Creation Rules Summary

Death rising features more combat than your average tabletop RPG, and the combat will be difficult. This means that I require several things from the group, so that you are not making a suicide run all the time.

Roles:

Melee Frontline fighter: This character should be rough, tough, up front, and able to take a beating as well as dish one out. If you've discovered the magical mystery build that can do 999999 damage per round, it won't matter at all if you get torn apart by the other 10 bad guys you didn't kill that round. I recommend that whatever character fills this role have staying power.

Trap detection: The reason I am not straight up saying rogue here is that its not the stealth you need, its the ability to reliably find and disable traps, especially magic ones. This means a character with the trapfinding class ability. To my knowledge, this can be done by a rogue base class, Urban ranger/trapper ranger, and a bard variant.

Divine Caster/Healer: This is crucial, the ability to be able to heal damage as well as the ability to cast divine spells. While I know that in theory some classes like Bard, Witch, and Alchemist "Can" heal, they are not going to output enough healing to account for being the party healer. This role will likely have to be filled by a Cleric, Oracle, or Palain (Yes, they can be kick ass healers if built to be so)

Arcane Caster: There is a lot of arcane magic in this campaign. Spellcraft rolls and knowledge Arcana rolls will come up a lot, as will magic items that stem from the arcane. There are a lot of classes that can perform this roll, such as Wizard, Sorcerer, Magus, and witch. Any of those 4 could fill the role.

IF we have a 5th player:

Support: Buffs. Buffs are amazing. Think of how many times you were 1 point away from an enemies armor class, 1 point low on a saving throw. It happens a lot. There are many classes that fill a support or supplemental role and are great as a 5th party member. This will be up to the group to decide where they are lacking.

Now that we've gone over roles, lets talk about how we are going to arrive at our final party. Character synergy is a very strong thing in pathfinder. A group built to work together will almost always far surpass a group of randomly built characters thrown together. That being said, character creation is going to be a group activity that spans a period of time. we can use the "Characters" page on obsidian portal to post them, but I'd like to see this email thread with peoples character build ideas in it, so that you can refine them before we play and turn it into a good Group. Neil, I know your kids wanted to play, and I don't  have emails, so please share or forward them into this thread.

Base character creation and leveling.

This campaign is going to begin at level 5, as I've no interest in making players who have seen it before slog through the beginning again.

Use the 25 point point buy for stats.

Start with 10,500 gp, however no single item can be greater than a +1 bonus (for weapons and armor)

Core races only. This means Dwarf Elf, Gnome, Half-elf, Half-orc Halfling, and human.

2 traits, which may not be taken from campaign traits. Death rising has no specific campaign traits. Keep in mind you may only select one trait per category, such as one combat trait and one faith trait.

Leveling up and cohorts: John mentioned the possibility of the leadership and torchbearer feats, which allow followers. Normally, you track experience to figure out when your followers level up.

In Death Rising, you do not track experience. You will level up at landmarks, and be informed of this by the GM. That being said, we will work out when it is appropriate for your followers and cohorts to level up, and it will be announced.

Other helpful topics:

Item crafting: I won't discourage anyone who wants to make magic items for the party, as there will be some opportunities to do so. Just keep in mind, when you decide to take a week in town to craft items, your enemies do not. You may be more powerful next week when your +3 sword is finished, but the bad guys have just spent a week recruiting, gathering resources, and furthering their plans. I leave this at player discretion.

Death:

Players will die. If you guys get through my campaign without someone dying, I'll be shocked. This means that if you do die, I will find some way, some how, to fit your new character in quickly.

Combat is not the only time you can be killed. Traps are deadly, and designed to stop people, not just to slightly injure them. Also, you should not assume that every challenge put before you is something you should charge and attempt to kill head on. Knowledge rolls are very handy in identifying the challenge level of a monster.

Example of above: last time a ran this, a big bad decided to come down and talk to the players, as he knew they were clearly no threat to him at that point in the game. One player decided to attempt to trip the bad guy, and heartily failed. The bad guy then prepared to kill him. A successful diplomacy check from another player convinced the bad guy to spare the life of the offender. it was then randomly rolled, and the big bad killed a different party member.

This is a simple example, you can do everything right and still have a character die. If the party has the time and money, they may raise you. Keep that in mind when interacting with the party.

That being said, this campaign offers tons of opportunity to do some very epic and heroic things. Have fun with it, and I very much look forward to playing.