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View Full Version : Best place you started a campain



kasubot
2007-07-27, 10:25 PM
We all know that the default starting place for any campaign is a tavern, bar, or inn. But where have you started them besides that?

My favorite was the back of a paddy wagon, our entire party started off the campaign under arrest.

BardicDuelist
2007-07-27, 10:38 PM
Making the entire party witnesses to a horrible murder, and having them arrested was a great way to start.

The murder was in a park in a large city. I had gotten the character back stories beforehand, and so was able to place each character there for a specific reason.

Dean Fellithor
2007-07-27, 10:39 PM
while everyone else was in the tavern I was in a top-secrete Headquaters being interrogated, I was then promptly thrown into a Garbage pile in a back alley behind the Tavern.

Krellen
2007-07-27, 10:43 PM
The best start to a campaign I ever had was a murder scene; two of the characters were investigating the murder, of which the third was suspected, and to which the fourth had been beaten.

Hadrian_Emrys
2007-07-27, 10:56 PM
Attempting to kill each other in an arena. Talk about a lasting first impression.

suckered_D.M.
2007-07-27, 11:31 PM
if you do want to start in a tavern you have to make it a good one. THE VULGAR UNICORN from sanctuary is an awsome place to start. some of my players are a little older so they new some of the pit falls though.

SurlySeraph
2007-07-27, 11:45 PM
In the sewers of a major city. The rogue had been severely beaten and had his seemingly dead body dumped there. The cleric was chasing undead he'd detected there. The wizard's hideout was hidden there. The barbarian woke up lying there with a very bad hangover, next to a gnome of the opposite gender.

ClericofPhwarrr
2007-07-27, 11:56 PM
I hesitatate to ask, but... what race was the barbarian?

RedScholarGypsy
2007-07-28, 05:33 AM
The entire party, before forming, held various positions in the castle. My sorc's was in the princess's bedroom, right before our Fighter stormed in with several other guards. Good times, good times....

I think his bastard son ended up ruling that kingdom....

Morty
2007-07-28, 06:11 AM
My campaign started when two other players' characters got in trouble because they owed money for a crime boss, and by mutual aquitance they've met my character, who helped them by giving them some information. It all ended by us three escaping from city in a caravan, running away from both city guard and crime boss' thugs, and thus our group was formed.

Xuincherguixe
2007-07-28, 06:19 AM
For when I was the GM, I ran a few missions out of a Sushi bar that was a front for Yakuza. It was an exceptionally silly place.

Order the Tuna and you get Heroin. Amazing that the place wasn't busted by the cops. :P

TheDon
2007-07-28, 06:24 AM
Best place where I started was in an evil lair, as the kobold minion. We created a normal lvl 2 party and as soon as we were done the DM took our sheets, then gave us those kobolds. Our lord and master charged us with retreaving a precious magical amulet, so we did, having the hardest time of our life, but we felt proud when we did... only to be TPK by our own party on the way back.

The DM then followed that by giving us our sheets back and resuming the fight we just had exept on the party's point of view and telling us we had just found an amulet. Great fun overall.

The Mormegil
2007-07-28, 06:32 AM
I havn't got a "best" place, but I damn have a worst:
little city scorched by sun in a destert. All PCs were there for a reason or another and they started there, for a reason or another, a big struggle in which one was killed while the rogue was taking away everything that wasn't over 100lbs... And they were supposed to help the village... Well, after that the game went very well, but it was quite an opening for sure!:smalleek:

TheAlmightyOne
2007-07-28, 07:54 AM
Started one in jail wher we'd been falsely imprisoned
Started one on a ship
And my favourite was where nobody could be bothered with a backstory so i got to pick how we all met up. we started by graduating from heros school. good times

Saithis Bladewing
2007-07-28, 08:21 AM
My favourite was in the middle of a desert. A fierce storm was brewing and the characters were all members of different caravans. Forced to search for shelter, there was only one convenient landmark in reach: a large outcropping of rock and stone just within reach of escaping the storm, marked on the maps as having a number of large caves. Everyone rushes their to escape the storm and get drawn into chaos from there.

waffletaco
2007-07-28, 08:25 AM
I've never played D&D before, but I've always wanted to start out jumping out of an airship/balloon/plane. I haven't thought it out any farther than that. I'd make such a bad DM.

Swooper
2007-07-28, 08:51 AM
Hmm, I remember one where I (a human paladin) was heading out from my home city found a passed out dwarf lying by a tree with an urgrosh next to him. I woke him up and he had no idea who he was or where he was, he knew only his own name. I took pity on him and offered to travel with him. We later met the hobbit sorcerer down the road.

That was an awesome campaign, revolving partly around the dwarf finding out more and more about his past.

ranger89
2007-07-28, 09:31 AM
I haven't done this yet but I've always wanted to start a campaign in the middle of a massive battle between two armies. The characters have all been conscripted into the king's army. My first words would be "You hear the captain sound the horn and your unit begins to charge across the battlefield. Roll for initiative."

My favorite campaign beginning that I have done was having each member of the party individually attacked by very powerful orcs, chained up in the back of the same wagon, and sold to an evil little halfing who made them fight in an arena.

Dark Knight Renee
2007-07-28, 10:29 AM
I started a campaign in an abandoned "haunted" mansion a little ways from a small town. There actually weren't any monsters or undead in residence until the PCs moved in, one of them being a vampire. They were lucky they were in the middle of nowhere, because this was FR, where something like that will have adventurers knocking down your door in no time.

For me, the most common location to start a campaign or a new plot arc is In The Woods Somewhere. Taverns are usually reserved for starting or pursueing sideplots.

Diggorian
2007-07-28, 11:30 AM
Farscape (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape) theme: The party was made of abductees aboard an advanced living alien ship under attack that woke up in the same specimen storage hub. Half of them had no idea that other lifeforms existed until hey met each other.

Matthew
2007-07-28, 11:58 AM
I haven't done this yet but I've always wanted to start a campaign in the middle of a massive battle between two armies. The characters have all been conscripted into the king's army. My first words would be "You hear the captain sound the horn and your unit begins to charge across the battlefield. Roll for initiative."

The last long term campaign I ran began in the aftermath of a decisive battle, which was quite fun. I thought starting it during the actual battle might prove too deadly a beginning.

Swordguy
2007-07-28, 12:43 PM
"The five of you slowly regain conciousness...you each think who ARE these people lying on the dirt road next to me? Suddenly you hear hoofbeats coming from around the bend in the road. A group of men and women in fancy livery on large bay horses round the corner and reign in. The one in the lead points at you. 'It's THEM! Get them!"

Roll initiative."

Inyssius Tor
2007-07-28, 04:32 PM
Aboard a lightning-rail (magic Eberron train), which was being robbed by draconic thugs.

EDIT: I should say, we thought they were draconic. The campaign died after the first session.

Dihan
2007-07-28, 07:00 PM
My DM started a roleplay where we were in the wake of the destruction caused by a Tarrasque...

Korias
2007-07-28, 07:03 PM
Weaponry Conventions. The best places to start campaigns.

kasubot
2007-07-28, 07:43 PM
Well, there was one good one, it wasnt exactly the start, but i had come into the campaign late because another player had to drop out. It was a Star Wars campaign and my character came in as a deus ex machina to save the party and their smuggler freighter from a sith star destroyer.

Im going to have to use the idea to start right after a battle in my upcoming campaign.

ChrisMcDee
2007-07-28, 07:43 PM
On the front line of a battle is a great place. Start off with a situation where the risk of death seems very real and there's plenty of action available from the off. The way the battle ends can have a huge lasting effect on the players' lives.

I'm a big fan of starting a fresh campaign off with an action scene. A sinking ship, in a town being attacked by a giant or in the gallows with nooses around their necks are good starters.

Being imprisoned is a good start too, as there's opportunity for action but it's a relatively controlled environment, meaning you can establish any important things without too much risk of the players wandering off.

Maltrich
2007-07-28, 08:35 PM
Ugh... I don't think I've ever started a campaign really well, but I think the best place I have started one was on the hill outside of the mansion of a wealthy merchant, who was known to be playing host to a powerful diviner. The players were thieves, and would presumably be attempting to make away with all the diviner's powerful magic items.

It would've been really cool, except they never went in, because they decided to go screw around in town instead, and then the game died because we all started playing Shadowrun again.

The worst place I've ever started one is the one I've just started, which started in a tavern in the PC's home town. We decided to play on very short notice, so there was no real time for me to prepare, and at some point I decided (and said out loud) that the PC's were still living with their parents in their hick home town. None of them had backstories, so I was grasping at straws for how to get them to the cave with all the olive slime creatures in it... but obviously, I introduced a lot of unnecessarily boring complications.

If I had it to do over again, I would have had them be adventurers passing through, so that their histories could be fleshed in later.

That said, they must be having fun because they want to play like every other night, apparently with no concern for the fact that since I'm moving away, I really need to get the game transferred to an online forum, at which point I'm planning on introducing a few new players, and I'd rather not have the current ones reach level three before then (which they will, unless I start cutting their experience rewards, and I'm not sure how they'd take that).

SilverClawShift
2007-07-28, 10:42 PM
The campaign itself wasn't one of our greatest, but I think our best starting place was the ethereal plane.

We all woke up dead, for various reasons, and had to figure out how we died, why we were ghosts, what connection we had to each other. Then it spilled out into trying to scare/kill some baddies on the material plane, trying to find a way back to life, possessing people, ect. Our 'party' had a sorcerer who found a way to shift themselves physically onto the material plane, but then they were a melting pile of ectoplasm that had to shift themselves back to stay in one peice. Getting hounded by clerics trying to exorcise us...

wait, come to think of it, that campaign was pretty fun.

Zeta Kai
2007-07-28, 11:22 PM
My favorite place I've ever started off my players was aboard a pirate ship. They were pirates, so they didn't mind, & it kept them disciplined long enough to get the plot started (no small feat).

My least favorite place to start: In front a dungeon. It just doesn't go well.

ALOR
2007-07-29, 01:41 AM
epic level characters waking up on slabs completly naked and soon finding out we were dead. Deffinatly a shock.

Skjaldbakka
2007-07-29, 01:47 AM
*cough*Tavern*cough*

What?! I'm a traditionalist!

I put lots of work into the detail of my taverns too. My last campaign's barkeep was the main plot from about lvl 2-9. It helped that she was a PC's sister and a latent witch, but meh.

Roderick_BR
2007-07-29, 02:58 AM
Once I made each character start off somewhere close to where they live, before being captured and being taken to a prison. They were all non-humans, and they had to break out of a human-controlled prison.

Sir Giacomo
2007-07-29, 05:25 AM
The campaign itself wasn't one of our greatest, but I think our best starting place was the ethereal plane.

We all woke up dead, for various reasons, and had to figure out how we died, why we were ghosts, what connection we had to each other. Then it spilled out into trying to scare/kill some baddies on the material plane, trying to find a way back to life, possessing people, ect. Our 'party' had a sorcerer who found a way to shift themselves physically onto the material plane, but then they were a melting pile of ectoplasm that had to shift themselves back to stay in one peice. Getting hounded by clerics trying to exorcise us...

wait, come to think of it, that campaign was pretty fun.

That is somewhat akin to an idea I have for a campaign: players can basically play ANYTHING they like at 1st level, but they all start "waking" up in a dungeon/crypt of a sort, having lost somehow their memory how exactly they got there. From then on, they try to figure out what is going on - and eventually they realise they are in a kind of Lovecraft-like setting where THEY have risen from the grave (but they do not realise at first they are undead).

- Giacomo

CockroachTeaParty
2007-07-29, 11:25 AM
As a player, my favorite place to start was being tossed from the back of a camel into the sand, devoid of my belongings, banished to the hellish wastelands of the Red Desert. Good times.

As a DM, I enjoyed beginning a campaign at a bustling river ferry. However, my campaign for the school year is going to start off in Sharn. I'm looking forward to that.

LongVin
2007-07-29, 11:56 AM
On the street which then turned into a crime scene for multiple homicides...caused by the players. 3 if not 4 of the 5 directly caused by my character.

....
2007-07-29, 12:44 PM
During a Call of Cthulhu game I ran, each of the three PCs was at a local campground for different reasons.

The Private Eye has been hired to find a woman who vanished a few days ago, the catholic priest was there with a church group of kids in a cabin, and a local history professor had been caught accepting 'extra credit' from one of his female students and had been told to come there to pay off the blackmailer.

Turns out the camp was the hideout of a cult that was raising the dead. The three of them were all attacked by zombies during a really bad rainstorm that night.

But the timeline was different. The priest, when he realized the children were all being eaten by zombies, lit the cabin on fire and then jumped out of the window and grabbed an axe. Then I switched the narrative to the professor, who was talking to someone for a few minutes, when he saw a plume of smoke form through the trees.

Eventually all three of them met up and escaped the zombies, but the cult chased them into the city. Long story short, they used a dynamite-loaded Volkswagen Bug to blow up the priests church because it was crawling with cultists, and then carjacked the late-comming PC, a psychologist.

She was pretty freaked out when I told her the first thing she saw when driving into town was a church burning, a wild-eyed man in a trenchcoat with a .357 (the PI had losy quite a bit of sanity), a priest with a blood-soaked axe, and a man in a vest and white shirt bleeding from a gunshot wound to the gut.

Good times.

blkhawk26281
2007-07-29, 03:39 PM
I think the best starting spot for a campaign I ran was in a wizards laboratory. They woke up up in what was once a laboratory, everything had been seared by magical fire, as if a massive fireball had exploded inside. The walls were warped and everything looked like it had gone through a miniture planar blender. Half a wall growing out of the floor, a puddle of water dripping from the ceiling, part of the floor frozen and crystallized, and in the center of it all a body dressed in scraps of robes horribly burned with a mostly burned note in one hand giving them a hint as to what happened, a wizard was attempting to summon heros to this keep lost to the rest of the realm by a Gods intervention for wrongs commited by the occupants of the city. They had to join forces to solve the mystery and bring to light the root cause of the curse, and make things right in the God's eyes, before they and the cities innocent inhabitants could be returned to the "true" realm's plane.

horseboy
2007-07-29, 04:58 PM
Hmm, most recent was at a bakery kiosk. Most fun: Neighbour kids in a cul-du-sac at Telpmar.

Remus of Rome
2007-07-29, 05:02 PM
waking up after being in a coma for 3 days I forget what caused that it was a few years back

GenLee
2007-07-29, 09:30 PM
One that I've wanted to do would be to have them all "wake up" after having been turned to stone long ago (different time periods?) by a medusa/basilisk/whatever, and then get rescued by some other party. Then, they stumble out of the dungeon into a world much different from the one they left....

kasubot
2007-07-30, 12:23 PM
Ok, this is not one that i played, yet, but i was going to start one of my campaigns with it.

a sort of shawn of the dead, in a abandoned tavern that they just barracaded because they are being attacked by zombies/insane cultits/ i dont know yet, depends on what level i start them at.