Lost Citadel Campaign

[Starchild7309]

So I have been waiting for this campaign for so long and I finally got the PDF and read through it, but now that I am getting ready to start working on a campaign for my friends, I seem to have lost all creativity. I have a lot of ideas but they all involve later game stuff.

For those of you that don't know the world, the God of Death has stopped doing their job. The dead rise, magic is corrupted, and what is left of known civilization lives in this MASSIVE walled city. When I say massive I mean the biggest city I have seen in a game before. Life in the city sucks pretty bad, even for the well off, space is cramped, resources are limited, there is crime, and disease, and the constant fear of the dead rising.

I am looking for a way to bring a group of 4-5 strangers together and have them work together. This is where my creativity is failing me. What could a group of 5 strangers want or need that they would work together for and want to stick together for afterwards. They will be 1st level so it can't be overly complicated and I would prefer them not to deal with the undead right away.

Let me hear your "starter" quests. Any other thoughts or ideas would be great too.

[Corsair14]

This concept is interesting. Where is this from?

As for having the group get together, just have them guarding a caravan from one end of the city to the other, that way they are all together to begin with.

[Rivaler]

I'm not the most experienced of the DMs, but what I did when I needed my players to begin a campaign together without forcing anything on them was to put them in a dangerous situation that required them to use teamwork to get out of. In my case, I used a city under siege, so that players had a reason to work together regardless of their agendas. The point is that when they begin an adventure compelled to act together on something, they are more easily persuaded to keep doing that for a lot more. This same approach is used on some official campaigns as well, like Out of the Abyss.

This said, I suggest acting similarly. Maybe they were drinking at a tavern, when out of nowhere a small horde of undead breaks in and they have to fend them off, after which someone approaches them with a job offer, seeing how they managed so well.

[Kobold_paladin?]

So I have been waiting for this campaign for so long and I finally got the PDF and read through it, but now that I am getting ready to start working on a campaign for my friends, I seem to have lost all creativity. I have a lot of ideas but they all involve later game stuff.

For those of you that don't know the world, the God of Death has stopped doing their job. The dead rise, magic is corrupted, and what is left of known civilization lives in this MASSIVE walled city. When I say massive I mean the biggest city I have seen in a game before. Life in the city sucks pretty bad, even for the well off, space is cramped, resources are limited, there is crime, and disease, and the constant fear of the dead rising.

I am looking for a way to bring a group of 4-5 strangers together and have them work together. This is where my creativity is failing me. What could a group of 5 strangers want or need that they would work together for and want to stick together for afterwards. They will be 1st level so it can't be overly complicated and I would prefer them not to deal with the undead right away.

Let me hear your "starter" quests. Any other thoughts or ideas would be great too.
Omigod you have no idea how much this has happened to me, losing my idea after it had seemed so epic. Well's here's what I got:
Hooks: the players where chasing a cutpurse down the city street when they find the thief dead in an alleyway a skeleton or zombie leaned over his corpse, devouring it. Fight ensues, blah blah blah Further investigation required.
Side quest: a band if refugees come to the city gates with a horrifying tale, their group was all but wiped out when traveling here by a horde of [input creature here]s and they where the only survivors. They don't have much more to offer than a fistful of silvers but if they players succeed the quest they might learn some valuable information about this whole kerfuffle.
Side quest:a wizard was caught trying to leave the city after curfew (I'm going to assume there is a curfew) and claims he only wanted to get a magical pendant from the one of the outlieing settlements that he left by accident. (You determine the rewards and whether they just helped villainy)
Side quest: undead breached the wall! The city needs heroes to help the city guard!
Alter the encounter based on their level.
Hope this was helpful -k_pal?

[Segev]

Do groups venture outside of the city for normal adventuring things? Like, say, to explore a recently-exposed collapsed or sunken citadel?

I ask because Sunken Citadel is my go-to advice for adventures to start a campaign with. It's the first adventure in Tales From The Yawning Portal, and is designed to go from levels 1-3. It features unholy plant monsters, kobolds, giant rats, goblinoids, a war between goblins and kobolds, and a quest to rescue some adventurers who disappeared there.

You can have the merchant who hires the PCs as one of the hooks be the reason they've been gathered together.


Regardless of what you do, I would recommend you leave it to the PLAYERS to decide why they're together. Come up with your first hook for your first adventure, and then tell the players something like, "Alright, you need to decide why your characters are all doing X."

For example, if your premise was that a tenement has been discovered to be empty, and nobody seems to remember anybody ever living there, so investigations into how an entire building of living space has been left abandoned for this long is the adventure hook, "A building in the city is abandoned, but looks like it could house almost a hundred people if packed as densely as normal for the area. Nobody seems to know who owns it, nor anybody who's lived there. Your characters all need to have a reason to have applied for and gotten the job from the local Ward Council to investigate it and see if it's safe to move people in and relieve a smidgen of the pressure on the local tenements."

[Democratus]

Do groups venture outside of the city for normal adventuring things? Like, say, to explore a recently-exposed collapsed or sunken citadel?

I ask because Sunken Citadel is my go-to advice for adventures to start a campaign with. It's the first adventure in Tales From The Yawning Portal, and is designed to go from levels 1-3. It features unholy plant monsters, kobolds, giant rats, goblinoids, a war between goblins and kobolds, and a quest to rescue some adventurers who disappeared there.


Sunken Citadel is, legit, one of the great modules for starting a new campaign.

I second this suggestion. :smallsmile: