I want to run a short campaign that starts with the dead PCs' souls adventuring in the afterlife in Kelemvor's realm. Are there rules already for this? If not, what adjustments must I make to the rules for the PCs being dead when the campaign begins?
[RPG] Are there rules for role-playing in the afterlife
dnd-5eplanes
Related Solutions
That article doesn't come out and say it, but the ultimate goal of petitioners is to become their deity. Sort of, anyway. See, a petitioner who dies faithfully following their deities' precepts loses their memories, like you've read; What you haven't read is that the memory-less soul that's left has the sole goal of pursuing that deities' philosophy. Eventually, the petitioner comes to understand, embrace and embody that philosophy so completely that they think about and react to things exactly the same way their deity would - and that's the point at which they merge into them.
This means that petitioners of the same Power all have a simple and easy-to-understand goal, and only differ in what they're "missing" to reach it. You could say there's just one question you have to yourself about each player character to determine whether they'll have a motivation to pick up your plot hooks: "Will doing this bring her closer to who she's trying to become?"
You're therefore going to want to pick a Power for the PCs who is broad enough to support a wide variety of classes while still allowing all the PCs to gradually progress towards the same kind of personal ideal. That ideal also has to be compatible with adventuring, so something like a deity of protection or community might be a good bet.
When petitioners go in the dead-book, they're deader-than-dead. As in, the bashers are gone. Forever. No way to bring 'em back. If they're still on the plane they went to when they died, they merge with their deity or plane a little ahead of schedule; If they're on any other plane, the poor sods cease to exist. Oblivion embraces 'em, and whatnot. In other words, no matter what plane a petitioner is on when it shuffles off the post-mortal coil, raise dead and resurrection are off the table.
You might want to modify that for your campaign, or you might not. It's something to think about.
Other than that, the only special rules changes relevant to running an afterlife game are the standard Planescape ones, and rather too extensive to replicate here. They mostly affect magic items and spell casters.
There aren't rules, but there are some guidelines and boundaries...
I think you'll have an easy time interrupting a long rest (and thus denying the benefits therefrom), but going into the exhaustion mechanic seems too much. But interrupting even one night's rest should be a lesson to the characters: day two of encounters gets pretty tough, and looking ahead to a possible third day without a long rest should be enough to drive them inside. They're not paying to get the long rest, they're paying for assurance that they'll have a long rest.
Below I detail the rules and scenarios that inform my thinking.
Resting
For a long rest RAW requires at least 8 hours: at least 6 sleeping, no more than 2 of light activity: reading, talking, eating, and standing watch are the examples given. 1 hour of walking, (any) fighting, casting spells, "or similar adventuring activity" are examples of what might ruin a long rest. (PHB p.186)
Exhaustion
The next touch-point we have on the spectrum is that of exhaustion. At the mildest level of exhaustion one incurs disadvantage on all ability checks.
The general description refers to starvation or extreme (freezing or scorching) temperatures (PHB p.291). Further, under Travel Pace we see that the ninth, tenth, &c. hours of a forced march become progressively more-likely of incurring exhaustion (PHB p.181).
Two examples from D&D Expeditions modules also come to mind, one from season 2, one from season 3:
DDEX2-4 Maybem in Earthspur Mines requires the characters travel through a blizzard for approximately three days. Failing a DC12 CON save will gain characters 1d4 exhaustion levels. So three days in a blizzard might get you no exhaustion; might get you disadvantage on all checks, saves, and attacks as well as halving movement and HP.
DDEX3-2 Shackles of Blood lands the characters in a prisoners' caravan where the guards provide them only moldy bread, fetid water, and the guards "jab at prisoners with sticks to pass the time." The journey is "cramped and uncomfortable." Unless the characters alleviate these conditions, they will arrive at their destination with one level of exhaustion.
From these general guidelines and specific examples we see it takes a good deal--much more than an uncomfortable night's sleep--to incur even one level of exhaustion. So the exhaustion mechanic would seem horribly overpowered for your park-sleepers.
Encounters
Recall that encounters don't have to be hostile, and don't even have to bear sentient features. An encounter might just be the lamplighter coming by to douse lamps. Or a caravan of fish coming up from the docks at 4am. Or the night-rending sound of tomcats fighting for territory. Or a few hours' cold rain (good call, @GMJoe). Any of these--and certainly a few of them--could reasonably turn a long rest into a couple of short rests.
And a "relatively safe" urban area certainly has a militia or constabulary--or gang!--making it so. If you're not getting pick-pocketed or stabbed, it's got to be because the local authority is keeping a lid on those problems. And you're "those sorts of problems."
Economy
A night's lodging has a price. What are your characters paying for when they purchase a night's lodging? If you can answer that, you know what to take away when they eschew a roof and a bed.
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Best Answer
I have done this in 3.x extensively and, for reasons that will become apparent, I think the situation is similar. There are two funadamentally distinct ways to handle it that I have used, and both are appropriate for 5e play. Ultimately, the difference comes down to whether PCs are basically unchanged by death and the formation of outsiders (that is, the inhabitants of the outer planes who are formed from mortal spirits) from souls occurs very slowly over time or perhaps only by certain rituals or something, or whether that transformation is essentially immediate-- the dead quickly taking on the least form of the beings appropriate to their alignment and losing most of the abilities they had in life.
5e doesn't come down on which of these you should do. The DMG planar section is full of optional rules for outer planes that sometimes talk about planes being full of the 'spirits of the dead', like when discussing the recently deceased booking passage over the river Styx or the inhabitants of Carceri, but also talks about Hades being full of larvae formed from the souls of the dead. The fact these are all optional rules makes it seem to me like they intend you as DM to pick one or the other or a weird mix of both when using the default cosmology.
In any case, these are very different games. In my experience, I usually ran things the first way, where there's not much difference besides a 'dead' tag and a lack of body/soul duality in 3.5, while running things the second way, using the petitioner template, in Pathfinder. The mechanics of such campaigns will be very different from each other in 5e as well, since the differences between player and monster mechanics are very pronounced.
In the dead people don't change version, the game runs pretty much like normal, with a few caveats:
Being a single soul/body unit makes certain spells and effects function differently. Consider what you will have happen if a character is killed a second time before they return to life. Remember that things can't suck the character's spirit out of its body any more, or anything like that, instead either not working or leaving no body-missing-a-soul behind.
The character's corpses are still important even after death. If they are to be raised, you need to figure out what 'free and willing to return' means, and how the character experiences that. Is a character doing time in Bytopia for public drunkenness 'free'? Is a character currently struggling to escape from the pin of a three-headed guard dog of the underworld 'free'? What about a character whose alignment has been shifted by planar effects? What about a character who's failed a bunch of saves and been turned into a larva? what about a character trapped on Carceri? And then there's the matter of willing, and what sorts of information about the circumstances surrounding the casting the character is aware of, and if they get, like, a pop-up ad for resurrection or a mental query or the magic just figures it out inerrantly or what.
Characters of certain classes may have more dire problems. The warlock class, for example, provides several opportunities for a PC to create a character that is really, really dead once they are dead.
You'll also want to be ready to apply advantage and disadvantage liberally, in lieau of modifiers in 5th edition's rules paradigm, to account for stuff that's less or more of a problem when somebody's dead.
And, of course, be ready for the PCs, once they are high enough level, to go back to the material plane, pick up their bodies, put them on ice in some temple, and resume wandering round as normal adventurers who also happen to be dead. Of particular importantance is deciding what sort of thingy is required to know somebody is dead when you interact with them. Generally, I have people automatically know that, but that's a very 3.x thing and not very 5e-y. You might require a passive Wisdom(Religion) check, or something. In any case, remember that people might not know that before meeting the characters and the characters might very well not tell them, so then you'll need to know if they know or not.
The second method is much further away from normal. In Pathfinder, with the Petitioner template, PCs lose pretty much everything and instead have a very short list of alignment/form-based special abilities, and 2 levels of racial hit dice in Outsider. That puts them on par with first level characters, but weird. For example, they'll have many more skills than a typical first level character, and at higher levels, but vastly inferior combat abilities to any respectably built first level character, as well as no real option to be a spellcaster.
If you are interested in this method, the way to do it in 5e is to have players play monsters instead of player races. Design petitioners for each of the 9 alignments (pay special attention to True Neutral, which will need its own whole deal, cause there's no True Neutral Outer Plane, unless you count the Material Plane itself), give them a special thingy or two each (perhaps using these as inspiration), and have players pick what alignment they had in life. Just as your 12 skill points and one feat helped add in a tiny bit of agency in the 3.X version, consider letting players still pick a background and get the benefits and proficiencies that are a part of that.
There's yet more problems with this method, though, because you then have to decide how the PCs advance. You can either let them add class levels, which I would discourage, or let them evolve into more powerful beings of their alignment, which is okay except for balance issues. In practice, I've only used this method for specific one-shots or short campaigns that focus around ensuring the players will work together for the duration of the arc despite their different alignments being in the forefront all the time.
As for printed 5e material, you'll definitely want to check out the Planes section of the DMG, as well as what few outsider-y monsters have been published so far, pretty much all of which are in the Monster Manual.