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Tanuki Tales
2012-06-26, 11:08 AM
Topic of this thread is quite simple:

What was the most memorable (or your favorite) campaign to be part of as a player or to run as a DM/GM/ST/etc.

For the sake of this thread we'll let One-shot adventures/sessions and incomplete campaigns be valid choices as well.

Rallicus
2012-06-26, 11:19 AM
Never been in or GM'd a campaign that I've enjoyed the whole way through. There's always the inevitable burnout and lack of interest in the inevitably generic story. One day I hope to be a part of a good campaign with an awesome GM that tells a story that blows my mind, but it hasn't happened yet.

That said, most memorable session I was a part of: 2e, 11 years old, drow campaign. I was the only player because at that age, only my friend (the DM) and I were interested in D&D, mostly because of his older brother. Thanks to a pep talk the day before from his brother, my friend ran an awesome session consisting of my character fighting through an organization of thieves, murdering helpless elves in the woods and dragging the survivors back to the Underdark. If I was a part of something similar nowadays I'd probably write it off as "so edgy, so grimdark, cut my life into pieces generic garbage," but as a kid it was pretty good.

Best campaign I ran was....
...
....
......

I don't know. I'm a pretty mediocre DM.

Zerter
2012-06-26, 01:24 PM
As a DM my most memorable campaign involved a relatively new group which included experienced players, inexperienced players, people I knew and people I did not. I created an urban campaign setting in which the city was ruled by various factions, every PC played a character from one of these factions and all of them had a separate reason for working for a well mannered vampire called Lars.

Lars was a key member in the undead faction and was engaged in a secret war with the dwarven faction in which various other factions had a stake for some reason or the other. The campaign at first involved the party on the one hand doing various missions for Lars (sabotaging a mining operation, stealing high value beer, protecting the beer) and on the other hand being occupied by their various professions (entrepreneur, cheerleader, assasin, diplomat & teacher). The first few missions went reasonably well, every PC had their own secret agenda, but they got along nevertheless. One of the inexperienced players made various mistakes in the eyes of other players and that led to annoyances, his character was eventually assassinated and he made a new one.

Because of the dissatisfaction of one of the PCs with all missions going through Lars (he felt he was being railroaded), I introduced a plot line which involved a underling of Lars betraying him and the party being tasked with the assassination of the underling. They did this successfully and in the process acquired a fort in the city which they could use as a base of operations. At this time Lars took a backseat, still being available to be asked for work but without every session revolving around the quests by the quest giver. Instead the game moved to more individual plot lines: the exploration of the underground surrounding the fortress, assassinations targeting the party paid for by the PC that was killed (he saw it coming and put it in his will) and one of the PCs was sentenced to be put in a mental hospital (and later freed by the party).

The PC that was assasinated had made a new PC by now that ran a inn close to the fortress (I insisted every character have a profession). While exploring the underground he killed a drow orphan for no real reason, causing the party to leave him behind when he was later captured by a salamander lord.

Most of the group enjoyed the campaign up to this point, but the player that had originally voiced dissatisfaction with Lars remained dissatisfied as well as a new player that he had brought to the group. Additionally the new player was very much disliked by the others in the group, creating tension. Eventually I decided to try and shake things up a little to try and get a dynamic that would work for everyone and introduced a deck of many things by a NPC (something I had warned the group about the week before so they could prepare mentally). Everybody drew cards, two players drew poorly: the PC that had previously spend time in a mental hospital and the player that was dissatisfied (both had Imprisonments). The dissatisfied player went a little bit mental about this, insisting we simply ignore the draw. Wanting him to please him I almost went along, but I saw the other players were very unhappy with this (having taken the same risks) and I came with an alternative solution: the PCs that were imprisoned were not imprisoned in some far off dimension, instead they were imprisoned by their worst enemies.

In the case of the satisfied PC we spend a 1-on-1 session role-playing him being held by, and trying to escape the home of a Orc he had previously bought on a slave auction with the intent to use him to rape several guards to take revenge on them. He eventually adopted some of the point of view of his captor and made up satisfactory for his crimes towards the Orc. This was one of the best sessions I've ever seen roleplaying wise.

The unsatisfied PC thought I had screwed him over. Because Lars had already found out the PC had tried to backstab him it made sense to me to have Lars being the one to capture him (having already established that Lars would be looking for payback anyway). This did not go over well, the PC in question felt he was being targeted and was eventually killed after lying repeatedly to Lars, with him insisting what he said was believable.

Subsequently the unsatisfied PC tried to actively sabotage the campaign (not something he openly said, but something he later did admit), first by moving the party out of the city where the campaign took place and later by making a Psion and abusing my lack of rule knowledge about Psions to basically do whatever he wanted with it. His new friend joined in on the sabotaging and I eventually offered him that I would quit DMing. I did, but the damage was done and relationships were poisoned to a degree that he and his friend quit the group.

The urban setting created is still the one we use today (1,5 years later), and all players but the two are still in the group. This campaign was memorable for the actual campaign which had some great battles and role-playing scenes as well as for the IC and OOC in-fighting that took place in the party. It was also my first serious campaign as a DM and I learned a lot from everything that happened. After the first year (and several months) of the group we had an award ceremony in which the campaign was voted the best we played up to that point, though I doubt it would have been if the two that left would have stayed.

Tanuki Tales
2012-06-26, 02:37 PM
-Snip-

Ok, shooting myself in the foot here...but why didn't you just kick that one guy and his friend from the group?

Lost Demiurge
2012-06-26, 02:39 PM
Years ago I got inspired. I had an idea "Hey, you know what would be neat? A fantasy game that involved an expedition into a wilderness area full of ruins, where the players explored and slowly built up their fort while taming all the hazards around it, and unravelled some of the old mystery as to why the land was wrecked and haunted..."

I was working on it, really just kicking around ideas and drawing maps when DnD 3.0 was released. So I offered to run a game for my regular group, we decided to go for it, and WOW.

No one really knew how to minmax yet, so I didn't have to worry about too much power imbalance and my scaling was pretty good. They tooled around the wilderness, mapping it out square by square and fighting critters both regular and homebrew. They retrieved lost carts for farmers, slowly gained the trust of the isolated farmsteads, explored north to find a city long-since fallen to a few inhabited ruins, solved the question of WHY undead kept attacking from the west, saved the fort from destruction a few times, made peace with an illithid cult-leader in exchange for his help against the big bad, (a black dragon sorceror), and lead 20 militia archers to rout about 100 orcs and 10 ogres. (At 8th level, mind.) Eventually it culminated at 13th level or so, with them taking on aforementioned BBEG, barely pulling it off.

Though I didn't know what to call it at the time, nowadays I'd say it was a pretty good example of a sandbox game with connecting plot-threads. It wasn't flawless, not by a long shot, but the PC's got right into it and developed their own goals and neat things to try. They chased after the plot threads, and solved mysteries, and killed epic monsters, and tromped through dungeons... It was good. That was over a decade ago, though, and for a long time I never quite duplicated the success of it.

Then two years ago I head of the KINGMAKER adventure path, and I purchased it, hoping against hope that it was something like my old idea... And I found it good! I pitched it to my new group, and they agreed, and damned if it doesn't have that same sort of vibe... Now a whole new bunch of people are romping around the wilderness... Exploring, defending their towns and cities and whatnot, generally saving the day, and solving the mysteries...

Yeah, life is good. The fact that I get to DM something like this, a flavor of game that I REALLY love with not one but TWO awesome groups of folks... Well, that makes me a happy, happy Demiurge.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-06-26, 02:53 PM
I don't know if I could narrow things down to the single most memorable campaign, but the campaign I ran involving this party and the first villain in this post would definitely be in my top 5.

Zerter
2012-06-26, 02:56 PM
@Troll Brau:

I founded the group together with that one guy and we were all connected relationship-wise (not that I knew him that well, but most of us travelled in the same social circles). His best friend was in the group for example (and still is, note that he is someone else than the friend you are referring to which I will call 'the other guy'). So it was hard to raise the issue on account of it risking the party falling apart, aside from that nobody really wanted to bring up the issues (we all avoided confrontations to some extent).

The other guy was someone I did not know, but he was a major disruptive factor (not going into details with him) and I later found out he had been kicked out of other groups. At first I wanted to make it work, but eventually I did force the issue and addressed the behavior of the other guy, at which point both of them left, right before the start of the next campaign. Another reason I waited to do this was because to a significant extent their negativity was directed toward me and I felt that alongside being DM I should not also be the one to act as party chair since they already thought I was abusing power and being the one to raise the issue of their behavior would only validate these thoughts (they blamed me so it would not gone over well).

But that was then. The lesson I did learn was to deal with these kind of issues sooner, I spend so much energy trying to please the disruptive player (changing the direction of the campaign several times to try and please him, letting him get away with stuff because I knew he would complain otherwise, trusting him with the Psion) but the negativity remained.

Tanuki Tales
2012-06-26, 03:15 PM
-Snip-

Morbid curiosity ringing in, but did you ask the other player's their opinions at any point? Just because you were the only obvious target doesn't mean you were the only one feeling it.

I know it's way after the point and hindsight is 20/20, but, as I said, morbid curiosity.

Zerter
2012-06-26, 03:24 PM
Yes, I talked with everyone involved, to some extent with some (I was not the only target, there was negative interaction between some of the PCs as well). Basically there were some bad feelings towards the founding guy but since he had positive qualities as well we (as a group) did not want to kick him out. The other guy though... we tried to make it work but it was really a disaster from day one with one guy almost leaving because of him early in the campaign, nobody except the founding guy wanted to go on with him unless he changed his behavior.

The complicating factor (which I might not have explained properly) was that the founding guy on his own was a asset to the party. It was just that when the new guy came he strengthened some of the guy's negative behavior (they both felt they were the victims and reinforced that to each other) and it was obvious they came as a package, meaning we could not kick the new guy out without also kicking the other one out.

I also want to stress that even though all of this went on, the campaign really had some great moments and was experienced very differently by different people.

Tanuki Tales
2012-06-26, 03:33 PM
-Snip-

Well, at least that's good to hear at least.

Ianuagonde
2012-06-26, 04:18 PM
Two favorites to DM:

2nd Edition: my players wanted to play evil characters. I wrote a short campaign where they were all drow, and all members of the same noble house. Each was a son or daughter of the Matron Mother, vying for her favor without destroying the house. Assassinating your wizard brother loses a lot of appeal when he is the one maintaining the magical wards on your family estate.
The plot: another party was undermining their trade monopoly one certain rare surface items (paper and parchment most importantly; good luck writing scrolls without it). Lots of intrigue, spying and non-lethal backstabbing ensued. Two players wanted the same suite in the estate, two others were memorizing religious hymns to show the Matron just how devout they were...it was sweet.

3rd Edition: Red Hand of Doom. Very well written. Afterwards, the players told me how much they enjoyed the freedom of the adventure; that they could make their own plans to win the war and that I just went with it. It turned out they followed the adventure by the book. Everybody wins in such a situation.

icantsavemyself
2012-06-26, 08:43 PM
The absolute most fun I've had in a campaign was actually the third or fourth try for our group to play as ourselves in our small hometown during the zombie apocalypse.

The GM was passed out drunk and we woke him and asked him to run a zombie game. We made our characters on blank sheets of paper, two people to a sheet, and started in about ten minutes.

We started mowing down zombies through the town, then boarded up the school gym and shop class as our initial base. a few days later a bunch of marines came to save us, were impressed, gave us a bunch guns and supplies and let us stay as the guards for the location since we knew the area and had it under control.

Later we started to uncover government plots about the zombie plague and had to rescue a doctor from the hospital. After we botched that assignment up we got saved by some rednecks who then told us they were going to, "Kill those pesky kids in that backwoods town who killed our cousins" and we watched them peel out.

The game has been on a two year hiatus since then because the GM got deployed to Afghanistan and every time we game he doesn't want to run a system, he just wants to play. But that game lasted about 12 sessions of at least 8 hours each.

lyko555
2012-06-26, 11:10 PM
two campaigns come to mind the first was a high power in which my character ended up being soul bound into a shadowsteel golem after he committed sepukku to release himself from the service of what he had discovered to be an evil lich lord.
Then the party proceeded to romp around the realms making a peace treaty between all of the opposed factions based on the, if you don't join you will be out numbered by the rest of the joiners. meanwhile the party was secretly traveling the 9 layers of hell 1 by 1 killing and absorbing the demon lords power's and domains. that campaign ended by a poorly worded wish being used to remove the soul of the samurai from the golem and the lich killed the other character in retaliation.

the other was a majorly low power campaign that started with the old dnd group from high school getting back together after 7 years and starting as lvl 1 commoners trying to survive a zombie invasion.
i played as a dwarven blacksmith with an obsession for pitchforks. "EVRY RIOT NEEDS PITCHFORKS SO GOTTA KEEP EM IN STOCK"
we survived to 2nd lvl based on ingenuity and luck we were supposed to go to 1st lvl in an actual class at that point but we decided to stay as
commoners.
campaign stalled when college and work picked back up but last session had ended with 3 lvl 2 commoners setting siege to a town with nothing but a bunch of pitchforks ( disguised as bandits) and some flashy words and lots of lamp oil.

Gimur
2012-06-27, 12:21 AM
For me, it had to be a game that I DM'ed for. I had two players, so I gave the campaign a Mass Effect-esque treatment by introducing them to various NPCs which they could bring along for "missions". So it was usually the two PCs and two NPCs that they handled themselves. That was interesting, and worked out fairly well.

But how it really became memorable was in one instance, trying to track down the army that kept destroying outlying hamlets from the city they were in. The survivors of those massacres claimed insistently that it was goblins that was doing it, and I had a pair of goblin tribes that they had to "whodunit" to figure it out. But, the thing was, those armies were illusioned into appearing as goblins, and were actually the thralls of an Old Red Dragon, which was seeking to reclaim its birthing grounds by force.
The PCs, who usually err on the side of violence, actually approached both of the goblin tribes diplomatically and found that they had nothing to do with the raids, and were actually also at war with those forces. So, instead of slaying the goblins, they befriended and allied with them (got me to stat them out as additional NPC allies), and brought the chiefs with them to discuss a plan of attack with the city's military advisor. Naturally, in the time it took for them to diplomance the goblins, the city had already been overrun with the Dragon's thralls.
It was then that they turned back to their normal answer: violence. Their new allies, the goblin chieftains, contacted other outlying tribes and rallied them to join the retaking of the city. So it was no longer just the PCs and a few select NPC allies that they took to the fight. They got a goblin army, too. It was... Awesome.

Jukebox Hero
2012-06-27, 10:16 PM
My favorite campaign of all time was actually rather short-lived. It was a duo campaign, and was going amazingly until the other player (I wasn't running this one) became a huge butt (for lack of allowed words). It fell apart after that, but it started out as a very simple world without violence, where our characters were level 1 commoners. Three towns. Slowly, the plot started to form, and it was just....indescribably marvelous. Magical apples, astronomical fallacies, conspiracies, etc. Wolves were described as ferocious beasts, we had no idea what a lantern was, for in our limited world, no such things existed. Weapons were decorations, armor was near nonexistent. Drow, orcs, elves, and humans lived together in peace. After a little bit, we became level 1, My human taking rogue, while Maxx (my friend) turned his orc into a barbarian. This DM didn't use epic stories or anything like that, but had the rare ability to make a world come to life, to make the mundane magical, if you know what I mean. I don't have the writing ability to do this campaign justice...and it makes my best campaign ever really very sad (although everyone else in my group thinks I'm the best DM?)

My DMing style relies on my ability to wing, to react to all character decisions/words appropriately and quickly, to keep them on their toes, whereas Jay's (the one who ran my favorite campaign) was completely different, engaging the players in a discovery of a fantastically mundane world.
But in my campaign, the best moment was after the players solved the three-part puzzle (over a period of 3 gaming sessions), and managed to figure out that the princess that they had kidnapped was under a curse. (Very long story, my plots are EXTREMELY complex/convoluted) One was LG, another LE, and the final player true neutral.
The LE wizard took it upon himself to wear the magical locket, and failed his will save and tried to murder the party and the princess (unsuccessfully).
So, it was given to the LG Fighter. While the players are discussing strategy (including the fighter), I begin to whisper as the locket, telepathically. Promises of power, of gold, of glory, of everything he ever wanted. Slowly, I crescendo into a near shout. Fortunately, this player was sitting next to me, so I could talk loudly enough to make it hard for him to participate in the strategic discussion, but soft enough so everyone else would have no problems. This culminated in him screaming at the top of his lungs on an epic tirade against the locket, breaking every promise, every whisper with logic (this player was VERY good at roleplaying and even better with epic speeches. Unfortunately, the only alignment he could roleplay well was LG).

hiryuu
2012-06-27, 10:43 PM
Had three that stick especially hard in my mind.


Eberron: Level 1 to level 15. PCs worked for Sharn-based House Cannith recovering artifacts and the secret to the Warforged forehead-symbols. It was a vast, awesome, amazing, fun experience and I want to try to do it again sometime. It also made the party wizard feel very, very dirty and he once went two levels without casting a single spell. He only trusted magic items made by artificers, and he would go out of his way to yell at other spellcasters, despite the fact that they'd blow him off as a silly conspiracy theorist. In the end, they found out their villain (a Lord of Dust who had once dated a powerful gold dragon) had engineered some of the biggest disasters in history just so she could build the craft reserve she needed in order to create an artifact that would allow her to ask why her boyfriend left her. Oh, they were pissed. They ended up not killing her, but trying to explain to her some basic morals. I think they ended up using an eldritch machine to turn her into a mortal human infant and passed her off to the paladin so that she could get some moral lessons.

Legend of the Five Rings: The PCs were being sent into the province between the Lion and Unicorn lands to stop the Unicorn and Lion from beating each other up about who owns it and to build a road for trade to help the empire economically. It was supposed to be an introductory L5R campaign for some old D&D players, and I gave them every opportunity to run off into the woods and stab ronins and goblins. What did they do? Track down every non-combat lead and follow up on it. They went to court. Ronin court. They manipulated things and built up contact networks and were polite and honorable and it was awesome. They talked an oni into committing seppuku, they turned a ronin band into an imperial army, they uncovered a plot to smuggle useless soapstone into Rokugan as jade, and they built a road. They were especially proud of the road. The players cried at several points. Once I got them to cry for a man they had basically only met five minutes ago (ok, this is good: they encountered a village that, at night, was filled with people and had perfectly normal buildings, but was burned down and ruined during the day. They thought this was odd and stayed in town for a few days with a painter who didn't disappear during the day, until they recognized someone the Dragon shugenja knew, but who was dead. After some investigation, they discover that these are all people who could not find their way to Meido, and they remain stuck in Ningen-do, vanishing as the sun rises. They determine that the way to do this is to have someone as a guide take them along the trail created by the moon. So, they ask for volunteers, and one of the ronin they hired to help with the road volunteers, despite having a son. They used a favor with the Scorpion to get him adopted and get permission for him to commit seppuku. I described the adoption ceremony and the sunset and subsequent full moon in high detail, read a death-poem and played this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrIfY9YQ-Cw) while a horde of ghost peasants followed him on a silver trail into the valleys. One of the players broke down.). That was fun as hell.

Mutants and Masterminds: Western/Tall Tale/American Mythology inspired dieselpunk fantasy setting. Totally fantasy world, mind. No actual American places. Four teenagers (a girl who could dream that she was a dragon, a coke-bottle glasses wearing nerd who fixed golems, a well-meaning but slow kid who hunted animals so that he could turn into them, and a girl who could touch people and transport herself and others into a geographical representation of the touched person's mind) fought the machinations of a series of entities known only as The Man with assistance from a mystery man named "Buddy" who wielded a magical guitar, and had dealings with NPCs ranging from steam train conductors, aliens, and Robby the Robot style beings amid a wasteland created by the dreams of another world (ours) that had long been tarnished, bruised, and forgotten. Real, good old American folklore type stuff. It was a lot of fun. Their campaign reward? A TV show about their adventures.

chainer1216
2012-06-29, 12:24 PM
I ran a ravenloft game in a homebrewed domain based on candyland, old fairy tails and newer children's stories, like Charlie and the chocolate factory andthe wizard of oz, all with a classic horror spin to it. All the townsfolk were turned into gingerbread people, the only wildlife were living chocolate rabbits and peeps, and the darklord was an adult, canibalistic Hansel from Hansel and Gretel. I'm told that its the best ravenloft game most of the players had.been in.

Tanuki Tales
2012-07-03, 01:02 PM
So many good stories so far. Hope to see many many more. :smallbiggrin:

RandomNPC
2012-07-03, 04:15 PM
Every so often one of my gamers will say "Remember that 4 year game with the Lich?"

Took out a group of keeps, he was trying to establish a kingdom. Party overthrew him and chased him over the north pole, down the other side, and fought him to the death within the linchpin of reality, The Dark Tower (of Stephen King fame) Then, without knowing what was going on, the bard sat in the throne of all reality.