Death, Imprisoned!

The following is from the introduction to the module, which sets up the players' mission.

"Once upon a time, in a plague ravaged village in the middle of an idyllic, agrarian region, DEATH was trapped and imprisoned by a vengeful hedge Witch."

"DEATH was imprisoned, unable to continue the gathering and escorting of the souls of the dead into their afterlife as it had for millennia.  From that moment on, no mortal being can find release from life through death. Instead, all mortals find UNMORTALITY at the end of their lives."

"UNMORTALS are neither alive nor dead nor undead. They are instead blighted with horror, pain and awareness." 

Using the pointcrawl

The player's objective is very straightforward; find and kill the Witch and so release DEATH from imprisonment and return the world to the normal order. The locations, NPCs, encounters and treasures are briefly summarised, allowing the module to be easily dropped into an existing game world, or can be fleshed out as required.

 A couple of twists offer themselves. Firstly, a PC “killed” on the quest could carry on as an UNMORTAL, a possible nice surprise for the player as the character is able to take more damage and carry on. A less happy surprise would be if the UNMORTAL later became subject to an uncontrolled “Dire Rage”, attacking all in sight! 

It should be possible to use Death, Imprisoned! with pretty much any campaign setting, or solo or as a funnel.  This version is written with fantasy elements in mind, however swapping out The Witch for a maddened A.I., vengeful scientist or terrorist and DEATH with a deadly virus or runaway nanobots works for a sci-fi, cyberpunk or modern alternative.

Update September 2024

St Tomaz's Sword advneture was added to the Zungeon Jam 2025- link here