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FreakyCheeseMan
2014-07-01, 04:10 PM
For the most intricate, most ambitious, most devious campaign ideas that are just too long or too amibitous for you to ever use.

Secrets of the Grave
All characters begin play at level one, with only basic equipment and no memories: At start of play, they have all just been raised from the dead, together, by an unknown person.

The premise of the game is that unknown person is actually a beyond-ancient Lich who has been fighting against mortality for millenia, and aged so long that even their own grasp of necromancy is becoming insufficient to hold their tattered soul in the mortal plane.

The characters are all figures from throghout history who, at some point in their lives, came closer than any others to fully understanding the nature of mortality. The lich brought them back in hopes of learning their secrets - but, they've all been dead for so very long that they've lost most of their power and memories, so the lich is now hoping they'll reclaim their old knowledge if he lets them loose on the world for long enough.

Potential Backstories (Based on class):

Sorcerer, Psion, Wizard, Etc: One of the Lich's old friends, involved with originally bringing him to power, before the group turned on eachother in a rapid series of murders and betrayals.

Cleric, Favored Soul, Archivist, Etc: High priest(ess) and lover of a lesser god or godess, up until the day that god/godess was killed. Spent the rest of his/her life trying to make contact with their lost lover and restor them to life/divinity.

Rogue, Factotum: Good Spymaster for an evil king, in a time of great political turmoil: Believed that the death of the king would bring about chaos that would be even worse for the realm than his reign. Tried (and ultimately failed) to protect the life of his king through every mudane, magical, necromatic and alchemical process he could, against an endless number of assasins.

Barbarian, Fighter, Warblade: Legendary hero from the dawn of time. Unlike the others, this guy didn't seem to have any special knowledge of mortaity - he just wouldn't die, or wouldn't stay dead. After having one too many evil plots foiled y his stubborn refusal to stay in a grave, a cabal of evil mages found a way to bind his soul to the lower planes - the necromancer didn't even have to resurrect this guy, just break their spell.

Monk, Swordsage, Psychic Warrir, Incarnate Classes: Old ascetic who explored the nature of mortality and the planes through pure meditation, rather than magic or the divine.

As a bonus, several of the players may have been contempories or rivals in life. Also, the secret sauce:

One player is actually a two-bit criminal thug or petty demon, who "hijacked" a resurrection spell intended for the others. Unlike the others, he retains his memories - including his memory of who some of the others, who had made a name for themselves in hell, had been.

Kid Jake
2014-07-01, 10:45 PM
I've always wanted to run a low/no magic game where the PCs represent 'Knights of the Church', a human-centric religion based on taming the world and bringing civilization to the masses whether they want it or not. Everywhere they go the world is crazy and they end up protecting people that don't even want to be protected.

You see, outside of the Church's influence are the old gods, the river spirits and the forest deities and all of the other little niche portfolios and even some of the big guys that represent people like Odin or Ares. The old gods show their favor in exchange for sacrifice, so set a pretty little virgin on fire in your cornfield and you'll have the best harvest ever; but forget the annual Drowning Festival and half the village will be washed away. It's not ideal, but so long as you aren't one of the people who draw the short straw then things are pretty nice.

The PCs would go to all of these exotic locations, bear witness to the strange customs of the various gods and then kill them to spread the glory of civilization to the savages. At first it'd be all fame and glory, but eventually they discover a horrible secret: The gods are literally what make the world go 'round.

They stabbed the Great Wolf in the throat to save the fair maidens, but without his protection the forest is disappearing. They slew the River King so that he could no longer withhold his bounty from the fishermen who need it; but without the River King all of the fish are dying. They killed Thor to prove to the pagans that their religion was powerful, but no mere mortal has the power to call the storms and so drought is sweeping over the land.

Basically everything is becoming nice and tidy and civil, but without the wild power of the old ways the world is doomed to stagnate and die. So either they can have faith in a well-meaning doctrine and keep at it; hoping that things will work out in the end but having no guarantee that anything will survive, or take the side of genocidal monsters that demand constant tribute for the right to simply live; but have a pretty good track record on the whole 'humanity not going extinct' thing.


I doubt I'll ever get to run the game though, my group meets way too sporadically to have a really story heavy game.

FreakyCheeseMan
2014-07-01, 11:05 PM
I've always wanted to run a low/no magic game where the PCs represent 'Knights of the Church', a human-centric religion based on taming the world and bringing civilization to the masses whether they want it or not. Everywhere they go the world is crazy and they end up protecting people that don't even want to be protected.

That's actualy similar to a thing I actually ran once. However, the church - and a collection of LG establishment gods - had already "Tamed" the world, or at least, as much of it as anyone cared about. This basically worked by shunting everything unacceptable onto another plane; this included most fonts of magical power. Arcanists still existed, but the equivalent of 10th level power was something only a few archmagi could ever reach, and going beyond that was unheard of. It was, essentially, an E6 world.

The game started when a conspiracy of cultists managed to break the mystals keeping the planes apart; suddenly, and rather violently, they started to merg. This made things, temporarily, even worse then they would be normally - horribly extreme weather effects, rampaging monsters, demons and elementals taking over sections of the kindgom. As an upside, primal power came back into the world, and those with the most exposure to the "outside" influences soaked it up - adventurers started to level up by simple fighting and killing, which was much faster than the years of study and training it took them otherwise. :P

If it had gone on, players were ultimately gonna be responsible for choosing whether to re-establish the mythals or let the old way run once more. As it was... they spent some time trying to stop a village from starving to death in the middle of a blizzard, and then it fell apart. :P

NichG
2014-07-02, 05:08 AM
Mine would probably be 'Descent of the Dynasties', which would be a campaign with a custom system designed to span a couple centuries and multiple generations of characters. The idea would be that players have two characters - a permanent one who is an 'ancestral spirit' of a given clan, and a temporary one who is the current heir to the clan (or current favorite of the ancestral spirit). Characters who have the blessing of the ancestral spirit gain powers and abilities beyond the norm, but also make themselves vulnerable to being possessed to greater or lesser degree by their ancestral spirit. Each spirit is bound to a particular clan/bloodline, but their motivations are not necessarily the same as the motivations of the clan - they may in fact be quite at odds in places. Furthermore, all the spirits share the same looking glass into the mortal realm, so the actions of each champion are always known to all the other champions - if their spirit wishes it.

Basically the idea would be that the players actively play their mortal character over a series of mini-campaigns that cover periods of their life. These would be about 3 sessions long, after which would be a 10 year timeskip. Eventually characters get old, die, are replaced by their descendants, etc. However, the existence of the ancestral spirits allows the player to choose how much continuity of character there is when this happens - a particularly overbearing spirit may just fully dominate their host and always have the same personality, memories, etc regardless of what their host was like; another spirit may adopt particular personalities of past hosts and carry them forward; another spirit may allow the host full control - its all up to the player.

One of the gimmicks is that when a character dies, they grant a certain amount of points to the ancestral spirit that can be used to buy advantages for all future characters. Things would be set up in such a way as to encourage a bit of a calculation of 'when is the best time to die?', and to actually reward players for letting their characters get killed in awesome ways (e.g. there would be a multiplicative bonus to the xp gained if the death was significant or poignant in certain specified ways).

I had this idea, then my players informed me they didn't really like heavily political campaigns, so...

FreakyCheeseMan
2014-07-02, 11:01 AM
I had this idea, then my players informed me they didn't really like heavily political campaigns, so...

Ouch. Players really are the worst thing about D&D, aren't they?

2E Phoinex
2014-07-02, 12:07 PM
I have this really underdeveloped idea for my AD&D 2e game in which I would give each player full reign in making their character sheets. They could have access to about all the magic Items/spells/wealth they could want and they could start at 20th level with all the awesomeness accumulated from years of adventuring together. Basically, they would create the character concept and see him at maximum unrestrained glory.

They would have some time to be amazing and wreck stuff.
Then I would put them in an no win situation. A total railroad to death at the hands of some magnificent evil that they were called on to save the world from. Screw fun for players and sense of fair play: I would stop at nothing until their massive HP piles were whittled down to -10. Whatever it took to kill them all. No player choice would matter; all the creative thinking and skillful play in the world would crumble before my predetermined plot and the Evil would triumph.

After the inevitable TPK I would pass out revised character sheets of their same character designs starting with new names, crushed by poverty, and at level 1. I will explain that it has been 200 years or something since the heroes had been vanquished and the world has been dominated by the evil. The players would come to realize that they had been reincarnated to fight the evil once again and they would quest to reclaim their former glory and find a new way to combat the evil which so easily slew them the first time.

Of course at that point the railroading would cease and they could choose to follow the path of their predecessors, reclaiming old artifacts they had owned and such, or go their own way.

Lots of flaws with the idea of course. It's built around one somewhat interesting thought that requires being a lame DM in order to work. But, I do like the Idea of characters adventuring in a world that their predecessors helped shape now dominated by the evil that slew them. Reclaiming the lost power, discovering the types of people they were in the last life, choosing when to follow the legacy and when to make a change- it all sounds like a neat campaign. My players don't mind the occasional railroad if it leads to a fun place for them to explore, but I doubt I'll ever have time to complete a fun and unoffensive campaign with this idea.

FreakyCheeseMan
2014-07-02, 01:14 PM
Another of mine from the vaults:

Foundation
This game would be based on Asimov's foundation series, with a number of twists to make it playable.

The cosmology consists of a HUGE number of planes, including multiple inner and outer planes, with different levels of geographical overlap. (The planes you can plane shift to here may be different from the ones you could plane shift to fifty miles east of here.) Planes are themselves laid out throughout the astral sea - to reach a different plane, without being able to go to the astral sea directly, requires traveling through several different in-between planes, and moving geographically across each.

At some point in the past, all of these planes were ruled by a powerful Magocracy on Trantor, a "Central" plane. That magocracy either fell from slow decay, losing control of the more distance planes, or something more catacylsmic (below) happened.

The players would start off on a small, out-of-the way plane called Terminus, which hosts a library of magical work, supposedly intended to preserve the empire's knowledge in case of catastrophe. In reality, the Foundation at Terminus was created by a group of seers who foresaw the fall of the empire, and manipulated things so that Terminus would be in a position to create a new Empire from the wreckage.

The players job - once tehy establish themselves on Terminus - is to found that new empire by any combination of diplomacy, mercantilism, conquest, prosthletization or politicing they so choose. WBL and general power levels will be COMPLETELY broken - it wouldn't e surprising for players to intercept shipments of thousands of wands of Cure Minor Wounds, or to have a hundred warforged artificers come under their control. Their encounters would be likewise extravagent: One enemy empire might field Terrasque Cavalry brigades or defend itself by animating entire forests at once.

One alternate idea I had was for Trantor to have fallen to a singular catastrophe, rather than a slow decline - and that catastrophe would be a sudden shift in how time flowed across the planes, resulting in Trantor moving much slower, relative to the outer planes. By the time the players reached the old seat of the empire, thousands of years would have passed on Terminus - but only a few days on Trantor. This would hopefully mean that, when players went back to visit planes they'd been to previously, they'd get to see the results of their actions over the long haul - though, it would make things pretty awful if the party ever split.

Cowardly Griffo
2014-07-02, 07:49 PM
I'd love to run a game of Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition where the players aren't allowed to brew OCs. Instead, they'd roll out totally metal, postcyberpocalyptic incarnations of their favorite Saturday Morning Cartoon Characters and other fictional metaphorical totem animals. Just take all your childhood icons and turn the 90s dial until it snaps under the high dynamic pressure. Think Charles Barkley's Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. In Space. Featuring Keith David as The Voice of Keith David as Your Inner Narrator.

Cryogenically frozen and mildly cybernetic Commissioner James Gordon, with the ghost of Batman as a spirit guide? On-theme.

Carmen San Diego pirating the Crystal Spheres in a stolen time ship? On-theme.

Sonic the Hedgehog merged with the Speed Force and charting a path through the aether in search of crystal space dragons fused with Chaos Emeralds? On friggin' theme.

The setting would be a mishmash of all things childhood, too. God-Emperor Godzilla, ruling the 4th Great and Bountiful Kaiju Empire from his Golden Throne. Nightmare Moon's New Lunar Republic on an endless refugee pilgrimage on board Spiral King Lordgenome's Cathedral Terra, in search of a way to combat the Harmonious Spiral Nemesis. And at the center of the galaxy, locked in a prison of spiraling black holes and gamma ray bursts, an endless fight rages between Unicron and Galactus, their mutual hatred and hunger fueling Bruce Banner's Red Lantern Corps, a galactic mercenary force that will enforce any law for the right price. Due to their reputation for operating in shades of gray, some have taken to calling them the Shadow Proclamation...

And so on. But I'm way too intimidated to run the danged thing. Such is life. :P

NichG
2014-07-03, 12:32 AM
Ouch. Players really are the worst thing about D&D, aren't they?

Nah, my players are great, but you always have to run the right thing for the people you've got. Instead of the one thing I'm running a total amnesiac game where power is gained by consciously writing your own past and forcing the universe to adapt.

elliott20
2014-07-03, 09:44 AM
I wanted to run a supers game where you aren't the super heroes, but the people who have to live in the super hero world and survive. Our party would be a construction company who has to fix the damage from all of the super fights that go on around the city. However, each one of our characters all have incredibly dark secrets and agendas that we pursue.

prufock
2014-07-03, 11:23 AM
Bards on the Run: The PCs are all bards that have formed a troupe in hopes of making it big. Each bard should focus on a different instrument as well as different "bardic focus," such as a primary spellcaster bard, face bard, healer bard, melee, ranged, etc. They start at level 1 trying to secure their first big gig (a local tavern, whoopieee!) eventually gaining levels (probably to 6) and hoping to make the big time... playing at the castle for the royals. In between they have to deal with all the pitfalls of a musician's life (shady bookers, no money for rent, in-fighting, lead singer disease) as well as more fantasy-type adventures and Scooby Doo-esque mysteries!

Why it won't work: Not everybody likes playing bards, and becoming a musician doesn't interest all the players as a motivation.

Godslayers: In an E6 world where the gods are epic, and everyone else is 1st level. The gods (7 of them, styled on the seven virtues/sins) have turned their backs on mankind and become petty and cruel. Prophecy has told of those who would free the people from this tyranny. Are the PCs the ones? PCs start at level 6, becoming epic after defeating the first god, and each gaining a shred of divinity with every deity they take down. They form their own godly identities and portfolios, becoming the new gods of the realm.

Why it won't work: Players struggle to accept level 6 characters as "gods," particularly one player who hates low-powered/leveled games.

Sartharina
2014-07-03, 02:14 PM
I just made my players feel like bastards: This is more of an overview to vent my trollish attitude on imagining, inspired by a certain real-world faith I respect, and a badly-written module. There are two points to the campaign:

1. The goblins are a race of misunderstood, ugly pacifists with awkward body language (what we consider aggressive behaviors, such as snarling, fierce movements, and shrieks, they consider friendly). Language involving quests against them are designed to turn players against the goblins through terminology like "Ransom" (They sell what they have for money, and release prisoners who wrong them for compensation), "Kidnap" (People want the goblins dead, and send adventurers to take them out - the goblins incapacitate and imprison those people), "Took over"(They moved into a place nobody else was living, and started making a living there)), "Infest" (They live there), and the like, trying to continue to paint them as bad guys while their actual actions really indicate they're actually a bunch of harmless, trying-to-be-friendly, and tolerant pushovers (And pacifists).

2. There's a widespread doomsday cult of fanatic martyrs that meets once a week that engages in several occult rituals tied to all sorts of things and preaches the end of days. It's actually a Neutral Good organization, they are not trying to hasten the doomsday they await, and said Doomsday is actually a day of mass resurrections, immortality, and freeing the world of the necessities that drive Evil (No starvation to drive people to kill each other for food, enough space for everyone so no competition for resources, and removed violent/negative emotions/thoughts). This one would be hard to pull off - those affiliated with the source material would probably be offended for portraying them explicitly like a doomsday cult, and too many who aren't likely wouldn't see the problem with treating them like any other cult.

Grimtina
2014-07-03, 02:59 PM
Bards on the Run: The PCs are all bards that have formed a troupe in hopes of making it big. Each bard should focus on a different instrument as well as different "bardic focus," such as a primary spellcaster bard, face bard, healer bard, melee, ranged, etc. They start at level 1 trying to secure their first big gig (a local tavern, whoopieee!) eventually gaining levels (probably to 6) and hoping to make the big time... playing at the castle for the royals. In between they have to deal with all the pitfalls of a musician's life (shady bookers, no money for rent, in-fighting, lead singer disease) as well as more fantasy-type adventures and Scooby Doo-esque mysteries!



I would so want to play this!

bulbaquil
2014-07-03, 05:36 PM
Bards on the Run: The PCs are all bards that have formed a troupe in hopes of making it big. Each bard should focus on a different instrument as well as different "bardic focus," such as a primary spellcaster bard, face bard, healer bard, melee, ranged, etc. They start at level 1 trying to secure their first big gig (a local tavern, whoopieee!) eventually gaining levels (probably to 6) and hoping to make the big time... playing at the castle for the royals. In between they have to deal with all the pitfalls of a musician's life (shady bookers, no money for rent, in-fighting, lead singer disease) as well as more fantasy-type adventures and Scooby Doo-esque mysteries!

I kind of want to play this. It would mesh particularly well with Pathfinder's archetypes system - everyone plays a different bard archetype, as well as specializing in a different type of perform. For added fun, no duplicate races.

Cowardly Griffo
2014-07-03, 05:47 PM
Pathfinder's where my head went, too. Especially once you throw in archetype packages, so some of the bards can trade in spellcasting or performing (heresy!) for other class's abilities.

Grimtina
2014-07-03, 06:19 PM
I kind of want to play this. It would mesh particularly well with Pathfinder's archetypes system - everyone plays a different bard archetype, as well as specializing in a different type of perform. For added fun, no duplicate races.

Yeah my thoughts exactly! It's like the beginning of a joke. A party of halfling, dwarf, elf and gnome bards went to perform in a bar...

Grinner
2014-07-03, 07:05 PM
Bards on the Run: The PCs are all bards that have formed a troupe in hopes of making it big. Each bard should focus on a different instrument as well as different "bardic focus," such as a primary spellcaster bard, face bard, healer bard, melee, ranged, etc. They start at level 1 trying to secure their first big gig (a local tavern, whoopieee!) eventually gaining levels (probably to 6) and hoping to make the big time... playing at the castle for the royals. In between they have to deal with all the pitfalls of a musician's life (shady bookers, no money for rent, in-fighting, lead singer disease) as well as more fantasy-type adventures and Scooby Doo-esque mysteries!

Why it won't work: Not everybody likes playing bards, and becoming a musician doesn't interest all the players as a motivation.


I would so want to play this!


I kind of want to play this. It would mesh particularly well with Pathfinder's archetypes system - everyone plays a different bard archetype, as well as specializing in a different type of perform. For added fun, no duplicate races.


Pathfinder's where my head went, too. Especially once you throw in archetype packages, so some of the bards can trade in spellcasting or performing (heresy!) for other class's abilities.

Looks like you've found your players. :smallbiggrin:

Mr.Sandman
2014-07-03, 09:38 PM
Bards on the Run: The PCs are all bards that have formed a troupe in hopes of making it big. Each bard should focus on a different instrument as well as different "bardic focus," such as a primary spellcaster bard, face bard, healer bard, melee, ranged, etc. They start at level 1 trying to secure their first big gig (a local tavern, whoopieee!) eventually gaining levels (probably to 6) and hoping to make the big time... playing at the castle for the royals. In between they have to deal with all the pitfalls of a musician's life (shady bookers, no money for rent, in-fighting, lead singer disease) as well as more fantasy-type adventures and Scooby Doo-esque mysteries!

If you ran this on the forums, I would be interested.

ChaosArchon
2014-07-04, 04:19 AM
Mine would probably be 'Descent of the Dynasties', which would be a campaign with a custom system designed to span a couple centuries and multiple generations of characters. The idea would be that players have two characters - a permanent one who is an 'ancestral spirit' of a given clan, and a temporary one who is the current heir to the clan (or current favorite of the ancestral spirit). Characters who have the blessing of the ancestral spirit gain powers and abilities beyond the norm, but also make themselves vulnerable to being possessed to greater or lesser degree by their ancestral spirit. Each spirit is bound to a particular clan/bloodline, but their motivations are not necessarily the same as the motivations of the clan - they may in fact be quite at odds in places. Furthermore, all the spirits share the same looking glass into the mortal realm, so the actions of each champion are always known to all the other champions - if their spirit wishes it.

Basically the idea would be that the players actively play their mortal character over a series of mini-campaigns that cover periods of their life. These would be about 3 sessions long, after which would be a 10 year timeskip. Eventually characters get old, die, are replaced by their descendants, etc. However, the existence of the ancestral spirits allows the player to choose how much continuity of character there is when this happens - a particularly overbearing spirit may just fully dominate their host and always have the same personality, memories, etc regardless of what their host was like; another spirit may adopt particular personalities of past hosts and carry them forward; another spirit may allow the host full control - its all up to the player.

One of the gimmicks is that when a character dies, they grant a certain amount of points to the ancestral spirit that can be used to buy advantages for all future characters. Things would be set up in such a way as to encourage a bit of a calculation of 'when is the best time to die?', and to actually reward players for letting their characters get killed in awesome ways (e.g. there would be a multiplicative bonus to the xp gained if the death was significant or poignant in certain specified ways).

I had this idea, then my players informed me they didn't really like heavily political campaigns, so...
Wow that sounds like an awesome campaign idea, if you'd be willing to try it in a pbp format I'll love to give it a spin :smallbiggrin:

prufock
2014-07-04, 07:11 AM
I would so want to play this!


I kind of want to play this. It would mesh particularly well with Pathfinder's archetypes system - everyone plays a different bard archetype, as well as specializing in a different type of perform. For added fun, no duplicate races.


Pathfinder's where my head went, too. Especially once you throw in archetype packages, so some of the bards can trade in spellcasting or performing (heresy!) for other class's abilities.


Looks like you've found your players. :smallbiggrin:


If you ran this on the forums, I would be interested.

Alas, I really have no interest in running play-by-post games. D&D is very much a face-to-face social event for me. However, feel free to steal this idea!

BeerMug Paladin
2014-07-04, 07:47 AM
This would be a D&D campaign, probably. Day 1 goes more or less like this.

The players find an innocuous lead on a job, culminating in discovering that the world is coming to an end via an evil doomsday cthulhu-esque cult. At the end of the day, the player party witnesses the end of the world, as all the prophesized events of doom take place one after the next and the world's greatest champions (gods and mortals alike) are powerless to fight against it and fall.

The players discover a clue that leads to immortality is also prophesized, so they attempt to pursue it in hopes it will give them the power to stop everything in its tracks. Or at least make their novice contribution to helping a little more helpful. They arrive in the location and are slain by one of the rampaging eldritch horrors tearing the world apart.

The player party awakens in the inn they had been sleeping in at the start of their day. They discover that what had once seemed a horrid nightmare is coming true. The day seems to play out exactly like their supposed dream...

Every time the player party dies, they awaken at the start of the world's final day. They are effectively immortal.

The reasons I could never use this are pretty numerous:

I would have to have a detailed timeline of the day's events. Every NPC (an entire campaign's worth) would have to have a detailed account of what they are doing (or might do instead with influence) on this day. Also, I'd have to have an account of what things the player party could do to change the activities of NPCS as well. Obviously, a player party is also going to try to influence NPC behavior in ways I can't anticipate, but some things (like what can convince the various guild leaders to go cult-hunting and how they go about that goal) should be decided before the campaign begins.

No randomly generated loot. It would ruin the consistency of the theme. There's a modest to high level adventurer who is staying in the same inn as the player party. Nobody has seen them for a few days, but the innkeep and regulars know that's nothing unusual. There is a full allotment of useful gear that wasn't sold yet left in that room and sealed in an adamantine chest with a complex lock. When/If the player party discovers these facts and have the relevant skills, they could go acquire that loot using a few minutes at the start of every day and use it in their quest. The start of every day would involve the players using low-level equipment until they discover (or retrieve) other equipment. I'd need to have hundreds of substantial loot caches just like this of various levels all over the place for player parties to discover. It would also have to include spellbooks, scrolls, potions, etc... The positive part of this, is that in some parts of the campaign, low level characters could make use of some seriously awesome gear they should by no means otherwise possess. As the horrors in the timeline unfold, it's easier to stumble across equipment that would not otherwise be left unattended. The same non-randomness of the loot would also hold for the encounters, which means that every dungeon and encounter is prepared beforehand.

A full campaign worth of plot hooks. I'd have to have all the investigative information of what is happening divided up into many, many different plot hooks. Enough for a full campaign. Obviously, this idea could be done in a general RPG 'wander around killing random mooks until high level, then beat the end boss' kind of style, but that would get boring really fast. To really do this right, I think I'd have to give the players believably useful leads on information that they could pursue from the very start. Things that, while not necessarily greatly helpful individually, together would help flesh out the story of the cult, the mythology of the end of the world, the people interacting with said cult, etc... There would have to be room enough for the players to experiment with different strategies to avert the cataclysm. That would give the players some believable leads to investigate in their attempts to figure out how to ultimately stop it. Eventually, they'll learn about other plot hooks that get closer to the true nature of the problem because of information they learned on a previous attempt.

Although I do occasionally consider this idea, about what the nature of the end is, why the immortality loophole exists, why the cult leaders are doing this and so on, there's just far too many time-sink issues with this idea in order to ever really pull off.

prufock
2014-07-04, 09:00 AM
Day 1 goes more or less like this.
That sounds really cool, but a few issues come to mind:
- Does the party gain levels? They are presumably reset to original configuration except for their memories every day.
- Is there actually a way to stop it?
- What if one PC dies early in the day? Do the others keep going until the day resets? Can the dead PC be resurrected? Can the player adopt another NPC to play?

I don't think you would need it laid out as much beforehand as you think. Each NPC doesn't really matter unless the PCs interact with them in some way, and when that happens you can make your notes from there. You would need your broad strokes laid out first, but details can be filled in as you go.

Have it take place in February. Start every day with a hotel worker giving the wake-up call: "Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today."

Grimtina
2014-07-04, 09:32 AM
That reminds me of my own improbably idea.

Similar "can't stop doomsday" situation, just in our modern world. In the last moment, the PCs could sneak back in time to try to stop it, but it would probably lead to the same situation, and again, and again, until they find a solution.

Problem, the only group in theory able to play that is 1) busy with a long running campaign 2) some of the players would get bored with repeating situations and 3) the rest might just solve the problem in the second run.

Lakaz
2014-07-04, 11:46 AM
The main reason i'll never actually play this one is because i am TERRIBLE at running sandbox games. It's just not my playstyle as a GM. I try not to railroad anything but full-on sandboxes just don't work for me. And this idea was basically the ultimate sandbox.

Essentially, the players are a group of time-travellers. The first session is essentially a "Let's kill hitler" scenario, just replacing Hitler with some other guy who has wronged their families, or caused them significant grief in some way. They go back in time and kill this guy as a child, and return to their original world, as per the cliché, as a dystopia. It's just gone horribly wrong, as a result of their killing the guy who wronged their families.
So they go further back to fix it. And of course make it worse. Essentially, they have the option to go anywhere in time they like to try to alter events to allow themselves to return to their home universe. Or just to make a new world in their liking, it's really up to them.

Here's the twist though: The antagonists are them. A second group of time-travelling thems from the dystopia who've gone back in time to track them down, kill them, and stop the dystopia from being destroyed. (And then probably thems from OTHER universes who show up to try to create/stop the destruction of their own respective worlds).

Yeah, as you can tell, there's a reason i'm never gonna use this campaign idea.

Grimtina
2014-07-04, 12:32 PM
Yeah, that would be the song that never ends in RPG adventures. :smallsmile: Would make for a cool story though.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-07-04, 12:35 PM
- Does the party gain levels? They are presumably reset to original configuration except for their memories every day.
Yes, levels are gained. Apart from that, every physical item is what they began with in their backpack.

- Is there actually a way to stop it?
Yes, there is a way to stop it. When the world was first formed out of the primordial chaos beaten back by the gods, the Book of Eternity was formed. It is said that the BoE has every deed and event in history recorded in its pages, and if one possessed the book and had knowledge of the True Words, they would have the power of prophecy. In addition, if the Divine Quill used to write within it was possessed, it would grant the writer the power to change the future. If they acquire these things, in theory, the player party could avert the events. But there's more going on they don't know.

The end of the world is essentially the point when the BoE's divinely written entries reach their natural conclusion, and so with the events within its pages complete, the world is returning to its natural state of primordial chaos. The doomsday cult is attempting to use the Book for their own goals. Specifically, extend the lifetime of the world using the book, without inflicting the 'fate' it enforces onto its denizens. They believe this is what the Book itself says is going to happen.

But using the Book correctly is a tricky thing. The god of prophecy that was the Book's caretaker was tricked by the Evil One into writing a loophole into it which allowed it to become lost. In ages past, it is rumored that mortals have come across it before and managed to use it, but it's been lost soon after every time. It's also very difficult to use it without introducing unintended consequences by creating loopholes which play out in the world.

One of the major plot arcs will involve the player party tracking down this artifact in the hopes they can use it to avert the catastrophe and eventually discover it's in the cult's possession. A big part of discovering what's going on will have to involve revealing just what the nature of the apocalypse is very gradually.

The players are immortals due to the same loophole plot by the Evil One to make the Book of Eternity become lost. If the original timeline did continue, then it is known that the Evil One will get ahold of the Book soon after the events that kills the player party.

Eventually the player party finds out that they CAN be killed for good in a very specific way, so must avoid that at all costs (the servants of the Evil One know how to kill them. They know about the immortal beings, but think they must be members of the doomsday cult.) Probably the best way to do that is to have an NPC who was with the player party on that first day, so knows all about this, but is slain by one of the Evil One's servants and doesn't come back on the next loop. There would be a way to reverse this process, but having a way to have the player characters all get killed 'for real' and end the campaign would be needed to reintroduce tension into the game. But by design, I would also make sure this TPK is something very easy to avoid.

Stopping it involves three things. Acquiring the Book. Acquiring the Quill. And learning enough of the True Words to know what needs to be written into the book in order to avert the calamity. This is the outline of what my idea is, but if I were to seriously run this, I would want to get into much more detail about just what goes wrong with the doomsday cult's attempts at using the Book, the different choices of solutions the player party could discover, and the timeline of whom has the Book and Quill during what part of the day and what they do with them. So, again, detailed timeline stuff. The player party gaining possession of the Book or Quill makes them high-value targets for everyone.

- What if one PC dies early in the day? Do the others keep going until the day resets? Can the dead PC be resurrected? Can the player adopt another NPC to play?
The dead PC could be resurrected. I'd also expect this scenario would have a lot of TPK encounters in it, especially early in the campaign if they do a direct assault (a favorite tactic in my gaming groups). Maybe now and then a single player would escape a TPK situation, but then they would have severely reduced options in so far as what they could accomplish on their own. It really depends on how it's set up, but I don't think a scroll or two of resurrection/reincarnate that's possible to acquire at low levels would really be that bad a thing for a game like this.

I don't think you would need it laid out as much beforehand as you think. Each NPC doesn't really matter unless the PCs interact with them in some way, and when that happens you can make your notes from there. You would need your broad strokes laid out first, but details can be filled in as you go.
I didn't mean every NPC needs to be plotted on a timeline. Just that every NPC that could significantly impact the day's events needs to be plotted on a timeline.
That includes things like:
guild leaders learning about the day's unfolding events, the city's ruling council members, the high clergy of various deities, any significantly leveled adventurer types who might try to engage in heroics. The cult leadership. The Evil One's followers, and their leadership.

In a city, that's going to be a lot of people. For example, if it's day two and the party decides to get advice from the church of the god of prophecy, I need to know whether they can talk to the high priest when they arrive there at 3 PM. Maybe instead the high priest is out because they're investigating a portent about the Evil One's return that was brought to her attention at 2 PM by the leader of the mages' guild. (The moon is the Evil One's prison, and someone in the mages' guild noticed something was unusual about the moon.)

If instead, the party starts roaming the streets early in the day talking about the various things that are going to happen throughout the day in the hopes of rallying support for a direct strike on the cult's known location, I need to know who would respond to the party's prophetic knowledge and how.

Really, PCs are wildly unpredictable. And part of why I'd want to approach it in this way is I'd just want to be really careful not to accidentally introduce plot holes into this. If I say they see an NPC at one point in time, I need to know that NPC isn't going to be in another place doing something important at the same time in the future.

In normal games, plot holes are easy to steamroll over and resolve for the most part. But with the added constraints here, I could see the normal attempts to fix plot holes quickly descending into an avalanche of plot implosion.

Have it take place in February. Start every day with a hotel worker giving the wake-up call: "Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today."
You know, I was looking at this for a while before I realized what this was. That probably would be a good idea.

Grinner
2014-07-04, 07:09 PM
Alas, I really have no interest in running play-by-post games. D&D is very much a face-to-face social event for me. However, feel free to steal this idea!

That's understandable.

What's your opinion of IRC games?

Raine_Sage
2014-07-06, 02:59 AM
Campaign Idea 1: The Heroic Road Trip

- The PCs all start out as the level 5 heroes of a large city state. Each of them has something to anchor them to this place, be it a loved one, a dream job, or just having lived there all their life and helped to save it from countless perils. Then during the course of what should be a routine adventure, a magical incident flings them halfway across the world, and if they want to see their home again they have to trek all the way back the old fashioned way.

Would obviously require some house rules up front, namely vetoing teleportation, giant eagles, or other means of magic travel. Probably takes place in a low magic setting just to head off those questions, with the event that flings them there being a massive anomaly. DM could add urgency and keep track of the number of days it takes them to make it home again possibly to try and prevent some calamity.

Why I'll never run it: The sheer amount of world building, location fleshing out, and general bookkeeping needed to run a sandbox game of that nature.


Campaign Idea 2: Kingdom Building

- The PCs are each monarchs of a small kingdom. Either currently ruling or in line for the throne, and the game is a heavily political drama based around forming alliances with each other and NPC kingdoms, while expanding their borders and waging war and eventually becoming legendary heroes in the vein of king Aurthur.

Why I'll never run it: Even trimming the kingmaker rules down to the bare minimum when it comes to the actual kingdom building system, it's still too much bookkeeping for the players.

Silus
2014-07-06, 07:50 AM
A "story accurate" Fallout: Equestria game using the 3rd party Ponyfinder book for Pathfinder coupled with the 3.5 D20 Modern Apocalypse book. Just...let the players run around a bit and maybe pick up a plot somewhere.

Can't run it because, well, ponies. Almost all of the current players in my group are in that "Ponies are stupid and you're stupid for liking them" category. Also requires a basic understanding of the Fallout: Equestria world, which requires reading/listening to audiobooks.

Also a NWoD game with as many elements as I can fit in (Werewolves, vampires, hunters, etc) in a general Sci-Fi setting.

Doorhandle
2014-07-06, 09:34 AM
Granted iu may use this one eveutally buuuuut....

All the elder evils awaken at once. ALL OF THEM. It's a race against time to ensure the're enough earth left behind to save.

Reason I don't wish to run it: Tracking all of the signs is going to be very annoying.

Grimtina
2014-07-06, 03:43 PM
Why I'll never run it: Even trimming the kingmaker rules down to the bare minimum when it comes to the actual kingdom building system, it's still too much bookkeeping for the players.

In one of the groups my players expanded the Kingmaker system, kinda made it a bit more logical, too, and we are running the colonization of a world with it.

No one complains about bookkeeping :biggrin:

Raine_Sage
2014-07-06, 07:25 PM
In one of the groups my players expanded the Kingmaker system, kinda made it a bit more logical, too, and we are running the colonization of a world with it.

No one complains about bookkeeping :biggrin:

Heh unfortunately my group on the whole enjoys rules light and vetoed the idea when I brought it up. Given that I myself don't enjoy much bookeeping in a game I didn't really argue it.

prufock
2014-07-07, 06:16 AM
That's understandable.

What's your opinion of IRC games?

I've never run nor played in one, so I can't really form an opinion. Time is a factor in my life now, though; with wedding planning, my in-person game night, work, gym, and other various commitments, I don't think I can devote a night to another gaming group.

Another_Poet
2014-07-07, 07:50 AM
I'd love to do a campaign that starts off like a normal level 1 module... kill some goblins, rescue a few kids from their cave, something like that. BUT--

After killing the goblin chief, the loot turns out to be 1 million gold pieces (give or take). At level 1.

The problem: the small hamlet they're in doesn't have any of the expensive magic items they'd love to buy. They can get masterwork gear and a few healing potions, maybe a scroll or two, then it's up to them to figure out how they're going to haul several wagonfulls of gold to a major city to cash in. Along the way cue bandits, thieves, and rival adventurers.

Of course, as they gain a few levels they might find out who the gold's real owner is, and that owner is not going to rest until they get their money back....

vhfforever
2014-07-09, 04:49 AM
I've always wanted to do this, for a group that just hit Epic levels and wanted to flex their muscles.

-

For some reason, their attempts to teleport directly to their respective homes in the central city fail. So they drop in a short walk away. They teleport, giddy and happy after their latest triumph; only to find a handful of zombies cresting the last hill to their home city. The zombies are easily dispatched (as zombies should be at that point) and the characters make their jokes; stomping the CR1 encounter as they rightfully should.

Then they crest the hill. Where their city used to be is the massive [MASSIVE, bigger than hugely gigantic], rotting, burned, repugnant corpse of a zombified kindori (space whale, from Spelljammer)...plopped down on the earth...completely covering their entire city. The MacGuffin that allows one to pilot the Kindori, a space vessel for a Lich Beholder Mage, broke and it crashed onto the planet it was flying closest to.

The entire adventure then begins to take place inside of their home city, inside of the rotten giant zombie space whale, in an attempt to stop the Beholder Mage Lich from fixing the MacGuffin and taking back off. Populated with horsed of undead and other creatures that can survive in space; they slog through their destroyed homeland in attempt to find out who was behind it all.

NickChaisson
2014-07-09, 10:56 AM
I would love to run a game where the players make modern day characters. Like business men, high school students or anything else. Then have them being magically transported into a D&D world.
it would be a nice change, they would be almost useless fish out of water types. They would eventually become more useful though.

Loving this thread by the way! ^_^

LokiRagnarok
2014-07-10, 12:53 AM
I'd love to do a campaign that starts off like a normal level 1 module... kill some goblins, rescue a few kids from their cave, something like that. BUT--

After killing the goblin chief, the loot turns out to be 1 million gold pieces (give or take). At level 1.

The problem: the small hamlet they're in doesn't have any of the expensive magic items they'd love to buy. They can get masterwork gear and a few healing potions, maybe a scroll or two, then it's up to them to figure out how they're going to haul several wagonfulls of gold to a major city to cash in. Along the way cue bandits, thieves, and rival adventurers.

Of course, as they gain a few levels they might find out who the gold's real owner is, and that owner is not going to rest until they get their money back....

Consider reading the book Epic (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(novel)) by Conor Kostick sometime. It also deals with what equals to lvl 1 characters in a Fantasy MMORPG getting undescribably rich.

DigoDragon
2014-07-10, 06:50 AM
I had two pretty interesting campaign ideas, but alas my group dissolved before I could implement it.

The first was for D&D and inspired by a comic I saw on Tumblr. The party learns of a necromancer who has a princess captured and awaiting sacrifice, so the team goes to rescue her. They slay the necromancer and his skeleton hordes, rescue the princess, and... turns out she's a kobold princess. A fairly intelligent and articulate one at that. She's happy to be rescued and is totally fine with giving her hand in marriage to any of the PCs. Though first she needs to be taken back home so she can tell her father of the party's heroic deeds. Meanwhile, the princess' father is gathering an army to take out the kingdom he thinks had kidnapped his beloved daughter. Fun.

The second idea was for Shadowrun. The Combat Biker sport is nearing it's "Super Bowl", being held in Denver. Millions of people are going to be jacked in to watch this game, and a small group of technomancers are counting on it. They created a new kind of virus that'll mentally "zombify" everyone who's on the network watching the big game, and they plan on using the zombied masses to sieze control of Denver. The PCs have to uncover this plot and then take down the network before the virus is uploaded into the system.

Cowardly Griffo
2014-07-10, 07:02 AM
I actually really like the first one, mostly because of the odd underlying suggestion that the setting has enough missing princesses that neither the PCs nor the Kobold King are sure which one they're going to find when they get to where they're going. :smalltongue:

Did the kingdom the kobold is targeting, in fact, kidnap an entirely different princess and that's where he got the idea from? 'Cause that's my official head-canon.

Maybe all the princesses got together via Scrynet and it's all a massive shell game, with everyone kidnapping everyone else, the end goal being to pitch their respective kingdoms against one another, weaken the various monarchies and seize all the thrones at once. It would be a one-nation world, ruled by a Council of Queens. But the necromancers threw a wrench in the works and now there are adventurers involved and what the heck is going to happen now? Let's play to find out! :smallcool:

DigoDragon
2014-07-10, 10:48 AM
I actually really like the first one, mostly because of the odd underlying suggestion that the setting has enough missing princesses that neither the PCs nor the Kobold King are sure which one they're going to find when they get to where they're going. :smalltongue:

Did the kingdom the kobold is targeting, in fact, kidnap an entirely different princess and that's where he got the idea from? 'Cause that's my official head-canon.

Maybe all the princesses got together via Scrynet and it's all a massive shell game, with everyone kidnapping everyone else, the end goal being to pitch their respective kingdoms against one another, weaken the various monarchies and seize all the thrones at once. It would be a one-nation world, ruled by a Council of Queens. But the necromancers threw a wrench in the works and now there are adventurers involved and what the heck is going to happen now? Let's play to find out! :smallcool:

I love when I have an awesome idea, like a slice of delicious apple spice cake, and then someone else adds a scoop of ice cream to it and makes it even better. :smallbiggrin:

Kid Jake
2014-07-10, 03:45 PM
I'd love to do a campaign that starts off like a normal level 1 module... kill some goblins, rescue a few kids from their cave, something like that. BUT--

After killing the goblin chief, the loot turns out to be 1 million gold pieces (give or take). At level 1.

The problem: the small hamlet they're in doesn't have any of the expensive magic items they'd love to buy. They can get masterwork gear and a few healing potions, maybe a scroll or two, then it's up to them to figure out how they're going to haul several wagonfulls of gold to a major city to cash in. Along the way cue bandits, thieves, and rival adventurers.

Of course, as they gain a few levels they might find out who the gold's real owner is, and that owner is not going to rest until they get their money back....


I did something similar once, and it was a blast. At level 1 they found hundreds of thousands of gold worth of merchandise in a kobold lair and they were super psyched until they realized that if they actually wanted to get what this stuff was worth they were going to have to sell it themselves. A good portion of the campaign was just them traveling town to town, hocking their wares and solving mysteries Scoody-Doo style. They even started buying up merchandise of their own and eventually had a business going.

nedz
2014-07-10, 05:57 PM
Some entries from my campaign ideas file

1)
Stone Age - Pseudo Aztec
No skills, feats, classes etc which involve literacy, wheels, or non-ornamental metal.
Weapons will be wood, stone, flint edged or obsidian. The latter will be very rare and generally enchanted.

2)
Kobolds - you are all kobolds who live in a swamp.
No skills, feats, classes etc which involve literacy or wheels.
Obviously this is a wilderness type campaign featuring lots of swamps.

3)
Mongol Horde
Horse based game which can feature oriental characters.
Wilderness type campaign featuring lots of Steppe

4)
You are all circus performers ostensibly travelling from city to city with the Circus

5)
Barony based game
Almost like Gormanghast, you are all under-under-whatevers in a huge rambling castle.
You will often be sent out into the countryside to deal with various issues, returning to your base in the great castle. Some internal politics possible, though things often move at a glacial pace.

6)
Town and Country
You each have two characters.
One is an Aristocrat built using the non-elite array — this character can only multi-class into amateur classes, no trade characters like Wizards, martial classes are preferred.
The other character is a retainer built using the Elite Array — fairly open choice on classes here.

ShadowFighter15
2014-07-14, 07:25 AM
I've had a couple.

One was a mainly rules-free Eberron campaign based heavily on a BBC series called Hustle. The show was about a team of con-artists working in London (I've heard that Leverage is an American equivalent show - but not a straight adaptation like the mangling that usually happens when the Yanks copy a British show) and each episode had a bit where they'd con the audience too.

Campaign idea was that the players would be a team of grifters working in Sharn with the team's Roper (the one who finds the Mark and leads them to the Inside Man) being an NPC. Main reason I'll never use this one is because I wanted to go with as much freedom as possible for the players. Basically; the GM would design the Mark - their personality, their strengths, weaknesses, etc - and the con itself would be entirely up to the players, with the GM creating additional NPCs and environments as needed. Other problem is that I have no idea how to keep everyone from just making changelings and using their first score to buy vestments of many styles. I mean that just takes all the fun out of it.

Another Eberron one and a bit more traditional here - follow on from the adventure line started with The Forgotten Forge. Follow on starts with a modified form of Voyage of the Golden Dragon, drop some of the NPCs, change a couple of others, drop the whole trip to Xen'drik and change it to a trip to Karnaath where the PCs get involved in a plot involving one of the country's rogue generals and his stockpiled undead army. The next bit is where the new material really kicks off, though.

After the business in Karnaath, the Golden Dragon stops in at Stormhome for maintenance after its maiden voyage. At which point it gets highjacked again, this time by Emerald Claw fanatics who plan to start a Thrane/Karnaath war by covering the ship in Karnaathi heraldry and then flying it nose-first into Jaela's office. They don't care if it actually wrecks the building or not, they just want to provoke a war. Three mercs are in command of the group, though; a half-elf psion, a shifter totemist and a warforged artificer with some curious design elements (I'd probably refine it a bit more if I ever used this, but I basically imagined some sort of combination of Simon the Digger and GaoGaiGar - Simon's post-timeskip coat and Genesic GaoGaiGar's hair). While the party tries to stop the highjacking, it turns out that the psion was double-crossing the Claw - he's a Dragonmarked Excoriate of House Lyrandar and is using his mark to take the ship for himself. While they fail, they manage to escape from the PCs.

Through their Dark Lantern contact from way back in Whispers of the Vampire's Blade, they become embroiled in some of Breland's covert activities against the Lord of Blades, who's been expanding on a fortress deep within the Mournland, one built on a manifest zone with Shavarath. Basically he's been using his army in full-on munchkin mode - Wall of Stone, Stone Shape and having redirected parts of the Lightning Rail that ran through Cyre for a steady supply of the components for each. Warforged spellcasters working in shifts for constant expansion and construction while the Lord has moved his creation forge into the fortress. Here, they end up dealing with a trio of other Brelish assets, the trio of mercs from the last hijacking attempt on the Golden Dragon.

This was about as far as I got with solid plot ideas - but the jist of the rest was that the warforged merc was actually Aaren d'Cannith. More specifically; he was one of two warforged copies of him - rather than get their own unique personality, these two warforged were 'born' with all of Aaren's memories and personality, but one was caught within the Mourning and his personality became corrupted. Yeah; the corrupted one is the Lord of Blades. He's found a way to replicate both Aaren's original warforged copying and the 'enlightenment' that he went through, using it to create a cadre of powerful lieutenants from each of the Dragonmarked Houses, who have somehow retained some aspects of their marks - no SLAs, but the passive benefits like being able to control airships and such.

The party go to find the original Aaren d'Cannith and eventually the plot culminates in a massive, international assault on the Lord of Blades' stronghold, with the Golden Dragon reverted back to its original design intent as a warship and acting as a way to get the PCs into the fortress, even if it results in the Dragon being destroyed (original ideas of that method were comparable to how the Dai-Gurren got Simon into Lordgenome's throne room - by launching the entire prow of the ship out like some kind of boarding torpedo). The whole time, they'd be facing various warforged, including experimental ones that were basically half-dragon warforged.

And that's about as far as I got with that idea. I know it sounds railroady, but think of it more like Paizo's Adventure Paths; if you sign up to play in one of those, you kind of accept that there are some points where you should go a certain way for the sake of the story.

I think there were one or two others I thought of, but they're not coming to mind at this stage. All I can think of are ideas for certain kinds of games I wanted to play in, like a Burn Notice-esque campaign for Shadowrun or Dark Heresy.

Pronounceable
2014-07-14, 10:56 AM
-Throne of Bhaal IN SPACE!:
Last stage of Bhaalspawn saga with a scifi coating. Dying King of Everything (or whatevs) made hundreds of child clones of himself/herself, all of whom have different and strange superpowers, and seeded them all over the galaxy, declaring that the last clone standing will become the new King of Everything. Players are the "strongest" ones, who've gained their own armies, armadas, planets, etc and they're duking it out. Sort of Space Throne of Bhaal: PVP Edition, except none of the major powers are dumbasses sitting around in their lair waiting to be pwned.
Sadly, there's no way in hell I'll ever have the time, ability or the players to run this sort of campaign.

-Escape from Hell:
All players are in hell. All of their memories are gone, taken away by demons. They must track down those specific demons and bargain for parts of their old selves. Players being powerless ghosts, they'll never be able to fight demons (but they can fight and beat souls of other dead) and will instead do demons' bidding, maybe try to turn demons against one another. It's a campaign full of talking and planning and plotting and betrayal. The first one to get all memories back can return to life, others will rot in hell but they must work together to even have a chance of getting any memories off of the demons.
Another campaign that I'll never have the time or ability to run.

-Carrot Empire:
Lugaru meets Jade Empire. More or less exact same setting and plot of JE except everything is kungfu fighting rabbits (wolves, tortoises and other assorted animals will also feature but rarely).
Yet another campaign I'd never ever have time or committed players to run.

-Pyramid of Horrors:
More or less Tomb of Horrors but populated with weird undead looking metal golems. In the end it turns out to be a Necron Monolith (of WH40k fame) crashed into some hapless fantasy world, which gets woken up thanks to meddling adventurers.
Much as I normally dislike crossovers, I enjoy the idea of unleashing Necrons onto some lame Tolkien ripoff setting.:smallcool:

-Groundhog Ghost:
An idea too awesome to not ripoff, this time of a certain thing whose name would be a spoiler. A time looped murder mystery in a mundane world, where a large number of people in an isolated place all get killed under mysterious circumstances. Mysterious circumstances being a ghost who wants to convince everyone that it exists, at which point it will actually exist. Since players keep refusing to believe in the ghost, the ghost keeps groundhogging the scenario. Players must convince all the other very superstitious NPCs that there's no such thing as a ghost, demon, witch, alien or whatever and someone real is trying to kill everyone; thus unraveling the mystery, saving everybody and destroying the ghost for good. This campaign is also full of noncombat.
I'm neither smart nor knowledgable enough in the genre to set up a murder mystery.:smallfrown:
...
Originality? What's that?

Yora
2014-07-14, 12:57 PM
I'd like to run a plague campaign one day. Or rather make it smallpox in the New World campaign.

The campaign starts relatively normal with some rumors of remote ports being hit badly by disease. And over the next couple of months, the whole continent gets it. At some point roads and ports almost entirely shut down as people try to isolate themselves and hope to sit things out as the plague passes through, but it just doesn't seem to end. Sometimes people manage to avoid infection for months even in a town already hit, but everyone gets it eventually. Andfatality rates range from 80 to 98%. Healing magic can slow down the progress of the disease for a few days and more powerful spells can even make it disappear. But unless a person has successfully fought off the disease by himself, he'll just get reinfected after a few days or weeks. And it hits everyone, no matter how rich or poor. Of course rich people want to grab and bunker all the medicine and healers around, but that doesn't help either.
After a few years, everyone who is still left has become immune and the disease barely place a role anymore. Remote farms who get lucky and have only a few deaths in the family can get through quite well, but in many areas farmers are barely able to grow enough food for themselves and there isn't really any trade left to get food into the cities anyway. Government barely exist, as nobody wants to go to any public meetings and risk infection. In most areas society completely collapses as specialists die and nobody is left who knows their crafts. And where sufficient numbers of people remain to at least keep a small village together, whatever rank or position people had before no longer matters.

It's like a zombie apocalypse, just without the zombie. And as DayZ finally made it totally clear, zombies are the least problem in a zombie apocalypse.

At first, you could still have relatively normal adventures, just with a couple of abandoned or quarantines villages along the roads. And of course, a good number of PCs will die simply from disease. (Say 50% chance to have immunity for the first character, 60% for the second, 70% for the third, and so on until there simply are no more people left without immunity, who could join the party.) But at some points the larger cities become increasingly dangerous as they more and more turn into open air dungons. And eventually things turn to all out Mad Max style adventures about gangs and food raids.
I think it could be a really cool semi-horror campaign, but would be very difficult to pull of well. Especially because the players should not be aware of of the apocalyptic plague when the first rumors start to spread. Until at some point it will start to dawn on them, that this is probably the end of the world.

Silus
2014-07-14, 04:28 PM
The Nightlands

One day, the sun set and never rose again. The mortal races were forced underground as things descended from the void of space, up from graves and from just beyond our waking sight. Decades have passed and those surviving races are eking out an existence in the caves and caverns, never knowing the warm touch of the sun.

But a few days ago, your village unearthed a device that, if your elders are to be believed, has the potential to bring back the sun and banish the nightmares forever. But the device is incomplete. It requires components from the surface to work. So grab your Oil of Daylight and Everburning torches, it's time to take back the night.

ChaosArchon
2014-07-15, 06:18 AM
The Spire

The heroes are in a spire that has one-hundred floors, each which has two encounters and then a boss encounter. The defeating the boss rewards the party with level appropriate drops but the CR of the encounters scale by floor not level.

Basically there's a lot of reasons why this wouldn't work, mainly because it doesn't seem to allow for much roleplay, the way the monsters scale would most likely result in the party eventually hitting a brick wall in how far they progress, and it doesn't allow for much exploration. It would just be a huge combat gauntlet. But interesting concept in my opinion.

Brookshw
2014-07-15, 12:20 PM
You're a party of warforged in a modern campaign, your mission: activate skynet!

cobaltstarfire
2014-07-15, 12:53 PM
I had one that I only got to play a handful of games for (everyone moved away, and certain people were habitual no shows, so it sort of just petered out, this was also before there were reliable online tools to play).


The basic premise was that the party was a traveling group of performers with a wagon. They each got some free points to put into one type of performance per level. And a large base pool of money to outfit their wagon with supplies.

It was kind of exploratory, they had a map, and a calendar with various festivals marked. And I had hidden loose hooks all over the world (loose that way if they never found them or took them, I wouldn't have wasted time developing them). There was to be an overarching goal involving evil dragonkin and the world turning very cold and losing its magic, but to start everyone was just traveling together for mutual protection and income, each after their own personal goals which would be facilitated by travel. (One was searching for a missing lover, another was hunting down a hated enemy, one was searching for a cure for something, ect)

I'm sad it didn't get to play out very far it was fun while it lasted at least.

Actana
2014-07-15, 01:06 PM
I have two that stick to mind:

First one would be a grand scale war epic with multiple sides and points of view. Preferably a civil war, each player (around 3-4) has a character in a different faction and a driving ambition on how they want to shape the land. In addition, each player also has a single more minor character as a retainer for each of the other players' major characters. Then, switching POVs once in a while, unfold an epic of the people in power and how they act and react to the war, with a focus more on the characters than the war itself. As for why I don't believe I'll run it... It's just a bit too large and complex in scale for me to handle. I have plans to eventually try to do it at some point, but we'll see.

The second one would be one of those "stuck on an island with a murderer campaigns". Played by PbP, people would play in their own threads through their own POVs without even knowing who is playing which character but their own. Tell the players beforehand that one of them will be playing the murderer and attempt to eliminate them. However, in truth there would be no murderer. Instead, there is a supernatural entity that isn't played by any player. Watch the players trying to figure out who the murderer is and maybe even eventually figure out that the true murderer isn't any one of them and try to figure out how to eliminate it. Of course, the whole idea is completely nuts to even try, requiring isolated players not able to talk to each other, a pace that would drag on forever (since the players are on different threads, everyone's actions would need to be repeated over and over for everyone individually), and the whole game is just a massive bait-and-switch it'd turn half the players extremely angry were they to find out that they've been lied to since the beginning (of course, that's the entire point).

Fire Lord Pi
2014-07-15, 05:03 PM
Yora's post about a disease campaign

Woah woah woah... This sounds waaaay too much exactly like one of my ideas? Are you sure you didn't sneak into my house to steal a look at my DM notes. Seriously though I love this idea. I may be using it soon... At first I was gonna use zombies, but disease is scary enough.

Cowardly Griffo
2014-07-17, 04:24 AM
Exalted, an undisclosed period of time after the Usurpation. The PCs are (heroic?) mortals who have been imprisoned in a twisting, labyrinthine underground vault filled with decaying and malfunctioning First Age technology by a driven-mad IAM in desperate need of repairs. They are constantly sent on seemingly-irrelevant and often contradictory missions throughout the vault, which may or may not actually be situated in The Labyrinth, and they are constantly under attack by old bits of Solar Tech–said Solar Tech likely being their only hope of escape, if they can somehow manage to tame it.

So basically Paranoia, but set in Exalted's Creation.

ChaosArchon
2014-07-17, 04:28 AM
Exalted, an undisclosed period of time after the Usurpation. The PCs are (heroic?) mortals who have been imprisoned in a twisting, labyrinthine underground vault filled with decaying and malfunctioning First Age technology by a driven-mad IAM in desperate need of repairs. They are constantly sent on seemingly-irrelevant and often contradictory missions throughout the vault, which may or may not actually be situated in The Labyrinth, and they are constantly under attack by old bits of Solar Tech–said Solar Tech likely being their only hope of escape, if they can somehow manage to tame it.

So basically Paranoia, but set in Exalted's Creation.
I would play the hell out of that, can you imagine pulling off the hijinx that happen in Paranoia but with an Exalted power level! :smallbiggrin:

HockeyPokeyBard
2014-07-17, 05:07 AM
My campaign idea was an adapted Fantasy AFMBE game. The continent and thefore world was split into two nations. The players start off as soldiers in the army for one side. Eventually, as they advance through the ranks, they're approached by the Resistance. It's revealed that the two kings have been allies for their entire lives, and the previous rulers before them. They keep the conflict going in order to keep the citizen quiet and subdued. The campaign continues, and after the resistance builds, they're attacked by the very leaders of the Resistance.

Turns out the leaders were working for the kingdoms in the first place in order to weed out the disloyal. It's explained to the players that the kings actually continue the war so as to satiate the pantheon of bloodthirsty gods. If peace ever broke out for a prolonged period, the gods would just wipe the planet clean and start over with more savage creations. So the players amass powers. They are chosen by cult leaders and given enough powers to kill these old gods and become gods themselves, effectively becoming NPC's.

100 years later, new characters are starting out fresh, laboring under the threat of a brand new species, the Mind Flayers. The flesh and blood of the old gods decays into these Mind Flayers and their brains are secreted away to become Elder Brains. The new gods can't intervene directly because no two beings of divinity can kill each other and so the new gods need champions to fight for them.

The players discover that the Illithiads are tearing holes in reality, attempting to find a new world to live in and so characters from my other campaigns enter the world, making a hell of a ruckus. So the players have to close the portals and exorcise the threats before all of reality is torn asunder.

Note: I actually played the first half of this and am currently building a party for the second half but I know I'll never get around too it.

Silus
2014-07-17, 06:10 AM
Not one that I'll never use, but one that I'm likely never going to get to DM:

The Gear Wastes

Just...*Points at signature* Top link, third post, bottom spoiler. Just check that out and tell me that don't seem like a cool place to run. Like I really REALLY wanna run some stuff in that world but actually finding a group of people that's like "Hey, a magitech steampunk post-post-apocalyptic world with no gods sounds awesome" is easier said than done.

Also go to the second link there and feed me suggestions please =D

DigoDragon
2014-07-17, 06:46 AM
Found some notes on an idea I had long ago~ a campaign based on Erfworld. The PCs play themselves stuck in a D&Dish game world and have to help their side win a war. This was back when half my players were former military and the others were familair enough with strategy games, so they all had the right mindset to succeed.

prufock
2014-07-17, 07:05 AM
Found some notes on an idea I had long ago~ a campaign based on Erfworld. The PCs play themselves stuck in a D&Dish game world and have to help their side win a war. This was back when half my players were former military and the others were familair enough with strategy games, so they all had the right mindset to succeed.

I've done something similar (as a player), but without the war. Went WAY off the rails, ended up with PVP, game got abandoned.

Yora
2014-07-17, 09:12 AM
Woah woah woah... This sounds waaaay too much exactly like one of my ideas? Are you sure you didn't sneak into my house to steal a look at my DM notes. Seriously though I love this idea. I may be using it soon... At first I was gonna use zombies, but disease is scary enough.

Zombies are supernatural. The supernatural can be defeated by steel and magic.
Plague and smallpox are just nature doing it's natural thing. How can you fight nature? There is no big bad to kill or portal to hell to close. It's happening regardless, and all that can be done is sitting through it and hoping not everyone gets killed. The challenge for the heroes is to make sure the survivors will still have a society to inhabit when the plague is over.
Horror is always about having no idea what needs to be done. In an apocalyptic pandemic, there isn't anything that can be done. And when the whole scale of the disaster becomes apparent, the players will attempt a desperate quest to find the necromancer lord or demon who is spreading it. That may be bleak, but at least they know what they have to do. But eventually they will realize that there is no big bad and it was all a fools errand.

Another really cool campaign concept is something I read as a pitch for a campaign setting, but with my own ideas how it progresses after the start:
The PCs wake up in the city square of an abandoned city as part of a group of 5,000 people, with nobody having any memory who they are, where they are, or how they got there. The roads outside the city are overgrown and there are no ships in the harbor or any carts with supplies. All they have are their clothes on their back (but maybe not even that).
From there on it's a pure sandbox setting covering a large archipelago of subtropic islands, of which many are covered in well preserved ruins, but there isn't anything that would give a clue how they got there or where they came from. Whatever primitive natives there are also can't tell them anything about the world beyond the ocean, the ruins, or how the newcomers got here.

ImNotTrevor
2014-07-25, 03:52 PM
I hope I'm not casting Raise Thread here, but I have had a couple campaign ideas that I would like to do someday. I likely will, but anyone can use them and I may turn them into full-fledged campaign settings someday.

1.The Labyrinth-world: Many hundreds of years ago, two legendary wizards began to duel for long-forgotten reasons. Their combat filled the air with sizzling arcane energy that became more and more unstable as their hours-long battle raged on. One of the spellcasters had a scroll capable of creating a magical labyrinth, his contingency plan to escape. Unfortunately, it did not go according to plan.
The unstable arcane energy in the air reacted violently with the scroll, causing the maze to activate immediately and spread uncontrollably. The maze walls grew from the ground, formed by twisting the trees or splitting the mountains. Within a year, the land was turned into a continent-sized labyrinth. Eventually, cities were successfully founded between the magical walls and efforts began to map the maze and restore civilization.
The PC's will be part of the effort to map the labyrinth and establish trade routes by clearing safe paths to other cities. (Yes, air travel will be available but is prohibitively expensive at low levels and not exactly the best solution available for transporting large amounts of goods.)

2. Post-apocolypse Earth via D&D 3.5
No magic D&D, no standard races. 100% anthropomorphic animals and similar (Kobolds, Lizardfolk, Kenku, etc.). The world of man has ended, and the only beings left behind are genetically modified servant-animals. "Magic" items still remain but are refluffed to be lost technology. There are probably better ways to do this, but the challenge of doing it in the 3.5 system appeals to me, personally.

GrayGriffin
2014-07-27, 08:09 AM
I had two pretty interesting campaign ideas, but alas my group dissolved before I could implement it.

The first was for D&D and inspired by a comic I saw on Tumblr. The party learns of a necromancer who has a princess captured and awaiting sacrifice, so the team goes to rescue her. They slay the necromancer and his skeleton hordes, rescue the princess, and... turns out she's a kobold princess. A fairly intelligent and articulate one at that. She's happy to be rescued and is totally fine with giving her hand in marriage to any of the PCs. Though first she needs to be taken back home so she can tell her father of the party's heroic deeds. Meanwhile, the princess' father is gathering an army to take out the kingdom he thinks had kidnapped his beloved daughter. Fun.

Link to this comic, please?

DigoDragon
2014-07-27, 09:10 AM
Link to this comic, please?

Egads, uh... oh I think this is the comic that inspired (http://mandiblebones.tumblr.com/post/92569772516/insanitybreach-i-want-a-video-game-based-around) the idea.

3SecondCultist
2014-07-28, 09:46 AM
Oh man! There are so many good ideas here! I especially like the 'Bards on the Run', the crashed Spelljammer whale, and the episodic Eberron 'Art of the Con'. I've been thinking about seriously trying to run an Eberron game again - my first two attempts have sizzled, unfortunately.

Actually, while I'm on the topic I'll talk about 'After Mourning'. Basically, it was an alternate Eberron set in 1057 YK (about 60 years ahead of the normal timeline), where the mists of the Mournland have started to cover the entire continent of Khorvaire for some unknown reason. The Wynarn Protectorate (basically all of southern Breland, and a bit of Zilargo, aided by House Cannith) have literally walled themselves off from the mists. But Baron Merrix d'Cannith, the mastermind behind the Protectorate's survival - and ultimately the survival of anything east of the Eldeen Reaches - is dying. So with the full resources of his house behind him, he begins a new project.

Collecting the memories of countless thousands who fought in the Last War, Merrix begins to work on a machine that will 'rebuild' a simulated Eberron, in the past before the Day of Mourning. In order to combat the coming of the mists, he needs to unravel one of Eberron's biggest mysteries. And so? From his deathbed, he summons a group of handpicked and diverse heroes to travel back and inhabit the consciousnesses of those who lived through the Day of Mourning.

Why it didn't work: several reasons. First of all, I picked a bunch of my friends to play, and none of them really had any PbP experience. So a good chunk of my time was spent showin them how to edit posts, use Roll20, that sort of thing. The second major hurdle was that I needed all applicants to submit two characters - one in the present, and the other in the past. That also cut down people's interest. And last but certainly not least, was the amount of research I had to do with Eberron. I am extremely meticulous: the plot up there should give you a rough idea how steep the learning curve must have been to new players. I plan to eventually try this game again, but not until I've pared out a few elements and made it a bit simpler.

Diachronos
2014-07-28, 10:38 AM
Bards on the Run: The PCs are all bards that have formed a troupe in hopes of making it big. Each bard should focus on a different instrument as well as different "bardic focus," such as a primary spellcaster bard, face bard, healer bard, melee, ranged, etc. They start at level 1 trying to secure their first big gig (a local tavern, whoopieee!) eventually gaining levels (probably to 6) and hoping to make the big time... playing at the castle for the royals. In between they have to deal with all the pitfalls of a musician's life (shady bookers, no money for rent, in-fighting, lead singer disease) as well as more fantasy-type adventures and Scooby Doo-esque mysteries!

Why it won't work: Not everybody likes playing bards, and becoming a musician doesn't interest all the players as a motivation.

That reminds me of one campaign me and my friends were throwing together at 3 in the morning just for kicks. We were going to be a bardic troupe, with my character as a succubus dancer whose #1 rule is "Look, but DON'T TOUCH", one friend as a ditzy harpy, and the other friend as a doppelganger who was basically the troupe's manager. We were all going to be 20th level, and instead of being "destined to resolve the plot" it was more like we tripped over the plot as it was waiting for the real heroes and the plot decided "I'm tired waiting, you guys'll do."
Main reason it never got started is that the doppelganger player finished rolling up his character (with hundreds of thousands of gold worth of magic items)... only for the character sheet program he was using to glitch out and save a blank character sheet over the doppelganger. He hasn't been in the mood to rebuild the character yet.

Maybe I should try something similar to this one with the next campaign...

Super Evil User
2014-07-28, 10:45 AM
This would be a D&D campaign, probably. Day 1 goes more or less like this.

The players find an innocuous lead on a job, culminating in discovering that the world is coming to an end via an evil doomsday cthulhu-esque cult. At the end of the day, the player party witnesses the end of the world, as all the prophesized events of doom take place one after the next and the world's greatest champions (gods and mortals alike) are powerless to fight against it and fall.

The players discover a clue that leads to immortality is also prophesized, so they attempt to pursue it in hopes it will give them the power to stop everything in its tracks. Or at least make their novice contribution to helping a little more helpful. They arrive in the location and are slain by one of the rampaging eldritch horrors tearing the world apart.

The player party awakens in the inn they had been sleeping in at the start of their day. They discover that what had once seemed a horrid nightmare is coming true. The day seems to play out exactly like their supposed dream...

Every time the player party dies, they awaken at the start of the world's final day. They are effectively immortal.


Isn't this basically Majora's Mask?

Silus
2014-07-28, 10:50 AM
The Scavenger Hunt
Imagine this:

You wake up in a cave with only a lantern, your gear (Nothing spectacular, only about 150g worth of supplies) and a scroll, but no memory of how you ended up wherever you are. Upon reading the scroll, you are informed that you have been selected to retrieve 25 items from the highly extensive cavern and ruin complex that you now find yourself in. Upon gathering the 25 items, you will be freed. The scroll also informs you that there are others here, same as you, and it would be in your best interests to find them and work with them.

As you finish reading and getting your bearings, you hear a chittering, clicking noise in the dark. You are not alone. Whatever lives down here is beginning to become aware of your presence, and it would be best if you got a move on.

Lord Raziere
2014-07-28, 01:26 PM
Masked Eberron
Imagine Eberron exactly as it is....except that every single person, from the poorest beggar to the kings themselves is a Changeling. and that no one knows it. because its all apart of a vast conspiracy by the Changelings to make everyone a changeling over thousands of years. Little do they know, that they have already succeeded. people who act racist against Changelings are actually undercover Changelings, pretending so that they don't give themselves away. all the Changelings are either playing out their roles because they need to or because they love to, without knowing that anyone else is a Changeling. the cultures they assumed are still upheld to pinpoint accuracy, and somehow even the Dragon Marks still appear as they should.

the game could be anything from Eberron Paranoia, to intrigue spy comedy, to romantic comedy ("oh my love, I regret to tell you....I'm actually a changeling!" and she goes "oh my love....I have to be honest with you as well...I am also....A changeling!" they say this in front of a crowd of people who all go "wait....I'm a changeling to...")

Silus
2014-07-28, 01:33 PM
Masked Eberron
the game could be anything from Eberron Paranoia, to intrigue spy comedy, to romantic comedy ("oh my love, I regret to tell you....I'm actually a changeling!" and she goes "oh my love....I have to be honest with you as well...I am also....A changeling!" they say this in front of a crowd of people who all go "wait....I'm a changeling to...")

Great, now I'm reading that in the voice of Catbug.

"WABECCAAAAA!"

JBPuffin
2014-07-28, 01:49 PM
Masked Eberron
Imagine Eberron exactly as it is....except that every single person, from the poorest beggar to the kings themselves is a Changeling. and that no one knows it. because its all apart of a vast conspiracy by the Changelings to make everyone a changeling over thousands of years. Little do they know, that they have already succeeded. people who act racist against Changelings are actually undercover Changelings, pretending so that they don't give themselves away. all the Changelings are either playing out their roles because they need to or because they love to, without knowing that anyone else is a Changeling. the cultures they assumed are still upheld to pinpoint accuracy, and somehow even the Dragon Marks still appear as they should.

the game could be anything from Eberron Paranoia, to intrigue spy comedy, to romantic comedy ("oh my love, I regret to tell you....I'm actually a changeling!" and she goes "oh my love....I have to be honest with you as well...I am also....A changeling!" they say this in front of a crowd of people who all go "wait....I'm a changeling to...")

...or a completely normal campaign, until the curtain call at the very end ("Guys, guys guys guys guys guys...WE'RE ALL CHANGELINGS!!!"). Bonus points: the players build normal characters, and are told they are the only changelings left; survival of the species depends on their murdering everything else alive. Yes, that's no where near a normal campaign :smallamused:.

Fable Wright
2014-07-28, 04:30 PM
And last but certainly not least, was the amount of research I had to do with Eberron. I am extremely meticulous: the plot up there should give you a rough idea how steep the learning curve must have been to new players. I plan to eventually try this game again, but not until I've pared out a few elements and made it a bit simpler.

I know how this feels, and you have my sympathies. I planned on doing an Eberron game once. The players would be playing random (demi)humans that found themselves in Droaam with no memory. And no money. In a land of hostile carnivores. All they knew was that they were in a pact with each other to restore Galifer under their rule, whatever the cost.

As it turns out, charting the discrimination of immigrants who have no memories before Droaam, researching ways they could go from rags to riches in Sharn, succeed where Queen Aurala and the Aurum could not in retaking Galifer, and mapping out all of the different factions and their agendas that the players could work with and/or against (from the Daask, Boromar Clan, House Tarkanan, city watch, city council, and 12 different dragonmark houses in Sharn, to the Aurum, Five Nations, Dreaming Dark, Chamber, Lords of Dust, Daughters of Sora Kell, warlords of Droaam and Darguum, and more at the top, with religions, cults, and intermediate city governments in between) was... time consuming, to say the least.

Of course, after I did all this work, I realized that without the thorough knowledge of Eberron I worked up while researching this game... the players would not get very far at all. So, one more for the shelf.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-07-28, 09:28 PM
Isn't this basically Majora's Mask?
Very similar, yes. I think when I originally thought it would be a neat idea, I was thinking of that game in particular.

Cowardly Griffo
2014-07-29, 02:48 AM
The Scavenger Hunt
Imagine this:

You wake up in a cave with only a lantern, your gear (Nothing spectacular, only about 150g worth of supplies) and a scroll, but no memory of how you ended up wherever you are. Upon reading the scroll, you are informed that you have been selected to retrieve 25 items from the highly extensive cavern and ruin complex that you now find yourself in. Upon gathering the 25 items, you will be freed. The scroll also informs you that there are others here, same as you, and it would be in your best interests to find them and work with them.

As you finish reading and getting your bearings, you hear a chittering, clicking noise in the dark. You are not alone. Whatever lives down here is beginning to become aware of your presence, and it would be best if you got a move on.Brass lantern, directions in a letter, collect 25 random things to win, great underground empire, mysterious thing in the dark... unless that's somehow not a Zork reference, you get nineteen brownie points. :smallbiggrin:

Silus
2014-07-29, 03:26 AM
Brass lantern, directions in a letter, collect 25 random things to win, great underground empire, mysterious thing in the dark... unless that's somehow not a Zork reference, you get nineteen brownie points. :smallbiggrin:

Honest to God it's not a Zork reference :smallbiggrin:

DigoDragon
2014-07-29, 08:02 AM
Great, now I'm reading that in the voice of Catbug.

"WABECCAAAAA!"

Now you got me doing it too... and I don't even watch that cartoon! :smalleek:

Lakaz
2014-07-30, 11:00 AM
Okay, this is one based on a universe not everybody'll know, and i'll never run it because it relies on my PLAYERS knowing it, and it'll be nearly impossible to verify everybody present knows it beforehand without giving away the twist.

Anyway, the players are dropped, with total amnesia, into the middle of a forest at dawn. They feel like something is off, subtly wrong with the world they've been dropped into, but they can't put their fingers around what. Anyway, they explore around a bit and as they do so, they run into these gigantic, grand monuments, clearly artificial, fashioned mostly out of wool. For example, They run into a grand three level arena, with cacti overgrowing the bottom and two giant towers of solid gold at either end. Or possibly a huge area with skull and crossbones in wool on the floor half a mile wide, surrounded by trees, and with five strange pedastals with half-completed similar golden towers (And also strange, darker ones of some kind of weird quartz), alongside four rooms with empty chests in them.

I spend a session or two just having them explore these monuments, trying to discover their purpose, and the reason behind this recurring golden tower that seems to be appearing everywhere, while fighting off zombies, skeleton archers, giant spiders, and other creatures which come out to attack them at night.

Anyway, a few sessions in they run into what appears to be a town, consisting of five houses of various sizes in a circle, around a wool square depicting some sort of odd arcane rune inside a pentagram, and a huge, miles-high solid stone tower to the south. They explore this and, in the smallest house, with dilapidated and faded paintings of exotic warriors outside, they find a cow. In a hole. Covered in glass. Which they free.
Worked out the twist yet?

It turns out they're in a now abandoned achievement city (If you don't know what that is, check out the minecraft let's plays by Achievement Hunter). A recurring joke in those Let's Plays is that Ryan, one of the players, has trapped a cow called Edgar in a hole in his house, and he often jokes it is of cosmic importance that he stays there (Or at least that A COW stays in the hole). So the players freed the cow and everything goes to hell. The world starts crumbling around them, huge chunks of land begin dissapearing, and they can only see so far into the distance. The rest of the campaign revolves around them trying to get Edgar back into the hole, to save themselves from the end of the world.

thematgreen
2014-07-30, 11:40 AM
I FINALLY got to use an idea I had had for a long time. The adventure ended with the group fighting zombies, then a group of adventurers turned super zombies, and then holding off a giant flesh golem made out of hundreds of corpses, all in a casino. It ended when the McGuffin, a necromantic artifact in the form of a crystal ball was bumped off it's table in a vault under the casino and shattered on the floor, ending the threat.

DigoDragon
2014-07-31, 08:18 AM
I was reading something related to the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes movie and my roommate said that if we ever get a group together, we should totally cross that with Pony.

'Dawn of the Planet of the Ponies', the PCs are part of a colony of surviving humans faced with extinction against the magic of the Ponies' "friendship".

arcane_asp
2014-07-31, 08:49 AM
I did have a great idea for an on-going campaign - could suit any setting, but D&D in particular:

PC's are convicts, shipped off/teleported to a remote island as punishment for their crimes. The join a group of other convicts, and hack out a wilderness survival existence for a session or two before someone gets them organised. With hopes of escape unrealistic at best, they begin planning a settlement, exploring the island for resources, and eliminating threats to their new village.

Over time they could maybe reach and explore small surrounding islands, expand the village and police the new community. Would work especially well if the PC's get cast as sheriff style enforcers by the community. When they are really establish, there could even be other threats like breakaway groups establishing themselves nearby and creating resource shortages, new convicts arriving and throwing their weight around, even local gods/spirits becoming angered by the upstart invaders on their land.

Will never happen because my gaming groups don't really care for this kind of campaign and would have absolutely no interest in the resource management side of it :smallfrown:

Nemesis67
2014-07-31, 05:31 PM
I came up with a vaguely XCOM / Lovecraft inspired game pitch, but have never really pursued it outside of writing a single prompt. It was an interesting idea, but I have no idea how I'd run it. Could be fun, with the right group though.


In 1969, American astronauts first set foot on the moon. Just over a decade before, the first satellite is launched into low Earth orbit by the Soviets. Ever wondered why? Why the superpowers of the world decided to turn their gaze from their launch buttons up to the heavens?*

It was the height of the Cold War. The threat of complete nuclear annihilation was real. It was ever-present, a foreboding sense of doom hanging over everyone. But that's not the story I'm here to tell. The spooks can tell those, if they ever get declassified. No, I'm here to tell the tale of what was beyond the stars. What we found out there. Or rather, what found us.

This is the story of Earth's invasion. We won the war, of course. Well, we at least survived it. For 12 years, brave men and women fought and died across the surface of our little blue dot, but not a soul knows about it. Those soldiers have no monument. No medals. No awards. Not even a gravestone. But that's what you get for what we did. Ivan and Sam can't have people knowing what happened. Can't have them asking why the two are so wrapped up in being at each others' throats when there's something even scarier just over the horizon. But someone has gotta tell this story. The truth has to get out. Because I think they're coming back. And they'll be ready this time.

Silus
2014-07-31, 05:54 PM
I was reading something related to the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes movie and my roommate said that if we ever get a group together, we should totally cross that with Pony.

'Dawn of the Planet of the Ponies', the PCs are part of a colony of surviving humans faced with extinction against the magic of the Ponies' "friendship".

I would play that so hard you don't even know.

Cowardly Griffo
2014-07-31, 05:55 PM
I was reading something related to the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes movie and my roommate said that if we ever get a group together, we should totally cross that with Pony.

'Dawn of the Planet of the Ponies', the PCs are part of a colony of surviving humans faced with extinction against the magic of the Ponies' "friendship".So basically The Conversion Bureau?

Alabenson
2014-07-31, 09:34 PM
I was reading something related to the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes movie and my roommate said that if we ever get a group together, we should totally cross that with Pony.

'Dawn of the Planet of the Ponies', the PCs are part of a colony of surviving humans faced with extinction against the magic of the Ponies' "friendship".

http://www.pmsclan.com/photos/pony4.png

Doorhandle
2014-07-31, 11:10 PM
...Let me play a nuckelavee, and I'm there.

Marlowe
2014-07-31, 11:45 PM
A party of Clerics, with Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil all represented, travel the world investigating the internal workings of various organisations, ncluding "Did you actually find any evidence that these goblins you've killed have been behind the recent kidnappings?" "Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you supposed to be making money? You're spending how much on smokesticks?" "And just what is all this kidnapping and sacrificing of people doing to hasten the coming of Hamank'Arn the Devourer of Worlds?" and "What's with the silly clothes?" to ensure they're really operating true to their mission statements and performing the necessary...corrections if they are not. They must remain one jump ahead of another party from their parent organisation investigating them. The campaign climax will come when they need to investigate "You employ us! Seriously, you guys are insane."

Silus
2014-08-01, 01:40 PM
Based off equal parts the original Call of Duty, World at War and DOOM...


Ok, so personally I'd run this as a PF/3.5 game, but that's just me.

So all the players start as Russian soldiers pushing through Germany on their way to Berlin. They get orders from command that a fragment of the German High Command is holed up in a nearby castle and are ordered to enter it and kill or capture the command.

Upon entering, they notice that things are not...right. Instead of swastikas, there are strange runes and sigils that almost hurt to look at. As they press onward, things become more..occult'y. Half Fiend SS officers, Hellhounds, zombified soldiers. The veteran Russian soldiers press onward until they reach the heart of the castle to find that the "High Command" they were ordered to take out are in fact high ranking members of the Thule Society who have obtained legitimate magical power and are using it to literally cast Gate spells to pull in demons, daemons and devils to serve them. It is now up to this small group of elite soldiers to chase the occultist into the realms of evil, reacquire the tomes to shut the gate for good and, hopefully, retain their humanity in the process.

Gnoman
2014-08-01, 03:20 PM
I've had two games that I actually started to run.

The first was a late Cold War-era game where a lot of the disasters in the 70s and 80s were the result of a shadow war (a conflict of sabotage, assassination, and such fought by small groups that is tolerated because neither side is willing to risk open warfare) between the CIA/FBI and the KGB, with the players working for the former. After a few sessions, they'd start to find a path to a major victory, and suddenly find themselves framed for treason, and would have to go into hiding while dodging kill teams from both sides. Discovering what was going on would then take center stage.

The second was set in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war (nobody's sure how it started, since most of the people involved were killed in the war) between India, Pakistan, China, China, China, and North Korea. The players would be placed in the role of the LAPD investigating a string of murders in a city swollen by refugees and racial tension, with vicious fighting between extremist groups old, new and resurgent increasing world wide. Soon, they would have found that several of the dead women didn't quite match the M.O. of the serial killer, and all would have links to a certain aerospace corporation.


The second game died due to lack of interest, while the first ended because everyone in my group wanted to go back to the fantasy game I had been running.

DigoDragon
2014-08-01, 04:07 PM
Based off equal parts the original Call of Duty, World at War and DOOM...

With a lemon fresh hint of Wolfenstein?

I like you idea. :smallbiggrin:

bulbaquil
2014-08-03, 06:19 PM
From levels 1-8, the campaign plays as a normal save-the-kingdom fantasy campaign, until the apparent BBEG retreats through a portal that malfunctions, engulfing the party and sending them elsewhere. (Not Ravenloft.)

The party wakes up to the slam of the door on what appears to be a smooth surface demarcated unfailingly in five-foot by five-foot squares in either direction. Standing where the BBEG was is a painted, life-sized, pewter(!?) statue of the BBEG. The PCs have essentially become their minis made into living creatures and must find a way to navigate the "real world" at the 1 inch = 5 foot battlemap scale. They quickly realize that spells like plane shift seem not to work as intended. Their ultimate goal... to defeat the GM, a (to them) 350-foot-tall colossus who holds the key to their return to their own land.

Silus
2014-08-03, 06:23 PM
A short and sweet concept: Attack on Titan with Halflings, Gnomes and Dwarves vs Giants.

Super Evil User
2014-08-04, 06:49 AM
A novice hunter falls in love! Unfortunately, his girlfriend's a Scelestus.

Gracht Grabmaw
2014-08-04, 11:01 AM
I always wanted to run a game where the players' responsibility isn't just to their immediate party of 3 to six people but to manage and command a pretty big body of people. Like the bridge crew on a space ship ala Star Trek, or a council of primogen in Vampire the Masquerade or a full noble house in A Song of Ice and Fire, something where they have to run the whole place from the top down. I just don't have the skills or the patience to really keep track of something like that, or at least not to the extend where it would feel like a real place. Luckily I think my players wouldn't really be interested in something like that anyway, they're all much more comfortable doing the antisocial murder hobos adventuring thing.

DigoDragon
2014-08-04, 03:27 PM
I always wanted to run a game where the players' responsibility isn't just to their immediate party of 3 to six people but to manage and command a pretty big body of people. Like the bridge crew on a space ship ala Star Trek, or a council of primogen in Vampire the Masquerade or a full noble house in A Song of Ice and Fire, something where they have to run the whole place from the top down. I just don't have the skills or the patience to really keep track of something like that, or at least not to the extend where it would feel like a real place. Luckily I think my players wouldn't really be interested in something like that anyway, they're all much more comfortable doing the antisocial murder hobos adventuring thing.

I experimented with a similar concept.
Using GURPS 3e and the Wild West source book, there was a section in the back for an abstract combat system usable in "army-vs-army" situations. Since my Western took place during the Civil War era, I tried it out. Firstly, it doesn't work well if your players don't have a liking for big numbers or military mindsets. Two of my players were retired military and a third the son of a retired military officer. They followed along well. The other two players were a little shaky on the concepts. Secondly, some players fell into this trap that they started naming a bunch of the units under their command. That was kind of weird to see a list of 20-30 soldiers with names, ages, and two to three words describing their backgrounds. The trap was that when they took losses in battle that resulted in some deaths of named NPCs, they felt sad about it.

Overall everyone had a positive experience. Just that it really plays differently than when a PC just controls their one character. :smallsmile: