspired however by the previous post, would be that it kills by greatly accelerated aging. Perhaps instantly in the case of the peasants and over the course of up to a month in the case of great heroes, with some degree of randomness thrown in to keep everyone guessing. A fortitude and/or level based roll would not be difficult to define. This would permit adventuring in the Shrould but put anyone doing it on a clock and extract from them a price. When you think about it, the idea of adventuring within the Shroud should be daunting in the extreme and indeed ought to border on madness. To my eye, we do not need to do what Planescape did for planar travel, make it accessible to everybody. An adventure into the Shroud should be high level, although perhaps not quite so high level as it currently is, presupposing extremely potent magic items and/or spells.
Last edited by cure on Sat Aug 22, 2009 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Below are snipets set within the Shroud or related to it. The first three in particular are told from the perspective of a dirgist from a high level party that penetrated the Shroud as part of an attempt to steal out of Necropolis a very heavy object.
"We did not have time to prepare an appropriate construct and involving outsiders was unthinkable. The unliving would not do and the living, even with the amarnath, were too likely to become their opposite. That left elementals and a test demonstrated that they could withstand the Shroud. Covered by a storm, we entered the city with two bound elementals of the air, eventually setting them upon the natives as a distraction. An earth elemental bore the prize to the Vulchar where a bound water elemental lay in wait with a barge. But its exposure to the veil of death had been too long and a century upon the salt flats of Har'Akir could not have been less kind. What had been a force of nature was now a calcified, inexplicably quadrupedal form, distinguished by a yawning maw and a strength perfectly insufficient to bear us away. Fatally, attention turned from the useless thing to the summoning of a substitute, leaving unmarked, in our very midst, a newly minted minion of Death, with a breath more withering than the wind of the Ashen Wastes."
"Imagine having every song you ever sang, in joy and in sorrow, drip, drip, dripping out of you like blood. And you are perfectly conscious of the loss counted off by the drops. It is your very genius that quickens the dance, that quickens the night black parody of man licked by, and licking you with, insatiable flame."
"The dead whisper true. But Death will not be cheated a second time. The stratagem does not admit of repetition. And I escaped only its bony hands, not its ashen realm. What is to be salvaged from this? Much is confirmed. And I may have glimpsed something unexpected. I do not believe that Death was simply gloating in choosing to torment me with the undead minions newly minted from the elementals that we had summoned to its abode. It shares some profound affinity with them that exceeds that with the other slain. It might have taken my soul personally and I expect it ultimately intended to, indeed still intends to. But it took the greatest pleasure, a mothers pleasure, in letting the wreck of the air elemental in particular, that roiling, red-eyed abyss, suck from my lungs not just the air that I breathe but, little by little, my very life."
-Extract from an unsigned, encrypted letter recoved by the Kargat in a bottle beached at the mouth of the Musarde River
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Menu in Celebration of New Years Eve 750 BC
-Gnome liver terraine soaked in Kartakan port
-Elf tongue stuffed with thigh bone marrow
-Leg of Halfling preserved in its own juices
-Blackend Dwarf ribs
-Jellied Lamordian Brains
L’École d’Haute Cuisine, Il Aluk
- - -
"When I arrived with the buckets of water from the Vuchar river, he sat hunched at work before a prodigious pile of dead rats, separating flesh from bone with a knife. When I returned with more water the prodigious pile of dead rats sat hunched at work upon him, separating flesh from bone with tooth and claw."
-Falkovian military report detailing the death on December 23, 750 of company cook Timvad Nayor
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"The thing that did this was for a century confined within sewers and charged with the gathering of bone. The night that birthed Necropolis undid its chain and its life, bequeathing freedom and undeath upon what had been a corrupted elemental of water. It fled the power that arose to command the slain and made the Musarde and its tributaries, save for the Vulchar to which it does not return, its abode. Its passions are strong currents, rushing water, and living bone. The ivory of its victims it dons as you or I might a fine cloak. The cloak does not make the man, but the man makes much of the cloak. Listen for a soft chattering. Listen for a rattling roar. And where man, woman and child are flood caught, their screams cut short are its sign."
-Count Strahd von Zarovich XI, instructions for the hunt of Old Bones
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-Les frère de mort are a highly secretive guild based in Richemulot. Its members are freelance assassins who met untimely ends and were reanimated as constructs by Azalin in “an act of kindness” with an eye to eventually using them to penetrate the Death Shroud. They were subtly pushed together in Pont-au-Meseau that they might be tested. They number 6 currently, guided and brought back from destruction as need be by Ladislas Sintesti (construct Nec12 CE). They are equally willing to kill man, beast and man-beast, but are very conscious, indeed paranoid, about unwittingly creating patterns that might establish their existence and lead to their permanent destruction.
