Help fleshing out a campaign

[ILM]

So just to be on the safe side: French people about to start a campaign in early October, stop reading here. Unless you're 100% sure I'm not your DM.




I've got a new group and am thinking of running some kind of long campaign. The main idea is that one day, the sun fails to rise. Now I have a pretty good idea of the day-to-day repercussions and secondary plot hooks (crops start failing, temperature drops, arson on the rise, a nearby beast kingdom that sees a chance for expansion (darkvision and all that), clergymen of gods of darkness being attacked by angry mobs, and so on) but I'm drawing a blank on the main item: where has the sun gone?

Any suggestions that would work for a campaign that spans from levels 5 (tops) to 20, and spans at least a couple months in-game and a solid 15-20 sessions? (Those aren't strict numbers but we're likely to only play about once a month and I'd like to be able to finish it before we all die of old age).

[dsmiles]

Maybe the 'sun' is actually some sort of entity, and took a vacation. Not realizing, of course, the consequences and repercussions of his actions.

[Premier]

- It's been eaten by Fenrir wolf's offspring.
- It's been eaten by Apep while travelling the underworld to rise in the east.
- It's been stolen by an evil wizard. Now it's locked up in a magical box and is powering the wizard's fire spells.
- Halfway across the world, the Aztec's have stopped offering human sacrifice.
- It's still there, only a wizard has cast Darkness on it along with some other spell that also blocks the heat.
- Someone on the other side of the planet has stopped the sun. Obviously, while the sun is stopped over there, it can't rise here. See Joshua 10:12-13.
- A wizard or god has moved a very, VERY cold lake into the path of the sun. When in the evening it descended in the west, it sunk into the lake and was extinguished.
- The creatures living on and in the sun decided to move their world elsewhere.
- There never has been a sun, the hot bright thing in the sky was just a magical construct and now it broke down / ran out of steam.

[Medic!]

Vague half-lost prophecies almost nobody knew about point out the event as an omen that occurs once every 100 generations, heralding the temporary release of an obscure demi-god from imprisonment. Each time this World Eclipse occurs, he gets a chance to fufill his wish to set himself up as a god-on-earth, but each time he tries a noble party of adventurers stops him in the nick of time.

Maybe he's even a vampire (or a super-vampire, with marmalade that makes cohorts commit larceny) and the party is sponsored by the sun-worshiping pelor-type church?

[Gabe the Bard]

It could be a total eclipse that lasts indefinitely, as the planets have been realigned. It could have been caused by powerful ritual, or an anomaly in the solar system, depending on whether you want it to be more fantasy or sci-fi.

Regardless of the real reason, there might be people who believe that the sun has disappeared for different reasons. Everything from "the end of the world" to "the gods are punishing us." New cults could spring up around these beliefs. Some people may despair in their fatalistic beliefs, while others resort to blood sacrifices in an attempt to appease the gods.

[Emmerask]

Maybe the rotation of the planet has somehow changed so that one half of the planet is now constantly with sun while the other without.

The continent (or island) the pc live on is on the dark side so that it appears as if the sun is gone.

The backstory would be that a once powerful and advanced (in magic or technology however you want it) civilization has once settled this planet and created a machine deep in the core of the planet to increase the spin of the planet (to create day and night).
This machine is now broken or was sabotaged by <insert evil>.

The objective would of course be to repair/restart this machine.

The constant dark side would become very very cold very soon so that not much could live there for long.
The constant light side would become extremely hot.
Huge!!! stormsystems would build up.

There is a small belt around the planet that is in constant twilight which pretty much becomes the only habitable zone that still can produce food.

[Jair Barik]

One of the elder evils (father lymic) causes the sun to be blotted out so that he can escape from his prison of ice (he freezes when exposed to sunlight, no it doesn't make sense).

The point is though that the sun being blocked out is a good one as it avoids having to explain things like 'how big is the sun then?' and other scientific questions.

Beyond the where have you thought of the why? In the father lymic exampke it is not a case of removing the sun to cause suffering but removing it to be free (the being in question is evil but that isn't the point). Whatever the cause the motivation behind it should probably be more than just 'evil for the sake of evil' as that is a kind of lousy plot background for such an epic occurence.

[JohnnyCancer]

The chariot that pulls the sun across the sky busted a wheel or the god driving it got chariot-jacked.

[Ajadea]

It wasn't sun, it was suns. They took turns cycling around the earth. Until one day they decided to all come out at once. Now, their home is somewhere around the other end of the world, and the local adventurers acted quickly, so the PCs never saw the [insert-number-here] suns all out at once.

Two ways you can go from here:
1) The adventurers were a bit overzealous, and killed all of the suns instead of leaving one to do crucial things like bring heat and light.
2) They didn't kill all the suns, but the remaining one(s) are too scared to leave the safety of their home again.

[Funky Goose]

You could do a lot worse than going for something like the mare in the moon plotline (refluffed obviously) - 2 Fueding gods of light and darkness, the god of night tries to Overthrow the god of day.

Good thing about this is that it leads to a lot of options for the PC's to resolve it, eg. Kill a god, Help gods work together, Become gods even!

[ILM]

You could do a lot worse than going for something like the mare in the moon plotline (refluffed obviously) - 2 Fueding gods of light and darkness, the god of night tries to Overthrow the god of day.

Good thing about this is that it leads to a lot of options for the PC's to resolve it, eg. Kill a god, Help gods work together, Become gods even!

You know, that was my first plan, with a twist: it was actually the god of light who decided to hold up the sun and frame the god of darkness for it. Cue massive slaughters of the clergy of darkness and increased worship of light, etc. However, I realized I don't like the 'let's kill gods!' approach. I prefer the gods to remain invisible and silent and faraway, and working the world in ways no human can understand, much less simple Olympian feuds like that.

I actually like the Llymic suggestion. I'm not going to go with Llymic as described, I'll probably make up my BBEG and reasons why the day/night cycle seals him away and stuff, but the idea of the sun keeping something away is one I can work with. Now to find something that isn't Drow or vampire...