Best Campaigns

[Olo Demonsbane]

Hello fellow playgrounders!

As a DM, one of the hardest things for me to do (and I'm assuming its hard for others as well) is to think up a campaign idea.

So....Post campaign ideas so everyone can use them

For example:

I redid the Oots campaign as my own campaign, though with different players. It turned out really differently (we won the battle of azure city, due in no small part to me being able to turn the dragon's Xykon had befriended into vampire dragons on my side :smallbiggrin:). We ended it by killing Xykon at Kerigor's Gate. It was hard but rewarding, though this idea would not work if any of your players read Oots :smallsmile:.

[josh13905]

Just so u know harm can't reduce a creature to less than 1 hp

That is all

[D-naras]

Isn't that when they make their saves?

I lately, dont try to have campaigns stories ready. I prefer having NPC with goals and desires so that helps against railroading and it's much more rewarding to know that cool people live in your setting along with your PC's fish-frying-pun-spewing wizard. :smalltongue:

[Darth Stabber]

My best campaign as a gm was one I save from the toilet. One of my Friends was GM'ing this one, he has no real interest in character interaction, and everyone else does, and he has a flair for large groups of enemies, like if the party is lvl 6 it has no business dealing with 20 dretches and a babau. especially with only 1 cold Iron weapon amongst the 5 (and 1 cleric and no other full casters). Every one is on the verge of quitting @ any rate I take over move the campaign to finding aid against the demonic invasion. Some political intrigue and wilderness travel and exploration. People loved it, campaign saved.

Best player campaign, easy it was in L5R. Another friend was running the Topaz championship module from the AEG website. We start off meeting the emperor, and we each get to ask him 1 question. So my question bowls the emperor over and i get points there, and through out the contest i keep my lead going into the Iajitsu duel, I get eliminated in the second to last round of that, and if the girl who beat me (a rediculously over powered young samurai-ko, who in the official cannon wins the the thing) wins the finals i take second if she loses i take first, she loses. Random Scorpion (who behaves very unscorpion like, infact i had the can't lie disadvantage) wins the topaz championship, is declared the best young samurai in the empire and is made a member of one of the imperial families. Yay.

[Zenos]

I had a very short campaign where the PCs were investigating a murder on a respected wizard in a republic city-state, which led them to uncover a hidden organisation that was intending to re-instate monarchy. Ended up in a chase through the city trying to catch the leader (not the guy who was gonna be monarch). Quite fun, since for me it is the one adventure where investigation missions has worked really well for me.

[Satyr]

The campaign I mastered and which was probably the best I have yet done was all about the beginning, apex and end of a larger war in a fantasy realm which was mostly based on the thirties year war - and which was decidedly unromantic and close in the depiction to how people are, and not how they should be. It was a good combination of plot-driven and character-motivated game, describing the rise of the PC's in the ranks of the army and getting important while they slipped slowly from their moral position and became more and more scrupelous and hardened.
The campaign was so outstanding as the decisivley unromantic atmosphere and mature contents really set it apart from the standard dull and euphemistic (or ridiculously exagerated) depictions narratives you normally find to this topic. Sometimes a narrative must hurt, and must show the abyss, when it takes this to become more than mere entertainment.
The shift from an extrinsically motivated scenario to an intrisically motivated one worked extraordinarily well, and the paralell of the rise of the characters in power - they became important mercenary leaders in the end, hold an important city for more than a year and probably saved the kingdom through this - and their moral decline and willigness to sacrifice others in the name of the greater good, or at least their personal interests was impressive. One of the players later told me, that the campaign was too intense and that she became affraid of herself sometimes, so she quitted.
This was not the first time, that I tried to create a campaign which focused on depth and the confrontation of the players with reality and very problematic situations instead of the superficial crap most "official" campaigns often are. But even I was surprised how well it worked and how much we discussed the campaign outside of the gaming, and how sad and reliefed at the same time everyone was when it actually ended.

[ghost_warlock]

I've played in a few campaigns that I absolutely adored, including an Eberron campaign with the Best DM Ever.

However, my favorite campaign was one that was right for all of the wrong reasons. The GM was a jerk who felt that the point of the game was to try to kill as many PCs as possible. The setting for this was perfect: an Alternity version of ALIENS vs. Predator with the PCs cast as Colonial Marines.

After every player had lost a character or two, we independently came to the conclusion that the only way we'd 'survive' the campaign was to come up with the most trigger-happy, unscrupulous sadist of a character imaginable. :smallbiggrin:

The campaign thereafter featured near-constant in-fighting to the point where the characters were literally trying to murder each other in their sleep. Battles against the aliens and/or predators would sometimes be disrupted by one character or another deciding the time was right to finally get back at whoever had previously inconvenienced them (or whoever seemed like a vulnerable target). The characters barely worked as a team and the whole campaign quickly devolved into a competitive exercise in exemplifying Refuge in Audacity (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RefugeInAudacity)/Vulgarity (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RefugeInVulgarity).

Nevertheless, it was a blast! :smalltongue: The players were all just barely mature enough to let what happened in-game stay in-game and the GM was curious enough about what we'd try to pull next that PC deaths by GM-fiat dropped off dramatically and eventually ground to a halt.

What would have otherwise been an unremarkable GM vs. PCs game turned into the most fun Evil campaign I've ever participated in.