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View Full Version : DM Help Ideas for longterm Realm-Defense of a Wizard



Dawnhunter
2017-03-17, 05:34 AM
Greetings!

I would like to get your opinion and help on my Campaign-Idea.

There once was a good, powerful, wise Wizard who had gotten a big chunk of land for his services from the king. So he rules over his lands, everyone is very happy, and he grows old. He wants to protect his lands after his death, so he establishes a system that selects the individuals that are most suited to protect this realm, and magically marks them with a symbol. After he thinks of ways to prepare and help those future adventurers, he pours every last drop of his magic essence into those magical defenses, and dies.

I plan that this campaign should be pretty much a sandbox for the players, and want them to be able to wreck havoc and do whatever they want. Which is why the wizard designed powerful artifacts that only the marked characters can use, to help them protect the realm. I was thinking of single-use magic stones, that can stop armys (and stuff like that). But the Wizard was good and wise, so he dislikes fireballs to solve stuff in this way. So I was thinking something along the lines of mind rewriting the whole army into never following any direct order from authorities - solves the invading army problem, doesn't kill people, and the enemy that send them in the first place lost his army and got a whole lot of troublemakers (that would probably still defend their homes if another empire attacked them, so the power balance between empires shouldn't be disrupted).

I would like ideas for other useful/overpowered spells that can stop external and internal powers from bringing chaos and evil into the realm of the wise wizard. Also, how would the wizard support his chosen adventurers? I was thinking of automatic stabilization/teleportation once they get to negative HP, for example. I would like lots of good/bad/any ideas :-)

And finally, please show me some plotholes, so i can fix/explain them.

Thanks for reading!

Dappershire
2017-03-17, 06:44 AM
Pull (shamelessly steal) some ideas from Myth Conceptions. Good book on small time mage needing to take on an entire army.

In fact, just how real do you want those all powerful items to be? could be that the stories behind them are more frightening than the reality. Or, looking at it sideways, the characters don't need to -actually- be the heirs, right? Simply faking the markings will prolly get them babes and beer all over the kingdom. What could go wrong? Until the place really does get invaded by monsters or whatnot, and all those swindled people remember who claimed to be the heroes...now they have to use these artifacts that wont answer to them, or try and find the real heirs. Without admitting they lied.
Plus, you can DMPC the "real" heir. Or even wait til a player tries to remove their fake marking, and finds the real one underneath.

noob
2017-03-18, 07:05 AM
He could also have made a school teaching magic.
And make a program to encourage the learning of magic and then there might be possibly a bunch of new wizards who will defend the land of the wizard after a few generations.

Dawnhunter
2017-03-19, 07:15 AM
Thank you for your replies!

I will read into the myth series, but that will take some more time :-)
I want those artifacts to be real, and very necessary for them. But i won't give them precise instructions on what they do exactly.
I want them stumbling around with forces that are beyond their power.

The school of teaching magic sounds very good. But I will give him only one or two apprentices, which he very careful selects - he had his share of wizards turning bad :-)

I should probably tell you more of what I’m planning:

Most of my players are new to this, so we will start it as a test run with the iconic pathfinder characters. Give them a Quest to solve a little Problem for the powerful wizard (which I will call Gandalf for now), as a test run for the system he creates. A few goblins thieves that started stealing from a small village. But they only steal the food because they were kicked out of their homes by a pack of dire raccoons, which liked the messy hive of the goblins and moved in. After they solved the issue one way or another, they will talk with Gandalf, tell them about their adventure, and leave.

After that I plan to start the real adventure with characters they made themselves. It will take place ~700 years after the previous story, and they will be summoned to an old ruin that was the place where the chosen ones where to get support from. There an old recording of Gandalf will greet them in place of the current mayor, and invite them into the inn (now ruins) to wait for further guidance. After some minutes, an imp (in the form of a raven) will pop up, sent by the successor of Gandalf. He will guide them towards a problem and tell them to stick together and be careful, because their marks are easily detectable by magic (still not sure about this, but I like to have a reason why they have to stick together and work with each other, even if they are chaotic evil, instead of going the more reasonable "**** this, I’m out"-way).

This is because the system that Gandalf designed uses a lot of power, and his successors weren't able to keep up the magic supply and ran out some time ago. The current successor (let’s call him Saruman) fixed that by contracting Devils too keep it in power, but in return has to offer them souls. He keeps a tribe of goblins around his tower for that reason, and disguises himself as an evil big boss to keep them in check. That's why the marks of the heroes radiate a weak evil aura (which is detectable).

My further plan is that the mark also works as a map of the kingdom with pointers where there are problems right now. Kind of like the marauders map from Harry Potter, but for problems instead of persons. So they get instructions from the mark, and also instructions from the imp of Saruman. Saruman is not aware of the map-function of the mark. Also one of the problems on this map is created by his tribe of goblins, so they may have a conflict with him at some point.

I also need to envision some neighboring kingdoms. One of them tries (despite warnings) to take Gandalf’s realm over with his army, which the heroes should hopefully prevent with the mind-altering artifact I mentioned above. Or they use it for something else, and swear fealty to the new king of the combined realms, who knows?

Do you have other ideas I could implement into this campaign? I was thinking about more one time use artifacts for them to use. But I have no idea what they should do :-)
Also some ideas for kingdoms around the realm would be nice.

Thanks for reading & your replies :-)