Level 1 Supermonsters

[Angelalex242]

Taking a cue from Final Fantasy X (where they call it Sin...)

Could you use something like the Tarrasque in place of Sin, and basically make it the recurring villain the whole time?

Like, every once in a while they watch it eat an entire city, but for some reason it never eats the party along with it.

The party basically spends their whole careers trying to find a way to take out the super monster.

[Madfellow]

I think you could structure a campaign around the Tarrasque, but you would have to break it up into parts and avoid repetition. First they find out someone's trying to wake it up and lure it, so they try to foil that plot but ultimately fail. Then the party has to find the artifacts of do-whatsit to combat the beast and seal it away again. Then they have to track it down and prepare for the fight itself. I don't think you could do a whole 1-20 campaign with just that, but perhaps something in the 11-20 range.

[Man_Over_Game]

Sin worked because the current iteration of Sin was the main character's father, and Sin refused to kill his son. Jecht was a stubborn bastard that also hated Sin (now himself) and made sure his son didn't die so that the main character could kill him (Sin/Jecht).

So there's a valid reason for the main villain to not kill the "player" despite devouring the world.

Strahd, as in, the Curse of Strahd module, has some reason not to kill the players, mostly because he finds them entertaining, and he simply thinks they'll be more fun to toy with alive. He has no hesitation to show that he can kill them without thinking; the players live because he decides it, and he'll make sure the players agree. So he pops up regularly to rain on their day and terrorize them without ever killing them (unless he feels like it that day).

You can implement something similar. If it's a crazy beast, it's a crazy beast that inherently doesn't want to kill the players (maybe some kind of Diviner death-curse prevents it from preventing its own demise).

If it's something sentient, then it has a reason to not kill the players as a conscious choice.

[Sception]

Plenty of characters apart from tidas survived encounters w/ sin. A kaiju sized monster like sin isnt going to direct its ire at individual humanoids, particularly when attacking settlements w/ dozens or hundreds of individuals, though in sin's case the lethality was increased significantly by the swarms of smaller monsters it spawned. Similar to the cloverfield monster. Pasting that gimmick onto a terrasque or other large monster could give some level appropriate encounters the party could actually fight and beat while escaping from the larger threat.

As long as the party is focused on escaping rather than drawing attention to themselves, you can certainly run low level encounters where an elder dragon or the terrasque or some other massive monster destroys a village around them. The bigger and more poweeful the monster, the more believable it is for low level adventurers to escapw beneath its notice.

[Aussiehams]

I had a campaign which started with the party being survivors of the Tarrasque destroying a town and them meeting while fleeing. They then tried everything they could to avoid it for a long time, but kept hearing about it rampaging around.
We never got to the point they could take it on though.
This is very setting specific though. If you have a high power setting someone else will probably sort it out before the PC’s can.

[Foxhound438]

I believe that Out of the Abyss has a few similar moments to this, and it does work out. As others have said, attacking a larger settlement means that they probably expect some people to get out, and it's probably fine if those happened to include some few individuals repeated at different locations, especially if they happen to be particularly good at getting away (which you would expect the players to be, what with their better than commoner stat blocks).

[Ninja_Prawn]

I agree that this works much better with intelligent monsters. Especially a humanoid that can actually get stronger between each meeting with the party (like Seymour in FFX), so that they're a fair (or indeed unfair) fight at each point in the story.

[LudicSavant]

Taking a cue from Final Fantasy X (where they call it Sin...)

Could you use something like the Tarrasque in place of Sin, and basically make it the recurring villain the whole time?

Like, every once in a while they watch it eat an entire city, but for some reason it never eats the party along with it.

The party basically spends their whole careers trying to find a way to take out the super monster.

Not the Tarrasque specifically, because the Tarrasque is rather infamous for being a punching bag that can't justify its CR very well, and isn't actually strong enough to realistically take out High Fantasy Tokyo. But a supermonster in general, certainly. I've run games like that in the past.