Previous Thread
It's taken a few weeks to start moving peices (that is, the party finally stopped picking fights with librarians long enough to measure time in hours rather than rounds), but since their second night of resting after the murders they have been the targets of Nightmare spells, twisting their dreams. Unfortunately that's just been a soft chorus of clucking as they keep succeeding on the will saves, but it did prompt a round of worried discussion between the characters about whether chickens have souls.
After a new round of preparations they ventured back into the Gauntlight and started picking fights with librarians again. Also they tried to contradict a ghost administrator and got ghost slapped into purgatory for a moment, but eventually they got back en-route towards the first chicken ghost encounter: the smashed remnants of Krrrterra, who was obliterated with a landslide. Impressively, their first instinct was to go for diplomacy, apologising for killing it, and asking what they could do to help it move on to the afterlife. With a speak with animals spell and a critical success on a diplomacy check, I couldn't just have the chicken fly into a panic and cause a fight, so engaged in dialogue.
There were four issues here though: One, while ghosts are normally animated by unfinished business and can only be permanently put to rest by making right the injustices that created them, these ghosts are mostly reanimated by the giant spooky lighthouse that shoots beams of ghosts, so the primary answer is to destroy the 20th level artifact (they are currently level 4). Two, even without the lighthouse, they're motivated by revenge against their killers, so the secondary answer is for the party to be killed by the chicken ghosts. Three, ghosts are often unaware or in denial about their own deaths, nevermind what is needed to put them to rest. And four, chickens are not particularly capable of higher level thought, so the only thing their questioning actually established is that it wanted to eat some worms.
So they hit it with positive energy damage until it dissipated. It wasn't a difficult fight, a single PL-1 enemy, because even as a ghost a chicken isn't much of a threat (on its own), but it did teach them some embarrassing lessons about weapons attacks and incorporeal creatures while minorly inconveniencing them, as planned. The ghost chickens have been established as a fun callback, and soon a running joke. Once they start coming back (and in greater numbers), we'll have some good horror cooking and can really start the emotional rollercoaster, but I have to be sparse with details until future updates, as the Goblin Sorcerer's player is reading and I don't want to spoil too much for him.
New Art
It's bad. You wanna see some cool ghost chicken tokens, go back to the first post. First up, we have Krrrrterra, who was hit with a landslide:
get it? because she was... squashed. It doesn't get better.
Hyppokoko, bludgeoned and drowned by a blast of tsunami:
the file name is wetghost.png. like seriously i got no idea
And finally, and most [CW: meat]ly, Brrrkit, who was incinerated by a beam of pure heat:
I'm sorry.
Mechanics
Applying the ghost template to a basic bird statblock didn't get me close to an appropriate challenge for the party, so I altered a ghost commoner statblock in different ways for all chickens. Krrrterra had the weak template applied, the Kinetic Assault ghost ability added, and a handful of minor additions and changes:
and there was already the idea of NERPs ("New Exciting Retail Products" that caused explosions of consumerist violence a bit like the szechuan sauce riots some years back), so unless it was too uncomfortably close for my group or too on the nose, I was tempted to have a setting where a prevalent presence and potential threat was a bunch of affluent bazingas with combat drones that are scoring epic hero points for their battle passes and season passes and so on by remotely shooting undesirables (such as Shadowrunners) that are visually reskinned as zombies or whatever so they can be "just like in the treats."
