Need campaign theme idea

[Ducklord]

I'll be DMing for a group of friends over the summer and I'm stumped on what to run. I don't really like premade adventures, but I'm not sure what to center my campaign around either. The only thing I have so far is a tournament campaign, where the players fight in an arena against increasingly tough opponents, but I'm afraid my players are not so much into optimizing, and that such a game won't be as fun for them as it could be for me. Any ideas on what else i could do? Wacky ideas are good too :smallbiggrin:

[Serpentine]

What sort of stories do you like?

I'd quite like to run (or play in) a fairy tale-themed game - some would be twisted, others just references, and others played straight. One idea was that an advanced Mimic looks like a tall tower, its "tongue" resembling a dangling braid of hair.
There's a lot of different ways you could take the overall plot, too - or it could just be a sandboxy game.
Maybe you have to rescue a princess.
Maybe you think you have to rescue a princess, but it's actually a trap, or she just eloped, or it turns out to be a prince (who may or may not have formerly been a princess), or maybe you just had to rescue a prince from the outset. Maybe you have to rescue a dragon from an evil princess (or a good one - fairy tale Evil campaign!).
...and other non-princess related possibilities.

[Jay R]

I have had good success with the following:

The characters are hired by a Great White Wizard to sneak into the Black Mage’s castle to steal the Ruby of Power in his throne that is the source of his power. After they go through the traps, monsters and other dangers outside, they have to make their way through the guards and castle traps, finally arriving at the throne room, to find the Great White Wizard calmly sitting and holding the ruby.

PC: “If you were coming here, why did you hire us?”

GWW: “To take all the risks, of course. Once the Black Mage’s full attention was bent on killing you, I had no trouble slipping in.”

PC: “Why didn’t you at least tell us?”

GWW: “Because the Black Mage can read lower-level minds. Why do you think you wound up facing every minion he had?”

----------------------------

I also ran a game in which every PC began by coming across the great desert to the town of X. Unknown to them, not long before the game started, a Great Prophecy appeared for one week as the answer to every attempt to see the future, even those that normally don't work at all. "An unknown stranger will cross the Great Desert, and appear, powerless and friendless, in the town of X. With the aid of a powerful patron, He will rise to become the greatest hero of the age, and his patron will soon become the most powerful ruler in the world." Nobody has any idea what it means, or what magic could make that prophecy appear in response to every form of future-telling.

Hilarity ensues when every powerful lord wants to be patron to a character that comes out of the desert, and to kill any such character who serves someone else.

[SamBurke]

I like the previous poster's idea, and here's one of my own, in similar style, designed to delay the main action with what they think is the main action until you can think of the overall plot:

The characters are hired by a mysterious stranger in a bar (or anywhere else), who tells them to go into the dungeon, rescue the Ruby of Ultimate Power, and come back.

They go, level after level of traps and enemies. They notice that each trap RELOADS after they leave, and that each monster is a type that regnerates (Hydra, etc).

At the very end, the come down, and see the guy who hired them standing there.

PCs: "Um. What?"

Guy: "You've done well. Finally, someone worthy of the task."

Players: "Dude. We just spent 15 sessions, and we just now got to the tavern scene."

Guy: "I don't know quite what you mean, but you are about to go on the true quest."

Basically, you run the dungeon as long as you need to so that you can figure out what's going to happen in the main story, and then you use the dungeon as a VERY original tavern scene.

[Knaight]

From a somewhat narrative perspective, there are a few elements that work really well as RPG standards. These are:
1) There is a character.
2) This character wants something.
3) There is something preventing them from getting it.
4) There is a line they will not cross in their attempt to get something.

Now, this on its own is pretty much a typical heroes journey, and boring too. However, you are working with much more than just one character. Everyone in the party might want something, maybe these somethings are mutually exclusive, and they aren't the only one. Everyone has their agenda*, and it is the player characters following theirs and the interaction this has with everyone else's that drives the campaign.

Now, these four elements are not the be all end all, merely the driving force. Moreover, each of them may change over time, gaining complexity as they do so. People may make enemies, and their wants turn towards dealing with them, people may make friends, and the lines they won't cross include hurting them, the world is changing and what was once in the way might not be, and what was once not in the way might be. Plus, the characters should change.

*Note that this doesn't mean everyone is trouble. Often agenda's line up pretty well. For instance, a PC agenda might be to find someone they wronged in the past, and seek their forgiveness. An NPC agenda might be to get a reputation as a wise and knowledgeable person as a way of seeking acceptance. If the PC tries to get information from this NPC, it should be easy.

[Tvtyrant]

Worm that Walks storyline! You can do almost anything with that story, including nerfing it all to kingdom come and running its end game at mid levels.

[Dark Herald]

Any Fantasy or Soft Science fiction novels or movies make good springboards for games. I regularly run pirate themed games that borrow heavily from Pirates of the Caribbean, and once ran an adventure that emulated Resident Evil with Traps and Monsters the PCs run from instead of fighting.

Whatever your favorite series is, turn all the technology to fantasy and design several adventures like that. Then you should have a world up and running that will feel planned and consistent.

This is all assuming you are playing Fantasy/D&D. Otherwise, just mash your two favorite settings together and call it a day.

[Delwugor]

I'd quite like to run (or play in) a fairy tale-themed game - some would be twisted, others just references, and others played straight.
*hefts dwarven battleaxe in salute to Serpentine's awesome idea*

I've always thought an game using elements of Indian Mythology would be an interesting diversion to the typical fantasy usually played. Shard (http://www.shardrpg.com/) has some of the elements but unfortunately they decided to include furries ... grrr I have my axe ready.

[Ducklord]

Some of the ideas you gave me were really good, but they weren't really what I am looking for. However I did come across another idea while I was contemplating what to do. What about if I ripped off one of SCS's campaigns? My players don't read this forums, so there's little chance that they would know the story in advance, and those campaigns were just awesome. I'd probably start with Crystal Cantrips, because it's a bit shorter. What do you think, would it work? Is it ok to steal someones idea like that?

EDIT: we're playing D&D by the way. 3.5 if it matters

[Necro_EX]

Last 3.5 campaign I ran what I did was I took a general idea or theme from another form of media and wrote up a plot centered around that. It was a Forgotten Realms game, so I recalled some of the Baldur's Gate games and the one I remembered most recently playing was Dark Alliance 2 which centered around the Onyx Tower.

So what I did was take the Onyx Tower and wrote a plot around that, what I ended up with was a four-way free for all over the acquisition of a planar trestle to open a gate to bring back the tower. The fire giants of the Crags wanted it to open a gate to the plane of fire to increase the domain of their leader, the Shades sought the trestle for unknown reasons, a cult of moon elves wanted to use the tower's power to awaken a sleeping god, and the Harpers (including the party as retainers of a Harper) wanted to destroy the trestle.

It turned into a series of fetch quests (which weren't irritating in the least, considering failure could result in all the major cities of Faerun overrun) to gather the pieces of the trestle and ended with a big climactic battle as the tower was summoned in the heart of Waterdeep. Over the course of this whole ordeal I managed to introduce some NPCs that will come back in later games I run with my group and I gave them a decent little tour of the Western Heartlands and the North.



My point is that outright plagiarism is bad, but finding inspiration in the works of others can be great.

[DonEsteban]

Society for Computer Simulation? Singapore Computer Society? Shelby County School?

Anyway, you seem to be the action-oriented type. A war campaign where the PCs have to act as scouts, commandos, strategists, and must ultimately defeat the big bad who turned out to be responsible for all this? A pirate campaign? Where the players have to find the sunken city of whatsisface, explore it, stop the dark rituals that are taking place there, blow it up, barely manage to escape through the volcano and then find out that it was all just a deception to... I'm running out of steam here, but I'm sure you can take over now. Or a planar campaign where they have to fight their way through all thinkable and unthinkable sorts of different planar sites (and a visit to Sigil is always a good idea, too). Memorable battles guaranteed!

[Ducklord]

SCS = SilverClawShift, the authoress of the best d&d game journals I've ever come across. Here's a link to tho campaign I'd like to recreate:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112245

And while plagiarism is bad when you steal someone's idea and sell it as your own, if I tell my players the campaign is based on someone else's it isn't much different than running a published adventure, only that here I get to play with NPC creation a bit more. It would be nice to know if someone already tried to do so successfully though. I think that question deserves another thread.