Ghostwalk

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The premise is simple: the Land of the Dead is a real place, miles beneath the earth, and the spirits of the dead travel there when they cannot or will not leave the world of the living. These souls become ghosts, which aren't the horrific undead monsters of other D&D campaign settings, but are instead a form of playable pseudo-race/pseudo-class that can be player characters.

Written by the infamous Monte Cook, with assistance from Sean K. Reynolds, Ghostwalk adds some interesting new concepts and classes to the standard Third Edition roster, while complicating things by allowing the transfer of levels between ghost and living states of being. There are a lot of updates to skills and feats from base 3e that are updated in the sourcebook due to the oddities of Ghostwalk ghosts, and the setting as a whole really does add a lot of weird new things to the Third Edition.

It really does need some more notice and love. I don't know who made this article, but you're a goddamn beautiful bastard for doing it. Going to go dig up my book, you can get a copy from Paizo for like five bucks. There is no reason to not gobble up this sweet as setting.

Geography

The World of the Living

The scope of the setting covers a far smaller region than most settings, mostly due to the fact that it was designed to be dropped into any DM's campaign rather than being a full-fledged world all on its own. Still, it packs an unreasonable amount of nations, conflicts, and plot hooks into its small region.

The City of Manifest

Located amidst the sea and woods of the Hikirian Peninsula, the city of Manifest is built at the heart of the Land of the Dead. Beneath its sprawling congestion are a series of caves, ready-made for dungeon crawling. These lead to the realm of the Deathwarden Dwarves, who guard Veil of Souls, the gate between the worlds of life and death. The path to the Veil is the titular Ghostwalk.

George Romero's Xaphan

Xaphan was once a human kingdom set on a small archipelago just off the coast of the Hikirian Peninsula. Originally known as Inuitea, it was conquered by Orcus, the demon prince of the Undead and the setting's greatest villain. Now it is ruled by a council of vampires and its "inhabitants" are almost exclusively evil undead, with a few human slaves kept around for sport and sacrifice. Xaphan constantly plots to invade Manifest and take control of the portal between life and death, but such plots often take a backseat to vampire politics. The primary import of Xaphan is slaves, and its primary export is undead.

The World of the Dead

Unique among the D&D settings, Ghostwalks establishes a completely separate and unusual Afterlife that can be explored by players and DMs. Beyond the Well of Souls, in what is known as the True Afterlife, the spirits of the dead live a hollow existence reminiscent of their past lives. They lose all memory of this existence and this world upon revival, but so long as they remain they retain their memories of the living world.

Small islands float atop an endless sea, which plunge to unknown depths. These islands are not attached to anything, they merely float atop the water, like a piece of pumice in the bath. Various factions claim control of a series of isles near the Well of Souls, but it is possible to swim out into the ocean and appear next to islands never before known, far from the Well and other beings. Strangely, there are even undead monsters in this world, who somehow smuggled themselves through the City of Manifest to appear in this World of the Dead.

Beings in this world can survive as long as they want. When they are hungry, food appears before them. A pale kind of sunlight pervades during the "daylight" hours, while pitch darkness fills the "night." Only when a soul is tired and ready to move on, to be consumed by Dracanash, the Eater of the Dead, do they fade and experience true death.

Races

All the standard D&D races are represented, but here we'll list those that are given some unique identity or flavor by the setting.

• Dwarves: They guard the doors to the Land of the Dead.
• Elves: They become one with the Spirit Wood and their ghosts merge into soul-trees.
• Ghosts: Physical beings made up of ectoplasm, which exist in the Material Plane rather than the Ethereal Plane. They are the alignment they were in life, rather than being wholly evil as in other settings, and are preyed upon by other evil undead.
• Yuan-Ti: Extradimensional invaders who come from a demiplane made of snakes. Literally, made of snakes. Like, the sky, the trees, the ground, all snakes. They also have no souls, so they hate Manifest and all the ghosts that live there, jealous of their ability to remain in the world after death.
• Vampires: Favored servants of Orcus, god of Undeath.

External Links

• One of the most obscure campaign sourcebooks is now available, courtesy of /rs/.