He’s begun bolstering his army, and on top of that has decided to complete and re-man the fort at Weston Hill. It’s been standing derelict for the better part of a century, though, and the first thing the king decided should be done is to assess the current situation. At the moment, his army is occupied with recruitment and restructuring efforts, so the king must hire adventurers to go and explore the fort. Of course, he ends up hiring the PCs.

The situation at the fort is relatively benign. It is somewhat difficult to enter; the portcullises are long-since rusted shut and the stone walls are as impassable as they were designed to be. However, it should be fairly simple for a well-prepared group to gain entrance.

Most of the buildings have been destroyed by time and the elements. The barracks and tower still stand, though. Exploring the barracks, the PCs will eventually come to a wall in the basement which appears hastily-erected. If they examine it, they find it to be hollow and, behind it, is a door.

The door has been barred and locked, the lock melted with acid, spikes of metal have been used to jam the door shut, and mortar was used to seal it. Clearly, some effort was made to ensure that this door should never be opened, from one side or the other.

Inside are several dozen dessicated corpses, the remains of the supposed mutineers. Several of them are missing chunks of flesh, and teeth marks can be seen on the bones. One corpse remains notably intact, and is wearing finer garments than the rest. It was the commander, and in his hands he holds a journal detailing what really happened.

A few weeks after they’d first settled into the fort, one of the soldiers fell ill, complaining that he was seeing and hearing things. Hours later, he turned hostile, savagely attacking the doctor. He was locked in the brig. A few days later, the same fate befell another soldier and another, and within a week all but a few of them were locked away in this room. Finally, when the commander himself started seeing things, he ordered his second-in-command to lock him in with the rest and leave the fort, and to convince the king to abandon it.

If the PCs tell Thornwald what happened, he dismisses it and orders the fort re-staffed. He also hires the PCs on as scouts, to explore the land around the fort. He charges an experienced man by the name of Sir Andromus Galwain to command the fort.

A few weeks after the fort is re-opened, Sir Galwain sends for an audience with the PCs. He explains to them that the same events which happened when the fort was first opened are happening again; he’s sent word to Thornwald, but suspects the king will not allow the fort to be abandoned. Galwain doesn’t want to put his own men into investigating what’s happening, for fear of what the truth of what happened so many years ago might do to morale, and so he asks the PCs to figure out what’s causing this sickness and fix it.

Life, you see, is an interesting thing. Left unchecked, it would thrive and grow and reproduce until it choked itself on its own waste and smothered itself with its own mass. Without a grim reaper, carefully watching and pruning, the world would not be able to support such explosive growth, and like a raging bonfire with too little fuel life would snuff itself out.

Johann’s possesses a divine implement, a scythe, which allows him to perform his duties. It allows him to travel to any corner of the globe, to command vermin to spread a plague, to call hurricanes and blizzards and earthquakes, even to affect the fertility of an entire region. It’s not all bad, though, for the grim reaper’s job is not wanton destruction, but balance. Just as he can decimate a city, he can make it grow and prosper. He can make make the women bear more children more readily or the land bear more fruits.

The grim reaper is a mantle which is passed down through the ages. Each grim reaper is intimately aware of death, and in particular his own death. When the time draws near, they cease their duties in order to find the next reaper. It is almost an instinctual feeling, like a bird returning each year to the same nest in a city a half a continent away. The reaper knows who is destined to follow him and seeks out that person.

It is not an easy sell. The next person is invariably incredulous and hostile to the entire idea. The great power held by the reaper would be a terrible thing in the wrong hands, and so it is only entrusted into the most selfless, empathic person of an entire generation. The idea, to such a person, of wreaking death on such a wide scale for the rest of their lives is utterly anathema… but it is the final task of a reaper to convince his successor that the job must be done, and must be done by them.

Encounters with The Reaper

Johann is dying and decides that it is time to pass the mantle. The new grim reaper is to be the sister of one of the PCs. When she will not hear of it, Johann seeks out the PCs to help them convince her that she must accept her fate.

Someone has stolen Johann’s scythe and is using it to terrible ends. The PCs must recover it.

A dying noble has learned of Johann and the power he wields. He hires the PCs to bring Johann to him, so that he may convince Johann to grant him immortality.

Like all those afflicted by the plague, the ravaged wither and atrophy. However, their muscles and tissue at some point cease their decay. The end result is that ravaged have tight, gray skin with a dessicated appearance. All of their hair falls out, and their eyes become dark as the night.

Needless to say, the appearance of the ravaged is quite disconcerting. Some use this to their advantage to intimidate people, but most try and hide their appearance under baggy clothing and deep hoods. Few places willingly harbor the ravaged. Most, understanding that it’s not the poor being’s fault, just urge them along, but some places kill them on sight.

One notable exception is the Kamit pyramid-city Nertiti, now also known by the sobriquet “The Necropolis.” While most of the death-worshipping dwarves believe the ravaged to be terrible mockeries of death, the pharaoh of Nertiti decided that the ravaged are actually blessed by death, walking two worlds at once. He actively sends envoys abroad to seek out the ravaged and invite them to a new home. There are even rumors that the pharaoh is trying to infect himself with the lazarus plague, sure that he’ll become a ravaged.

Encounters with the Ravaged

Nostorin was once the son of the mayor of Lieberton, until he was stricken with the lazarus plague. He was abandoned in the middle of the forest, left for dead, so as to minimize the spread of the disease, but he did not die. He tried returning home, but when they saw him he was run out of town and would have been killed if he hadn’t found a good hiding place.

He’s been living on the fringes of society for several weeks now, careful to hide his identity, and has heard rumors about a “promised land” of sorts for people like him, a city in the desert called The Necropolis. Unfortunately, it is far away and the lands between here and there are still being ravaged by the plague. Any who recognized him for what he is would likely kill him on sight.

Thus, Nostorin needs some able bodied escorts. He has a small amount of money to pay them, as he managed to sneak into his old house and take his things. The PCs could come upon Nostorin fleeing for his life after being discovered, or might be approached by the cliché “mysterious stranger” in the corner of the tavern.

Spellblight is a magically-transmitted disease; it can pass along when someone infected by it casts a spell on someone else, and even when they are having a spell cast upon them! Many priests have contracted spellblight from healing a templar’s wounds.

The disease feeds on magical energy. It seems more severe when arcane magical energy is used, but it does not spare practitioners of divine magics. Interestingly, psionicists seem unaffected by the disease. When someone with spellblight casts a spell, they will feel a burning sensation throughout their entire body as if their blood itself was boiling. The more powerful the spell, the more intense the effect. If not careful, a wizard infected with spellblight could easily pass out from the pain or even die.

Aside from that, there are no other symptoms. It is almost impossible without the aid of divinations to determine if someone is infected with spellblight. Spellblight will usually go away on its own in a few weeks, though the process can be speeded along a bit by chewing ganthum root and drinking hot tal. Ganthum root is also useful for dulling the effects of spellblight. Fresh ganthum is most effective, but most magic users carry around dried ganthum root for emergencies, because you never know when spellblight will strike.

Encounters with Spellblight

Spellblight is a wonderful little disease to inflict on your PCs, as it’s fairly easy to introduce. All it takes is a single afflicted sorcerer to try and charm the warrior, and then the cleric who tries to heal or buff him is going to have a nasty surprise. Of course, the players might notice that the sorcerer was afflicted with it as well. In this case, there are two options to make it a bit more sneaky.

1: Have some people be immune to it. They still act as carriers, but it doesn’t affect them.

2: Add an incubation period. During the incubation period, the disease can still spread, but it won’t effect the host.

How the Lazarus Plague works is a mystery. It somehow puts a cease to all the biological activities in your body, but doesn’t really kill you in the sense we’re accustomed of thinking. In every clinical sense you’re dead; no heart beat, no need to breathe (though those afflicted by it still tend to out of habit), not even any signs of electrical activity in your brain.

In essence, you’re coasting, like a car on a hill with a broken engine. But just like that hill flattens out and you lose your inertia and stop moving, the Lazarus Plague doesn’t keep you going forever. You can still move your muscles, but just like when you’re alive they’ll tear when you stress them. Now, though, there’s no process to rebuild them. Your eyes dry out, wounds never heal, it’s a pretty terrible way to go, actually.

And here’s the worst part… Once all your muscles are atrophied and you can’t even move your tongue or your eyes… It’s still very much possible that you might be conscious in there. Among some of the first cases, scientists studying them said that the people remained cognizant and responded to stimuli up to the point where they literally couldn’t move anymore.

It’s a pretty scary thought, your body would essentially become your tomb. Most who contract the disease set their affairs in order and then elect to be cremated… Of course, there’s no evidence that that would work either. Victims have been beheaded and both their bodies and heads were kept under their control. Brains have been destroyed as have hearts, but it doesn’t seem that either of those are necessary for this “unlife.”

That raises the question, then; if burning you may not kill you, what happens to your consciousness when there’s no body left?