Campaign help

[Mojake]

Hi everyone,

I'm soon to start DMing a group. Thinking of a campaign premise where the characters start level1, not knowing each other, in a completely new land that they have no idea about.

The best thing I could think of is that they are tributes from another land, being sent to explore a continent that was lost eons ago. It would have a feel similar to first exiting the Vault 101 on F3 once they arrive.

Any better ideas or suggestions?:smallsmile:

[Yakk]

If you want to emulate F3, I'd actually emulate it. Here is a campaign backstory I've played with.

You start with a world that was basically the 4e default setting. Then you post-apocalypse it.

After the Dusk War:

A thousand years ago the Primordials rose up, fought the Gods, and the Gods lost.

The founder of Sanctuary constructed it out of an astral seed, and various races (insert races that the PCs choose) hid the destruction of the world in it. The founder sacrificed existence itself to ward the Sanctuary against all sight, and in doing so erased his or her very name from existence.

A thousand years have passed within Sanctuary. Generations have come and gone.

But now the water elemental has gotten sick.

As the Primordials have presumed to have won (the war was not going well when your ancestors retreated), the world outside is presumed to be dominated by elemental forces. Your team has been selected to scout whatever is outside the Gate and determine if it can be survived in, and/or if you can find a new source of elemental water to heal our sick water elemental.

For each class+race combination, create an organization that survived the end of the world. These are the pillars of the community. Ie, if there is a Half-Orc Monk, then a legion of Half-Orc warriors was one of the founding communities. Inside the Sanctuary, they have perfected the art of controlling their body with their mind.

If there is a Divine class, the Gods as noted above have cut off (and they have presumably been killed). However, a Divine Relic remains, containing a fragment of a God's power. The church of the God invests that power in a champion: that is your PC.

Etc.

---

What happened outside?

Well, the Primordials did win. They tore the world apart, and killed the Gods (except maybe for some who hid).

After that they got bored, and/or the Primal spirits blocked complete destruction.

The world was reduced to shards floating in a void of air.

Gravity in this void only pulls down when you are above elemental Earth (well, there is some gravity "below" Earth, but much less radius), and to a lesser extent water when water is on top of Earth.

The Islands of Earth floating in the void thus look like a broken shard of a planet, with a flat part on top with a "down", and on the bottom rocky craigs.

Landing on an Island requires either landing at the edge (ideally on a dock), or coming in from above and landing on a sufficiently large body of water (to shield you from the gravity of the earth). Taking off basically requires "sailing off the edge", or a careful system of wooden docks at the edge of the world.

The Wood in a ship provides a very small gravity field (pulling down). This both protects against attacks from 'below' to a certain extent (gravity deflects them), and provides a reason why ships look like water ships (plus, landing on water is very convenient). But, if you fall of a ship in the void you float rather than fall to infinity (which makes it easier to recover people who fall off, game-wise, and allows for void-farmers who have large wood/cloth wings and flap them to move around).

The gods are as noted absent outside of Sanctuary.

Sanctuary has much in the way of advanced magical knowledge compared to the rest of mortals in creation.

The Gate opens up at the bottom of a mini-dungeon occupied by some "uncivilized" race, who has captives from a local community (of at least 1 overlapping race) hostage.

They can ally with this race, or wipe out the mini-dungeon. They can ally with the nearby community. Anyhow, from this doorway they can explore the new continent, of which they know nothing. The fact that they are on an island planet-shard should not be revealed at least until they get out of the dungeon, or possibly later than that.

Possibly there are other Gates in Sanctuary, but this was the one the Diviners chose as being the least likely to lead to disaster with a scouting party.

The PCs have access to magic and knowledge ancient in the outside world. They are the elite of Sanctuary, imbued with what power they can spare. They can use Sanctuary to set up an empire, turn against it, bring the gods back, find out why the primordials stopped dismantling reality (a war with the far realm?), seek to rebuild the world, explore strange worlds on air-ships, fight against the human-supremacist New Nerathian Empire, ally with the Dwarves as they fight off Dragon invasions on the bottom of the worlds, explore the underdark in the core of each island and discover the strange tunnels that join each island to each other and listen to the rattling of the chains in the deep, seek out the 9 hells and find out what happened to Asmodeaus...

[Inevitability]

That's a pretty neat campaign! I second it!

[Mandrake]

Yep, quite cool. I'm currently DMing something that I dare call similar.
In my world, in short, a great war happened between Primordials and Gods. In the previous campaign, the PCs were fighting against pretty much everyone, since they knew about Primordials coming and were trying to free Tharizdun, the Chained God, and point him into the right direction, in hopes he could stop them.
All that power and might can have devastating effects on Material Plane, so the group split, and while two of them were freeing Tharizdun, other two were on a secret mission.They took all of the Material plane (there were actually more than one, but never mind) and, through magic that doesn't matter right now, zipped it into a nutshell, with all the living things in it, as well, this way hiding it from the random destruction going around. When the war ended, they "released" the world.
The consequence of these actions, besides saving the world, is that it got shuffled, in a way. Stuff that were not close became close, whole regions moved, and, suddenly, a lake was in the middle of a desert, a nice valley was abruptly ended by swamps and a huge mountain was moved from its ranges. The same happened to cities and kingdoms, on various scales, big or small. Many innocent people just popped right next to a group of hungry orcs :smallfrown:
Now, the world is unexplored. Many scholars argue if world is even "one" or "split" now. Cartographers are among the most respected of people. Et cetera. So, a whole world, wild, unexplored, untamed and, most importantly, not-understood. Are places actually geographically linked, or do we cross some lay-lines to get somewhere? Is the world shifting still? Were we all sent to this same time? and so on.
This way you can, basically, have a nice organized surviving region or even kingdom or whatever, and still have room for them to explore and not know what happens in the rest of the world, and even feel free to add in some "unexpected" stuff, such as vicious geography or a pack of gnolls living in a temple of Pelor.

Hope you like it, hope it helps. Have fun! :smallsmile:

[shamgar001]

If you already have an idea for the campaign and just need to get the PCs together, you can do this:

Start them on a ship, making a voyage across the ocean. The ship runs into a storm and shipwrecks on whatever land you want them to be on. No survivors other than the PCs explains why they're together in a strange land as well as why they are working together despite not knowing each other.

You could even open with a skill challenge, where the players try to help the crew keep the ship afloat. Either way, they wreck and are the only survivors, but a success means they wash on the beach with full healing surges and some supplies; a failed challenge starts them with half of their healing surges and no supplies.

[Lucy]

Hello,

This is my first time of writing on a forum so please excuse the fact I'm a little wet behind the ears. I'm also writing an epic campaign at the moment, the second so epic of it's kind with the group. I love the idea of having tributes from another world. I like introducing the final 'boss' as it were in the first few minutes to really terrify/intrigue players before having sed 'boss' flee. I did this in my last epic and it really worked to make the players feel like they would never be able to face such a foe. I really liked that through every chapter/game they levelled up and got just that little closer to being able to defeat it.

We played the final boss story on New Years Eve and I included a timer that ticked down until midnight. The players were told that, if they idn't defeat the creature (Red Dragon) by midnight the world would be forever scarred by it's reign. Really worked to heighten the tension.

Might be cool to include...

[Tegu8788]

I've got a fun idea for a "module" that I've been playing with. It's very flexible, because I've done very little work on it, but that makes it easier for others to use. In my head, this is how it goes:

Players report to the King of series of Islands. His daughter has been kidnapped by terrible monsters as a magical sacrifice, and he needs the adventures to go save her. She was being taught proper illusionary and summoning arts, like a lady, to have all the tools she needs to maintain a royal appearance. There are a number of large islands and a mainland nearby, each with a different group of hostiles. The King has his Oracle scry the Princess, so the Heroes know where to go. Each island/land used to belong to this Kingdom, but the hostiles have pushed them back and taken over the strongholds.

The adventures then have to go get the girl. They either use a teleportation circle to just get into the Castle, but who knows what may be waiting on the other end, or sail a ship and sneak inland to the Castle. They defeat the Enemy Warlord, but find that the Princess was moved into a different Castle, stolen from the kidnappers.


That might seem familiar, your Princess being in another Castle….


The Princess summoned her kidnappers with her powers, and is using her knowledge of the Scryer to trick the King. Her chains that hold her down are implements that help her focus her powers. The Adventurers defeat various Warlords, and she then fills the power vacuum, building her own army. Finish three or four castles, and then reveal what she's doing.

Her army is gathered on the mainland, and ready to invade. The Adventurers then has either defeat her head on, help the Kingdom defend itself, or get out of town.

[shamgar001]

The Princess summoned her kidnappers with her powers, and is using her knowledge of the Scryer to trick the King. Her chains that hold her down are implements that help her focus her powers. The Adventurers defeat various Warlords, and she then fills the power vacuum, building her own army. Finish three or four castles, and then reveal what she's doing.

Her army is gathered on the mainland, and ready to invade. The Adventurers then has either defeat her head on, help the Kingdom defend itself, or get out of town.

I had a similar idea. In mine, the king is well known for being a military genius. His daughter studies martial arts and studies military tactics in her spare time. She wants to be one of his generals, but he refuses, considering combat to be "no place for a woman."

So she orchestrates her own kidnapping and secretly leads the group supposed to have kidnapped her. He plan is to build her army and become her father's greatest adversary. After giving him the fight of his life, she'll force him to admit that this opponent is his greatest adversary, at which point she would reveal her identity and he will be force to admit her competence.

[GPuzzle]

I had a character in a campaign of mine that was like that.

She was dating the Rogue because of reasons.