Dungeoncrawl, D&D Campaign in the modern world PEACH

[Bryan1108]

I have been playing around with an idea for a campaign for a while now and I thought that I'd toss it out there and see if anyone had input to improve on it or if people thought it was just too silly.

The players will use D&D classes but can pull from D20 Modern for equipment, skills and feats if they want. For simplicity's sake, a dollar equals one silver.

It starts with the premise that the supernatural exists in the modern day but is hidden from most people. There is a demilich who has been around since the fall of the Roman Empire. This demilich, who we can just call Darius, is dealing with boredom on a level that a mere mortal cannot comprehend.

Then, in the 1970's, Darius somehow becomes aware of a game designer who is decidedly not based on Gygax, I am not that much of a jerk. The game designer has created this world's version of D&D, called Dungeoncrawl.

Fast forward to the present day. The demilich has a form of entertainment that appeals to it. It "tweaks" people, turning them into first level characters and then watches as heroes are formed, have adventures, go up levels and eventually die.

Once a character (the PCs) is chosen, they have a dream or something of themselves rolling up a character. I want to be a little cheesy and maybe even a little superhero-ish here. The character's abilities and powers functions just like in the game and they are aware of the rules, kind of like OOTS. The PC is aware of a "character sheet" that he can picture in his mind and check out his stats.

I think that the equipment on the character sheet can go ethereal and be summoned back by the player as a standard action. They can do the same thing with familiars, animal companions and special mounts.

If they want to carry a modern firearm, they can but it doesn't go ethereal so unless they are cops, they'll probably have some explaining to do. Only equipment that would or could be part in the game can be part of the character sheet. Pick up a magic sword, fine. Pick up an AK-47, it isn't going to vanish when the cops show up.

Once a player is chosen, they are subject to Random Encounters, rolled every 8 hours. They are contacted by "The Dungeon Lord" via scraps of parchment leading them to various adventures, which in turn are based on classic D&D modules (Ravenloft, Keep on the Borderlands, Against the Giants, etc) and are operated by minions or allies of the demilich, who doesn't care about them dying so long as he gets his entertainment. Most of these adventures take place in and around the fictional city of Avalon, MI, located on the shore of Lake Huron.

As the game continues, the players realize that it has been going on since the seventies and that there are other players out there. One of them is secondary villain, Robert Cahill, an evil 20th level fighter that I'm basing on Robilar. He has the Leadership feat and can summon over a hundred followers from the ether (none of my players ever gets the leadership feat so I don't think they'll see that one coming)

The overall goal of the campaign is to make it to epic levels and defeat the demilich, thus ending the "game".

One thing that I can't decide is race. At first, I was going to say that there could only be human characters but if I am already being a little goofy in letting them shift from regular clothes to armor and equipment and back, is it really too much to say that the characters that the PCs "roll up" are non-human and let them shift to an alternate form the way they summon equipment?

There would some house rules but not too many. The PCs would use vitality/wound points rather than hit points. A gun fired from ten feet away or less goes directly to wound points. When you lose wound points, your speed drops in direct ratio of 25, 50 and 75 percent. Stuff like that.

[Kaun]

a similar IDEA that came together on RPG.net some time ago.

Figured you might find some useful ideas in here.

[Bryan1108]

Thank you.

It had been bothering me how the world knew nothing of magic but Darious would need thousands of followers for this to make sense. I hadn't even thought about another reality.

I think that I'll have him running the show from a magical alternate reality/world where he is sort of an undead god-king like Darkseid on Apokalips.

[Ashtagon]

This sounds pretty much like Urban Arcana, one of the d20 Modern supplements.

[Brookshw]

Sounds like a really fun concept, lots of things you could do with that.