Help with Campaign idea

[Boujak]

Hello everyone,

I am working on a new campaign and I have decided on the theme of balance. As most things in life balance is essential and if the pendulum swings to far to the extreme dangerous things can happen. I am having trouble though coming up with end game ideas that work within that theme and I am hoping for some ideas from the DM's and players out there.

For a little background info I like to create campaigns that run from level 1 through 20. I do not have a group of players yet and will need to do world building once I have a campaign plan. I am trying to prevent what I did before which was to world build and not have a solid campaign idea. I ended up having to constantly world build in between sessions and it was to much work and I don't have the time to do that anymore.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Sparky McDibben]

So it sounds like at one point things were in balance, and then something tipped it out of balance. I have four questions it might help you to answer:

1) What was the inciting incident that tipped balance out of whack? Was it a person? An action? A technological or magical innovation?

2) Is this balance bipolar or multipolar?

3) What is in balance? Good and Evil? Gods? National power? Law and Chaos?

4) Are there multiple axes of balance? Has something disrupted national power balances, and now something's trying to skew the balance between the gods?

[Unoriginal]

So it sounds like at one point things were in balance, and then something tipped it out of balance. I have four questions it might help you to answer:

1) What was the inciting incident that tipped balance out of whack? Was it a person? An action? A technological or magical innovation?

2) Is this balance bipolar or multipolar?

3) What is in balance? Good and Evil? Gods? National power? Law and Chaos?

4) Are there multiple axes of balance? Has something disrupted national power balances, and now something's trying to skew the balance between the gods?

Also important to ask:

-Does the universe re-balance itself or does it requires people's deliberate intervention?

-How easy is it to unbalance the universe and at which point is it noticeable?

-What happens when things are balanced vs when it isn't?


In typical D&D, Mordenkainen would tell you he and his buddies are what maintain the Balance, and that he has to actively affect what's going on in the Outer Planes to make everything balanced. It's strongly hinted that he is quite incorrect in this assumption, though.

[PhantomSoul]

I don't have anything direct to add to the first two replies (they're great starting points), but one of Matt Colville's videos had this quote, which I quite enjoy as a starting point because it helps you think of the opposite question (what was/would_be required to generate and maintain peace, which could be adapted into the question of balance):


“People wrongly assume peace is the natural order. It isn’t. Nations and cities and towns and people are at war all the time. It is not war that must be justified. Peace is the precarious state. The cause of war is the failure of peace.”
(IIRC he framed it as a quote, but it was a paraphrase. It's been a while, but I liked it enough to transcribe it into my notes.)

The idea feeds nicely into the worldbuilding questions by those above! (And, of course, maybe your universe "evolves" towards balance in some innate sense and imbalance is thus more crucial to explain and might give you a good starting point. Did a central god die? Did a new race emerge/relocate? Did a race stop existing? Were there rifts between planes and they start to merge or collapse -- perhaps the actual eventual result of what appeared to be balance?)

[Sparky McDibben]

one of Matt Colville's videos had this quote

Good call; Colville's Politics series is great for this!


of course, maybe your universe "evolves" towards balance in some innate sense and imbalance is thus more crucial to explain and might give you a good starting point.

In this way, it starts to look like Star Wars, with the world constantly overcorrecting toward either the light side or the dark. Solid reference!

[Man_Over_Game]

For a little background info I like to create campaigns that run from level 1 through 20. I do not have a group of players yet and will need to do world building once I have a campaign plan. I am trying to prevent what I did before which was to world build and not have a solid campaign idea.

I don't mean this in the wrong way, but you mention that you:


Don't have players in mind.
Don't have any world building at the moment to fill in this campaign.
Don't have a campaign plan right now, as that's why you made this thread.


What exactly made you decide to have a campaign theme on 'Balance'? Normally, I'd expect a DM to come up with the theme to fit something else that they had planned for the campaign,such as player interests or to involve a world they've been thinking of. For example, say you have hardcore players that want something difficult, you know they've been interested in Ravenloft, so you decide to run a Curse of Strahd campaign that's modified to go to level 20. However, it feels like you're jumping ahead of all that to go straight to the theme.

That itself isn't necessarily weird...except you're asking for the details on that end goal. It's a bit like asking us what color you should paint your future car, when you don't even know what your budget or kind of car you want to get is.

Why exactly is balance the focus that you're looking to start from? If we know that, we can have a foundation to build off of.