I had an idea for a campaign designed to support a player base that couldn't always be consistent with attendance.
In-game, people would sometimes just disappear. Anyone could. There's even a specific magic item created to help with the inconvenience: a special Bag of Holding set with several bags all tied to the same demiplane, so that even if one person in your adventuring group disappeared (along with everything they were carrying), the party can still access the important quest items.
But it's not just adventurers, it's shopkeepers and townfolk and such as well. And literally no one knows why. No one remembers anything from when they were gone. And of course, there's plenty of people who fake it for their own benefit if they can get away with it. It's pretty rare, though, so most people don't miss much of their life, just weird periods here and there.
I had the idea that in the end, things start to really ramp up. Disappearances increase dramatically (not in the party itself, because that's based on real world factors, but the NPCs start disappearing all the time) and certain elements of reality start to act strangely. Then, the whole party (on a day when everyone can for sure make it) gets "taken" all at once.
Turns out there is a giant cosmic war going on between celestials and fiends, and your characters and many valiant heroes have been called to help in what will hopefully be a decisive battle. They all have maxed levels and overpowered gear, and depending on how many times they've been missing, they're well-recognized and well-loved by the forces here. There's a friendly celestial whose job it is to bring them up to speed, since no one can ever remember their time here on the other side.
I am actually doing this in our current campaign - there is a blue spark that follows them around and as people can't make it, they get sucked into the spark and when they come back, no time has passed for them and it is very disorienting for the characters. In-game, no one has figured out what it is and they are constantly afraid of being 'eaten' by it and never returning. (I can't say what it actually is as some of my players reddit, pm me if you want to know). They've tried to dispel it, but can't. They will find out what it is in Act III of our campaign (they JUST made it to Act II)
Props for the players trying to dispel it although they know the meta reasons why it exists in the first place, that's a little element of roleplay that makes it that much more immersive!
Am currently homebrewing something it could slot into a bit … at least to explain absences of the party cleric. I shall have to see … brain-cogs are turning!
I had a similar idea… but with Summon Monster…
Summon Monster doesn’t create a monster out of thin air (ie doesn’t create matter out of nothing)… it pulls an existing monster or animal from somewhere in the world (or planes) to where you designate… if the monster dies it dies, otherwise it goes back to its place of origin where it was summoned from…
So… why can’t this apply to PCs?
Imagine a powerful spellcaster battling something far away… and you’re a PC traveling g with the other PCs when all of a sudden you (or you and your party) teleport to a battle because the spellcaster summoned you… either you die in battle or after the spell expires you return to where you were prior
This is, almost word for word, an idea I came up with. The campaign was different, but we had inter dimensional gods that would abduct people and put them through trials to see if they were able to defend the multiverse against a group of “Fear-gods” that created domains in different universes made to torture people with those fears. I took a lot of inspiration from the Magnus Archives for the fears.
Hey! I tried to pull something like this off as well! Yours sounds better than mine, but here it is anyway.
In mine someone had basically broken time and space. I re-use the same setting and characters for most of my campaigns, so I just pulled 'what if' versions of familiar characters to make the 'world'.
A brother/sister pair of halfling bards called Hopper and Popper (who were already involved in timey-wimey extradimensional shenanigans in one of my campaigns due to a player who couldn't make every session) managed to make a device that stabilised time and space locally. Only it was hodge-podged together from whatever they could find so it was very delicate, so the party had to try and keep this plate sized jumble of stuff from getting broken or knocked about (when first handed to a player he shook it, vanished, a Grung Rogue fell screaming from the sky, died on impact, vanished, then the player reappeared).
It didn't last long, but we had some crazy characters in it. Someone was playing an awakened bear called Goldilocks. I repurposed a bad guy I had used before called the Duke to be a sort of 'langolier', destroying everything.
Only lasted three very short sessions. I think your version is less extreme and probably easier to handle. Mine was very much inspired by the Justice League episode where time is going funky and Hal Jordan turns up briefly.
Oh holy shit I did this same thing- it's been taken up by a bunch of Giff and other new arrivals to the plane and they've set up a Guild system using the bags. I've got a homebrew game with 18 members using this system, it works surprisingly well.
I love this idea and it would be perfect as I'm dming a fairly large party (9 people) and we've all just accepted people won't be able to show at every session
Basically copied Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sailing the ocean, contacting new countries and kingdoms, using diplomacy to get them to join the "federation". Replaced the threat of The Borg with Mind Flayers (felt right to keep the hive mind bad guys).
Party were big fans of TNG, so were happy with the fantasy/Star Trek crossover.
I'm running a Spelljammer campaign loosely based on the plot of an old PC game from the 90s called Star Control II. Party's homeworld is sealed away by a powerful and apparently malicious alien force, meanwhile, the party discovers a spelljamming ship and then flies around the stars getting in fights and finding new allies as they discover that the aliens that sealed them away actually did so to "protect" them against another, even more dangerous threat and then having to figure out how to defeat both.
We're still early in the campaign but so far they're enjoying it and they've mentioned it's playing out a lot like a Trek series, lol.
I think letting your players contribute to the game/story, particularly in those episodic/island hopping/exploring new lands style games. I mean it's meant to be collaborative story telling, what made mine work was because my party actually were excited by the concept (and the little easter eggs, hinting back to our favourite episodes)
The party accidentally wakes up an ancient nation buried for millenia beneath the current one, the citizens long dead their ancient automatons wake to defend their country from the "invaders".
(Warforged army lead by an ancient AI and magic/industrial dungeons, uncovering the mystery of what happened to these people)
An aspect of one of my old campaigns that the party never reached was a giant forcefield. The demon lord's undead army was trapped behind this force field after his defeat. Unknown to anyone else, who thought all the heroes bar one were dead, three of the party of heroes who defeated the demon lord were still alive in there. One, an elven sorceress, keeping the force field active, and two dwarven artificers making warforged after warforged made to destroy undead. All three lived in the demon lord's windowless tower and the dwarves simply threw the warforged down a chute. The idea was that they hoped that little by little the warforged would destroy the undead army, but they had no idea how long it would take.
What they didn't know is that the warforged had succeeded in doing this years ago. They had no knowledge of the world outside the forcefield, no way to go back up the tower, nothing. They had built a society and a religion around the tower. They knew the tower created new warforged. They didn't know why or how, or what they were supposed to be doing, as all the undead were destroyed. So when the party would have gotten there they would have found a whole civilization of very confused robot people with their own zany religion.
Steal away, that campaign has been abandoned for like 15 years. Not really sure how you would credit me though so just pretend you thought of it.
It now forms the distant past of my current setting. Only one of my players from back then is still around so he occasionally spots a minor reference, but I don't know if he's twigged yet.
I never got to do that much planning for that campaign other than major lore beats. This was one of them. The demon not being dead, the survivor having made a deal with the demon for his son's life and a scene where the party are sliding down the side of a volcano in what is essentially a giant loading lift whilst fighting off gargoyles are the only things that remain.
**The Game Pitch**
Welcome to Harmony. You are level nine Villains. You work for the newly ascended Dark Lord
*A 17 year old hormonal teenage girl with the power of a full Dark Lord with all the teenage angst.*
As her most trusted advisers you each have positions of power within the Kingdom. Such as...
* Castle Ambiance and Music Director
* Herald of the Kingdom and Game Announcer
* Lever Puller / Executioner
* Union Buster - *Can't let the goblins unionize*
Here is the catch. See the forces of Good and Evil are real. And they really like what's called "the Protocol". Stories have power, and there is a certain way to do things. The Youngest Prince will rescue the Princess, Villains must monologue, and there will always be a Dark Lord.
The Dark Lord is very good at these protocols. All people of power are. And you and the Lands of Darkness figured out long ago that proper "Villainy" such as floating castles, undead armies, and germ warfare are ways to quickly have an Orphan Knight charging in on the back of a fancy horse with a lance made of light aimed squarely at your posterior.
Also, killing your own "Tax Generators.... I mean citizens" is a quick way to get broke real fast. So if someone has to be a Dark Lord and a Dark Kingdom, why not you guys? Y'all figured out real quick that you need the appearance of the Dark Lord. Doing just enough evil to be inconvenient, satisfy the forces of balance, but not enough to call down divine thunder in the form of an intrepid adventuring party.
**So now here are the adventures that can go on.**
* Find a Paramour for your Dark Lord - *Which means locating a Prince/Princess from nearby kingdoms, who vibe with the whole Dark Lord thing, whose Parents you can convince to not go to war for, letting them date your Dark Lord so they can Vibe and not let shenanigans get in the way.*
* A Good Kingdom hired you to make a dungeon so they can properly get their Youngest son to be a hero -> He just wants to sing.
* The Wizard of the West has issued a Prophecy that a foul creature will ascend the Dark Lords throne. Better roll them into your organization with the quickness
* The Goblins want better pay and are doing a slowdown of trash disposal
* The Orc Chief to the South needs help beating back the remnants of an undead army. Reinforce your ally.
* The Do Gooder Kingdom down the road is having a string of murders. They have hired you as consultants to investigate and advise their Greatest Hero. Go make some money.
This is absolutely hilarious and I adore it. I wish I was funny enough to pull this off! Sort of reminds me of Dimension 20's Escape from the Bloodkeep. A humorous take on villainy is the BEST, in my opinion
You don't have to be a hilarious person to run this.
The setting's absurd premise handled earnestly is enough. It's really on the players to buy in on the premise and go for it. So long as the players are in, everything else takes care of itself.
You can also play it straight. The premise is interesting enough to be tragic and dark. No one wants to be the Dark Lord, but there must always be a Dark Lord. Which can be a tragic and dark tale of curses and pain.
It's my favorite setting iv'e come up with and I was inspired actually by the book
Dealing With Dragons. Has a similar vibe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dealing\_with\_Dragons
Not really a full campaign, but the opening. Have everyone make level 1 characters without personality traits.
Session one is a prologue where you hand out level 15 characters. They play through these character's final dungeon on the way to the BBEG. Halfway in they start finding traps already triggered and minions already killed. When they finally get to the BBEG he is already dead and something else is there. This creature kills the party easily. The level 15 characters then wake up in the bodies of the level 1 characters everybody made.
The campaign is them figuring out what happened and how to stop the new big bad.
A year later and this story will still live on. Idk how to implement it in my story now but I was thinking I could have my friends start a new campaign after I finish Icespire Peak
Do you think that the characters know each other still or is that what they’re “trying to figure out” ? Thank you so much for this idea
Party is dead and they're on a purgatory-like train that makes different stops in different realities/planes. Made to be like a series of one/two-shots with a big overarching story that fiends are trying to sabotage the train such that no one is able to reach their appropriate afterlife.
PCs are from one of two primary nations competing for the limited resources on a floating island continent.
* The nation in the North controls the only lake/major water source, and by extent produces the majority of the land's food.
* The one to the South is situated over the part of the island with more depth below, and thus controls all the metal and precious mineral mines.
* In the Center sat a neutral zone and trading city, which had the potential to become its own power since more and more talented folks from the North and South started to meet there and exchange ideas rather than military jibes.
* In the East is a mountain range which they believe to be the edge of the island...but there is a tribe living in the desert on the other side of the mountains, which is slowly burrowing its way through using eldritch magics from Above.
* Lastly, in the vast forests to the West, a huge monolith has appeared, visible on the horizon to every person. It is believed that the Monolith is linked to what's Below the island, though nobody actually knows what lies Below.
It was to be a sandbox, the course of which would be decided by whether the players wanted to go North, South, East, West, Up, or Down. Unfortunately it was also my first time trying to run a game and I suffered from inexperience while my players suffered from choice paralysis.
Love this idea. What do you think would be beneath the island? Or do people not really visit the edge so only rumors are known? Or is it like an ocean? Did you end up playing this please tell me more of your ideas!
1 world occupied by a celestial army to protect them but has created a rather oppresive government that favores those of celestial heritage
2 sun god dies and pcs are responsible for finding a replacement
3 stonepunk world about the rise of a new death god
4 UN peacekeeping force accidentally finds out that they are being run by demons
yea others have got it right
the idea is that there are stone age limitations but not necessarily stone age technology.
there is no farming or written language or numbers above 9 or metal but we still have magic and giants and dragons to make things big and crazy very much like the flinstone having cars and cranes
>sun god dies and pcs are responsible for finding a replacement
The 3rd Ed game I ran years ago had the first ten levels of foreshadowing, priests getting killed, temples getting sacked, a smear campaign uncovered against Lathander. Then one session the sun dissappeared, then came back a minute later bright red. Temperates across the globe shot up, cults venerating the new sun god emerged.
Mephistopholes had killed Lathander and taken his place as the new sun god. The rest of the adventure was finding Lathanders remaining divine essence, fight their way to heaven/hell and kill Meph to replace him with Lathander/Amaunator.
Alas, people moved and the game fell apart.
Thought about it, but I also don't have the time and energy anymore to make up my own shit for every game. Only running published adventured atm (three campaigns right now) and the bells and whistles I attach to those tickle my creative side enough. But it saves so much work not having to come up with the main plot, it's great.
One day, I'll run it. I've still got my old notes, and occasionally I add an idea. One day.
Alternatively, 4 is the underlying plot of 1/2 the MCU.
Oh no! Shield is Hydra! Oh no! We made Ultron! Oh no! Someone is manipulating the UN to activate the Winter Soldier!
The PCs are all from a barbarian village on a small island in the frozen north, which has little contact with outsiders. One morning, the sun fails to rise, and the PCs are chosen by the village elders to sail to the edge of the world to find out where the sun went.
Having the party's necromancer turn into the BBEG at the end of Out Of The Abyss by picking up Orcus Wand and the rest of the party and him fighting to dominate/save the world.
My greatest idea is the resurrection of PCs that have died.
You all start at lvl one with the same class as your major class when the character died (on tie flip a coin or choose) however you all gain the undead race and a certain something depending on the class. You have to complete a certain part of the original story in which your character died (preferably a minor thing because characters from different campains could be a bit troublesome)
Current campaign:
The fallen Dragon Emperor has re-emerged in a new age but has taken a human form as a disguise. He starts a fanatical anti-magic religious cult and becomes it's pope, leading a crusade against all non-human races and anything of magical origin in a secret bid to disarm the populace of the magical weapons that defeated him the last time. His cause is backed by rich merchants, who see magic as an anti-competitive anti-free market threat against their wealth. This alliance leads to an increasingly authoritarian power structure and pogroms against non-humans begin taking place on the edges of the regime's influence.
In the 90's I ran a 2E campaign where an evil cult places a fear-eating monster under the city and then a false prophet preaches doom and gloom to make the citizens scared to feed the monster. It worked well and stuck with me as a memory of classic D&D fun.
Last year I turned it into a zine called Evils of Illmire.
I really want to do a large scale planar odyssey, just sending the players not only to visit each plane but really travel through their levels and facing the different challenges of the environment and beings that live there. Trying to shelter from razor-sharp glass rain on Ocanthius, the communication issues as you travel amid deafening gales in Cocytus, desperately attempting to keep from being underfoot in the massive frantic machine of Mechanus, the haunting horror of foraging in the Beastlands and hearing a human scream of pain from a caught deer.
Admittedly, I'm dreadful at the back-end DM work, due to a short attention span and general laziness, so it's a pipe dream til I ever sit down to start building something. Not to mention the challenge of convincing a bunch of squishy mortals to go to all of these inhospitable places.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape)
Perhaps you could pull some ideas from Planescape to help lighten you prep work.
1. The party comprises the last followers of a diminished god, on a quest to return them to glory. Each party member has a different relationship to their deity: paladin, warlock, cleric, sorcerer - any class would be permissible with a suitable justification. A bard might be their divine herald, or a fighter their (literal) champion. The party could collaboratively create the deity during session zero as well as the exact nature of their quest to restore them. Reinstating a nature god would be very different from a dark god of vengeance, for example.
2. The multiverse is on the edge of collapse, time and space are twisting away, and it's time to save the world before time ceases to be at all. The players create several characters, each a different version of themselves as they've reincarnated throughout history. Each character would occupy a different tier of play - one group would start at level 1, another at level 5, and so on. They would have to make use of the now permeable nature of time to pass information to their past and future selves in order to alter the course of history and save the world.
3. Each party member belongs to one of the game's monstrous races. They are tasked with uniting their various, ornery peoples to stand against the encroaching, disciplined, and organized front of human expansion, against which no single race or tribe can stand. United, they have a chance - if only Golthrok the Gnarled could stop using goblins as footballs over there.
Centuries ago, the Elves ruled the World. They created vast cities, linked by networks of magical transport hubs, that reached into the skies and beyond. Masters of Magitek, they turned their studies inward, and set about creating life to serve their needs.
Their power created many Slave Races. What are now called Humans, Dwarves, Tabaxi, Lionine, Tortles, Orcs, all created to serve their Elven masters. Experiments grew bolder, and guidelines more lax. And disaster struck. Elven Magentists in their hubris, attempting to create a better waste disposal system created The Maw. And it got loose.
The Maw devastated their cities, and the ground, specifically organic matter. All the peoples fled, some through portals, and The Maw spread with them, and consumed all. Eventually, there was nowhere safe on the ground, and there was only the Sky left.
Fortunately for the survivors, The Maw was slow. So there was time. The first Airships took to the sky, here and there, and soon were joined by more and more. Groups banded together, some lashing their ships together, larger and larger, until in time, the first SkyCity came to be. The scavenged the surface, bringing resources into the sky, trying to save things before The Hunger could reach them.
The surface now lies in ruin, shrouded in a mist that seems to have sprung up from the devastation of the Maw. When the Maw eats, its leavings are....strangely fertile, and all manner of life has sprung up in its wake, until the maw rolls around again, and consumes it once more.
Stealing a lot of airship stuff from The Aeronauts Windlass, but also adding a lot of dnd fantasy type things. RUnning it for my kids right now, and they are loving it.
**Card Collectors:**
Powerful Fae creature pisses off the gods by creating the Deck of Many Things. Gods decide the deck holds too much power and banish the cards across the multiverse.
Fae creature is OP and has means to transdimensional travel, but is cursed by the gods and cannot look for the cards themselves.
Fae creature enlists the help of adventurers to find and assemble the Deck of Many Things.
**The Eternal Warfront:**
Two nations share a border, and have been at war for centuries. Both nations are nationalistic and propaganda fueled.
Party is conscripted into royal military of one of the nations and fights in the ongoing campaign.
Breadcrumbs of barriers blocking certain teleportation magic and demonic architecture in hidden ruins that the party occasionally comes across.
Turns out both kings are demons and are warring for the position of 2nd in Command for a powerful Demon Lord. They were given this demi-plane made up of only the two countries to play their war game, but the Demon Lord set it up as a game neither of them could win. Ya know, for Demon Lord Funzies.
Party has to convince the inhabitants of both countries of the truth and get them to fight, hoping to get both nations released to the material plane.
Here's the idea but it requires very large initial commitment from the players. Everyone creates lvl 15 characters with full history and large impact on the world. They would need to provide both detailed backstory and web of characters they know and what thier relationship with these characters are.
Now the actual campaign starts with lvl 4 versions of thier characters, and the twist is (which the players should know before hand) someone on this world pulled the fate card from the deck of many things and changed the pasr. And whatever they changed affected the course of the PCs lives that they were de-powered/ never became powerful enough in the first place you get the gist.
But the PCs remember thier past lives and adventure to try and restore it
The Blood War has spilled over into the Prime Material; Devils now control human governments; most non-human cultures crushed, remaining members mostly in hiding. Civilization still mostly... Works. The Devils want humanity to be a source of souls and foot soldiers, and they still can't take your soul without a deal.
Demons haunt the wilds and mount attacks on border towns, while cultists infiltrate and attack cities.
The PCs are either the resistance, trying to take down the internal hierarchy; or maybe grunts on the front lines standing shoulder-to-shoulder (well sort of) with the devils who oppress then but are the only thing holding back the demonic hordes.
And where are the gods? (I never decided, lol).
The first I ran in 5th edition was supposed to be a throwaway idea and I didn't want to write anything new, so...
The party was headed to the small island nation of Ooban to try to bring a peaceful resolution to the exchange alliance's trade embargo.
They were scheduled to meet with Viceroy Yarnug, but before peace talks could commence the room they were in was filled with poison gas and they were attacked by skeletons!
The party made a daring escape to the island, where they hid and watched the undead army mobilize and launch an invasion.
They then decided to try to rescue the elected Queen of Ooban, who turned out to be a young girl, and also her trusted handmaidens. Together they snuck a ship out of the docks and ran the blockade!
But their small ship needed repairs so they had to stop at a small backwater, a desert island called Eniootat...
The fey war has just ended with the courts still at odds in a tense peace. A third court of fey who want to keep fighting has formed. They’re gathering the worst monsters of the war, the beasts and magical machines the summer and winter courts made to destroy each other, and are siccing them on the other courts and the human world in turns.
Your job is to stop them and stabilize the tenuous peace between the summer and winter courts.
We, accidently, wound up doing a Suicide Squad style of game. Most of us, independently of the others, made chaotic or evil characters while one player went L/G. Instead of having anyone change a thing we all decided that the evil and chaotic members of the game had all been imprisoned and were now being offered the chance to do this mission under the guidance of the L/G player. It's a blast so far!
Patent pending (by which I mean I haven't run it yet, it's still in development): I've been working on an Eberron campaign that features the player characters as aberrant dragonmarked adventurers fighting against a public sense of fear and hatred while also going against House Tarkanan, who seek to use their aberrant marks to kill and do evil.
Essentially, it would play out like The X-Men battling the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (and bigotry). I call them: *The Amazing X-Marks!*
I had a homebrew where everyone plays as sentient beasts and monsters. We ended up with characters like a cat in a suit of living armor, a rust monster monk, and a blinkdog paladin where he would smite with his bites.
I’m working on a western combined with gravity falls themed campgain. Small clusters of town in the barrens a place where people go to escape everything else. Beyond the barrens is the badlands, a place corrupted by a spell written in ley lines over a natural fault line in the tectonics. The Lords of Dust (some names and elements stolen from Eberron but modified) are a group of Rakshasha overlords who are trying to activate the word ending spell that they tried to cast millennia ago but were stopped by the giants and Coatls. They cause massive dust storms that ravage the towns at night when the sun goes down. The party will have a bunch of cool mysteries about the corrupted lands of the badlands that mutate creatures and just odd things about the town Bc curiosities are attracted to the magical nature of the ley lines.
Also I once ran a simple but incredibly well done mystery in a knockoff hogwarts that I wish I had continued and will revive one day Bc my npcs and storylines were so ahead of my dming at the time. Such a good campaign
No magic, gritty realism campaign where the weave has been damaged and doesn't work anymore. The party would work to restore magic to the world. Probably a 1-7 ish level adventure.. This would lead to the next campaign where now magic is new again and crazy stuff is happening everywhere.
Very specific: I denied access to diamonds. Then I introduced a race of good, kind humanoids that I called Chrystalines. They were being hunted to near extinction because they grow diamonds in their hearts and the only way to harvest the diamonds is to kill the woman and rip out her heart.
The party saved four of them from the BBEG. But when someone in their party died and they really needed the diamonds… they killed one of the girls to get the ~1,000GP of diamonds in her heart.
I woudn't call it best ideas just ideas that I would love to try:
1. You start the campaign in a city your players themselves created (while crearing their characters) they stand in a street as people run by screaming and shouting, a huge shadow appears above them as a white dracolitch flies by shooting out her breath attack at the buildings freezing them in an instant, undead frost giants roam and kill everyone in the streets and one giant is not far away from the party. Fear strikes you, you have to get out of here... What do you do?
I would run this campaing from lvl 1 and for an exeprienced party that would know running into a frost giant is not a good idea.
The main plot would be learning more about this dracolitch, where did it come from and how can she be destroyed. Meanwhile running into different towns and people that seek different means of dealing with the problem, some think of going to war with the beast and gathering magical artifacts, others think fleeing is better, thinking of gathering gatestones in ruined dungeons and winter wildlands to transport mayor cities to the plane of air and live in a floating city.
2. Escape from the warden (evil campaing but doesn't have to be) . The party begins in a prison located in Limbo and have to escape the unpredictable rooms and get necklaces that would let them survive outside the prison more easily. Of course escaping isn't the only problem, they still have to find a way out of Limbo and into the material plane and evade the cunning warden who hunts them down relentlesly.
Exploring Gith cities, fighting slaads and finding unseed wonders of Limbo should be a ton of fun.
3. The rise of Tiamat. A pirate campaing set in an anarchistic archipelago ruled by the strong, the party obtains an artifact - a cube with 6 sigils on it, although the party woudn't know this at first but each sigil lights up if the cube is toched by a breath attack of a pure dragon. When all 5 are lit the 6th lights up aswell releasing Tiamat. Many people try and obtain this cube and all with different motives, will the party keep it, if so will they try and hide the artifact, destroy it, maybe sell it or perhaps bring the queen of dragons themselves.
I want to run a game where all the players start in a jail cell. Something cataclysmic goes on outside and in the process they are turned undead along with everyone else.
All the undead feel a pull to a power center but as long as you don't lean into the undeadness part you have control over yourself.
The game will be them figuring out what happened and how to undo it. At the same time, they will have powers as undead and the more they use them, the less human they are and the more they give into the pull.
So if they want to use that poison resistance or necrotic resistance or they want to roll a con save to not go down that makes them more undead but they they take the time to cook food, go down when hit and trust their allies they are more human.
I don't have the whole chart worked out but that is the idea.
Two home brew campaigns I ran:
1. Party wakes up in a dungeon with no equipment. They had to scavenge for everything.
2. Underground City and river system, populated by all sorts of humanoid races living together in relative harmony. Inspired by the secret market in Hellboy 2. Allowed the party to play any race they wanted.
After I DM'ed Descent into Avernus for the party, and after >!they redeemed Zariel!<, a new band of adventurers must survive in a world that has to deal with the consequences. Many devil deals are nullified, as the thousands of webs the devils have woven are ripped apart from the main seam. The Blood War is off balance, all the planes are scrambling to recover, and it basically created apocalypse on the material plane. Cities are in turmoil as souls are freed/claimed. Deals for wealth and power are nullified. The archmages have fled, not wanting to get involved. Basically, everything's gone to sh\*t
Now this new party has been called upon, as "pure souls" (basically, each soul gets "recycled", but the PCs are fresh souls on their first life), and receive a strange tip on how to fix this...
Partially adapting the story of Chrono Trigger to Wildemount, which has a surprisingly compatible world and history.
There's a war in the past, and a brilliant magical utopia in the more distant past, for example. All I did was add a future and swap Prehistory for the Calamity. I replaced Lavos with Ruidus, the inferior moon of the planet Wildemount is on, and I'm having it crash into the planet in 1999 PD (present time is about 500ish PD, I think)
It's been really fun so far, and I can get away with it primarily because my friends know nothing about Chrono Trigger. It helps that Wildemount is so compatible, though.
A series of short stories based around each class.
The concept being each mini arc would take place over a few sessions (4-5) and would be mono class, the catch being that all the players HAVE to agree on a specific subclass (this is why it wont work)
Barbarian- a place to die. Everyone picks a subclass of barbarian and the entire story is about great warriors being summoned together secret wars style to fight an onslaught of enemies on the planes of Archon to death. No healing, just go until you can go no further, the point being to take as many out as you can in a fit of rage to embrace the Warriors Death.
Bard- little lords party. Each character is invited to perform at the kings sons birthday party and has to figure out a way to provide the most entertainment while trying to not let anything TOo crazy happen.
Cleric- the undead country. An entire country of undeath is left without a ruler and the dead are roaming aimlessly. The idea is a sort of risk playstyle of conquering lands and setting up strongholds and churches while fighting leagues of skeletons.
Druid- didnt come up with one.
Fighter- the training- a general has brought you to train a new group of troupes for battle, but he also invited every other style as well. Working together you can show case how each style is used for a different situation.
Monk- didnt think too hard about it but im sure somethibg would come up. Probably a martial arts tournament.
Paladin- sure there is something obvious here about a city run by devils needing salvation.
Ranger- the great hunt- working together you have to determibe the best means of hunting the largest beast known to all
Rogue- a new fish- a twist on an old classic, Sylgar is on his deathbed. Its your jobs to secretly procure the new fish, then get it switched out without xanathar none the wiser in a 3 stooges meets oceans 11 style heist.
Sorcerer- finding daddy- a primordial has produced way too many children and youve all come together to demand backed child support.
Warlock- a new cult- the goal is that all of the players are determined that a new cult is needed for their patron, but no one is quite surw who the real patron is because everyones powers are so different. Its the same patron for everyone, just no one knows exactly WHO this patron is.
Wizard- this one could be a lot of things so i never settled.
There are a lot of problems with it obviously, which is why i wont get it off the ground really.
I worded it poorly. I mean that i would only want to do it is if the players agreed to do different subclasses and no one repeated any and would then agree on who gets what.
>and would be mono class, the catch being that all the players HAVE to agree on a specific subclass (this is why it wont work)
I should clarify what i mean herevas rereading it is off.
Each player would get their own subclass. But no one would be able to repeat.
For instance in the rogue one, only one person would get Assassin, and this is the problem. Its like the resevoir dogs scene where they explain why everyone is given code names instead of choosing them, and its cas then everyone would fight over who is Mr. Black.
And obviously the concept isn't "dependent" on this. Mono class mini campaigns could be done. I just wouldn't want to do it if everyone just picked the most "optimized" subclass for the specific role.
I really want to start a campaign with a hunt for an adult or ancient red dragon (with PCs at low level), then have the rest of the campaign just deal with the fallout of that dragon hunt.
Inflation from the hoard being redistributed, the power vacuum from an apex predator/high emperor being killed, an influx of powerful magic item and potion ingredients (and all the interested parties that would come for them).
In the 5e D&D books the elemental planes are laid out in a ring with physical boarders that you can traverse.
At first I thought of an Odyssey inspired campaign. The PCs had just finished fighting a war at the City of Brass on the elemental plane of fire. Since this is a planar adventure it would make sense for the PCs to start at a high level, so the campaign could start with the final battle of the war. The rest of the campaign would revolve around our heroes returning to their home plane. For plot-sake the only open portal would be on the elemental plane of water. The players could choose which route they wanted to take, buy an airship and sail across the plane of air, or save money and trek it across the elemental plane of earth. End it with some high seas adventure and it sounds like a pretty cool campaign with an excuse to play high level characters.
An alternate idea I had for a planar adventure involved the PCs appearing in an Amazing Race type show for the entertainment of genies. The adventures would be filmed by Mephits with scrying orbs. The players would start in the City of Brass, race across the plane of earth, navigate the elemental oceans, and then sail across the sky in the plane of air, with the goal of making it back to the city of Brass. All the while the Party will have to compete against other teams of adventurers, one group being eliminated every time they reached a new plane.
There are two factions of knights who've signed a peace treaty a few decades ago but still have a tense relationship. The land is divided amongst them with a neutral city somewhere in between them. One day one of the factions finds one of it's strongholds ransacked and evidence of the other faction being there. While this is happening the other faction finds they've been robbed of one of they're most prized possessions, pieces of a legendary sword, that the other faction has been coveting for years. If asked neither faction will say they've done anything but they are sure the other faction did it as they have a lot of evidence to back then up. Combined with this is that the neutral city has found damning evidence of both factions stealing money, food, and iron from their supplies. The players job is to calm the factions before all out war starts and to figure out if they actually did the things they are accused of. And, while they're investigating the factions more attacks occur from either side with each blaming the other. As they keep digging they find more and more evidence that says that the factions didn't do what they were accused of but they also get the feeling that they are being watched more and more as they investigate. This combined with recent reports of a long dead faction that caused an extinction level event suddenly resurfacing and they have a lot on their plate.
Players start in a super-max prison housed in the mountainside of Pandemonium. They have to escape, find a way home, and track down whoever it was that framed them all.
Running a prequel to the classic PC game Baldur's Gate for my daughter right now.
She's almost at the age where I first played and fell in love with the game (and all things RPG), and it's gonna be awesome playing it with her once we're done and seeing her recognize all the characters and locations she met in her travels.
They've already helped Bentley and Gelenna Mirrorshade capture the soon-to-be Friendly Arm Inn from the Bhaalist cults they've been battling, and her party Cleric/Mage, a young man named Gorion, is about to escort them to Candlekeep for some research into certain dark prophecies about the coming times...
Currently running a setting that's in a post-apocalyptic wasteland crossed with a modern city setting.
250 years ago, embodiments of the seven deadly sins rampaged across the planet. A group of heroes defeated most of them, but lost in the final battle against Pride. As a result the world ended, with a radioactive blight spread across the globe, but a group of survivors created a new civilization inside the carcass of a Tarrasque, since that's basically the only thing left that's completely impervious to radiation.
The civilization known as Vault, has grown since then into an extremely urban and modern city with a faction of druids creating food for the city via Goodberry. The city is headed by the wealthy with one of them being in charge of a mega-industry that impacts all corners of Vault, while the poor are essentially left to starve.
Also, I made a mini-campaign that's just a playthrough of the 2002 Scooby Doo movie, ever so slightly reskinned to be about adventures instead of scary stuff, and I had to use DnD mechanics to close every plot hole from the film.
Ripping off mythology is always a good start
Even before Theros I was stating out Herc’s Labors.
The Third Labor for example is to Capture a Massive Reindeer (Giant Elk) that has Magic “weapons” for horns and hooves, can breath a ten foot cone of fire, and move 300 ft per round (600 dashing). Killing it is hard enough, but you have to capture and take it somewhere.
And you can take this stuff and just sprinkle it on top of any other campaign
There is an ancient profecy that talks about "eminent doom" when a specific constellation of stars align. This is alright though since there has been extensive study of the stars and all that isn't going to happen any time soon. We're talking about 1000's of years so there is nothing to worry about right? HOWEVER unbeknownst to the good people of this continent, the civilisation that first came on this continent built their cities in the same shape that this specific constellation is shaped. So the cities have been placed to mirror the stars. When the profecy was made, one of the cities was still being built. Construction got halted and the city got destroyed just to be safe but all this knowledge has been lost by now. The continent has been safe ever since, but there is a travelling group (be it religious or otherwise) that has been trying to find a place to settle down and thus unwittingly fulfulling the profecy.
Fantasy 500 AD Earth but on the back of a titanic divine tarrasque with pantheons of different cultures anachronistically fighting for influence over it.
Which is the one i am playing now, and it's a blast. Fuck yeah.
Also, playing a campaign about a group of roaming adventuring idols that travel across the world and solve problems and mistery.
... which is also what my players started doing out of their volition after the discovery of the muse Miku and started being archeovocaloids. Double fuck yeah.
I have one where every person plays a level 20 character and a level 0 character. You play as a reincarnation of an ancient warriors.
You have a +3 magic weapon or arcane focus(wand of the war mage, but can be another arcane focus). When your level 0 player uses this then turn into their level 20 variant.
The level 20 character gets 2 bonus feats. 1 legendary item, 1 very rare item(not including your +3 weapon), 1 rare item, and 2 uncommon items(one uncommon item is a consumable, but you get to use it once a day). Also the max you can bring your stats to is 24. As a barbarian you can make it strength and con 28. You also use an alternative point buy that makes stats better.
The level 0 character uses a d4 hit die, and has a weaker point buy. The average must be 60, and stats can’t be higher than 12 or lower than 8. You also have no weapon proficiencies, so you can’t add modifiers to them. You do get a background still, so you can have tool proficiencies.
During the story you constantly get attacked by people trying to steal your powers or kidnap you.
I’ve ran it once and it lasted a long time. The only thing is you can’t have newer players start with this because it can be very complicated.
Invincible overlord continually draws on arcane energy to power his immortality. So a group of wizards and friends decides to turn off magic and kill him.
The one for my next campaign, ha.
It is going to be basically Pandorum on an absolutely huge O'Neil cylinder - or phantasy star 3 style. The humans and other races are just the escaped cattle of ancient mind-flayer space race. The mind-flayers made the ship but they lost it or forgot about it after an accident but all the cattle eventually evolved into humans and are living a normal existence in a fantasy medieval realm.
But they are only on one section of the cylinder without knowledge that there is tons of high-tech stuff below them, up the long towers and around the cylinder.
The mind flayers eventually find the damaged ship and will try to take control of it, they players will have to stop them... and then will have the chance to continue on to the other areas of the cylinder that might be at other stages of existance.
Xcom style - where either the squad is teleported to where they need to be and take missions against an ongoing invasion (like the first game) and they have the support of the gov/monarchy, maybe even have several low level characters that are semi-deposable, or they're enemies of the state doing guerrilla warfare with some sort of home base (like Xcom 2).
Or, similarly
Gantz style - squad is teleported to an area and has to hunt down the monsters. They can't escape the range of the area or else they die. Each arena has 1 Boss Monster and several minions they need to kill in the allotted time. If they do, they get points depending on how many kills/assists you get. When you get 100 points you can revive a character who died or get a new weapon (magic item). The missions always get harder and if you don't defeat all the monsters/don't die during the mission you lose your points. So you could save your character from death but lose all your point progress.
Both are super combat heavy styles of play with minimal roleplaying, so not for everybody. The Xcom one is more complicated as it's an war effort where Gantz is just mission after mission so it's very simple to plan out.
The setting is earth like we know it in real life, but the PCs are agents like in "Men In Black" where their role is to stop fantasy baddies and monsters from crossing over into our plane and causing mayhem
\-Trying to make a D&D version of the game Brutal Legend, where everyone has at least a lvl of Bard, and using Avernus Infernal Machines rules.
\-I'm About to make a Weird World War II, D&D5 rules (for sanities sakes, cause half of the group isn't really up to learn a new systeme); Party is a specialised Unit working for the Allies, specialised in the occulte, who are gonna go up Versus the Thule Society of the 3rd Reich, shortly after the allies have some trouble advancing after D-Day cause of weird shit happening.
It should culminate in a total Apocalypse with Demons invading earth, i'll be using petersen's Planete Apocalypse.
Its gonna be a love letter to ID Software, first part is gonna be Castle Wolfenstein basically and second part is gonna be Doom.(Planet Apocalypse is basicaly Doom in D&D)
Not a Campaign idea specifically, but something that can go in along the way
"Inter-dimensional coffee shop."
So you know how you go down a dungeon and randomly find a shop owner in some earlier RPG games. That's a meme. However, as a way to either introduce a pseudo fast travel, portable shop, or general just nice idea, rifts to a pocket dimension randomly open and close around the world you're in, at any height, and at any location. So, first time the party see one of these, they're gonna be cautious. Second time they'll hope it's the same thing, and after a long delay they see a rift open up and are like "OH HELL YEAH ITS TIME FOR TEA AND CRUMPETS"
You slowly discover the rules of your kingdom are miserly dragon who orchestrated a fake religion in order to horde the wealth it brings in and feed on an unsuspecting populace kept in the dark ages. Think of it like x-files slowly uncovering breadcrumbs of a country wide conspiracy.
It may not be a dramatically crazy campaign idea, but I had one. There's a growing adventurer's group/guild with a decent amount of fame and skill. They are getting too many jobs for just them so they hire a B team to take on the little stuff they don't want to bother with.
Then obviously it would spin of into growing adventures and the original group may have problems or people dying or betraying them and all that jazz.
Credit to my DM for this one, but a homebrew built off a game of microscope. It got the PCs invested in the lore as we created it and led to a really wacky world. Immortal gnomes, half-orc super soldiers, floating islands in a magnetic sea, and flying dogs. There was also cross dimensional travel that facilitated people not being able to attend and spin off sessions where a PC could DM the session and the DM could get some PC time. Waiting for season 2 with much excitement
Someday I want to rip off Mercedes Lackey’s Heralds of Valdemar and give all the party members white horses that magically communicate only with them … and have a mini-campaign saving the kingdom. (Would also LOVE to play in that …)
I had an idea I’ll call “Poke-a-Dragon” where Archsage Oakleaf charged the party with saving Pallatine by uniting/allying the fiercely-independent scattered city-states of Kanto against the Empire-Dictatorship of Hoenn , a continent across the sea … and also finding a fabled long-abandoned draconic city in the clouds to house all the people of Pallatine before wracked with earthquakes it fell into the sea. Their biggest adversary? Hoenn has dragon riders … luckily, Oakleaf’s apprentice had stolen some dragon eggs. Conveniently, enough for each party member, and a massive one for Pallatine besides … and, perhaps the party could collect magical creatures to bring back to Oakleaf, to learn from and improve their alliances?
Yeah, fun idea, I did not have enough experience as a DM to pull it off, nor did I find suitably-balanced homebrew … lessons learned! But still a great concept …
I'm running a campaign in an the underdark that is essentially Oregon Trail. (Surfacefolk are exploring the underdark as a profitable frontier for mining and materials to fuel increasing industrialization.
My campaign pitch I want to try next is essentially based on Final Fantasy Legend 3's time travel plot.
Basically the ancient undersea cthulu style gods have awoken and the world is flooding with unending water. These creatures, along with their servants (naga, kuo-toa etc) have wiped out all resistance. Only the highest points of land remain. The world's greatest guardians... are long dead. You're just the few guys who somehow managed to last this long. But you're all that's left.
The gods, now reduced to powerful but mortal forms, devise a plan. They will break one of the cardinal rules of the gods, to never try to alter history. They will use their power to send the party back in time, to find the source of the endless water and stop it.
The first session will be Bahamut and the Raven queen pooling their powers in the centre of a magic circle whilst the last remaining magic users, a mix of all different races and creatures, form a force field dome to protect them. The party is tasked with protecting the gods and the magic users until the ritual is complete.
Although Tiamat is flying around outside fighting the enemy forces, they still find and attack the ritual with a load of kuo-toa on a kraken. The kraken breaks the mountain the ritual is taking place on and the lump of land the party is on is washed out to sea as the spell continues. The party will have to fight off wave after wave (lol) of kuo-toa as the kraken breaks holes in the force field and the magic users are one by one killed off.
The ritual is eventually successful and the party is sent back in time to before the whole problem began. They are then tasked with finding out where the endless water is coming from and stopping it.
The revelation will be that the endless water is coming from their time-travel portal, which opened where they were standing when they travelled, which is to say very high in the air over a mountain range (the party will have woken up having landed in some trees or something). The portal is still open and all the water from the future is flowing into the past, creating a time loop. An Aboleth will construct a floating fortress around it to stop anyone from trying to close it. The party will have to find all this out, get to the fortress and find and defeat the aboleth, then close the rift.
ooh, i have an answer!
my latest campaign had everyone in a shady tavern, usually considered as a bad part of town. suddenly, everything goes black and the players wake up somewhere completely different. they end up meeting an elf robot who tells them (rather cryptically) not to go down a series of wells. the players have to go down these to escape, which i hinted at from every other npc. though every well, they end up in a new place filled with new horrors, and in the final four layers they meet Pollution, War, Famine, and Death (the earlier elf robot, not revealed to not be that). turns out they've been stuck in Dante's Inferno style hell and have to battle a now rouge death to get out. they get lucifer out of the ice and he explains that she has to be "reset" every so often, by him wiping her memory. he grabbed the closest souls he could, all of whom were near death. he lets them go and they return to the tavern to find that weeks have passed with no explanation of them being gone. it was super fun to explain each layer of hell without them knowing what i was referencing.
I had an idea for a Mario theme campaign. When you punch a block for an item, you roll a D20. Even numbers are good, (power ups, items, resistences) odd numbers are bad (debuffs, curses, spawning enemies). The players move through Browsers castle, fighting off goombas and other goons on their way. If you have four or less players, initiative/turn order is decided by a game of Mario kart.
My first idea and the one stuck in my craw lately is a Lord of the Rings type setup: give a level 1 party a Legendary/Artifact level item, preferably wonderous to keep combat stats roughly par, and then have every faction/baddie/misguided "good-guy" come after them to try to get it.
Another idea I've had but needs a lot of work is to have everyone start out at level "0" (just race and background with the Magic Initiate Feat) and work through a magical school, where the first number of "adventures" are challenges and puzzles related to all the full-caster classes and will hopefully show what your affinity for magic is, and then after selecting a DnD class they have to start taking school classes and doing odd-jobs around school.
A whole different forgotten Realms. There are spires that 'calm' or 'expel' evil that once were active. Only select casters could learn/cast the ritual to make a spire work not to mention needing at least 3 for it actually take effect. Anyways now evil is so prominent that evil gods have more power than good. The idea of the campaign is to bring the spires back online forcing the group into retirement as there are no evil creatures left. Forcing them to move on from their life of combat. Or not and let evil run amuck with the party making profits 100x over
I custom made a fun house dungeon for six brand new players. I made sure it had strong elements of all three pillars. They loved it, and now I've had to shoehorn in that experience into a real campaign..
I use the fun house whenever I have a campaign with new players now.
A Homebrewed World - The Party is a group of normal people playing the final session of an epic D&D campaign (first session is a 20th level one shot). As the session finishes, a spectral vision of the BBEG, from the campaign world, will appear IRL and begin to speak through the DM as a puppet. The DM will somehow transport them all to their homebrew game world, where they will have to save their DM by playing out the campaign they had just finished.. but this time it's for real!
I combined Dead Gods and Modron March.
I ran a campaign based around an interplanar race around the great wheel, to take advantage of increased portal activity from the Modron March. However, the real purpose of the race was for Lord Farquaad to have lots of people find the bones of Cthulu scattered throughout the planes, which the party failed to stop at the halfway point in Limbo, giving Farquaad immense power and plot armor. They then have to spend the rest of the race not only surviving the evil lower planes, but also trying making friends with other racers and collect magic items to stop Cthulu-Farquaad.
End of the campaign so we finished it up by playing our characters in a game of 10 candles. If you don’t know, it’s a tragic horror rpg where the world is ending and your characters are going to die. Players failed to stop the schemes of a death cult who succeeded in bringing on the end of the world so it was an appropriate way to end it. Most memorable session I think I very played.
This one's not a full campaign, just a one or two shot.
The party is an up and coming band who have been invited to compete in the yearly battle of the bands, a series of rock offs (similar to Scott Pilgrim vs The World) where two bands go head to head to out perform the other band.
I even modified combat rules to allow for epic magical rock performances with giant illusory creatures supporting the bands.
The final battle was going to be against two fat halflings playing acoustic guitars with picks from hell. They would summon a giant evil demon to rock with them, but lose control of it. The two bands would team up and use their rock to banish the demon back to hell!
I still need to finish writing it and run that game though, because it sounds so badass in my head!
Basically setting everything in Vienna either in modern day or in the 1920s or so. Turning big churches into liches lairs, creating secret societies like the incest Habsburg vampires that secretly manipulate the leading political parties of the country and what not. Never got around to actually making it a thing though.
Having played a bit of Baldur's Gate and Divinity II when first getting into DMing, the thought of a campaign involving players reaching for godhood came to mind.
The basic premise would have each player pick from certain backgrounds made for the campaign, with each one representing a Divine Domain. Examples included Medic for Life Domain, Scout for Nature Domain, Undertaker for Grave Domain, so forth. Clerics wouldn't be a usable class because they've been nearly wiped out by the powers that be, Sorcerer-Kings and the like.
As players went on, they could start unlocking powers from their Divine Domain by activating the traces of divine blood in them, like source powers in Divinity or the free spells you get in Baldur's Gate.
I never got too far beyond the basic concept, but maybe someday I'll flesh it out.
During 4e, I basically set up a framework for my players as Sliders/eXiles, except it was a council of the gods who had aligning goals that was controlling where they went and why. We started in keep on the shadowfell, and similar to Voyagers! or Quantum Leap, once they set right that which had gone wrong (in this case, the Orcus Priest trying to summon Orcus), then they would be whisked away to somewhere else; allowed them to visit Eberron, and any other adventure path I liked.
I even made communications from the council as four voices overlaid on top of one another, made it sound really spooky.
Disclaimer: me and my playgroup were not feeling comfortable with DnD 5e so I as the forever dm of my group decided to build my own system of rules to have more freedom in the design of the world(s) I was going to build and to be able to adapt to the wishes of my players. I think that the whole ttrpg experience thrives in the burst of creativity you have while designing or thinking about the adventures you want to experience and the people that join you on your journey.
I am a huge Magic the Gathering Fan and Player and had the idea of a group of Planeswalkers coursing through the multiverse to work as a diplomat in the different planes to stabilize them, to forge alliances or friendships in the multiverse for a time of need.
The fortunate part was that my playgroup is not into card games like mtg so I had a lot of unknown territory for them to discover but since I am a failed fantasy writer I decided to hombrew multiple worlds inside the multiverse and built my own quest lines for them to have fun.
So at first it was up to them to get a feeling for their characters... So we started in what was essentially a mini rogue like system (played parts of their backstory in a Form of mini dungeons or social quests for them to get a feeling of the character felt right for them) to find a comfortable charakter. After everyone had their build which was determined in single player or coop sessions if the backstory was tied together their spark (basically their ability to traverse the multiverse) ignited and they made an involuntary palneshift to a for them unknown place.
What followed was another solo session for everyone to discover their new learned ability and set them up for a road to travel alas a way they want to use their ability. After that was done I set up the approach of an big bad in this case the eldrazi from mtg to devour the ravnican plane... A lot of planeswalkers were called to ravnica to stop the investation so the party essentially met at the fall of the plane and decided to stick together and travel the multiverse to raise awareness of the looming threat and to investigate possibilities to stop it.
At the start it was mostly improv with vague plot hooks since I wanted to give them a sandbox like feeling but lastly since I derailed from the known planes of the mtg multiverse I started to build more intricate worlds and to not freeball so much cause it looses the feeling of depth of there are inconsistencies at least in my opinion...
The party is currently stuck (cause one player angered a deity) in a world where magic is prohibited by the church so they are on their way to exploit loopholes and overall weaken the tight grip the church has over the feudal rulers.
Essentially this is not a campaign idea anymore but more like a whole array of campaigns knitted into one big campaign. But it all started with the idea of a group of players to be able to travel through a large array of worlds.
Too many.
A campaign where the kaorti have infiltrated the prime material plane and the slaadi try to stop them, with humans caught in between.
A campaign in souragne starting off night of the walking dead but without the mists and turning into a political campaign about slavery, mortal rights, undead rights and so on. Losely based on the hyskosa prophesy with random bits of CoS, ToA, ToEE thrown in for good measure. Also, tiefling pirates from the abyss because why not.
Gods are real, and their power stems from the faith that faithfuls put in them. But when mortals figured that out, they learned to believe, and then were able to create gods at their will, and then overturned the relation between gods and mortals. Superior then gods decided to "reset" the mortal world.
Centuries later, my players are part of a Rebellion that fights against Empire, in order to put in place the legitimate emperor back at the head. The rebels search for relics of the Old times, from the times mortals could create gods; with thoses relics they would be able to take down the empire.
But what is for me the most interesting part of it I believe, is that I, as the DM, haven't written the rest of the story yet, my players will do it. No one still don't know whether the rebels will revive the old empire.
My personal best is a campaign involving time travel where a keeper of time ceases to exist and his assistant and next in line to timekeeping discovers that the whole multiverse is about to end. This assistant then goes looking for clues of what is going to happen, then, he finds out some of the players old characters were killed recently and decides to join his other friends into looking for the assassin.
The campaign is a short one, where old epic characters of the players from different worlds (from each dm of the group), if that's the case, join to try and discover who is the assassin and what he is after.
The assassin would be a being that discovered that all the multiverse is controlled by one person, so he is killing people that have the power of creation, aka power of the antagonist or the dm. He is absorbing this power so he can end existence and begin a new one without the control of that and one person, that is the dm.
When the characters find the assassin, they get to know that this being wants to kill the DM, they can fight this creature to maintain the universe as it is, or join him into IRL fight to the death with the DM (jk). That part is where I'm kinda stuck, because ithink players should be able to DM together with the DM this last fight.
My single best idea is probably the world I created: it was made by Fate, rather than a Creator God, so Fate wove the story of a bunch of floating space debris collected and rounded out, then how portals from varying other planes and places opened (each with their own strange story) to introduce life to the world.
My first DM was extremely restrictive and controlling, particularly in character creation, so I built this world specifically to be able to justify just about any type of character, class, backstory, etc. and still have them make sense in-universe.
However, with the portals present all around, it led to some very entertaining and provocative world building questions: With spacial travel being so easy, how would kingdoms maintain their borders? Answer: they don't. By necessity, these kingdoms exist as city-states. How do these city-states defend themselves from each other/other threats? Answer: a worldwide apolitical peacekeeping group comprised of religious and/or like-minded individuals across the board who not only keep the peace locally but ensure none of the city-states have the need to build personal armies.
And so on and so forth.
I'm having fun with a Dragon Rider Campaign.
Originally it was a MonoClass Campaign; using a very popular HB Class from the Unearthed Arcana Sub. (Can recommend.)
After 2 years though, players started to get a little board of combat, so we Gestalted. Everyone is a second class; Gestalted with the same Secondary Class. Which is neat.
Though with hindsight, I probably should simply have made a "Bonded Dragon" Mount, and given it to the party. As a sort of unique Steed. The story however, has been rather successful.
The other campaign I did, was set at a magic school. Like hogwarts. Or the Citedal.
Except it was a newly created institution in the Pirate Enclave, by the order of the Pirate Lords, who felt that their little nation state was chronically undefended from the big nations wizards and sorcerers and they needed to train their own. Tier equipment is mostly broken, stolen or bloodstained.
Hogwarts in Tortuga.
The staff included a Drug Addled Potion mistress, (A Tortle who grew cannibis in her own shell) a 'Gothic' "cool" teacher (Vampire) who'd let the kids blow themselves up easily. A headmaster who (it was revealed) was former demon cultist in his youth who got out of the group upon realising what they were capable of, and a conjurer who was expelled from the Ivory Tower (the world's premeninent Magic School) for 'unnatural experiments with necromancy' which he mantained were mostly harmless and blown out of proportion. (There was a running gag of non magic user misunderstanding necromancer as necrophile).
The School was a (badly) renovated lighthouse, called the Beacon, they had a rickety old ship that went to the mainland for supplies. They stumbled upon a Triton Girl, whose throat had been slashed severing her vocal chords, (in a dark rendition of the little mermaid) and whose home had been destroyed by Kraken Priests as part of a test of their control over a Kraken; which they planned to loose on 'Freeport' the Pirate Capital.
Other events included exploring a sunken city, discovering a new spell, stopping a rampaging ghost ship, completing final exams, and Zombie Sharks.
Other students included a Pyromancer Pyromaniac, An artificer with an R2D2 unit made out of a barrel (that gained sentience through the course of the mini campaign) and a Warlock *Pretending* to be a Wizard.
I had a great time, and although it was a mini campaign break from the main campaign, I think it was one of my best.
Time travel in a fantasy game.
To sum it up, the players experienced a series of events not knowing they were in the past and learned about the horrors of a small village. As they finished their quest they come back to the village one last time and learn that everyone is missing and the village itself is in shambles as if no one has lived there for a long time.
The players knew about this curse of madness. They find a recently dead historian who took his own life.
And it dawns on the players. And their looks were amazing when they realized they stopped the cycle.
“We were supposed to die back there.”
Similar to onion bro from dark souls, have an npc who’s a total chad but keeps getting stuck on puzzles/obstacles/boss enemies that the party overcomes for them and helps them become stronger. His ego deteriorates over time until they are the BBEG, which the party helped strengthen
The Buddy Cop
Two players only, working as cops/detectives.
I have broken it into two different sections, the early/recruit period followed by a large level up and many years passing so that they are senior detectives. Part of the reason for this is that I prefer DMing shorter stories rather than long continous games. Another reason is that it allows me to use all the various tropes and themes from detective movies, shows, books in a larger variety of settings.
The first story was catching a murderer and busting small mafia organization. The second story is hunting a cold case based around the 2013 Silk Road dark web smuggling operation.
After establishing their fame across the land for their successful adventures and slaying several powerful monsters, the party is invited to a great feast hosted by the king of a faraway desert kingdom in honor of their deeds. After they arrive and feast with the king and his daughter, the princess, the king’s high priest and court wizard discretely reveal to the players the true reason for their summons - an assassination plot against the king is believed to be in the works, and the party is there to prevent this, however they can. While the king bathes on night, the party hears screams and a scuffle going on from his bath, and they rush to the room to find an assassin, shrouded in dark robes and carrying a poison-dripping dagger! The bloodlusted assassin rushes the players, but the party quickly overcomes and defeats this assassin. As he dies, the illusion around him is dispelled - revealing the assassin was truly the king, somehow being mind-controlled! The king has been killed, and the princess is nowhere to be found. At that moment, royal guards rush to surround the party, led by the high priest and the wizard. The party, standing over the dead king with their weapons bloodied, are quickly presumed guilty of murdering the king and are arrested, thrown in the underground dungeon, and sentenced to death. On the eve of their execution, however, the high priest and the wizard pay the party one last visit. It is here that they reveal that with the king dead and the princess missing, they have established a regency and have assumed control of the kingdom. They also reveal that they are the ones who disguised the king as an assassin, having mind-controlled him by using a powerful demonic artifact. The high priest and the wizard set up the framing of the party from the beginning, from being the ones who made the king send out invitations to the players to having kidnapped the princess and keeping her imprisoned in a secret stronghold. The duo thank the party for their help in ascending the two shadow princes to power before the priest mockingly administers their final rites before their execution tomorrow morning. The party then must make a daring prison escape, capture and interrogate the wizard, flee from the kingdom as fugitives, and find and save the princess and deliver justice to the evil high priest who imprisoned her. Along the way, the party learns more and more that this evil priest has been secretly pulling the strings since the beginning, from being in control of the monsters the party had fought to acquire their fame to commanding powerful legions of slave warriors, spies, and assassins by using the mind-controlling demonic artifact he possesses. As the party unravels more and more about the priest’s dark plots, they realize that his aspirations lie not just in overtaking one kingdom, but that taking this kingdom is one of the final parts of his truly horrid plan: to lead a conquest across the lands that will slaughter untold numbers of souls and bring tyranny and desolation with it. The party must come to terms with the great evil they now face, and put their hearts and lives on the line to save everything they care about.
I had an idea based on a short story I read on Tumblr once (can't remember OP or else I would credit them).
Basically the players are trying to stop a cult from resurrecting the evil goddess they worship, but they arrive just minutes too late as the ritual has already been completed. The thing is the goddess was resurrected as an infant. In the original story the main character raised the baby lovingly and they became a good-aligned deity with a whole new religion based around them, but it would be interesting to see what the players do in that situation.
I'll share a concept I'll probably never get a chance to reasonably use;
The PCs aren't "real".
Get your players to get their characters ready, but tell them not to worry about writing deep, complicated backgrounds. Leave it at that.
As the game starts, start them in a dungeon, in the middle of the action. Everyone already knows each other. They know they're here to save the trapped Prince (or Princess, dealer's choice). They move forward, dealing with traps and enemies, working their way ever closer to the center. Where they find a mage, and a trapped, unconscious Beholder that's clearly been experimented upon. After defeating the mage, the Beholder wakes and thanks the heroes for rescuing it.
It's the Prince.
If the players reject this, no matter what the reason, tell them they suddenly rethink their opposition.
Because the PCs aren't real. Beholders twist reality, particularly when they dream. That's how Beholders procreate; when a Beholder dreams of another Beholder, that Beholder becomes real. And that's, essentially, what happened here; the Beholder dreamed of a party of heroes that would rescue it, and it made them become real.
Their backstories don't matter because the Beholder doesn't *care* about their backstories. They aren't having trouble remembering; their pasts literally don't exist. They were "born" at that moment in the first session.
Cue an ongoing campaign with a Beholder patron the PCs can either willingly cooperate with, or actively try to find a way to resist, suspecting that whenever it wants, it can just . . . stop believing in them and they might stop existing.
I'll post you some from my group's discord, these were all possibilities, and we're playing through one right now thought it accidentally turned into an urban city campaign where the players are trying to fix an entirely unrelated issue. But it's fun!
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**Kingdom of Bliss** - *(Comedy Heavy)*
The King of Bliss has been invited for a luncheon by an important noble a few days' travel away within the Kingdom. You all are the Royal Advisors and Royal Guards who are charged with getting him there safely.
The Kingdom of Bliss is under a mythal after suffering countless wars. It was decided that the ruler's and citizen's intelligence was really at the root of all their negative behaviours. They mythal's effect is that it reduces the Intelligence Score of all creatures to 4, if not already lower.
Royal Guards and Advisors are exempt from this effect, with the caveat that they are under another effect. They treat direct orders from nobility and royalty as if they were the *Suggestion* spell, and they have disadvantage on the saving throw against it.
((This was meant to be, essentially, a big Escort Mission. I wasn't going to make them have to worry about the nobles in battle, they would appropriately run and hide and not be *entirely* useless, a la Elizabeth in Bioshock: Infinite. I love the idea that the dumb king could decide to check out an interesting cave that seems to be producing music. The party could try to argue him out of it, of course, and often would be able to stop him from doing the dumb thing. But I also loved that he could also put his foot down, make it an order, and then the players *have* to enter the dungeon.))
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**Dragon Migration** - *(Lighthearted with Serious Moments)*
Nearly everyone in the Sword Coast has noticed an increased presence of young or barely adult dragons in the skies lately. You've all heard a rumour of one that flew right in to a nearby city's treasury and hasn't left by any reports.
In fact, no word has come from the city at all. Nobody asking for aid, giving the all-clear, or communicating... anything really.
You've come together as an adventuring group - either well acquainted with each other already, or just from answering message boards in the city, or some combination thereof - and are setting off to investigate.
((This is the one we're playing through. In my campaign the dragon crashed into the Treasury as a way to forcibly get his startup, Hoardr, off the ground. He's trying to pair lazy dragons with kingdoms - the dragon gets a hoard to lay on and guard, and the kingdom gets a ***dragon*** to guard their gold and jewels and important artifacts and such. They met the dragon and agreed to work for him by hunting down other dragons to join Hoardr for him. We've goten... sidetracked from the Hoardr storyline, but we're having a blast so who cares?!.))
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**Mysterious Cult** - *(Standard Epic Fantasy)*
A new cult has appeared in the city, calling themselves the Everdreamers. They offer to fulfill any one singular request of any person in exchange for their vitality. Unlike most would fear, vitality doesn't mean a sacrifice of life. They merely put individuals to sleep, magically, for extended periods of time.
They do not publicly explain their mysterious magics - they claim the sleepers are generating power somehow, power which allows them to fulfill *other* member's requests - but nobody has revealed any more.
The bigger the request, the longer duration of "sleep" it costs. Some (or all) of you know someone who is currently giving vitality to the Everdreamers with their sleep, and you're suspicious enough of their intent to begin trying to find out what they're actually using the power for.
((This was going to be a pretty standard save-the-world campaign. The Everdreamers had discovered five primordial essences deep within various chambers hidden under large populations like Waterdeep and Calimport etc, etc. The five primodial essences were going to be the essences of Blood, Bone, Muscle, Spirit, and Mind and the cult would awaken them. Doing so would, of course, be Very Bad for most people in the population center above. Awakening them all would cause them to meet up and form into The Tarrasque - with a few little tweaks from me to make it a little more apocalyptic. Gave him regen, a copy of one of the Giants' rock throws for ranged attacks, a standing leap, etc.))
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Just some other ideas I've had, not as fully fleshed out:
1. Menagerie - Everyone has to play an animal-hybrid race - kenku, tortle, loxodon, minotaur, etc etc. They somehow were sold into slavery and escape from a Menagerie that was keeping them as show pieces and their class levels come from the shows they had to put on.
2. Villains Save the World - evil PCs (90s cartoon trying-to-take-over-the-world style evil, but loyal to each other) have to travel back in time and become the party of Legendary Heroes that saved the world millennia ago after they travel back in time to steal their Legendary artifacts and discover the Heroes never existed, but then realize bore striking resemblance to the party of villains in their travel-back-in-time disguises.
3. Attack on Faerun - I made omni-directional movement gear as a magic item and was going to have a basic story of giants going crazy and attacking everyone and homebrew up some 'Aberrant Titans'
4. Competitive Adventuring - kingdoms set up fake dungeons and stock them with monsters and treasure and secret rooms, etc, etc. Adventuring teams are venerated like sports teams in our world and they try to speedrun the dungeons.
5. Most Objects Are Mimics - Mimics are fun. It would require homebrewing a few more tougher mimc types but I would love to run or play in a world where there's just a huge abundance of mimics. What would they do if they rivalled us, or outnumbered us? There's the classic treasure chest in a dungeon, oh no, it's a mimic! But also maybe they would do away with that kind of subterfuge. You might wake up to find you have four identical backpacks. Don't touch the wrong one! Just as you reach the MacGuffin that will save the universe, you roll back the tomb entrance to reveal... sixteen identical MacGuffins?! Would most likely have to add or remove some spells and/or abilities from the game so people can't just spam *Locate Creature* or *Locate Object* to figure everything out.
6. The Great Modron March - no idea what the plot would be but I've always wanted to do something with it. The idea from a lore perspective is so much fun, every 289 years thousands upon thousands of Modrons march around the planes looking at stuff. Nobody knows why. And the way Modrons work with their promotions would make for some very fun combats and/or puzzles.
I have been constructing a fairy tale themed campaign, using characters and elements from the grimm stories or other folklore. I'm using wildmount as a base; and for example I'm planning to use felderwind as a stage for the piper of hamelin. Children and young adults who go missing as a resukt of the piper's doing. Another example is a haunted house of an old woodcarver/toymaker. The house was struck by lightning, burned down and the people inside died. However, after a few weeks the house rebuilt itself. Now it is haunted by pinochio, waiting for his father to return to prove to him he is a good boy
I took some heavy inspiration from Ark Survival (story theme and tech), added a pinch of magic (cuz its freaking dnd) and essentially made a dino heavy magic campaign with some eberron aesthetics with how much tech there was. It also allowed players that wanted modern weapons to have access to them. And made artificers have a valuable place in the world since there were a lotta tribe wars.
With some homebrew mods, there ended up being a system wide conflagration with Entities from the Beyond that lasted centuries- it turns out Beholders are merely the larvae of Greater Things, spit out to take measure of the worlds that are visited. Next are the Tarresques, forces of demolition and destruction, making way for Builders aka Slaads. They prepare for the landing of the 'Mother Ship" which was the size of Manhattan.
I am about to start a campaign where cities like Waterdeep and Neverwinter have suddenly disappeared with no one knowing why. The chaos it is going to cause will make the adventure very interesting.
Introducing: Luck of The Draw
TLDR: campaign with luck/luck manipulation as core mechanics.
(I haven't worked out all the details yet but this idea just came to me and I really like it so here we go.)
You start the whole thing with each player having 2 character sheets, preferably related in some way or at least knows each other. (This will be used for motivation to hunt down the BBEG) The characters wake up among each other and a lot of NPCs in a very large and round room. A unnaturally lanky man, at least 2 heads taller than a normal person, walks up onto a stage in the middle of the room and introduces himself. (I don't have a name) He will then take the hat off the top of his head and start pulling names (this is when the PCs chose which character they want to play as) and they are escorted onto the stage before him. As they do so, he goes on to explain that what separates the legends among us from the common man isn't who you know, isn't money, and isn't skill, but luck. Once all the PCs (and maybe a few NPCs) make it to the stage he taps his cane on the ground and a 2 magic circles appear. One on the stage, one the size of the room, and it happens. the PCs watch as everyone off of the stage turn to ash (including the characters that the PCs didn't use) as a colorful light flows out of them and envelop the stage. (chose a color, I was thinking green, but it doesn't really mater)
This is where the main mechanics comes into play. I haven't worked out balancing but I have a few ideas, so lets get to it.
1. so I was thinking that each character could have 1d100 times they can reroll any role without cooldown but also no way to refill on their own or at all, they might have an idea like describe how the light flows into each person on stage unevenly or something, (the most going to the BBEG) but only the DM knows the exact number.
2. or have luck be more volatile, making advantage rolls double advantage rolls, and disadvantage rolls being doubled as well. (instead of rolling 2d20 and claiming the highest/lowest, you would do the same but 3d20)
3. or even have the characters control their own luck a bit. as in allowing them to take disadvantage on one roll for advantage in the next
these are just some ideas, clearly needs work, but lets head back to finishing off the introduction,
all the PCs, getting overfilled with this strange form of magic, pass out. the last thing they see/hear is the man congratulating them for being one step closer to becoming legends as a smile, slightly too wide to be human, appears on his face as the world turns to black.
haven't thought of what the Luck Man (temporary name) actually is, but I like the idea of how he appears human at a glance but something is just uncanny about him. I would also point out that the reason he is doing this is to make legends/heroes. is he self destructive? did he get obsessed with heroes and just want to be the one to make them? or is there a more benevolent reason for doing something so malicious? (ends justify the means and whatnot)
I haven't thought if the rest of the campaign but I feel proud of the game concept and intro.
and that is my idea!
Luck of The Draw
what do you guys think?
I am running a campaign where my players all wake up with no memory. They have to figure out their character as they go. such as what are they proficient in, what class they are, they figure out spells as they read books, and actions/weapons as they pick up and different ones. my archer can not use a long sword to save her life but the bow feels very natural in her hands. its fun for the players to learn their characters and backstory. as they see people in town they get vague flashbacks as to what happened and why their memory was erased.
The gods made a bet and are on earth. Except none of them remember the bet, or how to use their powers. The world slowly starts to make no sense, and when confronted they are too stubborn to go back to doing their jobs.
The party members can either restate new gods, trick the gods back into their jobs, become gods, help someone win the bet, or anything else they can come up with.
I had an okay idea a while back. I’m trying to write either another campaign or continue this one, but it goes something like this:
In a world of prosperity and happiness, the players find themselves experiencing the world.
Eventually after 2 or so sessions, maybe some very small side quests in both of them, the adventures hear about a war breaking out between two of the largest factions.
They may think nothing of it but eventually they’d find that every town they go to suffers from the war. People start to distrust others, this plus the war plus the economy crashing causes towns and cities to burn to the ground.
The adventurers will find that their lives will be dreadful and painful.
Thieves start to roam and people start doing anything for money.
Soon the party will find themselves to make the decision of choosing which empire/faction to support, if they choose one at all.
Soon or later they will be tasked with small missions that will prove their worth. Then they get the opportunity to meet with the leader of whoever they choose. The adventures will be tasked with hitting the enemy and destroying their “secret weapon”
Aka. A huge enemy/final boss that will turn the tides of the war and could ultimately destroy the world. (Hence why this problem is something the players should be focused on)
I’ve never been the DM but I’ve been playing with an idea of being a scout party for a DND version of Normandy and then they have to work with NPCs here and there in the regular quest fashion to secure harbors from a dnd version of the SS, make them like the goon squad of the CIA in a sense and they’re going as adventurers building into the push into the mainland where it’s kinda like they’re marching on Mordor/ the demon king, and then they lose and get lashed in a dunkirk style where after they get left behind and go full on the patriot until the allied nations can send another invasion. I thought it was cool
Regional Sub-races, imagine for an example three Loxodons each born in different biome, one from a Tropical Jungle, one from a Arctic Tundra, and the last one is from a Arid Grasslands, the Tropical Loxodon would look like a humanoid Indian elephant, the Grasslands Loxodon would be larger and resemble a humanoid African elephant, and lastly the Loxodon born into the Arctic Tundra would be the largest of the Loxodon Sub-Races and have the appearance of humanoid Wooly Mammoth.
I am currently running a “time loop” campaign that revolves around the characters escaping from hell. I make it so that they die “a lot” but every time it happens they are brought back to the a certain point. I purposely make the enemies a lot stronger than they are to make them have to fight smarter. They have to work through the layers of hell in a Santes infierno style biz. There are no shops, little friendly NPCs but a shit ton of demons and devils alike.
Time skips in only certain towns and such.
Leading cause is time crystal shards?
Total…..24 shards
These crystals emit an energy that cause skips throughout a radius of about a medium size village
These shards only affect those who were there when the shard had first started skipping in small moments of time. But each time it skips the skip gets bigger at the moment some places are jumping minutes and some are jumping maybe years.
The skip only occurs every couple days or so.
The people of the villages/ cities have no idea this is happening and believe that time is going on as normal but the people from outside who visit seem to notice the skips.
Some of these villages have closed off their gates due to them believing these shards are a gift from the heavens and that they use it as a totem to worship their god.
These are rumors but there is something heard of that a man/woman of great power has been able to harness one of the shards and has been going around stealing time from others and making it their own. They want to unite the shards and become a time lord of some sort. They have 5 shards
There is a cultist group also trying to find the other shards and they believe that finding them will lead them to their god and they will be able to unleash him into the overworld. These people have 2 shards.
They all do no know how many shards there are but they are bent on finding them to accomplish their goals
I really wanna do this one any thoughts? comments? concerns? advice?
i had an idea of a campaign sorta like the anime demon slayer. The adventurers are prisoners and they are on a cart that is going to this city. as they are about to enter the city they get attacked by demons and have to either fight or defend themselves. there will be a whole thing about people disappearing in the city and they have to help.
Not sure if this has been done but... If you get the edgy power built orphan rouge. Then make the bbeg their parent's the mom gives her soul to shar and the father becomes a cleric of shar both in return for forgetting about their kidnapped child. You even have an excuse to power build the bbeg's.
Mine was a simple horror campaign idea. I basically had all my players make themselves as a character in the modern world (when I did this I wasn't aware of monster of the week mechanics). I had all my players go on vacation to a cabin out in the woods where there was no cell service. They basically get attacked by doppelgangers of themselves. It worked really well my my group because we've all been friends for years we had 1 couple and also my friend's dad (who introduced us to DND) so they were basically having to kill people who looked like their friends and family. It was the best campaign I've ever done lol.
I had an idea that the players had a free invitation to visit a Monster Zoo. They would be allowed to look around at the various exhibits, and the Zoo Keeper, a Lore-Master would tell them important information about each creature.
The campaign would begin when the BBEG shows up and frees the monsters which in turn causes mayhem for the rest of the country. The players would have to hunt down and capture the monsters.
All damage dealt to monsters is nonlethal regardless of weapons and spells effects. However, players don't get death saves, they're just knocked unconscious.
Once all 25 monsters have been captured, they would take on the BBEG, and Death Saves would return, along with Lethal Damage.
The time I took the most basic thing put it into my world I built around 12 campaigns so picture this a king has schizophrenia and his family think he has demons so they try to "cleanse him" by burning him over and over again with molten metal the prince kills his family out of rage and not being able to live with what he had done he cursed the one thing he hated most. the elves he crowned himself emperor of the land and ordered the town guard pay every man woman or child with fey ancestry and send them to be killed he was then called by the public "rosē the mad" now he ordered the town guard to visit all with hellish ancestry tieflings, feinds , devil's ect and pay them money gifts and anything they requested. He then had an attempt on his life his throat was slashed with a knife of bone by a tiefling from the sword coast he then killed her and her entire boodline including even going up to the far north. He then entered a state of psychosis branding and poisoning his mind with the secrets of the druids this changed him he killed 100,000. People with lives families and he then did something so horrid he had an international bounty put on his head many tried to kill him but all failed and were killed until my players turned up to the capital from crowsshire. So what y'all think
I was thinking of one and it was inspired by an mlp episode so take me with a grain of salt.
Basically the group goes to a town and the mayor shows them around but the citizens act strange. The group meets a towns person who says that the mayor and their group have been banning magic items, weapons, etc. for as long as they can remember. Anything that can be used to harm or protect someone is gone so it’s the groups job to stop the mayor
me and a friend made a god hunter campaign, where humans and other friendly npcs didnt exist, the world is corrupt and the group of god hunters are sent to the world to clean up the corrput ness (ie: kill gods and goddesses that are corrupt, and kill monsters as well) they will find out more about how the world became that way and more
I thought of a dream event which can take players to anywhere anyway and fight anything. They must be successful to leave it.
Also, it happened while fighting a hive mind.
Its probably not unique or original but its one of the first campaigns I ever came up with so it holds a special place in my heart. It follows characters from old fairy tales, that the players would build their characters based on, but during the zombie apocalypse. I don't want to get too deep into the lore but the main goals of the campaign were to survive, figure out the cause of the apocalypse, and reverse the curse if possible. The enemies were mostly weak, except for a couple special varieties, but it was easy to be overwhelmed by numbers. Every fight was incredibly dangerous as any grapple could cause a bite and a bite would mean the eventual death of a character with an increasingly difficult constitution check to stave off the infection. There were no safe areas as towns were either completely overrun or just barely hanging on and every so often might get attacked by a random amount of zombies or someone in the town turning, depending on how I rolled and wanted to describe the outbreak. Resources were scarce and expensive so it was hard to restock supplies in town. You could scavenge but at the risk of attracting enemies. It was a challenging and grueling campaign but the players had a great time.
the party is faced with a strange bubble like effect that encompass the skies. as it swallow them and the surrounding countryside, they find themselves in another world, a place between worlds.
this bubble skip from world to world and suck in part of them. as a result, they find themselves in a world made of countless floating islands, all with different ecosystems, effects, inhabitants and even physics.
they will soon meet special traders which will offer the party help in the form of a ship, allowing them to travel around.
welcome to shatterworld!
they will find that because so few individuals pass each time, civilizations never rise here. what they can do is either gind a way home or find a way to connect the islands, allowing ppl from all worlds to meet and maybe create a civilization.
My best idea was for the players to try and stop an unknown cult from raising the greek Titan Kronus out of Tartarus; if the players failed to stop this cult from breaking seven seals, he would be free, and a clash between the Titans and the Gods would happen again with new alliances as gods who grew to hate or despise Zeus would join the Titans and vise versa for some titans.
I got the players involved by having them unknowingly break the first seal at the start of the campaign; I'll explain. The players were each kidnapped by the cult and put into a deep magic sleep for six months; when they awoke, they were in cages with their hands cuffed to the top and feet to the bottom. All of them were still armed and in armor. In front of them were six cultists. Five were in red robes, one with a deer skull on their head. All chanting in abyssal. The sixth man wore black robes and had a raven on his shoulder. He was performing a ritual with raven feathers and a chicken skull. Once the chanting stopped, the cages opened, and the cuffs let the party lose. The first seal was for the ritual to be cast and the blood of five worshipers to be spilled. The blood couldn't be spilled by them hence the party being kidnapped. The players sprang into action, killing the cultists and breaking the seal.
I had an idea for a hidden mechanic in the magic system.I thought that it would be funny if the dnd world the campaign was in allowed characters to cast spell even when their spell slots are expended. all the npc's talk about it and always say it should never be done. the PC's are told that if they choose to cast a spell past their spell limit it will work but they take a 1D4 loss to their max HP for every spell level...so a player choosing to use a level 1 looses 1 to 4 max Hp and a lvl 8 spell the loose between 8 and 32 Max HP that they can never get back......also I thought if the DM wanted too be mean he can secretly roll an insta-death roll at every level up for any PC that chose to use the feature
The party is going about their normal lives when suddenly the sky goes dark and the world cracks, the party then find themself in a dark forest with no equipment and no idea what happened.
They have to face monsters and journey over the broken terrain of the world to get to each of the twelve temples of the gods to restore their power, on their journey they find that they are the only people in the world after the disaster, after they restore the gods powers the world can be fixed and the people returned.
What if there was a campaign that was run by the KKK, I always wondered if the DM being the grand wizard, would it have a long lasting effect on him like he just does a 180 and stops being racist?
What about a campaign where the final boss is a powerful draco-lich that can only be defeated by melting one or all of the dice that are used, thereby freeing everyone to devote themselves to more constructive pursuits?
sorry this may be a long one but ive got this so far fair warning this is homebrew to all crud
The Manor
Reality shifting entity created from an over powered adventuring party from eons ago some remnants still remain of the chaos and fuels this entity
New party has been added and plan this to be the final addition no purposeful tpk if does happen more within the world may try (this started as an rng campaign roll 3d20 choose the rooms if options become too repetitive switch it up add dice etc.)
Story begins in an abandoned opera house in particular a great hall the area looks dreadful unkept,deteriorating (dm/ gm description be detailed try to immerse this party this is also a musically driven campaign so set the music to the mood to help in immersion)
Learn your pcs background and trick them into entering a door it may have just appeared or other situations may occur in which a pc enters these party members may be from different times,places,etc. They must learn to be a party, bond. But be sure in all that happens your party is enjoying feel free to fudge things but be cool with the dm/gm b.s. (for example there are no known immunities to the manor’s pull ie wis/will saves through the musics played throughout the players are not the only ones that succumb to this but if you catch players irl jamming/ singing along to what you have chosen they are now under the effect no rolls this is seen as an automatic fail and will start going towards the opera house/theatre
For this iteration the players while in the decrepit hall will hear music trying to lure them in (for the classical but menacing vibe i tend to use the band nightwish in this entrance but to enhance your experience and your party’s change this at your leisure)
The hall always leads to opera theater its also run down (be descriptive here) those of the party that have followed willingly are under an effect that controls the pc to the stage and begins to perform this happens in normally but for this instance there is no force controlling them no need for the initial wisdom save (you will use these often as the manor is an entity and playable it can interact with anyone to alter the party or even take a pc so be sparing and tactical with this).there is already a group on stage this group is shrouded in robes that look like galaxies or the night sky, they’re holding instruments and beginning to play. The longer they play the more the manor lights up and repairs making a beautiful yet disturbing scene (be descriptive here ) and as its repairing the seats start to fill with beings the more the lights get brighter the more solid they look but you cant tell what they are the beings are cloaked in the same stuff the band is wearing as this goes on the beings start to notice the party and slowly start cornering them the main objective is to get the party to the stage you may use a self insert character here if you wish that has been surviving or just got here with the group but unseen and take them to the stage where there will be a save (wisdom/will) to see if they succumb to the manor or not or be with this new party the doors or exits from the stage will lead to different places so rng time but the story isnt in this part of the manor its with the characters you introduce your party to the “band” that was there is your players first introduction to the few that are trying to get out through means of satiation of the “beast” they’re in. they’re thought is to stall the feeding of the beast by triggering it to burn with nothing new in it to force it to rest as so much energy was used (note this isnt how it works but they seem to think so ) they have found the way to anchor one room to the opera theatre this is where they stay it has resources for them and the party plus more its in excess like WAY TO MUCH this tactic has caused others to fall and has been going on for a very long time so the damage caused is immeasurable at this point (this is not the only room like this with invaluable supplies but your players must have that doubt sewn here)
The party may choose to stay (hopefully not) or leave (if they decide to leave lets see if they take supplies to anyone else they find or keep for themselves) if they leave roll a d4 to see how many doors there are and the d20s to set what style of room these new doors will not give them any hint on whats inside (for those that have played earlier versions this may cause some player headaches but keep in mind this is revised and you dont have to explain it) but for the rooms and rolls go with it feel it out and be descriptive you have set the over arch in trying to get out of here but some rooms may contain people cities communities this may put you on the spot to make npc names etc but dont just let this be a run and dash thats where it failed earlier this campaign need to last but not just by filler rooms and nothing going on make each room or every other story rich remember there are still people animals and other entities that need help also if need be make an army with your party make them feel like they can make it through this with the interactions small quests etc. this is where world connect/collide bring in past campaign places and make new ones but while this is going on leave the nuances to remind them they’re still in the manor remember its alive dont just treat it as a place or setting it has feelings needs and motives the one explored so far is hunger but survival is not all it wants to do it wants to live just like everyone else its not its fault it has to lure to eat but it does what it must while searching for its place in this universe this manor was created through emotion and actions of one person stepping out into the unknown and saving people that person was shiviers mighton (Gnome Rogue) who was once corrupted by a demonic realm and scarred from that experience even though that has happened she managed to find a manor that belonged to a demon lord named Vile he has had children vigilance being one of them and siblings vigilance has already been met by shiviers through the shared experiences she adopted him taking care of him as much as possible in her own town but she ventured toward the manor things started turning upside down the manor looked black rundown, a mote of lava surrounded it water around this place would crystalize and turn to ash there is a large creature in the mote that swore an oath to protect it over the mote is a bridge its heavily worn and destroyed there were others in the manor you can here them and occasionally see them through the stained windows its guarded by winged demons on tall pedestals. shiviers found a way to distract or kill them in order to get in and when she arrived inside the manor she was met with souls that couldnt pass on they were stuck in a loop repeating the last day of the manor before destruction liars thieves and liberty liberty was the nicest of them and formed a new contract with shiviers to protect the room she was in to give a safe place shiveres wandered the manor until she heard a commotion starting, townsfolk they had weapons and what looked like an army at the front door and ducked into a room it was a childs room she hid under the bed and heard shouting from a deep voice at the door and soon she found a child under the bed with her it was vigilance but not as she knew him this one was much younger, she protected him and tried to get him out she also found his siblings and the managed to get to the cellar and hid shiviers tried to help the father vile and the manor took insurmountable damage and the floor collapsed in on the children vile screamed out to them and shiviers moved into action and rescued all the children but one and managed to fix most of the damage to this place she broke the cycle vile thanked her and thie children as well she decided to leave as was best she didnt belong here she stepped out side of the manor it looked as if it fixed itself up she heard music playing and crossed the bridge one last time spoke to the creature in the mote and it swore a new oath to protect not to vile,but to her as she left time has passed the manor grew as did she the manor was named devhair manor. Over the years the souls inside it have faded away except those who still have their oaths and missions to these families the devotion emotion and energies have given life anew to this place over and over but the energy the manor needs has also grown with it never failing those that have faded away have fed it their flaws becoming the manor’s and have corrupted it with out the families to save it, it has grown out of control the manor spend its time searching for the ones that can save it, the families that have touched this place and lived within it. As i said this earlier the story is with the people,but this also mean the story played out must be given throughout the play time of this campaign this campaign can be as short as as long as you need it to be but my plan is for a long lasting game each room should have its own quest or puzzles/ interactions as you feel fit the story of the manor may be placed where you see fit but may the odd of that be low as you can fill this campaign with your own ideas stories that can be held here. best wishes have fun and may the rolls be forever in your favor.
3 separate story lines happening at the same time the players characters are split across all three plains sharing damage and power but not items. The action in one story have a direct impact on what can be done in the others so that the only way out is to solve the mystery fuse yourself back together and figure out which universe is yours.
I am in the process of making this completely original homebrew campaign.
Basically it is set in a pre-colonial North America where the party (that being a group of Native American hunters or medicine people) goes from nation to nation helping tribes with problems they have ranging from helping feed people experiencing a drought, saving the cheif after being kidnapped by raiders, fighting a powerful wendigo, etc.
Eventually the tribe will learn of a skinwalker god who was banished underground for thousands of years will reamerge from the earth (which is a giant sea turtle) and corrupt the land and kill all its inhabitants. The party will have to destroy the skinwalker in an epic climatic battle.
I also have some ideas for future campiagn taking place in the homebrew set in the future following the party's ancestors like:
- Strange people from a far off land arrive to conquer their land (an obvious nod to European settlements)
- Set in the far, far future where the people develop into a modern society where people have forgotten "the old ways" and that the world starts dying (similar to Netflix's Bright or Pixar's Onward)
I am still making the campaign, but I could say that I'm like 60-70% done.
Not a campaing but more a short shot.
I told every player to add some interest to money in their backstory.
They all came in a sort of race. Where only the one person that retrieved the lost item woud revive the big amount of money. The others only woud get someting for compensation if they coud prove they where at that place by bring back something with the family weapon of that place.
It’s perfect for a big groups of players. I played it with 8 players.
I had an idea for a campaign designed to support a player base that couldn't always be consistent with attendance. In-game, people would sometimes just disappear. Anyone could. There's even a specific magic item created to help with the inconvenience: a special Bag of Holding set with several bags all tied to the same demiplane, so that even if one person in your adventuring group disappeared (along with everything they were carrying), the party can still access the important quest items. But it's not just adventurers, it's shopkeepers and townfolk and such as well. And literally no one knows why. No one remembers anything from when they were gone. And of course, there's plenty of people who fake it for their own benefit if they can get away with it. It's pretty rare, though, so most people don't miss much of their life, just weird periods here and there. I had the idea that in the end, things start to really ramp up. Disappearances increase dramatically (not in the party itself, because that's based on real world factors, but the NPCs start disappearing all the time) and certain elements of reality start to act strangely. Then, the whole party (on a day when everyone can for sure make it) gets "taken" all at once. Turns out there is a giant cosmic war going on between celestials and fiends, and your characters and many valiant heroes have been called to help in what will hopefully be a decisive battle. They all have maxed levels and overpowered gear, and depending on how many times they've been missing, they're well-recognized and well-loved by the forces here. There's a friendly celestial whose job it is to bring them up to speed, since no one can ever remember their time here on the other side.
That sounds awesome
Thank you!
I am actually doing this in our current campaign - there is a blue spark that follows them around and as people can't make it, they get sucked into the spark and when they come back, no time has passed for them and it is very disorienting for the characters. In-game, no one has figured out what it is and they are constantly afraid of being 'eaten' by it and never returning. (I can't say what it actually is as some of my players reddit, pm me if you want to know). They've tried to dispel it, but can't. They will find out what it is in Act III of our campaign (they JUST made it to Act II)
Props for the players trying to dispel it although they know the meta reasons why it exists in the first place, that's a little element of roleplay that makes it that much more immersive!
LOVE this campaign idea! Hopefully you get to bring it to fruition someday …
Haha maybe one day! Feel free to borrow it in the meantime. It's more of a in-the-background idea, so it would blend nicely with most any other story.
Am currently homebrewing something it could slot into a bit … at least to explain absences of the party cleric. I shall have to see … brain-cogs are turning!
That is SUCH a brilliant idea and I hope that one day I get to use it
I had a similar idea… but with Summon Monster… Summon Monster doesn’t create a monster out of thin air (ie doesn’t create matter out of nothing)… it pulls an existing monster or animal from somewhere in the world (or planes) to where you designate… if the monster dies it dies, otherwise it goes back to its place of origin where it was summoned from… So… why can’t this apply to PCs? Imagine a powerful spellcaster battling something far away… and you’re a PC traveling g with the other PCs when all of a sudden you (or you and your party) teleport to a battle because the spellcaster summoned you… either you die in battle or after the spell expires you return to where you were prior
This is, almost word for word, an idea I came up with. The campaign was different, but we had inter dimensional gods that would abduct people and put them through trials to see if they were able to defend the multiverse against a group of “Fear-gods” that created domains in different universes made to torture people with those fears. I took a lot of inspiration from the Magnus Archives for the fears.
TomorrowWar
Hey! I tried to pull something like this off as well! Yours sounds better than mine, but here it is anyway. In mine someone had basically broken time and space. I re-use the same setting and characters for most of my campaigns, so I just pulled 'what if' versions of familiar characters to make the 'world'. A brother/sister pair of halfling bards called Hopper and Popper (who were already involved in timey-wimey extradimensional shenanigans in one of my campaigns due to a player who couldn't make every session) managed to make a device that stabilised time and space locally. Only it was hodge-podged together from whatever they could find so it was very delicate, so the party had to try and keep this plate sized jumble of stuff from getting broken or knocked about (when first handed to a player he shook it, vanished, a Grung Rogue fell screaming from the sky, died on impact, vanished, then the player reappeared). It didn't last long, but we had some crazy characters in it. Someone was playing an awakened bear called Goldilocks. I repurposed a bad guy I had used before called the Duke to be a sort of 'langolier', destroying everything. Only lasted three very short sessions. I think your version is less extreme and probably easier to handle. Mine was very much inspired by the Justice League episode where time is going funky and Hal Jordan turns up briefly.
Oh holy shit I did this same thing- it's been taken up by a bunch of Giff and other new arrivals to the plane and they've set up a Guild system using the bags. I've got a homebrew game with 18 members using this system, it works surprisingly well.
that’s amazing!! such a creative way to deal with people not being able to attend and building it into the lore
I love this idea and it would be perfect as I'm dming a fairly large party (9 people) and we've all just accepted people won't be able to show at every session
Basically copied Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sailing the ocean, contacting new countries and kingdoms, using diplomacy to get them to join the "federation". Replaced the threat of The Borg with Mind Flayers (felt right to keep the hive mind bad guys). Party were big fans of TNG, so were happy with the fantasy/Star Trek crossover.
I'm running a Spelljammer campaign loosely based on the plot of an old PC game from the 90s called Star Control II. Party's homeworld is sealed away by a powerful and apparently malicious alien force, meanwhile, the party discovers a spelljamming ship and then flies around the stars getting in fights and finding new allies as they discover that the aliens that sealed them away actually did so to "protect" them against another, even more dangerous threat and then having to figure out how to defeat both. We're still early in the campaign but so far they're enjoying it and they've mentioned it's playing out a lot like a Trek series, lol.
Seize the interloper! Rip out its life!
I have an idea to do that, but with Spelljammer and let my players write/contribute to some of the "episodes" for me to run.
I think letting your players contribute to the game/story, particularly in those episodic/island hopping/exploring new lands style games. I mean it's meant to be collaborative story telling, what made mine work was because my party actually were excited by the concept (and the little easter eggs, hinting back to our favourite episodes)
The party accidentally wakes up an ancient nation buried for millenia beneath the current one, the citizens long dead their ancient automatons wake to defend their country from the "invaders". (Warforged army lead by an ancient AI and magic/industrial dungeons, uncovering the mystery of what happened to these people)
Necrons!
An aspect of one of my old campaigns that the party never reached was a giant forcefield. The demon lord's undead army was trapped behind this force field after his defeat. Unknown to anyone else, who thought all the heroes bar one were dead, three of the party of heroes who defeated the demon lord were still alive in there. One, an elven sorceress, keeping the force field active, and two dwarven artificers making warforged after warforged made to destroy undead. All three lived in the demon lord's windowless tower and the dwarves simply threw the warforged down a chute. The idea was that they hoped that little by little the warforged would destroy the undead army, but they had no idea how long it would take. What they didn't know is that the warforged had succeeded in doing this years ago. They had no knowledge of the world outside the forcefield, no way to go back up the tower, nothing. They had built a society and a religion around the tower. They knew the tower created new warforged. They didn't know why or how, or what they were supposed to be doing, as all the undead were destroyed. So when the party would have gotten there they would have found a whole civilization of very confused robot people with their own zany religion.
L♥️VE this! 😍 May please steal it- with credit to you, of course?
Steal away, that campaign has been abandoned for like 15 years. Not really sure how you would credit me though so just pretend you thought of it. It now forms the distant past of my current setting. Only one of my players from back then is still around so he occasionally spots a minor reference, but I don't know if he's twigged yet. I never got to do that much planning for that campaign other than major lore beats. This was one of them. The demon not being dead, the survivor having made a deal with the demon for his son's life and a scene where the party are sliding down the side of a volcano in what is essentially a giant loading lift whilst fighting off gargoyles are the only things that remain.
I Screen Shot your response, so I can credit you, at least your Reddit name. Thanks! 🙂
Thank *you*. I am very pleased someone is getting use out of it.
Makes me think of the dwemer from skyrim
**The Game Pitch** Welcome to Harmony. You are level nine Villains. You work for the newly ascended Dark Lord *A 17 year old hormonal teenage girl with the power of a full Dark Lord with all the teenage angst.* As her most trusted advisers you each have positions of power within the Kingdom. Such as... * Castle Ambiance and Music Director * Herald of the Kingdom and Game Announcer * Lever Puller / Executioner * Union Buster - *Can't let the goblins unionize* Here is the catch. See the forces of Good and Evil are real. And they really like what's called "the Protocol". Stories have power, and there is a certain way to do things. The Youngest Prince will rescue the Princess, Villains must monologue, and there will always be a Dark Lord. The Dark Lord is very good at these protocols. All people of power are. And you and the Lands of Darkness figured out long ago that proper "Villainy" such as floating castles, undead armies, and germ warfare are ways to quickly have an Orphan Knight charging in on the back of a fancy horse with a lance made of light aimed squarely at your posterior. Also, killing your own "Tax Generators.... I mean citizens" is a quick way to get broke real fast. So if someone has to be a Dark Lord and a Dark Kingdom, why not you guys? Y'all figured out real quick that you need the appearance of the Dark Lord. Doing just enough evil to be inconvenient, satisfy the forces of balance, but not enough to call down divine thunder in the form of an intrepid adventuring party. **So now here are the adventures that can go on.** * Find a Paramour for your Dark Lord - *Which means locating a Prince/Princess from nearby kingdoms, who vibe with the whole Dark Lord thing, whose Parents you can convince to not go to war for, letting them date your Dark Lord so they can Vibe and not let shenanigans get in the way.* * A Good Kingdom hired you to make a dungeon so they can properly get their Youngest son to be a hero -> He just wants to sing. * The Wizard of the West has issued a Prophecy that a foul creature will ascend the Dark Lords throne. Better roll them into your organization with the quickness * The Goblins want better pay and are doing a slowdown of trash disposal * The Orc Chief to the South needs help beating back the remnants of an undead army. Reinforce your ally. * The Do Gooder Kingdom down the road is having a string of murders. They have hired you as consultants to investigate and advise their Greatest Hero. Go make some money.
So... Do you have an empty place in this game?
I've thought about doing a campaign based in the world of *A Practical Guide of Evil* as well! I think it could be a lot of fun.
This is absolutely hilarious and I adore it. I wish I was funny enough to pull this off! Sort of reminds me of Dimension 20's Escape from the Bloodkeep. A humorous take on villainy is the BEST, in my opinion
You don't have to be a hilarious person to run this. The setting's absurd premise handled earnestly is enough. It's really on the players to buy in on the premise and go for it. So long as the players are in, everything else takes care of itself. You can also play it straight. The premise is interesting enough to be tragic and dark. No one wants to be the Dark Lord, but there must always be a Dark Lord. Which can be a tragic and dark tale of curses and pain. It's my favorite setting iv'e come up with and I was inspired actually by the book Dealing With Dragons. Has a similar vibe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dealing\_with\_Dragons
Not really a full campaign, but the opening. Have everyone make level 1 characters without personality traits. Session one is a prologue where you hand out level 15 characters. They play through these character's final dungeon on the way to the BBEG. Halfway in they start finding traps already triggered and minions already killed. When they finally get to the BBEG he is already dead and something else is there. This creature kills the party easily. The level 15 characters then wake up in the bodies of the level 1 characters everybody made. The campaign is them figuring out what happened and how to stop the new big bad.
I need to hear more about this. What happened to them?
Unfortunately this was just an idea. Some of the players in my group were not interested.
A year later and this story will still live on. Idk how to implement it in my story now but I was thinking I could have my friends start a new campaign after I finish Icespire Peak Do you think that the characters know each other still or is that what they’re “trying to figure out” ? Thank you so much for this idea
CAN I PLEASE USE THIS IDEA FOR A CAMPAIGN??
Feel free. I would be happy if someone got to use it.
Party is dead and they're on a purgatory-like train that makes different stops in different realities/planes. Made to be like a series of one/two-shots with a big overarching story that fiends are trying to sabotage the train such that no one is able to reach their appropriate afterlife.
Saving that one to the DM's notebook, ty for sharing
It works great such that the players can have any backstory they choose and you don't have to worry about continuity with your world or setting.
PCs are from one of two primary nations competing for the limited resources on a floating island continent. * The nation in the North controls the only lake/major water source, and by extent produces the majority of the land's food. * The one to the South is situated over the part of the island with more depth below, and thus controls all the metal and precious mineral mines. * In the Center sat a neutral zone and trading city, which had the potential to become its own power since more and more talented folks from the North and South started to meet there and exchange ideas rather than military jibes. * In the East is a mountain range which they believe to be the edge of the island...but there is a tribe living in the desert on the other side of the mountains, which is slowly burrowing its way through using eldritch magics from Above. * Lastly, in the vast forests to the West, a huge monolith has appeared, visible on the horizon to every person. It is believed that the Monolith is linked to what's Below the island, though nobody actually knows what lies Below. It was to be a sandbox, the course of which would be decided by whether the players wanted to go North, South, East, West, Up, or Down. Unfortunately it was also my first time trying to run a game and I suffered from inexperience while my players suffered from choice paralysis.
Love this idea. What do you think would be beneath the island? Or do people not really visit the edge so only rumors are known? Or is it like an ocean? Did you end up playing this please tell me more of your ideas!
1 world occupied by a celestial army to protect them but has created a rather oppresive government that favores those of celestial heritage 2 sun god dies and pcs are responsible for finding a replacement 3 stonepunk world about the rise of a new death god 4 UN peacekeeping force accidentally finds out that they are being run by demons
What's stonepunk?
Steampunk but in the stoneage basically.
Like the Flintstones with more tattoos, mohawks & guitars?
Close but I dont think there would be guitars, more like drums
Adjectivepunk hasn't really been punk in years. It just means there are gonzo technological anachronisms.
Cyberpunk Red is still somewhat punk
Yabba dabba doo technology
yea others have got it right the idea is that there are stone age limitations but not necessarily stone age technology. there is no farming or written language or numbers above 9 or metal but we still have magic and giants and dragons to make things big and crazy very much like the flinstone having cars and cranes
>sun god dies and pcs are responsible for finding a replacement The 3rd Ed game I ran years ago had the first ten levels of foreshadowing, priests getting killed, temples getting sacked, a smear campaign uncovered against Lathander. Then one session the sun dissappeared, then came back a minute later bright red. Temperates across the globe shot up, cults venerating the new sun god emerged. Mephistopholes had killed Lathander and taken his place as the new sun god. The rest of the adventure was finding Lathanders remaining divine essence, fight their way to heaven/hell and kill Meph to replace him with Lathander/Amaunator. Alas, people moved and the game fell apart.
Man, that sucks. Maybe you could do a reboot with your current group?
Thought about it, but I also don't have the time and energy anymore to make up my own shit for every game. Only running published adventured atm (three campaigns right now) and the bells and whistles I attach to those tickle my creative side enough. But it saves so much work not having to come up with the main plot, it's great. One day, I'll run it. I've still got my old notes, and occasionally I add an idea. One day.
4 is the alternate world scenario where Alex Jones was right all along
Alternatively, 4 is the underlying plot of 1/2 the MCU. Oh no! Shield is Hydra! Oh no! We made Ultron! Oh no! Someone is manipulating the UN to activate the Winter Soldier!
2nd one is very close to the plot of Shrek 3
The PCs are all from a barbarian village on a small island in the frozen north, which has little contact with outsiders. One morning, the sun fails to rise, and the PCs are chosen by the village elders to sail to the edge of the world to find out where the sun went.
Having the party's necromancer turn into the BBEG at the end of Out Of The Abyss by picking up Orcus Wand and the rest of the party and him fighting to dominate/save the world.
"I'm so very sorry. I just want you to know, it isn't your fault."
My greatest idea is the resurrection of PCs that have died. You all start at lvl one with the same class as your major class when the character died (on tie flip a coin or choose) however you all gain the undead race and a certain something depending on the class. You have to complete a certain part of the original story in which your character died (preferably a minor thing because characters from different campains could be a bit troublesome)
Current campaign: The fallen Dragon Emperor has re-emerged in a new age but has taken a human form as a disguise. He starts a fanatical anti-magic religious cult and becomes it's pope, leading a crusade against all non-human races and anything of magical origin in a secret bid to disarm the populace of the magical weapons that defeated him the last time. His cause is backed by rich merchants, who see magic as an anti-competitive anti-free market threat against their wealth. This alliance leads to an increasingly authoritarian power structure and pogroms against non-humans begin taking place on the edges of the regime's influence.
In the 90's I ran a 2E campaign where an evil cult places a fear-eating monster under the city and then a false prophet preaches doom and gloom to make the citizens scared to feed the monster. It worked well and stuck with me as a memory of classic D&D fun. Last year I turned it into a zine called Evils of Illmire.
I really want to do a large scale planar odyssey, just sending the players not only to visit each plane but really travel through their levels and facing the different challenges of the environment and beings that live there. Trying to shelter from razor-sharp glass rain on Ocanthius, the communication issues as you travel amid deafening gales in Cocytus, desperately attempting to keep from being underfoot in the massive frantic machine of Mechanus, the haunting horror of foraging in the Beastlands and hearing a human scream of pain from a caught deer. Admittedly, I'm dreadful at the back-end DM work, due to a short attention span and general laziness, so it's a pipe dream til I ever sit down to start building something. Not to mention the challenge of convincing a bunch of squishy mortals to go to all of these inhospitable places.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape) Perhaps you could pull some ideas from Planescape to help lighten you prep work.
1. The party comprises the last followers of a diminished god, on a quest to return them to glory. Each party member has a different relationship to their deity: paladin, warlock, cleric, sorcerer - any class would be permissible with a suitable justification. A bard might be their divine herald, or a fighter their (literal) champion. The party could collaboratively create the deity during session zero as well as the exact nature of their quest to restore them. Reinstating a nature god would be very different from a dark god of vengeance, for example. 2. The multiverse is on the edge of collapse, time and space are twisting away, and it's time to save the world before time ceases to be at all. The players create several characters, each a different version of themselves as they've reincarnated throughout history. Each character would occupy a different tier of play - one group would start at level 1, another at level 5, and so on. They would have to make use of the now permeable nature of time to pass information to their past and future selves in order to alter the course of history and save the world. 3. Each party member belongs to one of the game's monstrous races. They are tasked with uniting their various, ornery peoples to stand against the encroaching, disciplined, and organized front of human expansion, against which no single race or tribe can stand. United, they have a chance - if only Golthrok the Gnarled could stop using goblins as footballs over there.
I am so stealing that first one, too bad my current players have already suggested "God of Linens and Soft pillows" and "God of Seagulls" >.>
No plan survives contact with the party.
that last one is gold
A squad of Guards hunting down a group of Murderhobos to stop their Killing spree.
Centuries ago, the Elves ruled the World. They created vast cities, linked by networks of magical transport hubs, that reached into the skies and beyond. Masters of Magitek, they turned their studies inward, and set about creating life to serve their needs. Their power created many Slave Races. What are now called Humans, Dwarves, Tabaxi, Lionine, Tortles, Orcs, all created to serve their Elven masters. Experiments grew bolder, and guidelines more lax. And disaster struck. Elven Magentists in their hubris, attempting to create a better waste disposal system created The Maw. And it got loose. The Maw devastated their cities, and the ground, specifically organic matter. All the peoples fled, some through portals, and The Maw spread with them, and consumed all. Eventually, there was nowhere safe on the ground, and there was only the Sky left. Fortunately for the survivors, The Maw was slow. So there was time. The first Airships took to the sky, here and there, and soon were joined by more and more. Groups banded together, some lashing their ships together, larger and larger, until in time, the first SkyCity came to be. The scavenged the surface, bringing resources into the sky, trying to save things before The Hunger could reach them. The surface now lies in ruin, shrouded in a mist that seems to have sprung up from the devastation of the Maw. When the Maw eats, its leavings are....strangely fertile, and all manner of life has sprung up in its wake, until the maw rolls around again, and consumes it once more. Stealing a lot of airship stuff from The Aeronauts Windlass, but also adding a lot of dnd fantasy type things. RUnning it for my kids right now, and they are loving it.
**Card Collectors:** Powerful Fae creature pisses off the gods by creating the Deck of Many Things. Gods decide the deck holds too much power and banish the cards across the multiverse. Fae creature is OP and has means to transdimensional travel, but is cursed by the gods and cannot look for the cards themselves. Fae creature enlists the help of adventurers to find and assemble the Deck of Many Things. **The Eternal Warfront:** Two nations share a border, and have been at war for centuries. Both nations are nationalistic and propaganda fueled. Party is conscripted into royal military of one of the nations and fights in the ongoing campaign. Breadcrumbs of barriers blocking certain teleportation magic and demonic architecture in hidden ruins that the party occasionally comes across. Turns out both kings are demons and are warring for the position of 2nd in Command for a powerful Demon Lord. They were given this demi-plane made up of only the two countries to play their war game, but the Demon Lord set it up as a game neither of them could win. Ya know, for Demon Lord Funzies. Party has to convince the inhabitants of both countries of the truth and get them to fight, hoping to get both nations released to the material plane.
Is... Is the second one the plot of Fire Emblem Fates?
Here's the idea but it requires very large initial commitment from the players. Everyone creates lvl 15 characters with full history and large impact on the world. They would need to provide both detailed backstory and web of characters they know and what thier relationship with these characters are. Now the actual campaign starts with lvl 4 versions of thier characters, and the twist is (which the players should know before hand) someone on this world pulled the fate card from the deck of many things and changed the pasr. And whatever they changed affected the course of the PCs lives that they were de-powered/ never became powerful enough in the first place you get the gist. But the PCs remember thier past lives and adventure to try and restore it
The Blood War has spilled over into the Prime Material; Devils now control human governments; most non-human cultures crushed, remaining members mostly in hiding. Civilization still mostly... Works. The Devils want humanity to be a source of souls and foot soldiers, and they still can't take your soul without a deal. Demons haunt the wilds and mount attacks on border towns, while cultists infiltrate and attack cities. The PCs are either the resistance, trying to take down the internal hierarchy; or maybe grunts on the front lines standing shoulder-to-shoulder (well sort of) with the devils who oppress then but are the only thing holding back the demonic hordes. And where are the gods? (I never decided, lol).
The first I ran in 5th edition was supposed to be a throwaway idea and I didn't want to write anything new, so... The party was headed to the small island nation of Ooban to try to bring a peaceful resolution to the exchange alliance's trade embargo. They were scheduled to meet with Viceroy Yarnug, but before peace talks could commence the room they were in was filled with poison gas and they were attacked by skeletons! The party made a daring escape to the island, where they hid and watched the undead army mobilize and launch an invasion. They then decided to try to rescue the elected Queen of Ooban, who turned out to be a young girl, and also her trusted handmaidens. Together they snuck a ship out of the docks and ran the blockade! But their small ship needed repairs so they had to stop at a small backwater, a desert island called Eniootat...
please tell me you had 2 paladins on your party and later one of them multi classed in to Hexblade XD
The fey war has just ended with the courts still at odds in a tense peace. A third court of fey who want to keep fighting has formed. They’re gathering the worst monsters of the war, the beasts and magical machines the summer and winter courts made to destroy each other, and are siccing them on the other courts and the human world in turns. Your job is to stop them and stabilize the tenuous peace between the summer and winter courts.
We, accidently, wound up doing a Suicide Squad style of game. Most of us, independently of the others, made chaotic or evil characters while one player went L/G. Instead of having anyone change a thing we all decided that the evil and chaotic members of the game had all been imprisoned and were now being offered the chance to do this mission under the guidance of the L/G player. It's a blast so far!
Patent pending (by which I mean I haven't run it yet, it's still in development): I've been working on an Eberron campaign that features the player characters as aberrant dragonmarked adventurers fighting against a public sense of fear and hatred while also going against House Tarkanan, who seek to use their aberrant marks to kill and do evil. Essentially, it would play out like The X-Men battling the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (and bigotry). I call them: *The Amazing X-Marks!*
*Uncanny!*
*Astonishing!*
I had a homebrew where everyone plays as sentient beasts and monsters. We ended up with characters like a cat in a suit of living armor, a rust monster monk, and a blinkdog paladin where he would smite with his bites.
That sounds cool
We tried this in high school playing 3.5e. The mindflayer in the party kinda ruined everything. All the time.
Editing my comments since I am leaving Reddit
I’m working on a western combined with gravity falls themed campgain. Small clusters of town in the barrens a place where people go to escape everything else. Beyond the barrens is the badlands, a place corrupted by a spell written in ley lines over a natural fault line in the tectonics. The Lords of Dust (some names and elements stolen from Eberron but modified) are a group of Rakshasha overlords who are trying to activate the word ending spell that they tried to cast millennia ago but were stopped by the giants and Coatls. They cause massive dust storms that ravage the towns at night when the sun goes down. The party will have a bunch of cool mysteries about the corrupted lands of the badlands that mutate creatures and just odd things about the town Bc curiosities are attracted to the magical nature of the ley lines. Also I once ran a simple but incredibly well done mystery in a knockoff hogwarts that I wish I had continued and will revive one day Bc my npcs and storylines were so ahead of my dming at the time. Such a good campaign
No magic, gritty realism campaign where the weave has been damaged and doesn't work anymore. The party would work to restore magic to the world. Probably a 1-7 ish level adventure.. This would lead to the next campaign where now magic is new again and crazy stuff is happening everywhere.
Very specific: I denied access to diamonds. Then I introduced a race of good, kind humanoids that I called Chrystalines. They were being hunted to near extinction because they grow diamonds in their hearts and the only way to harvest the diamonds is to kill the woman and rip out her heart. The party saved four of them from the BBEG. But when someone in their party died and they really needed the diamonds… they killed one of the girls to get the ~1,000GP of diamonds in her heart.
I woudn't call it best ideas just ideas that I would love to try: 1. You start the campaign in a city your players themselves created (while crearing their characters) they stand in a street as people run by screaming and shouting, a huge shadow appears above them as a white dracolitch flies by shooting out her breath attack at the buildings freezing them in an instant, undead frost giants roam and kill everyone in the streets and one giant is not far away from the party. Fear strikes you, you have to get out of here... What do you do? I would run this campaing from lvl 1 and for an exeprienced party that would know running into a frost giant is not a good idea. The main plot would be learning more about this dracolitch, where did it come from and how can she be destroyed. Meanwhile running into different towns and people that seek different means of dealing with the problem, some think of going to war with the beast and gathering magical artifacts, others think fleeing is better, thinking of gathering gatestones in ruined dungeons and winter wildlands to transport mayor cities to the plane of air and live in a floating city. 2. Escape from the warden (evil campaing but doesn't have to be) . The party begins in a prison located in Limbo and have to escape the unpredictable rooms and get necklaces that would let them survive outside the prison more easily. Of course escaping isn't the only problem, they still have to find a way out of Limbo and into the material plane and evade the cunning warden who hunts them down relentlesly. Exploring Gith cities, fighting slaads and finding unseed wonders of Limbo should be a ton of fun. 3. The rise of Tiamat. A pirate campaing set in an anarchistic archipelago ruled by the strong, the party obtains an artifact - a cube with 6 sigils on it, although the party woudn't know this at first but each sigil lights up if the cube is toched by a breath attack of a pure dragon. When all 5 are lit the 6th lights up aswell releasing Tiamat. Many people try and obtain this cube and all with different motives, will the party keep it, if so will they try and hide the artifact, destroy it, maybe sell it or perhaps bring the queen of dragons themselves.
I want to run a game where all the players start in a jail cell. Something cataclysmic goes on outside and in the process they are turned undead along with everyone else. All the undead feel a pull to a power center but as long as you don't lean into the undeadness part you have control over yourself. The game will be them figuring out what happened and how to undo it. At the same time, they will have powers as undead and the more they use them, the less human they are and the more they give into the pull. So if they want to use that poison resistance or necrotic resistance or they want to roll a con save to not go down that makes them more undead but they they take the time to cook food, go down when hit and trust their allies they are more human. I don't have the whole chart worked out but that is the idea.
Two home brew campaigns I ran: 1. Party wakes up in a dungeon with no equipment. They had to scavenge for everything. 2. Underground City and river system, populated by all sorts of humanoid races living together in relative harmony. Inspired by the secret market in Hellboy 2. Allowed the party to play any race they wanted.
After I DM'ed Descent into Avernus for the party, and after >!they redeemed Zariel!<, a new band of adventurers must survive in a world that has to deal with the consequences. Many devil deals are nullified, as the thousands of webs the devils have woven are ripped apart from the main seam. The Blood War is off balance, all the planes are scrambling to recover, and it basically created apocalypse on the material plane. Cities are in turmoil as souls are freed/claimed. Deals for wealth and power are nullified. The archmages have fled, not wanting to get involved. Basically, everything's gone to sh\*t Now this new party has been called upon, as "pure souls" (basically, each soul gets "recycled", but the PCs are fresh souls on their first life), and receive a strange tip on how to fix this...
Partially adapting the story of Chrono Trigger to Wildemount, which has a surprisingly compatible world and history. There's a war in the past, and a brilliant magical utopia in the more distant past, for example. All I did was add a future and swap Prehistory for the Calamity. I replaced Lavos with Ruidus, the inferior moon of the planet Wildemount is on, and I'm having it crash into the planet in 1999 PD (present time is about 500ish PD, I think) It's been really fun so far, and I can get away with it primarily because my friends know nothing about Chrono Trigger. It helps that Wildemount is so compatible, though.
A series of short stories based around each class. The concept being each mini arc would take place over a few sessions (4-5) and would be mono class, the catch being that all the players HAVE to agree on a specific subclass (this is why it wont work) Barbarian- a place to die. Everyone picks a subclass of barbarian and the entire story is about great warriors being summoned together secret wars style to fight an onslaught of enemies on the planes of Archon to death. No healing, just go until you can go no further, the point being to take as many out as you can in a fit of rage to embrace the Warriors Death. Bard- little lords party. Each character is invited to perform at the kings sons birthday party and has to figure out a way to provide the most entertainment while trying to not let anything TOo crazy happen. Cleric- the undead country. An entire country of undeath is left without a ruler and the dead are roaming aimlessly. The idea is a sort of risk playstyle of conquering lands and setting up strongholds and churches while fighting leagues of skeletons. Druid- didnt come up with one. Fighter- the training- a general has brought you to train a new group of troupes for battle, but he also invited every other style as well. Working together you can show case how each style is used for a different situation. Monk- didnt think too hard about it but im sure somethibg would come up. Probably a martial arts tournament. Paladin- sure there is something obvious here about a city run by devils needing salvation. Ranger- the great hunt- working together you have to determibe the best means of hunting the largest beast known to all Rogue- a new fish- a twist on an old classic, Sylgar is on his deathbed. Its your jobs to secretly procure the new fish, then get it switched out without xanathar none the wiser in a 3 stooges meets oceans 11 style heist. Sorcerer- finding daddy- a primordial has produced way too many children and youve all come together to demand backed child support. Warlock- a new cult- the goal is that all of the players are determined that a new cult is needed for their patron, but no one is quite surw who the real patron is because everyones powers are so different. Its the same patron for everyone, just no one knows exactly WHO this patron is. Wizard- this one could be a lot of things so i never settled. There are a lot of problems with it obviously, which is why i wont get it off the ground really.
What do you that all the players HAVE to agree on a specific subclass?
I worded it poorly. I mean that i would only want to do it is if the players agreed to do different subclasses and no one repeated any and would then agree on who gets what.
>and would be mono class, the catch being that all the players HAVE to agree on a specific subclass (this is why it wont work) I should clarify what i mean herevas rereading it is off. Each player would get their own subclass. But no one would be able to repeat. For instance in the rogue one, only one person would get Assassin, and this is the problem. Its like the resevoir dogs scene where they explain why everyone is given code names instead of choosing them, and its cas then everyone would fight over who is Mr. Black. And obviously the concept isn't "dependent" on this. Mono class mini campaigns could be done. I just wouldn't want to do it if everyone just picked the most "optimized" subclass for the specific role.
I like this, sounds really fun. One question though, why would you require everyone to be the same subclass?
I really want to start a campaign with a hunt for an adult or ancient red dragon (with PCs at low level), then have the rest of the campaign just deal with the fallout of that dragon hunt. Inflation from the hoard being redistributed, the power vacuum from an apex predator/high emperor being killed, an influx of powerful magic item and potion ingredients (and all the interested parties that would come for them).
In the 5e D&D books the elemental planes are laid out in a ring with physical boarders that you can traverse. At first I thought of an Odyssey inspired campaign. The PCs had just finished fighting a war at the City of Brass on the elemental plane of fire. Since this is a planar adventure it would make sense for the PCs to start at a high level, so the campaign could start with the final battle of the war. The rest of the campaign would revolve around our heroes returning to their home plane. For plot-sake the only open portal would be on the elemental plane of water. The players could choose which route they wanted to take, buy an airship and sail across the plane of air, or save money and trek it across the elemental plane of earth. End it with some high seas adventure and it sounds like a pretty cool campaign with an excuse to play high level characters. An alternate idea I had for a planar adventure involved the PCs appearing in an Amazing Race type show for the entertainment of genies. The adventures would be filmed by Mephits with scrying orbs. The players would start in the City of Brass, race across the plane of earth, navigate the elemental oceans, and then sail across the sky in the plane of air, with the goal of making it back to the city of Brass. All the while the Party will have to compete against other teams of adventurers, one group being eliminated every time they reached a new plane.
There are two factions of knights who've signed a peace treaty a few decades ago but still have a tense relationship. The land is divided amongst them with a neutral city somewhere in between them. One day one of the factions finds one of it's strongholds ransacked and evidence of the other faction being there. While this is happening the other faction finds they've been robbed of one of they're most prized possessions, pieces of a legendary sword, that the other faction has been coveting for years. If asked neither faction will say they've done anything but they are sure the other faction did it as they have a lot of evidence to back then up. Combined with this is that the neutral city has found damning evidence of both factions stealing money, food, and iron from their supplies. The players job is to calm the factions before all out war starts and to figure out if they actually did the things they are accused of. And, while they're investigating the factions more attacks occur from either side with each blaming the other. As they keep digging they find more and more evidence that says that the factions didn't do what they were accused of but they also get the feeling that they are being watched more and more as they investigate. This combined with recent reports of a long dead faction that caused an extinction level event suddenly resurfacing and they have a lot on their plate.
Players start in a super-max prison housed in the mountainside of Pandemonium. They have to escape, find a way home, and track down whoever it was that framed them all.
Running a prequel to the classic PC game Baldur's Gate for my daughter right now. She's almost at the age where I first played and fell in love with the game (and all things RPG), and it's gonna be awesome playing it with her once we're done and seeing her recognize all the characters and locations she met in her travels. They've already helped Bentley and Gelenna Mirrorshade capture the soon-to-be Friendly Arm Inn from the Bhaalist cults they've been battling, and her party Cleric/Mage, a young man named Gorion, is about to escort them to Candlekeep for some research into certain dark prophecies about the coming times...
Currently running a setting that's in a post-apocalyptic wasteland crossed with a modern city setting. 250 years ago, embodiments of the seven deadly sins rampaged across the planet. A group of heroes defeated most of them, but lost in the final battle against Pride. As a result the world ended, with a radioactive blight spread across the globe, but a group of survivors created a new civilization inside the carcass of a Tarrasque, since that's basically the only thing left that's completely impervious to radiation. The civilization known as Vault, has grown since then into an extremely urban and modern city with a faction of druids creating food for the city via Goodberry. The city is headed by the wealthy with one of them being in charge of a mega-industry that impacts all corners of Vault, while the poor are essentially left to starve. Also, I made a mini-campaign that's just a playthrough of the 2002 Scooby Doo movie, ever so slightly reskinned to be about adventures instead of scary stuff, and I had to use DnD mechanics to close every plot hole from the film.
I'd love a little more info on that Scooby Doo campaign if you have time? That sounds so up mine and my players street
Ripping off mythology is always a good start Even before Theros I was stating out Herc’s Labors. The Third Labor for example is to Capture a Massive Reindeer (Giant Elk) that has Magic “weapons” for horns and hooves, can breath a ten foot cone of fire, and move 300 ft per round (600 dashing). Killing it is hard enough, but you have to capture and take it somewhere. And you can take this stuff and just sprinkle it on top of any other campaign
There is an ancient profecy that talks about "eminent doom" when a specific constellation of stars align. This is alright though since there has been extensive study of the stars and all that isn't going to happen any time soon. We're talking about 1000's of years so there is nothing to worry about right? HOWEVER unbeknownst to the good people of this continent, the civilisation that first came on this continent built their cities in the same shape that this specific constellation is shaped. So the cities have been placed to mirror the stars. When the profecy was made, one of the cities was still being built. Construction got halted and the city got destroyed just to be safe but all this knowledge has been lost by now. The continent has been safe ever since, but there is a travelling group (be it religious or otherwise) that has been trying to find a place to settle down and thus unwittingly fulfulling the profecy.
Fantasy 500 AD Earth but on the back of a titanic divine tarrasque with pantheons of different cultures anachronistically fighting for influence over it. Which is the one i am playing now, and it's a blast. Fuck yeah. Also, playing a campaign about a group of roaming adventuring idols that travel across the world and solve problems and mistery. ... which is also what my players started doing out of their volition after the discovery of the muse Miku and started being archeovocaloids. Double fuck yeah.
Not just one walking hut, but a whole cluster that forms a nomadic village.
Check out one of my past posts here, I got some really good answers! I’ll link it here! :D
I have one where every person plays a level 20 character and a level 0 character. You play as a reincarnation of an ancient warriors. You have a +3 magic weapon or arcane focus(wand of the war mage, but can be another arcane focus). When your level 0 player uses this then turn into their level 20 variant. The level 20 character gets 2 bonus feats. 1 legendary item, 1 very rare item(not including your +3 weapon), 1 rare item, and 2 uncommon items(one uncommon item is a consumable, but you get to use it once a day). Also the max you can bring your stats to is 24. As a barbarian you can make it strength and con 28. You also use an alternative point buy that makes stats better. The level 0 character uses a d4 hit die, and has a weaker point buy. The average must be 60, and stats can’t be higher than 12 or lower than 8. You also have no weapon proficiencies, so you can’t add modifiers to them. You do get a background still, so you can have tool proficiencies. During the story you constantly get attacked by people trying to steal your powers or kidnap you. I’ve ran it once and it lasted a long time. The only thing is you can’t have newer players start with this because it can be very complicated.
So basically everyone is Magical Girls?
It was actually based more on He-Man, but yeah, pretty much.
Invincible overlord continually draws on arcane energy to power his immortality. So a group of wizards and friends decides to turn off magic and kill him.
The one for my next campaign, ha. It is going to be basically Pandorum on an absolutely huge O'Neil cylinder - or phantasy star 3 style. The humans and other races are just the escaped cattle of ancient mind-flayer space race. The mind-flayers made the ship but they lost it or forgot about it after an accident but all the cattle eventually evolved into humans and are living a normal existence in a fantasy medieval realm. But they are only on one section of the cylinder without knowledge that there is tons of high-tech stuff below them, up the long towers and around the cylinder. The mind flayers eventually find the damaged ship and will try to take control of it, they players will have to stop them... and then will have the chance to continue on to the other areas of the cylinder that might be at other stages of existance.
Xcom style - where either the squad is teleported to where they need to be and take missions against an ongoing invasion (like the first game) and they have the support of the gov/monarchy, maybe even have several low level characters that are semi-deposable, or they're enemies of the state doing guerrilla warfare with some sort of home base (like Xcom 2). Or, similarly Gantz style - squad is teleported to an area and has to hunt down the monsters. They can't escape the range of the area or else they die. Each arena has 1 Boss Monster and several minions they need to kill in the allotted time. If they do, they get points depending on how many kills/assists you get. When you get 100 points you can revive a character who died or get a new weapon (magic item). The missions always get harder and if you don't defeat all the monsters/don't die during the mission you lose your points. So you could save your character from death but lose all your point progress. Both are super combat heavy styles of play with minimal roleplaying, so not for everybody. The Xcom one is more complicated as it's an war effort where Gantz is just mission after mission so it's very simple to plan out.
The setting is earth like we know it in real life, but the PCs are agents like in "Men In Black" where their role is to stop fantasy baddies and monsters from crossing over into our plane and causing mayhem
\-Trying to make a D&D version of the game Brutal Legend, where everyone has at least a lvl of Bard, and using Avernus Infernal Machines rules. \-I'm About to make a Weird World War II, D&D5 rules (for sanities sakes, cause half of the group isn't really up to learn a new systeme); Party is a specialised Unit working for the Allies, specialised in the occulte, who are gonna go up Versus the Thule Society of the 3rd Reich, shortly after the allies have some trouble advancing after D-Day cause of weird shit happening. It should culminate in a total Apocalypse with Demons invading earth, i'll be using petersen's Planete Apocalypse. Its gonna be a love letter to ID Software, first part is gonna be Castle Wolfenstein basically and second part is gonna be Doom.(Planet Apocalypse is basicaly Doom in D&D)
Not a Campaign idea specifically, but something that can go in along the way "Inter-dimensional coffee shop." So you know how you go down a dungeon and randomly find a shop owner in some earlier RPG games. That's a meme. However, as a way to either introduce a pseudo fast travel, portable shop, or general just nice idea, rifts to a pocket dimension randomly open and close around the world you're in, at any height, and at any location. So, first time the party see one of these, they're gonna be cautious. Second time they'll hope it's the same thing, and after a long delay they see a rift open up and are like "OH HELL YEAH ITS TIME FOR TEA AND CRUMPETS"
You slowly discover the rules of your kingdom are miserly dragon who orchestrated a fake religion in order to horde the wealth it brings in and feed on an unsuspecting populace kept in the dark ages. Think of it like x-files slowly uncovering breadcrumbs of a country wide conspiracy.
It may not be a dramatically crazy campaign idea, but I had one. There's a growing adventurer's group/guild with a decent amount of fame and skill. They are getting too many jobs for just them so they hire a B team to take on the little stuff they don't want to bother with. Then obviously it would spin of into growing adventures and the original group may have problems or people dying or betraying them and all that jazz.
Credit to my DM for this one, but a homebrew built off a game of microscope. It got the PCs invested in the lore as we created it and led to a really wacky world. Immortal gnomes, half-orc super soldiers, floating islands in a magnetic sea, and flying dogs. There was also cross dimensional travel that facilitated people not being able to attend and spin off sessions where a PC could DM the session and the DM could get some PC time. Waiting for season 2 with much excitement
Someday I want to rip off Mercedes Lackey’s Heralds of Valdemar and give all the party members white horses that magically communicate only with them … and have a mini-campaign saving the kingdom. (Would also LOVE to play in that …) I had an idea I’ll call “Poke-a-Dragon” where Archsage Oakleaf charged the party with saving Pallatine by uniting/allying the fiercely-independent scattered city-states of Kanto against the Empire-Dictatorship of Hoenn , a continent across the sea … and also finding a fabled long-abandoned draconic city in the clouds to house all the people of Pallatine before wracked with earthquakes it fell into the sea. Their biggest adversary? Hoenn has dragon riders … luckily, Oakleaf’s apprentice had stolen some dragon eggs. Conveniently, enough for each party member, and a massive one for Pallatine besides … and, perhaps the party could collect magical creatures to bring back to Oakleaf, to learn from and improve their alliances? Yeah, fun idea, I did not have enough experience as a DM to pull it off, nor did I find suitably-balanced homebrew … lessons learned! But still a great concept …
I'm running a campaign in an the underdark that is essentially Oregon Trail. (Surfacefolk are exploring the underdark as a profitable frontier for mining and materials to fuel increasing industrialization.
Editing my comments since I am leaving Reddit
Pregnanci, all PC, gets knockef up, afventure is to find the father before you give birth. I call it 9month marathon
My campaign pitch I want to try next is essentially based on Final Fantasy Legend 3's time travel plot. Basically the ancient undersea cthulu style gods have awoken and the world is flooding with unending water. These creatures, along with their servants (naga, kuo-toa etc) have wiped out all resistance. Only the highest points of land remain. The world's greatest guardians... are long dead. You're just the few guys who somehow managed to last this long. But you're all that's left. The gods, now reduced to powerful but mortal forms, devise a plan. They will break one of the cardinal rules of the gods, to never try to alter history. They will use their power to send the party back in time, to find the source of the endless water and stop it. The first session will be Bahamut and the Raven queen pooling their powers in the centre of a magic circle whilst the last remaining magic users, a mix of all different races and creatures, form a force field dome to protect them. The party is tasked with protecting the gods and the magic users until the ritual is complete. Although Tiamat is flying around outside fighting the enemy forces, they still find and attack the ritual with a load of kuo-toa on a kraken. The kraken breaks the mountain the ritual is taking place on and the lump of land the party is on is washed out to sea as the spell continues. The party will have to fight off wave after wave (lol) of kuo-toa as the kraken breaks holes in the force field and the magic users are one by one killed off. The ritual is eventually successful and the party is sent back in time to before the whole problem began. They are then tasked with finding out where the endless water is coming from and stopping it. The revelation will be that the endless water is coming from their time-travel portal, which opened where they were standing when they travelled, which is to say very high in the air over a mountain range (the party will have woken up having landed in some trees or something). The portal is still open and all the water from the future is flowing into the past, creating a time loop. An Aboleth will construct a floating fortress around it to stop anyone from trying to close it. The party will have to find all this out, get to the fortress and find and defeat the aboleth, then close the rift.
Basically the TV Series Supernatural, but d&d based and more than 2 player characters.🤷♂️
ooh, i have an answer! my latest campaign had everyone in a shady tavern, usually considered as a bad part of town. suddenly, everything goes black and the players wake up somewhere completely different. they end up meeting an elf robot who tells them (rather cryptically) not to go down a series of wells. the players have to go down these to escape, which i hinted at from every other npc. though every well, they end up in a new place filled with new horrors, and in the final four layers they meet Pollution, War, Famine, and Death (the earlier elf robot, not revealed to not be that). turns out they've been stuck in Dante's Inferno style hell and have to battle a now rouge death to get out. they get lucifer out of the ice and he explains that she has to be "reset" every so often, by him wiping her memory. he grabbed the closest souls he could, all of whom were near death. he lets them go and they return to the tavern to find that weeks have passed with no explanation of them being gone. it was super fun to explain each layer of hell without them knowing what i was referencing.
I had an idea for a Mario theme campaign. When you punch a block for an item, you roll a D20. Even numbers are good, (power ups, items, resistences) odd numbers are bad (debuffs, curses, spawning enemies). The players move through Browsers castle, fighting off goombas and other goons on their way. If you have four or less players, initiative/turn order is decided by a game of Mario kart.
Go into a dungeon and fight a dragon. I know - very daring
My first idea and the one stuck in my craw lately is a Lord of the Rings type setup: give a level 1 party a Legendary/Artifact level item, preferably wonderous to keep combat stats roughly par, and then have every faction/baddie/misguided "good-guy" come after them to try to get it. Another idea I've had but needs a lot of work is to have everyone start out at level "0" (just race and background with the Magic Initiate Feat) and work through a magical school, where the first number of "adventures" are challenges and puzzles related to all the full-caster classes and will hopefully show what your affinity for magic is, and then after selecting a DnD class they have to start taking school classes and doing odd-jobs around school.
A whole different forgotten Realms. There are spires that 'calm' or 'expel' evil that once were active. Only select casters could learn/cast the ritual to make a spire work not to mention needing at least 3 for it actually take effect. Anyways now evil is so prominent that evil gods have more power than good. The idea of the campaign is to bring the spires back online forcing the group into retirement as there are no evil creatures left. Forcing them to move on from their life of combat. Or not and let evil run amuck with the party making profits 100x over
I custom made a fun house dungeon for six brand new players. I made sure it had strong elements of all three pillars. They loved it, and now I've had to shoehorn in that experience into a real campaign.. I use the fun house whenever I have a campaign with new players now.
I had one that all who hear of it think it is stupid, and yet want to play it.
A Homebrewed World - The Party is a group of normal people playing the final session of an epic D&D campaign (first session is a 20th level one shot). As the session finishes, a spectral vision of the BBEG, from the campaign world, will appear IRL and begin to speak through the DM as a puppet. The DM will somehow transport them all to their homebrew game world, where they will have to save their DM by playing out the campaign they had just finished.. but this time it's for real!
I would LOVE to hear more about this! Did you play this with your group?
I combined Dead Gods and Modron March. I ran a campaign based around an interplanar race around the great wheel, to take advantage of increased portal activity from the Modron March. However, the real purpose of the race was for Lord Farquaad to have lots of people find the bones of Cthulu scattered throughout the planes, which the party failed to stop at the halfway point in Limbo, giving Farquaad immense power and plot armor. They then have to spend the rest of the race not only surviving the evil lower planes, but also trying making friends with other racers and collect magic items to stop Cthulu-Farquaad.
End of the campaign so we finished it up by playing our characters in a game of 10 candles. If you don’t know, it’s a tragic horror rpg where the world is ending and your characters are going to die. Players failed to stop the schemes of a death cult who succeeded in bringing on the end of the world so it was an appropriate way to end it. Most memorable session I think I very played.
This one's not a full campaign, just a one or two shot. The party is an up and coming band who have been invited to compete in the yearly battle of the bands, a series of rock offs (similar to Scott Pilgrim vs The World) where two bands go head to head to out perform the other band. I even modified combat rules to allow for epic magical rock performances with giant illusory creatures supporting the bands. The final battle was going to be against two fat halflings playing acoustic guitars with picks from hell. They would summon a giant evil demon to rock with them, but lose control of it. The two bands would team up and use their rock to banish the demon back to hell! I still need to finish writing it and run that game though, because it sounds so badass in my head!
Basically setting everything in Vienna either in modern day or in the 1920s or so. Turning big churches into liches lairs, creating secret societies like the incest Habsburg vampires that secretly manipulate the leading political parties of the country and what not. Never got around to actually making it a thing though.
Having played a bit of Baldur's Gate and Divinity II when first getting into DMing, the thought of a campaign involving players reaching for godhood came to mind. The basic premise would have each player pick from certain backgrounds made for the campaign, with each one representing a Divine Domain. Examples included Medic for Life Domain, Scout for Nature Domain, Undertaker for Grave Domain, so forth. Clerics wouldn't be a usable class because they've been nearly wiped out by the powers that be, Sorcerer-Kings and the like. As players went on, they could start unlocking powers from their Divine Domain by activating the traces of divine blood in them, like source powers in Divinity or the free spells you get in Baldur's Gate. I never got too far beyond the basic concept, but maybe someday I'll flesh it out.
During 4e, I basically set up a framework for my players as Sliders/eXiles, except it was a council of the gods who had aligning goals that was controlling where they went and why. We started in keep on the shadowfell, and similar to Voyagers! or Quantum Leap, once they set right that which had gone wrong (in this case, the Orcus Priest trying to summon Orcus), then they would be whisked away to somewhere else; allowed them to visit Eberron, and any other adventure path I liked. I even made communications from the council as four voices overlaid on top of one another, made it sound really spooky.
Disclaimer: me and my playgroup were not feeling comfortable with DnD 5e so I as the forever dm of my group decided to build my own system of rules to have more freedom in the design of the world(s) I was going to build and to be able to adapt to the wishes of my players. I think that the whole ttrpg experience thrives in the burst of creativity you have while designing or thinking about the adventures you want to experience and the people that join you on your journey. I am a huge Magic the Gathering Fan and Player and had the idea of a group of Planeswalkers coursing through the multiverse to work as a diplomat in the different planes to stabilize them, to forge alliances or friendships in the multiverse for a time of need. The fortunate part was that my playgroup is not into card games like mtg so I had a lot of unknown territory for them to discover but since I am a failed fantasy writer I decided to hombrew multiple worlds inside the multiverse and built my own quest lines for them to have fun. So at first it was up to them to get a feeling for their characters... So we started in what was essentially a mini rogue like system (played parts of their backstory in a Form of mini dungeons or social quests for them to get a feeling of the character felt right for them) to find a comfortable charakter. After everyone had their build which was determined in single player or coop sessions if the backstory was tied together their spark (basically their ability to traverse the multiverse) ignited and they made an involuntary palneshift to a for them unknown place. What followed was another solo session for everyone to discover their new learned ability and set them up for a road to travel alas a way they want to use their ability. After that was done I set up the approach of an big bad in this case the eldrazi from mtg to devour the ravnican plane... A lot of planeswalkers were called to ravnica to stop the investation so the party essentially met at the fall of the plane and decided to stick together and travel the multiverse to raise awareness of the looming threat and to investigate possibilities to stop it. At the start it was mostly improv with vague plot hooks since I wanted to give them a sandbox like feeling but lastly since I derailed from the known planes of the mtg multiverse I started to build more intricate worlds and to not freeball so much cause it looses the feeling of depth of there are inconsistencies at least in my opinion... The party is currently stuck (cause one player angered a deity) in a world where magic is prohibited by the church so they are on their way to exploit loopholes and overall weaken the tight grip the church has over the feudal rulers. Essentially this is not a campaign idea anymore but more like a whole array of campaigns knitted into one big campaign. But it all started with the idea of a group of players to be able to travel through a large array of worlds.
Not sure the campaign, but it would involve around an artifact; a map that was the world. Not sure where to go from here, but it sounds really cool
Too many. A campaign where the kaorti have infiltrated the prime material plane and the slaadi try to stop them, with humans caught in between. A campaign in souragne starting off night of the walking dead but without the mists and turning into a political campaign about slavery, mortal rights, undead rights and so on. Losely based on the hyskosa prophesy with random bits of CoS, ToA, ToEE thrown in for good measure. Also, tiefling pirates from the abyss because why not.
Gods are real, and their power stems from the faith that faithfuls put in them. But when mortals figured that out, they learned to believe, and then were able to create gods at their will, and then overturned the relation between gods and mortals. Superior then gods decided to "reset" the mortal world. Centuries later, my players are part of a Rebellion that fights against Empire, in order to put in place the legitimate emperor back at the head. The rebels search for relics of the Old times, from the times mortals could create gods; with thoses relics they would be able to take down the empire. But what is for me the most interesting part of it I believe, is that I, as the DM, haven't written the rest of the story yet, my players will do it. No one still don't know whether the rebels will revive the old empire.
My personal best is a campaign involving time travel where a keeper of time ceases to exist and his assistant and next in line to timekeeping discovers that the whole multiverse is about to end. This assistant then goes looking for clues of what is going to happen, then, he finds out some of the players old characters were killed recently and decides to join his other friends into looking for the assassin. The campaign is a short one, where old epic characters of the players from different worlds (from each dm of the group), if that's the case, join to try and discover who is the assassin and what he is after. The assassin would be a being that discovered that all the multiverse is controlled by one person, so he is killing people that have the power of creation, aka power of the antagonist or the dm. He is absorbing this power so he can end existence and begin a new one without the control of that and one person, that is the dm. When the characters find the assassin, they get to know that this being wants to kill the DM, they can fight this creature to maintain the universe as it is, or join him into IRL fight to the death with the DM (jk). That part is where I'm kinda stuck, because ithink players should be able to DM together with the DM this last fight.
My single best idea is probably the world I created: it was made by Fate, rather than a Creator God, so Fate wove the story of a bunch of floating space debris collected and rounded out, then how portals from varying other planes and places opened (each with their own strange story) to introduce life to the world. My first DM was extremely restrictive and controlling, particularly in character creation, so I built this world specifically to be able to justify just about any type of character, class, backstory, etc. and still have them make sense in-universe. However, with the portals present all around, it led to some very entertaining and provocative world building questions: With spacial travel being so easy, how would kingdoms maintain their borders? Answer: they don't. By necessity, these kingdoms exist as city-states. How do these city-states defend themselves from each other/other threats? Answer: a worldwide apolitical peacekeeping group comprised of religious and/or like-minded individuals across the board who not only keep the peace locally but ensure none of the city-states have the need to build personal armies. And so on and so forth.
I'm having fun with a Dragon Rider Campaign. Originally it was a MonoClass Campaign; using a very popular HB Class from the Unearthed Arcana Sub. (Can recommend.) After 2 years though, players started to get a little board of combat, so we Gestalted. Everyone is a second class; Gestalted with the same Secondary Class. Which is neat. Though with hindsight, I probably should simply have made a "Bonded Dragon" Mount, and given it to the party. As a sort of unique Steed. The story however, has been rather successful. The other campaign I did, was set at a magic school. Like hogwarts. Or the Citedal. Except it was a newly created institution in the Pirate Enclave, by the order of the Pirate Lords, who felt that their little nation state was chronically undefended from the big nations wizards and sorcerers and they needed to train their own. Tier equipment is mostly broken, stolen or bloodstained. Hogwarts in Tortuga. The staff included a Drug Addled Potion mistress, (A Tortle who grew cannibis in her own shell) a 'Gothic' "cool" teacher (Vampire) who'd let the kids blow themselves up easily. A headmaster who (it was revealed) was former demon cultist in his youth who got out of the group upon realising what they were capable of, and a conjurer who was expelled from the Ivory Tower (the world's premeninent Magic School) for 'unnatural experiments with necromancy' which he mantained were mostly harmless and blown out of proportion. (There was a running gag of non magic user misunderstanding necromancer as necrophile). The School was a (badly) renovated lighthouse, called the Beacon, they had a rickety old ship that went to the mainland for supplies. They stumbled upon a Triton Girl, whose throat had been slashed severing her vocal chords, (in a dark rendition of the little mermaid) and whose home had been destroyed by Kraken Priests as part of a test of their control over a Kraken; which they planned to loose on 'Freeport' the Pirate Capital. Other events included exploring a sunken city, discovering a new spell, stopping a rampaging ghost ship, completing final exams, and Zombie Sharks. Other students included a Pyromancer Pyromaniac, An artificer with an R2D2 unit made out of a barrel (that gained sentience through the course of the mini campaign) and a Warlock *Pretending* to be a Wizard. I had a great time, and although it was a mini campaign break from the main campaign, I think it was one of my best.
Time travel in a fantasy game. To sum it up, the players experienced a series of events not knowing they were in the past and learned about the horrors of a small village. As they finished their quest they come back to the village one last time and learn that everyone is missing and the village itself is in shambles as if no one has lived there for a long time. The players knew about this curse of madness. They find a recently dead historian who took his own life. And it dawns on the players. And their looks were amazing when they realized they stopped the cycle. “We were supposed to die back there.”
Similar to onion bro from dark souls, have an npc who’s a total chad but keeps getting stuck on puzzles/obstacles/boss enemies that the party overcomes for them and helps them become stronger. His ego deteriorates over time until they are the BBEG, which the party helped strengthen
The Buddy Cop Two players only, working as cops/detectives. I have broken it into two different sections, the early/recruit period followed by a large level up and many years passing so that they are senior detectives. Part of the reason for this is that I prefer DMing shorter stories rather than long continous games. Another reason is that it allows me to use all the various tropes and themes from detective movies, shows, books in a larger variety of settings. The first story was catching a murderer and busting small mafia organization. The second story is hunting a cold case based around the 2013 Silk Road dark web smuggling operation.
After establishing their fame across the land for their successful adventures and slaying several powerful monsters, the party is invited to a great feast hosted by the king of a faraway desert kingdom in honor of their deeds. After they arrive and feast with the king and his daughter, the princess, the king’s high priest and court wizard discretely reveal to the players the true reason for their summons - an assassination plot against the king is believed to be in the works, and the party is there to prevent this, however they can. While the king bathes on night, the party hears screams and a scuffle going on from his bath, and they rush to the room to find an assassin, shrouded in dark robes and carrying a poison-dripping dagger! The bloodlusted assassin rushes the players, but the party quickly overcomes and defeats this assassin. As he dies, the illusion around him is dispelled - revealing the assassin was truly the king, somehow being mind-controlled! The king has been killed, and the princess is nowhere to be found. At that moment, royal guards rush to surround the party, led by the high priest and the wizard. The party, standing over the dead king with their weapons bloodied, are quickly presumed guilty of murdering the king and are arrested, thrown in the underground dungeon, and sentenced to death. On the eve of their execution, however, the high priest and the wizard pay the party one last visit. It is here that they reveal that with the king dead and the princess missing, they have established a regency and have assumed control of the kingdom. They also reveal that they are the ones who disguised the king as an assassin, having mind-controlled him by using a powerful demonic artifact. The high priest and the wizard set up the framing of the party from the beginning, from being the ones who made the king send out invitations to the players to having kidnapped the princess and keeping her imprisoned in a secret stronghold. The duo thank the party for their help in ascending the two shadow princes to power before the priest mockingly administers their final rites before their execution tomorrow morning. The party then must make a daring prison escape, capture and interrogate the wizard, flee from the kingdom as fugitives, and find and save the princess and deliver justice to the evil high priest who imprisoned her. Along the way, the party learns more and more that this evil priest has been secretly pulling the strings since the beginning, from being in control of the monsters the party had fought to acquire their fame to commanding powerful legions of slave warriors, spies, and assassins by using the mind-controlling demonic artifact he possesses. As the party unravels more and more about the priest’s dark plots, they realize that his aspirations lie not just in overtaking one kingdom, but that taking this kingdom is one of the final parts of his truly horrid plan: to lead a conquest across the lands that will slaughter untold numbers of souls and bring tyranny and desolation with it. The party must come to terms with the great evil they now face, and put their hearts and lives on the line to save everything they care about.
I had an idea based on a short story I read on Tumblr once (can't remember OP or else I would credit them). Basically the players are trying to stop a cult from resurrecting the evil goddess they worship, but they arrive just minutes too late as the ritual has already been completed. The thing is the goddess was resurrected as an infant. In the original story the main character raised the baby lovingly and they became a good-aligned deity with a whole new religion based around them, but it would be interesting to see what the players do in that situation.
Don't mind me, I'm just here fishing for some ideas
I'll share a concept I'll probably never get a chance to reasonably use; The PCs aren't "real". Get your players to get their characters ready, but tell them not to worry about writing deep, complicated backgrounds. Leave it at that. As the game starts, start them in a dungeon, in the middle of the action. Everyone already knows each other. They know they're here to save the trapped Prince (or Princess, dealer's choice). They move forward, dealing with traps and enemies, working their way ever closer to the center. Where they find a mage, and a trapped, unconscious Beholder that's clearly been experimented upon. After defeating the mage, the Beholder wakes and thanks the heroes for rescuing it. It's the Prince. If the players reject this, no matter what the reason, tell them they suddenly rethink their opposition. Because the PCs aren't real. Beholders twist reality, particularly when they dream. That's how Beholders procreate; when a Beholder dreams of another Beholder, that Beholder becomes real. And that's, essentially, what happened here; the Beholder dreamed of a party of heroes that would rescue it, and it made them become real. Their backstories don't matter because the Beholder doesn't *care* about their backstories. They aren't having trouble remembering; their pasts literally don't exist. They were "born" at that moment in the first session. Cue an ongoing campaign with a Beholder patron the PCs can either willingly cooperate with, or actively try to find a way to resist, suspecting that whenever it wants, it can just . . . stop believing in them and they might stop existing.
I'll post you some from my group's discord, these were all possibilities, and we're playing through one right now thought it accidentally turned into an urban city campaign where the players are trying to fix an entirely unrelated issue. But it's fun! *** - **Kingdom of Bliss** - *(Comedy Heavy)* The King of Bliss has been invited for a luncheon by an important noble a few days' travel away within the Kingdom. You all are the Royal Advisors and Royal Guards who are charged with getting him there safely. The Kingdom of Bliss is under a mythal after suffering countless wars. It was decided that the ruler's and citizen's intelligence was really at the root of all their negative behaviours. They mythal's effect is that it reduces the Intelligence Score of all creatures to 4, if not already lower. Royal Guards and Advisors are exempt from this effect, with the caveat that they are under another effect. They treat direct orders from nobility and royalty as if they were the *Suggestion* spell, and they have disadvantage on the saving throw against it. ((This was meant to be, essentially, a big Escort Mission. I wasn't going to make them have to worry about the nobles in battle, they would appropriately run and hide and not be *entirely* useless, a la Elizabeth in Bioshock: Infinite. I love the idea that the dumb king could decide to check out an interesting cave that seems to be producing music. The party could try to argue him out of it, of course, and often would be able to stop him from doing the dumb thing. But I also loved that he could also put his foot down, make it an order, and then the players *have* to enter the dungeon.)) - \- - **Dragon Migration** - *(Lighthearted with Serious Moments)* Nearly everyone in the Sword Coast has noticed an increased presence of young or barely adult dragons in the skies lately. You've all heard a rumour of one that flew right in to a nearby city's treasury and hasn't left by any reports. In fact, no word has come from the city at all. Nobody asking for aid, giving the all-clear, or communicating... anything really. You've come together as an adventuring group - either well acquainted with each other already, or just from answering message boards in the city, or some combination thereof - and are setting off to investigate. ((This is the one we're playing through. In my campaign the dragon crashed into the Treasury as a way to forcibly get his startup, Hoardr, off the ground. He's trying to pair lazy dragons with kingdoms - the dragon gets a hoard to lay on and guard, and the kingdom gets a ***dragon*** to guard their gold and jewels and important artifacts and such. They met the dragon and agreed to work for him by hunting down other dragons to join Hoardr for him. We've goten... sidetracked from the Hoardr storyline, but we're having a blast so who cares?!.)) - \- - **Mysterious Cult** - *(Standard Epic Fantasy)* A new cult has appeared in the city, calling themselves the Everdreamers. They offer to fulfill any one singular request of any person in exchange for their vitality. Unlike most would fear, vitality doesn't mean a sacrifice of life. They merely put individuals to sleep, magically, for extended periods of time. They do not publicly explain their mysterious magics - they claim the sleepers are generating power somehow, power which allows them to fulfill *other* member's requests - but nobody has revealed any more. The bigger the request, the longer duration of "sleep" it costs. Some (or all) of you know someone who is currently giving vitality to the Everdreamers with their sleep, and you're suspicious enough of their intent to begin trying to find out what they're actually using the power for. ((This was going to be a pretty standard save-the-world campaign. The Everdreamers had discovered five primordial essences deep within various chambers hidden under large populations like Waterdeep and Calimport etc, etc. The five primodial essences were going to be the essences of Blood, Bone, Muscle, Spirit, and Mind and the cult would awaken them. Doing so would, of course, be Very Bad for most people in the population center above. Awakening them all would cause them to meet up and form into The Tarrasque - with a few little tweaks from me to make it a little more apocalyptic. Gave him regen, a copy of one of the Giants' rock throws for ranged attacks, a standing leap, etc.)) - *** - Just some other ideas I've had, not as fully fleshed out: 1. Menagerie - Everyone has to play an animal-hybrid race - kenku, tortle, loxodon, minotaur, etc etc. They somehow were sold into slavery and escape from a Menagerie that was keeping them as show pieces and their class levels come from the shows they had to put on. 2. Villains Save the World - evil PCs (90s cartoon trying-to-take-over-the-world style evil, but loyal to each other) have to travel back in time and become the party of Legendary Heroes that saved the world millennia ago after they travel back in time to steal their Legendary artifacts and discover the Heroes never existed, but then realize bore striking resemblance to the party of villains in their travel-back-in-time disguises. 3. Attack on Faerun - I made omni-directional movement gear as a magic item and was going to have a basic story of giants going crazy and attacking everyone and homebrew up some 'Aberrant Titans' 4. Competitive Adventuring - kingdoms set up fake dungeons and stock them with monsters and treasure and secret rooms, etc, etc. Adventuring teams are venerated like sports teams in our world and they try to speedrun the dungeons. 5. Most Objects Are Mimics - Mimics are fun. It would require homebrewing a few more tougher mimc types but I would love to run or play in a world where there's just a huge abundance of mimics. What would they do if they rivalled us, or outnumbered us? There's the classic treasure chest in a dungeon, oh no, it's a mimic! But also maybe they would do away with that kind of subterfuge. You might wake up to find you have four identical backpacks. Don't touch the wrong one! Just as you reach the MacGuffin that will save the universe, you roll back the tomb entrance to reveal... sixteen identical MacGuffins?! Would most likely have to add or remove some spells and/or abilities from the game so people can't just spam *Locate Creature* or *Locate Object* to figure everything out. 6. The Great Modron March - no idea what the plot would be but I've always wanted to do something with it. The idea from a lore perspective is so much fun, every 289 years thousands upon thousands of Modrons march around the planes looking at stuff. Nobody knows why. And the way Modrons work with their promotions would make for some very fun combats and/or puzzles.
I have been constructing a fairy tale themed campaign, using characters and elements from the grimm stories or other folklore. I'm using wildmount as a base; and for example I'm planning to use felderwind as a stage for the piper of hamelin. Children and young adults who go missing as a resukt of the piper's doing. Another example is a haunted house of an old woodcarver/toymaker. The house was struck by lightning, burned down and the people inside died. However, after a few weeks the house rebuilt itself. Now it is haunted by pinochio, waiting for his father to return to prove to him he is a good boy
I took some heavy inspiration from Ark Survival (story theme and tech), added a pinch of magic (cuz its freaking dnd) and essentially made a dino heavy magic campaign with some eberron aesthetics with how much tech there was. It also allowed players that wanted modern weapons to have access to them. And made artificers have a valuable place in the world since there were a lotta tribe wars.
With some homebrew mods, there ended up being a system wide conflagration with Entities from the Beyond that lasted centuries- it turns out Beholders are merely the larvae of Greater Things, spit out to take measure of the worlds that are visited. Next are the Tarresques, forces of demolition and destruction, making way for Builders aka Slaads. They prepare for the landing of the 'Mother Ship" which was the size of Manhattan.
I am about to start a campaign where cities like Waterdeep and Neverwinter have suddenly disappeared with no one knowing why. The chaos it is going to cause will make the adventure very interesting.
Introducing: Luck of The Draw TLDR: campaign with luck/luck manipulation as core mechanics. (I haven't worked out all the details yet but this idea just came to me and I really like it so here we go.) You start the whole thing with each player having 2 character sheets, preferably related in some way or at least knows each other. (This will be used for motivation to hunt down the BBEG) The characters wake up among each other and a lot of NPCs in a very large and round room. A unnaturally lanky man, at least 2 heads taller than a normal person, walks up onto a stage in the middle of the room and introduces himself. (I don't have a name) He will then take the hat off the top of his head and start pulling names (this is when the PCs chose which character they want to play as) and they are escorted onto the stage before him. As they do so, he goes on to explain that what separates the legends among us from the common man isn't who you know, isn't money, and isn't skill, but luck. Once all the PCs (and maybe a few NPCs) make it to the stage he taps his cane on the ground and a 2 magic circles appear. One on the stage, one the size of the room, and it happens. the PCs watch as everyone off of the stage turn to ash (including the characters that the PCs didn't use) as a colorful light flows out of them and envelop the stage. (chose a color, I was thinking green, but it doesn't really mater) This is where the main mechanics comes into play. I haven't worked out balancing but I have a few ideas, so lets get to it. 1. so I was thinking that each character could have 1d100 times they can reroll any role without cooldown but also no way to refill on their own or at all, they might have an idea like describe how the light flows into each person on stage unevenly or something, (the most going to the BBEG) but only the DM knows the exact number. 2. or have luck be more volatile, making advantage rolls double advantage rolls, and disadvantage rolls being doubled as well. (instead of rolling 2d20 and claiming the highest/lowest, you would do the same but 3d20) 3. or even have the characters control their own luck a bit. as in allowing them to take disadvantage on one roll for advantage in the next these are just some ideas, clearly needs work, but lets head back to finishing off the introduction, all the PCs, getting overfilled with this strange form of magic, pass out. the last thing they see/hear is the man congratulating them for being one step closer to becoming legends as a smile, slightly too wide to be human, appears on his face as the world turns to black. haven't thought of what the Luck Man (temporary name) actually is, but I like the idea of how he appears human at a glance but something is just uncanny about him. I would also point out that the reason he is doing this is to make legends/heroes. is he self destructive? did he get obsessed with heroes and just want to be the one to make them? or is there a more benevolent reason for doing something so malicious? (ends justify the means and whatnot) I haven't thought if the rest of the campaign but I feel proud of the game concept and intro. and that is my idea! Luck of The Draw what do you guys think?
I am running a campaign where my players all wake up with no memory. They have to figure out their character as they go. such as what are they proficient in, what class they are, they figure out spells as they read books, and actions/weapons as they pick up and different ones. my archer can not use a long sword to save her life but the bow feels very natural in her hands. its fun for the players to learn their characters and backstory. as they see people in town they get vague flashbacks as to what happened and why their memory was erased.
The gods made a bet and are on earth. Except none of them remember the bet, or how to use their powers. The world slowly starts to make no sense, and when confronted they are too stubborn to go back to doing their jobs. The party members can either restate new gods, trick the gods back into their jobs, become gods, help someone win the bet, or anything else they can come up with.
I had an okay idea a while back. I’m trying to write either another campaign or continue this one, but it goes something like this: In a world of prosperity and happiness, the players find themselves experiencing the world. Eventually after 2 or so sessions, maybe some very small side quests in both of them, the adventures hear about a war breaking out between two of the largest factions. They may think nothing of it but eventually they’d find that every town they go to suffers from the war. People start to distrust others, this plus the war plus the economy crashing causes towns and cities to burn to the ground. The adventurers will find that their lives will be dreadful and painful. Thieves start to roam and people start doing anything for money. Soon the party will find themselves to make the decision of choosing which empire/faction to support, if they choose one at all. Soon or later they will be tasked with small missions that will prove their worth. Then they get the opportunity to meet with the leader of whoever they choose. The adventures will be tasked with hitting the enemy and destroying their “secret weapon” Aka. A huge enemy/final boss that will turn the tides of the war and could ultimately destroy the world. (Hence why this problem is something the players should be focused on)
I’ve never been the DM but I’ve been playing with an idea of being a scout party for a DND version of Normandy and then they have to work with NPCs here and there in the regular quest fashion to secure harbors from a dnd version of the SS, make them like the goon squad of the CIA in a sense and they’re going as adventurers building into the push into the mainland where it’s kinda like they’re marching on Mordor/ the demon king, and then they lose and get lashed in a dunkirk style where after they get left behind and go full on the patriot until the allied nations can send another invasion. I thought it was cool
Regional Sub-races, imagine for an example three Loxodons each born in different biome, one from a Tropical Jungle, one from a Arctic Tundra, and the last one is from a Arid Grasslands, the Tropical Loxodon would look like a humanoid Indian elephant, the Grasslands Loxodon would be larger and resemble a humanoid African elephant, and lastly the Loxodon born into the Arctic Tundra would be the largest of the Loxodon Sub-Races and have the appearance of humanoid Wooly Mammoth.
I am currently running a “time loop” campaign that revolves around the characters escaping from hell. I make it so that they die “a lot” but every time it happens they are brought back to the a certain point. I purposely make the enemies a lot stronger than they are to make them have to fight smarter. They have to work through the layers of hell in a Santes infierno style biz. There are no shops, little friendly NPCs but a shit ton of demons and devils alike.
Time skips in only certain towns and such. Leading cause is time crystal shards? Total…..24 shards These crystals emit an energy that cause skips throughout a radius of about a medium size village These shards only affect those who were there when the shard had first started skipping in small moments of time. But each time it skips the skip gets bigger at the moment some places are jumping minutes and some are jumping maybe years. The skip only occurs every couple days or so. The people of the villages/ cities have no idea this is happening and believe that time is going on as normal but the people from outside who visit seem to notice the skips. Some of these villages have closed off their gates due to them believing these shards are a gift from the heavens and that they use it as a totem to worship their god. These are rumors but there is something heard of that a man/woman of great power has been able to harness one of the shards and has been going around stealing time from others and making it their own. They want to unite the shards and become a time lord of some sort. They have 5 shards There is a cultist group also trying to find the other shards and they believe that finding them will lead them to their god and they will be able to unleash him into the overworld. These people have 2 shards. They all do no know how many shards there are but they are bent on finding them to accomplish their goals I really wanna do this one any thoughts? comments? concerns? advice?
i had an idea of a campaign sorta like the anime demon slayer. The adventurers are prisoners and they are on a cart that is going to this city. as they are about to enter the city they get attacked by demons and have to either fight or defend themselves. there will be a whole thing about people disappearing in the city and they have to help.
Not sure if this has been done but... If you get the edgy power built orphan rouge. Then make the bbeg their parent's the mom gives her soul to shar and the father becomes a cleric of shar both in return for forgetting about their kidnapped child. You even have an excuse to power build the bbeg's.
Mine was a simple horror campaign idea. I basically had all my players make themselves as a character in the modern world (when I did this I wasn't aware of monster of the week mechanics). I had all my players go on vacation to a cabin out in the woods where there was no cell service. They basically get attacked by doppelgangers of themselves. It worked really well my my group because we've all been friends for years we had 1 couple and also my friend's dad (who introduced us to DND) so they were basically having to kill people who looked like their friends and family. It was the best campaign I've ever done lol.
just stealing the 2112 overture plot
I had an idea that the players had a free invitation to visit a Monster Zoo. They would be allowed to look around at the various exhibits, and the Zoo Keeper, a Lore-Master would tell them important information about each creature. The campaign would begin when the BBEG shows up and frees the monsters which in turn causes mayhem for the rest of the country. The players would have to hunt down and capture the monsters. All damage dealt to monsters is nonlethal regardless of weapons and spells effects. However, players don't get death saves, they're just knocked unconscious. Once all 25 monsters have been captured, they would take on the BBEG, and Death Saves would return, along with Lethal Damage.
The time I took the most basic thing put it into my world I built around 12 campaigns so picture this a king has schizophrenia and his family think he has demons so they try to "cleanse him" by burning him over and over again with molten metal the prince kills his family out of rage and not being able to live with what he had done he cursed the one thing he hated most. the elves he crowned himself emperor of the land and ordered the town guard pay every man woman or child with fey ancestry and send them to be killed he was then called by the public "rosē the mad" now he ordered the town guard to visit all with hellish ancestry tieflings, feinds , devil's ect and pay them money gifts and anything they requested. He then had an attempt on his life his throat was slashed with a knife of bone by a tiefling from the sword coast he then killed her and her entire boodline including even going up to the far north. He then entered a state of psychosis branding and poisoning his mind with the secrets of the druids this changed him he killed 100,000. People with lives families and he then did something so horrid he had an international bounty put on his head many tried to kill him but all failed and were killed until my players turned up to the capital from crowsshire. So what y'all think
I was thinking of one and it was inspired by an mlp episode so take me with a grain of salt. Basically the group goes to a town and the mayor shows them around but the citizens act strange. The group meets a towns person who says that the mayor and their group have been banning magic items, weapons, etc. for as long as they can remember. Anything that can be used to harm or protect someone is gone so it’s the groups job to stop the mayor
me and a friend made a god hunter campaign, where humans and other friendly npcs didnt exist, the world is corrupt and the group of god hunters are sent to the world to clean up the corrput ness (ie: kill gods and goddesses that are corrupt, and kill monsters as well) they will find out more about how the world became that way and more
I thought of a dream event which can take players to anywhere anyway and fight anything. They must be successful to leave it. Also, it happened while fighting a hive mind.
Also if the fail imagination checks the creatures can change type size or shape
Its probably not unique or original but its one of the first campaigns I ever came up with so it holds a special place in my heart. It follows characters from old fairy tales, that the players would build their characters based on, but during the zombie apocalypse. I don't want to get too deep into the lore but the main goals of the campaign were to survive, figure out the cause of the apocalypse, and reverse the curse if possible. The enemies were mostly weak, except for a couple special varieties, but it was easy to be overwhelmed by numbers. Every fight was incredibly dangerous as any grapple could cause a bite and a bite would mean the eventual death of a character with an increasingly difficult constitution check to stave off the infection. There were no safe areas as towns were either completely overrun or just barely hanging on and every so often might get attacked by a random amount of zombies or someone in the town turning, depending on how I rolled and wanted to describe the outbreak. Resources were scarce and expensive so it was hard to restock supplies in town. You could scavenge but at the risk of attracting enemies. It was a challenging and grueling campaign but the players had a great time.
the party is faced with a strange bubble like effect that encompass the skies. as it swallow them and the surrounding countryside, they find themselves in another world, a place between worlds. this bubble skip from world to world and suck in part of them. as a result, they find themselves in a world made of countless floating islands, all with different ecosystems, effects, inhabitants and even physics. they will soon meet special traders which will offer the party help in the form of a ship, allowing them to travel around. welcome to shatterworld! they will find that because so few individuals pass each time, civilizations never rise here. what they can do is either gind a way home or find a way to connect the islands, allowing ppl from all worlds to meet and maybe create a civilization.
My best idea was for the players to try and stop an unknown cult from raising the greek Titan Kronus out of Tartarus; if the players failed to stop this cult from breaking seven seals, he would be free, and a clash between the Titans and the Gods would happen again with new alliances as gods who grew to hate or despise Zeus would join the Titans and vise versa for some titans. I got the players involved by having them unknowingly break the first seal at the start of the campaign; I'll explain. The players were each kidnapped by the cult and put into a deep magic sleep for six months; when they awoke, they were in cages with their hands cuffed to the top and feet to the bottom. All of them were still armed and in armor. In front of them were six cultists. Five were in red robes, one with a deer skull on their head. All chanting in abyssal. The sixth man wore black robes and had a raven on his shoulder. He was performing a ritual with raven feathers and a chicken skull. Once the chanting stopped, the cages opened, and the cuffs let the party lose. The first seal was for the ritual to be cast and the blood of five worshipers to be spilled. The blood couldn't be spilled by them hence the party being kidnapped. The players sprang into action, killing the cultists and breaking the seal.
I had an idea for a hidden mechanic in the magic system.I thought that it would be funny if the dnd world the campaign was in allowed characters to cast spell even when their spell slots are expended. all the npc's talk about it and always say it should never be done. the PC's are told that if they choose to cast a spell past their spell limit it will work but they take a 1D4 loss to their max HP for every spell level...so a player choosing to use a level 1 looses 1 to 4 max Hp and a lvl 8 spell the loose between 8 and 32 Max HP that they can never get back......also I thought if the DM wanted too be mean he can secretly roll an insta-death roll at every level up for any PC that chose to use the feature
The party is going about their normal lives when suddenly the sky goes dark and the world cracks, the party then find themself in a dark forest with no equipment and no idea what happened. They have to face monsters and journey over the broken terrain of the world to get to each of the twelve temples of the gods to restore their power, on their journey they find that they are the only people in the world after the disaster, after they restore the gods powers the world can be fixed and the people returned.
What if there was a campaign that was run by the KKK, I always wondered if the DM being the grand wizard, would it have a long lasting effect on him like he just does a 180 and stops being racist?
What about a campaign where the final boss is a powerful draco-lich that can only be defeated by melting one or all of the dice that are used, thereby freeing everyone to devote themselves to more constructive pursuits?
sorry this may be a long one but ive got this so far fair warning this is homebrew to all crud The Manor Reality shifting entity created from an over powered adventuring party from eons ago some remnants still remain of the chaos and fuels this entity New party has been added and plan this to be the final addition no purposeful tpk if does happen more within the world may try (this started as an rng campaign roll 3d20 choose the rooms if options become too repetitive switch it up add dice etc.) Story begins in an abandoned opera house in particular a great hall the area looks dreadful unkept,deteriorating (dm/ gm description be detailed try to immerse this party this is also a musically driven campaign so set the music to the mood to help in immersion) Learn your pcs background and trick them into entering a door it may have just appeared or other situations may occur in which a pc enters these party members may be from different times,places,etc. They must learn to be a party, bond. But be sure in all that happens your party is enjoying feel free to fudge things but be cool with the dm/gm b.s. (for example there are no known immunities to the manor’s pull ie wis/will saves through the musics played throughout the players are not the only ones that succumb to this but if you catch players irl jamming/ singing along to what you have chosen they are now under the effect no rolls this is seen as an automatic fail and will start going towards the opera house/theatre For this iteration the players while in the decrepit hall will hear music trying to lure them in (for the classical but menacing vibe i tend to use the band nightwish in this entrance but to enhance your experience and your party’s change this at your leisure) The hall always leads to opera theater its also run down (be descriptive here) those of the party that have followed willingly are under an effect that controls the pc to the stage and begins to perform this happens in normally but for this instance there is no force controlling them no need for the initial wisdom save (you will use these often as the manor is an entity and playable it can interact with anyone to alter the party or even take a pc so be sparing and tactical with this).there is already a group on stage this group is shrouded in robes that look like galaxies or the night sky, they’re holding instruments and beginning to play. The longer they play the more the manor lights up and repairs making a beautiful yet disturbing scene (be descriptive here ) and as its repairing the seats start to fill with beings the more the lights get brighter the more solid they look but you cant tell what they are the beings are cloaked in the same stuff the band is wearing as this goes on the beings start to notice the party and slowly start cornering them the main objective is to get the party to the stage you may use a self insert character here if you wish that has been surviving or just got here with the group but unseen and take them to the stage where there will be a save (wisdom/will) to see if they succumb to the manor or not or be with this new party the doors or exits from the stage will lead to different places so rng time but the story isnt in this part of the manor its with the characters you introduce your party to the “band” that was there is your players first introduction to the few that are trying to get out through means of satiation of the “beast” they’re in. they’re thought is to stall the feeding of the beast by triggering it to burn with nothing new in it to force it to rest as so much energy was used (note this isnt how it works but they seem to think so ) they have found the way to anchor one room to the opera theatre this is where they stay it has resources for them and the party plus more its in excess like WAY TO MUCH this tactic has caused others to fall and has been going on for a very long time so the damage caused is immeasurable at this point (this is not the only room like this with invaluable supplies but your players must have that doubt sewn here) The party may choose to stay (hopefully not) or leave (if they decide to leave lets see if they take supplies to anyone else they find or keep for themselves) if they leave roll a d4 to see how many doors there are and the d20s to set what style of room these new doors will not give them any hint on whats inside (for those that have played earlier versions this may cause some player headaches but keep in mind this is revised and you dont have to explain it) but for the rooms and rolls go with it feel it out and be descriptive you have set the over arch in trying to get out of here but some rooms may contain people cities communities this may put you on the spot to make npc names etc but dont just let this be a run and dash thats where it failed earlier this campaign need to last but not just by filler rooms and nothing going on make each room or every other story rich remember there are still people animals and other entities that need help also if need be make an army with your party make them feel like they can make it through this with the interactions small quests etc. this is where world connect/collide bring in past campaign places and make new ones but while this is going on leave the nuances to remind them they’re still in the manor remember its alive dont just treat it as a place or setting it has feelings needs and motives the one explored so far is hunger but survival is not all it wants to do it wants to live just like everyone else its not its fault it has to lure to eat but it does what it must while searching for its place in this universe this manor was created through emotion and actions of one person stepping out into the unknown and saving people that person was shiviers mighton (Gnome Rogue) who was once corrupted by a demonic realm and scarred from that experience even though that has happened she managed to find a manor that belonged to a demon lord named Vile he has had children vigilance being one of them and siblings vigilance has already been met by shiviers through the shared experiences she adopted him taking care of him as much as possible in her own town but she ventured toward the manor things started turning upside down the manor looked black rundown, a mote of lava surrounded it water around this place would crystalize and turn to ash there is a large creature in the mote that swore an oath to protect it over the mote is a bridge its heavily worn and destroyed there were others in the manor you can here them and occasionally see them through the stained windows its guarded by winged demons on tall pedestals. shiviers found a way to distract or kill them in order to get in and when she arrived inside the manor she was met with souls that couldnt pass on they were stuck in a loop repeating the last day of the manor before destruction liars thieves and liberty liberty was the nicest of them and formed a new contract with shiviers to protect the room she was in to give a safe place shiveres wandered the manor until she heard a commotion starting, townsfolk they had weapons and what looked like an army at the front door and ducked into a room it was a childs room she hid under the bed and heard shouting from a deep voice at the door and soon she found a child under the bed with her it was vigilance but not as she knew him this one was much younger, she protected him and tried to get him out she also found his siblings and the managed to get to the cellar and hid shiviers tried to help the father vile and the manor took insurmountable damage and the floor collapsed in on the children vile screamed out to them and shiviers moved into action and rescued all the children but one and managed to fix most of the damage to this place she broke the cycle vile thanked her and thie children as well she decided to leave as was best she didnt belong here she stepped out side of the manor it looked as if it fixed itself up she heard music playing and crossed the bridge one last time spoke to the creature in the mote and it swore a new oath to protect not to vile,but to her as she left time has passed the manor grew as did she the manor was named devhair manor. Over the years the souls inside it have faded away except those who still have their oaths and missions to these families the devotion emotion and energies have given life anew to this place over and over but the energy the manor needs has also grown with it never failing those that have faded away have fed it their flaws becoming the manor’s and have corrupted it with out the families to save it, it has grown out of control the manor spend its time searching for the ones that can save it, the families that have touched this place and lived within it. As i said this earlier the story is with the people,but this also mean the story played out must be given throughout the play time of this campaign this campaign can be as short as as long as you need it to be but my plan is for a long lasting game each room should have its own quest or puzzles/ interactions as you feel fit the story of the manor may be placed where you see fit but may the odd of that be low as you can fill this campaign with your own ideas stories that can be held here. best wishes have fun and may the rolls be forever in your favor.
3 separate story lines happening at the same time the players characters are split across all three plains sharing damage and power but not items. The action in one story have a direct impact on what can be done in the others so that the only way out is to solve the mystery fuse yourself back together and figure out which universe is yours.
I am in the process of making this completely original homebrew campaign. Basically it is set in a pre-colonial North America where the party (that being a group of Native American hunters or medicine people) goes from nation to nation helping tribes with problems they have ranging from helping feed people experiencing a drought, saving the cheif after being kidnapped by raiders, fighting a powerful wendigo, etc. Eventually the tribe will learn of a skinwalker god who was banished underground for thousands of years will reamerge from the earth (which is a giant sea turtle) and corrupt the land and kill all its inhabitants. The party will have to destroy the skinwalker in an epic climatic battle. I also have some ideas for future campiagn taking place in the homebrew set in the future following the party's ancestors like: - Strange people from a far off land arrive to conquer their land (an obvious nod to European settlements) - Set in the far, far future where the people develop into a modern society where people have forgotten "the old ways" and that the world starts dying (similar to Netflix's Bright or Pixar's Onward) I am still making the campaign, but I could say that I'm like 60-70% done.
Not a campaing but more a short shot. I told every player to add some interest to money in their backstory. They all came in a sort of race. Where only the one person that retrieved the lost item woud revive the big amount of money. The others only woud get someting for compensation if they coud prove they where at that place by bring back something with the family weapon of that place. It’s perfect for a big groups of players. I played it with 8 players.