What's Your Favorite Campaign Premise You've Never Gotten To Play?

[Sparky McDibben]

Any system, any genre. Give me your elevator pitch for the coolest campaign you've never been able to run.

Here's mine; this is what I sent to my players, so it might be more of an escalator pitch than an elevator pitch:

Science Fantasy (Esper Genesis System):

The galaxy is large and dark. Humanity believes itself to be alone in the galaxy, 200 years after humanity left Earth and began settling the solar system. Faster-than-light (FTL) starships are still quite new, but a few private consortiums are building them and funding pathfinding teams to identify lucrative colonization opportunities. Who runs these consortiums? What are their ultimate aims? They are curiously unregulated, as laws and governments race to keep up with developments already out of their control. Earth's existing colonies chafe under the yoke of the motherworld - colonies on Mars, Venus, and the asteroid belt grumble under mercantile trade restrictions and more forceful violations of their liberty. Many of these colonists actually consider themselves a new species, as the "spacers" underwent extensive genetic modifications. A new name has been bandied about for them: "Prometheans." And of course, where there's trade, there's crime. And space trade has its own version of criminal: pirates! Thus far, government navies have done more to fight each other than the pirates. Therefore, deserters and mutineers swell the pirates' ranks...and make matters in the Sector just slightly more desperate.

Twenty years ago, galactic explorers activated the Tartarus Gate, opening up the dark space of the Tartarus Sector. The Sector has already attracted attention for the discovery of sorium, a potentially limitless energy source that can power anything from a lightbulb to a battlecruiser. Now a gold rush to stake claims on potentially rich worlds has started...but what lurks in the darkness? And why are explorers reporting strange ruins and ravenous living beasts? And why is there such a high percentage of these worlds that are potentially habitable....yet uninhabited?

This one is going to be a somewhat gritty, hard science exploration run, striving to stay alive, dodging natural predators, battling pirates, and discovering aliens (yes, you get to do first contact!) like a hopefully less-horny cross between Dr. Aphra and Capt. Kirk. While fantastic elements will still be present (eg, psionics), they will be less prevalent than in the other options.

[Ettina]

Villains Versus. The plan was to have one DM running three linked campaigns, each featuring a villainous PC trying to do something drastic and villainous to Waterdeep. (My character was an ulitharid who wanted to take over Waterdeep and use it as a base of operations for his research on building an unstoppable army of modified trolls.) The idea was that stuff that happened in one campaign would change Waterdeep for the other campaigns as well, and eventually our PCs would directly clash, if we didn't get killed by some of the many powerful NPCs in Waterdeep first.

I had my first session, the other two players never actually got around to having their first session, so the campaign died.

[Concrete]

A really cliche fantasy story, where legendary heroes once saved the world. The Pc's would set out to find these heroes once more, when the world was in danger.

But these heroes would be unable to do so. Too old. Too crushed by grief. Driven mad by knowledge. Or even dead.

So the Pc's would have to instead learn from them. The ancient fighter would teach their techniques to the new fighter, and bequeath them their ancestral weapon.

The young rogue would have to infiltrate a prison to learn from the rogue, driven mad by a powerful, evil artefact.


A wizard would have to explore the warped tower of the old wizard, who disappeared into it 70 years ago, to discover their secrets.


Stuff like that. In the process of these interactions, the players would learn from and surpass these heroes of old, learn about their failings and become greater than they ever were. And also, learn something about the enemy, and why they are returning.


But I really don't know how to run it. It'd focus too heavily on one character at the time, leaving the others on the back burner. And I'd either have to have a near perfect understanding of the players characters to build matching ancients, or take way too much control over their characters.


And I kinda know that my players wouldn't go for it. Most of the times I've run a concept campaign, it has crashed and burned.

[SimonMoon6]

Never gotten to play (as the thread title suggests) or never gotten to run (as the first post suggests)?

Never gotten to play: Most of the games I've run for my very lucky players. And when one of the other players was suggesting that perhaps someone else might run a game, he commented something like "And of course NOT something like what we just played because we just played that."

Never gotten to run (and would take more research than I really want to do):

A D&D game set in Medieval Europe with a Cthulhu Mythos backdrop

The idea would be a somewhat realistic take (as much as possible when using the D&D rules anyway) on a Medieval Europe (with a bit of fictionalizing here and there). The only monsters would be humans and Cthulhu Mythos creatures (with occasional exceptions). The only deities that were real would be the Cthulhu Mythos deities (though foolish humans would worship the same deities they did in real life, despite not getting powers from them).

So, clerics, paladins, and so forth would not actually have magical powers because there would be no divinity that they could worship that would give them stuff. Basically, paladins are fighters without the bonus feats and clerics are just "experts". Bards would have the only socially acceptable form of magical healing.

Druids might still exist but would be considered heretical and therefore would be killed as soon as they are discovered. Wizards (etc) would also be labeled as practitioners of witchcraft and likewise would be burned at the stake.

[Anonymouswizard]

Oh, I've got many. Must of which aren't even at the elevator pitch stage. One of the most developed, and recounted here, began as an idea for a novel (which I still occasionally try to write).

Post Terra (hardish science fiction)
It is the 2100s, and the environment has collapsed. Global warming happened faster than predicted and trapped water in the summer, causing a positive feedback loop. Humanity is mainly divided into two groups: the Conservationists who manage 200-odd ecosystems on Earth (massive cooling systems are involved) while searching for a way to reverse the change in climate, while the Lunarians primarily live in the L4 and L5 Earth-Moon Lagrange Points in space habitats, mine asteroids, and are trying to set up the infrastructure to colonise the solar system.

Crime exists, but large scale conflict between societies (and yes, the Conservationists and Lunarians each consist of multiple societies) is primarily economic and social. The world has died,, and people have moved on from war and acts of terror.

So, of course, somebody causes an explosion (either a nuclear bomb or rod from God) in a major Conservationist preserve

The PCs are an elite team of police officers and experts tasked with tracking down whoever did this. With precisely no leads, superiors who know even less than they do, and the threat of more attacks happening they're set free into the world to try and complete their mission.

(I recommend checking the crime scene.)

[Willie the Duck]

Scenario:
The Robots (the PCs) have been awakened. Their human masters are all dead or disabled or something (perhaps in cryo pods). Some crises has happened and the robots are tasked with solving it. The intelligent robots have been assigned directives by their masters that they realize are not conducive to the success of the project, but cannot ignore them. The scenario is them trying to accomplish the goal while technically adhering to and without technically violating their directives.

[Batcathat]

Scenario:
The Robots (the PCs) have been awakened. Their human masters are all dead or disabled or something (perhaps in cryo pods). Some crises has happened and the robots are tasked with solving it. The intelligent robots have been assigned directives by their masters that they realize are not conducive to the success of the project, but cannot ignore them. The scenario is them trying to accomplish the goal while technically adhering to and without technically violating their directives.

Oooh, I like this one (though I suspect it'd require a fairly specific kind of player). Feels rather Asimov-ish. Did you have any particular directives in mind for them to struggle with?

I'm trying to think of an example of my own but I can't really think of any particular dream premise at the moment. In the more general sense, I would want to try and run a murder mystery. I actually did try it on these very forums a while back but it barely got started. In addition to the general tendency of many PBP games to die off, I suspect my own inexperience with running a game like that played a part (I thought figuring out a combat scenario that's exactly the right amount of challenging could be tricky, but weaving a mystery that's neither immediately solved nor impossible to was way worse...)

[truemane]

Cosmic D&D Hunger Games
(although I've has this idea since before the Hunger Games)

The PC's all awaken in a strange place and are told that they've been kidnapped by entities of vast power and will be forced to endure challenges for their entertainment. You can run every bonkers nonsense funhouse dungeon TSR or WOTC ever put on low-quality paper and wrapped in cardstock and it'll all make perfect sense.

You can have little side plots involving competition or co-operation with other kidnapped parties. You can have little intrigues with certain entities enjoying certain kinds of activities and providing help if they get to see them. You can have an on-going side plot about escaping. You can have a little village of the kidnapped people and have established relationships that can be ripped apart by the capricious desires of unknowable deities.

I've pitched this to my RL table four times now (as one of several options) and they always choose one of the other options instead.

Someday.

[Willie the Duck]

Oooh, I like this one (though I suspect it'd require a fairly specific kind of player). Feels rather Asimov-ish. Did you have any particular directives in mind for them to struggle with?

The sub-scenario I had envisioned was the robots waking up on a spaceship, and the humans had all retreated to their cryo pods -- either to escape a radiation storm or maybe just that it is a STL travel ship and the voyage is hundreds of years (perhaps they were supposed to awaken when they got in-system but didn't, or perhaps they were deemed unneeded as the landing would be a cakewalk but something has changed). The Robots have directives like "the first priority should be to analyze the local life forms, set us down in near their feeding zone," but realize that the local life forms are silica-based or something and the humans would likely find the resources needed to endure over near some carbon- and water-rich resources some thousands of miles away from said location. Another robot might have directives regarding defending operational capability of the interstellar vessel that don't adequately relinquish priority when it is the in-system or planer-landing vessels that ought be allotted more resources.

[jjordan]

Acretion I-
Sci-Fi setting. An interstellar human empire has risen and fallen. New interstellar polities are rising. Into this setting a massive starship arrives, bigger than anything the local polities have the ability to build, faster, coming from an unexplored portion of space. It's part of the reconstruction efforts of the fallen empire, tasked with bringing civilization to fallen worlds and bringing other worlds into the new empire. It's been at this task for a thousand years and in that time it has been badly damaged. The AIs that run the ship have fractured into multiple factions. The clones the ship produces to populate abandoned worlds and subjugate resistant worlds have been able to build their own societies on the ship. Parasites, human and non-human, have attached themselves to the ship for their own various reasons. It's a treasure trove and a threat and every local polity wants to control it or prevent their rivals from controlling it.

Acretion II-
Fantasy setting. It's the mysterious travelling magic shop, but it's a city. It sends out scouts to find favorable realities/worlds and then descends upon one. It becomes a magnet for trade, sucking in raw materials and turning out finished goods, draining the world of wealth until there is nothing left to take and then moving on, sometimes acquiring new residents in the process. I planned to run this by having one campaign running in the city and another running in the next world it's going to appear in and then merging the two campaigns.

A**hole Elves-
Fantasy setting. The elves are the losers of a power struggle in their home reality/world and come to a new reality/world with their halfling servants and orcish slaves and dominate the choice areas at the expense of the human, dwarf, gnome, and goblin inhabitants. Not all goes as planned. The humans discover the elves are vulnerable to iron and eventually fight well, dragons following the commands of Mother Tiamat try the same trick as the elves, the orcs rebel, and so do some of the elves.

Failing-
Fantasy setting. Magical warfare has destroyed reality. Now it's dying. A cold, barren world where the constantly encroaching borders are disappearing into the mists of the astral and holes in reality can open up anywhere. Strange creatures feast on the remnants of the reality or its inhabitants. Factions prepare their bastions to survive the final collapse, harvesting the very last dregs of magic so they can continue to exist in the astral. Or they seek ways to move to new realities. Some try to make peace with the coming end. Others deny it. A variation on this has the entire world brought into a single, enormous city protected by great magical barriers that hold the void at bay.

Mirror-
Fantasy setting. Two realities, side by side, separated by a distance measured using sub-atomic units and slowly merging into a single, composite reality. The inhabitants of each fight/labor to ensure their reality is the one that remains after the merge or, at least, that they survive. Killing your other is considered to be a good, but not the only, way to do this.

[thorr-kan]

Mahabba, City of Silence

My love for Al-Qadim (2E) knows no bounds. But what I'd like to run is a rogues-only campaign set in Mahabba, the City of Charity, more often called the City of Silence. It's a member of the League of the Pantheon, but it's basically occupied by the other members and its own military in response to a series of semi-popular uprisings by adherents of the local deity's religion. 2E has *A LOT* of rogue subclasses. Basically, play it like Northern Ireland occupied by the Mafia.

[Sparky McDibben]

Villains Versus. The plan was to have one DM running three linked campaigns, each featuring a villainous PC trying to do something drastic and villainous to Waterdeep. (My character was an ulitharid who wanted to take over Waterdeep and use it as a base of operations for his research on building an unstoppable army of modified trolls.) The idea was that stuff that happened in one campaign would change Waterdeep for the other campaigns as well, and eventually our PCs would directly clash, if we didn't get killed by some of the many powerful NPCs in Waterdeep first.

I had my first session, the other two players never actually got around to having their first session, so the campaign died.

This sounds like a lot of fun...but also a lot of work for the DM. You have to prep about 3x the content for a 1:1 session that you do for a group session, and having 3x the sessions means about 9x the work. I wonder if it would work better as a standard party-based game augmented by PBeM records for between-adventure stuff that the DM can start to work into the backdrop?

But I really don't know how to run it. It'd focus too heavily on one character at the time, leaving the others on the back burner. And I'd either have to have a near perfect understanding of the players characters to build matching ancients, or take way too much control over their characters.

Honestly, you know what this reminds me of? The old (old) anime Ruruoni Kenshin. Every few arcs a bad guy would come back from the past and the main character would have to go to his mentor to master some secret technique, in the process learning more about themselves. I'd just have the old mentors be like Luke Skywalker in the Last Jedi: these washed-up defeated old bastards who kind of mess with the PCs. "Yeah, sure kid. You've definitely got what it takes to beat Lord Zargothrax. You know, there's this old cave a few miles away that only a real hero could fight their way through..."

Alternatively: "Hey, so on a scale of 1 to 10, how fond are you of suicidal quests to prove yourself?"

I'd prefer to have the old masters be all in the same area (easier for them to play canasta while the PCs are questing through the Swamp of Desolation), but you could also have the old masters be spread out. Maybe use the Adventures in Middle Earth system (adventure --> journey to a new master --> downtime training with master (dropping hints about "I can't teach you my ultimate technique until you've proved you're trustworthy/honorable/etc!") --> Rinse / repeat). You could salt through the adventures the keys to other master's more advanced powers, too! So what if you gated the kensai's "Seven Swords Against Heaven" technique (steel wind strike 1x/ short rest) behind throwing off hostile mind control? And then, at the new master's place, the BBEG sends a vampire who can try to dominate that kensei - now the player has a choice. They could try to just make the save, or they could willingly fail, trusting that they can try to throw off the mind control after a few rounds when their party smacks them around some. More risk, more reward!

Never gotten to play (as the thread title suggests) or never gotten to run (as the first post suggests)?

More campaigns = better stories, bro.

Never gotten to play: Most of the games I've run for my very lucky players. And when one of the other players was suggesting that perhaps someone else might run a game, he commented something like "And of course NOT something like what we just played because we just played that."

I feel that one.

Never gotten to run (and would take more research than I really want to do):

A D&D game set in Medieval Europe with a Cthulhu Mythos backdrop

Don't they have Cthulhu Dark Ages? Would that work?

Cosmic D&D Hunger Games
(although I've has this idea since before the Hunger Games)

The PC's all awaken in a strange place and are told that they've been kidnapped by entities of vast power and will be forced to endure challenges for their entertainment. You can run every bonkers nonsense funhouse dungeon TSR or WOTC ever put on low-quality paper and wrapped in cardstock and it'll all make perfect sense.

That's ducking metal as hell. Love it.

A**hole Elves-
Fantasy setting. The elves are the losers of a power struggle in their home reality/world and come to a new reality/world with their halfling servants and orcish slaves and dominate the choice areas at the expense of the human, dwarf, gnome, and goblin inhabitants. Not all goes as planned. The humans discover the elves are vulnerable to iron and eventually fight well, dragons following the commands of Mother Tiamat try the same trick as the elves, the orcs rebel, and so do some of the elves.

Ooh! A planar invasion plotline that starts at level 1! Like Dragonlance, but better because you get to do elf-murder. Love it!

Mahabba, City of Silence

My love for Al-Qadim (2E) knows no bounds. But what I'd like to run is a rogues-only campaign set in Mahabba, the City of Charity, more often called the City of Silence. It's a member of the League of the Pantheon, but it's basically occupied by the other members and its own military in response to a series of semi-popular uprisings by adherents of the local deity's religion. 2E has *A LOT* of rogue subclasses. Basically, play it like Northern Ireland occupied by the Mafia.

Omerta prevents me from expressing my love for this idea.

[Pauly]

Vampires versus the Gods of the dead

Use any one of the sexy vampire urban fantasy games. Then make the antagonists the Gods of the Dead, whose actual role in mythology/religion was to protect the souls of the dead. Vampires being undead are a complete anathema to them. Can’t go into too much detail here without violating the ban on discussing real World religions and myths, but Baron Samedi from Haiti was my choice as most interesting main antagonist whose powers/abilities best fit the genre. Other Gods of the Dead would contribute based on the backstories of the characters. I mean there’s no point roping Hades into the game if there aren’t any ancient Greeks in the party.

[Azuresun]

The Necromancer King is defeated by a band of unlikely heroes after conquering a big chunk of the world, most of his army crumbles to dust. The PC's are undead minions who regain their free will after their master is slain, and who need to navigate a world split between blighted, monster-haunted wastes, the domains of lieutenants of the Necromancer King who now feud with each other, and surviving bastions of civilisation struggling to rebuild. The idea was originally inspired by Savage Species in 3e, but it could probably work now, after seeing the VRGTR lineages.

And for another Savage Species-based one-shot, a game where the party are just a regular party of adventurers going through a dungeon. Except each of them is actually a shapeshifting monster of some sort--the bard is a succubus, the wizard is a raksasha, the rogue is a doppleganger, etc. Each of them firmly believes that they are the only infiltrator in this band of witless mortal fools, and must keep their identity and hidden agenda a secret at all costs. And then see how long it lasts before the whole thing comes down in flaming ruin.

[Yora]

Shadows of the Sith Empire (Star Wars d6): Knights of the Old Republic Dark Side Ending. Revan goes more mad and disposed by Bastilla, who tries to find the power used by Marka Ragnos to keep the ancient Sith Lords in line.

The Outer Rim (Star Wars d6): After the destruction of Alderaan, various Old Republic officials and unhappy imperial peons see the signs of the times and decide to GTFO and disappear among the mercenaries and freight pilots on the Hyperlane between Sullust and Tatooine. An ambitious young imperial Moff decides to crack down on the spice trade between Hutt Space and the Outer Rim industrial area of Sullust, Sluis-Van, Malastare, and Eriadu. There's always room for corruption, but with the new crackdown there's not enough space for both the Hutts and Black Sun.

the Heart of Darkness (D&D 5th Ed.): A Planescape campaign that quietly ignores the most famous planes and instead focuses on the more obscure ones between them, particularly on the chaos side: Beastlands, Ysgard, Pandemonium, Carceri, and Gehenna. The party starts as refugees from a dying Prime world that discovered a portal to the Outlands in the area near Glorium, Bedlam, and Curst. Bleakers, Doomguard, Dustmen, and Signers appear in the new refugee town looking for new recruits.
Meanwhile an Arcanaloth learns about a giant Sphere of Annihilation buried in the ice on the lowest layer of Carceri and wants to find it. Anarchists think nobody should have control over such power, and Doomguards see it as the perfect tool of their cause. And a rogue Asura of the Free League tries to gather an army of bariaurs in Ysgard to claim the sphere as a weapon to fight evil.

[Anonymouswizard]

Remaking the Universe for Fun and Profit (Unknown Armies)

Everybody must be an Adept or Avatar. This is the easy part of the sell.

The game begins and the PCs get wind of an anonymouswizard trying to scene to godhood. There's only one thing for them to do: take the creep down a few pegs, steal his godhood ritual, and try to find a major charge to achieve godhood themselves. Or to guard the thing so that nobody else can use it, at which point the game becomes about setting up a new major occult conspiracy about guarding dangerous magick, but my experience with UA is that PCs tend to have few scruples that aren't related to self preservation.

The PCs will eventually draw the attention of, at the very least, TNI and Max Attax. Then they get to fight an occult war with whatever organisation they've pulled together.

[SimonMoon6]

Don't they have Cthulhu Dark Ages? Would that work?

It wouldn't be the same. Cthulhu Dark Ages is still basically using the Call of Cthulhu game system. My vision is something that actually uses the D&D game system, where characters level up and become more powerful, with the option to be a wizard or druid, knowing full well that all of society would be against you. The dominance of religion would be one of the great difficulties that the PCs have to deal with if they want to be a high tier character. Or, everyone could be low tier characters and not worry about it as much. People can buy magic items (potions, wands, etc) but mostly just ones made by bards (since all other forms of magic either don't work or are considered heretical).

More campaigns = better stories, bro.

Some of my campaigns that I've run (without getting to play in) have been rather intricate things that are difficult to describe in a simple paragraph. Two of my most popular games have been "self insert" games (where the PCs are the players). And both were multi-genre games.

Self-Insert Multiverse Game (Prelude)

The origin of this game is something I struggle to describe because it arose in a very non-traditional way.

It started off as a superhero game inspired by Marvel's "New Universe" comics which were new at the time. Basically, what I found interesting about the setting of the New Universe was that many of the super-powered characters did not know exactly what their powers were or how they worked. I wanted to run a game in that sort of setting. The premise was that the players would describe a character before they got powers and then they would get powers, the extent of which they would not know. The more skilled the pre-powers person was, the weaker the powers they would get. For example, the three PCs were a military guy (with lots of skills), a wrestler (with hand-to-hand combat skills but not much else), and an opera singer (with no useful skills). The military guy ended up with a power of danger avoidance via time travel, but only along his own personal genealogical timeline. The wrestler got some light control powers. The opera singer got vast telekinetic powers that even included a bit of elemental transmutation. But most importantly, their character sheets were kept secret. They didn't know how strong they were or how powerful their powers were.

And, see, I'm already feeling side-tracked as I discuss this because that has nothing to do with what the game would become.

In the "New Universe", the source of everyone's powers was a mysterious "White Event" where the sky went white for a moment. In my game, there was a similar "Black Event" where the sky went black for a moment. What was the source of this mysterious event? In my game, the source was beings of Chaos (Moorcock-ian style Chaos) who were trying to remold this world in their image. However, as a consequence, beings of Law (in the form of giant scalpel-like swords) appeared and tried to eliminate everyone with these powers that had come from Chaos.

To stop the swords of Law, the PCs had to find out how the beings of Chaos had been able to enter this universe in the first place. They tracked it down to a group of gamers, one of whom had found a magic book and used it to summon the beings of Chaos. And guess who those gamers were? They were the same gaming group that were controlling the PCs, with the particular individual who had summoned the Lords of Chaos being me.

Eventually, the only solution to the problem (beings of Law and Chaos fighting in this universe) involved sending that particular gaming group through five universes, to gather a powerful item from each world and return home. It had to be the gaming group (the players) because they were the ones who had summoned Chaos in the first place.

And that was pretty much the end of my pseudo-"New Universe" game, but that started the actual game that I wanted to talk about.

Self-Insert Multiverse Game

The PCs (who were also the players) now had to adventure in five different universes. First, they were in the world of Elric of Melnibone. Then... wow, it's been a long time now... I've kind of forgotten the details. I think next was a superhero world where the PCs got superpowers, then... I've forgotten. The last world was a Call of Cthulhu world though. Anyway, when the PCs returned to their home world, several things happened. First, their magic items merged with their bodies (there were 5 characters and 5 items, so everybody got one), though one guy decided to cut his out (not wanting the Lamp of Al-hazred to become a permanent part of him).

But more importantly, the universe now changed. The PCs had succeeded in making sure that their universe was no longer a Moorcockian world dominated by battles between Law and Chaos. However, because the fifth item came from a Call of Cthulhu universe, the world of the PCs retroactively became a world where the Cthulhu Mythos was real and always had been. Oops. Probably not the best trade-off, but now it was over.

Except that one of those five important characters was "me" who happened to know a lot about the Cthulhu Mythos and so I quickly went insane and became a major villain of the campaign, which now traversed twenty-three different universes (a D&D universe, the Doctor Who universe, Star Trek, DC, etc). And once that particular villain was finally dealt with, the PCs were free to roam around, having adventures in 23 (or more) different universes. One chose to become a king in the Dreamlands of the Cthulhu Mythos stories, another went to study advanced science in the Doctor Who universe, etc. And that was just the beginning...

That was a strange game that quickly became a sandbox game of "what do you want to do?" since the PCs could go almost anywhere and do almost anything, in worlds that they were often quite familiar with (though often not as familiar as they thought).

This game transcended game systems, changing a couple of times, and then mutating into a very different game at the end, when the multiverse was destroyed when the wrong question was asked.

And then, there was my personal favorite...

The Self-Insert Multi-Genre Patchwork World

Here's how this game began: The PCs (who were also the players) were gathering to play a new game that was going to be a self-insert game (yes, this is getting a bit recursive, but bear with me). So, they naturally had brought with them "adventuring gear" in case they would need it in the game they were going to play.

But the PCs never got to play that game (whatever it was going to be). Instead a strange crystal found by the GM suddenly activated and then many things happened rather quickly.

First of all, the PCs suddenly gained all of the powers, skills, and equipment of fifteen of their favorite characters (I had asked for this list before the game began; it was five characters from each of three genres). Many of them were bristling with god-like powers. However, the crystal also turned all five of them evil. As they considered battling amongst themselves, a portal opened up and a badly injured wizard wandered through it. He immediately stopped time and then somehow pulled out the evil parts of each of the PCs. So, now where each PC had been, there was an evil version of that PC (with all the awesome powers, skills, and equipment) and a non-evil version (with no powers, skills, or equipment apart from what they originally possessed).

And then the wizard explained (although not all of what he said turned out to be true). He explained that there was an evil being who was destroying worlds, but keeping a small section of each world (a 1000 by 1000 mile square) as a trophy on a patchwork world. The PCs' world was being destroyed at the moment. And basically their only hope to survive was to go to that patchwork world (through the portal), find more crystals (there was one in each "patch" of the patchwork world), and use each crystal to regain a fraction of the power that their evil selves now possessed. Their evil selves would be hunting for them and trying to kill them, so the PCs needed to hurry and be discrete as much as possible, though they would get a bit of a head start thanks to time being stopped on Earth for everyone except the PCs and the wizard. Then, with enough power, they can fight back against their evil selves and defeat the main bad guy.

Then, the wizard died and it was up to the PCs to explore this patchwork world. In each patch, different rules for what worked and what didn't work would apply. The first world was generic fantasy, where magic worked, but not superpower or high tech. Other worlds including a sci-fi world with robots, an opera world, an undersea kingdom world, a martial arts movie/video game world, 80's cartoon teddy bears world, an anime world, a fairy tale world, a fun on the beach world, a Power Rangers kind of world, a cheesy horror movie world, a world based on Greco-Roman mythology, various superhero worlds, etc. Basically, any genre you could think of, as well as just plain boring forests full of giant insects or a world of liquid mercury.

And the PCs gained powers from the crystals in different ways. Each crystal would give them one thing, like an ability to actually become one of their favorite characters (though staying in that form for too long would start to make their original body transform to become more like that character) or they could gain one ability, skill, or item that that character possessed. There may have been other details, but it's been a long time and I've forgotten.

Also, you can't take a crystal from one of the worlds because then that world is annihilated. One of the PCs actually accidentally did this one time and had huge regrets.

The adventures always involved finding a crystal and moving on, but there were always complications. Sometimes, one of the evil versions of the PCs would get close to finding the PCs. One time the evil versions left a trap (a massive explosive device where the PCs had been told a crystal would be). And there were lots of wacky hi-jinks. One of the more memorable moments was when one of the PCs won his round in a martial arts competition despite being dead at the time (his competitor was disqualified for sending assassins to kill the PCs while they were sleeping).

Eventually, the PCs won. And then, after the actual truth of the nature of the whole campaign was revealed to them (it was meant to be a "gift" to allow the PCs to be who they obviously wanted to be and have the adventures they obviously wanted to have... there wasn't really a massive bad guy behind everything), the PCs got to choose whether to return to a not-destroyed-after-all Earth without any powers or special items (though with their mundane skills and abilities getting significant improvements) or staying on this patchwork world in any patch they wanted.

In the end, two of the five went back home, while three stayed (two in a superhero world and one in a fairy tale world after getting married there).

[Telwar]

Starfinder - The Plucky Delivery Crew

The party are all employees of a small package delivery company, in obvious financial straits. They're hired in when all the company's other crews are busy, for a special delivery.

As they fly off and go into FTL, a component of the drift engine (deteronic frombitzer, L-unit, whatever) fails catastrophically, sending them careening out of the Drift, crashing onto an unexplored world. All communication systems are down.

After several months of exploration and repair, and of course shooting monsters and plundering abandoned temples, they're able to return to Absalom Station...where they find they've been declared dead.

In their absence, their employer has gone bankrupt, and all possessions of the company have been auctioned off (which happens a lot faster than in real life).

Now, the real campaign begins, the PCs have their now-improved ship, and are going to be chased around by:
The AbadarCorp insurance agents who really want their property back (as the owner claimed the policy on the ship prior to the bankruptcy);
The interstellar drug cartel, who want their truly gigantic load of $illegaldrug back;
The mad scientist owner of their former employer, who took their absconding with the ship rather personally;
Dominion of the Black cultists who are upset with the PCs for looting their Sekrit (sic) Temple;
and maybe others.

[Sparky McDibben]

Starfinder - The Plucky Delivery Crew

ZOMG how did I not realize Futurama could totally be a campaign setting????

[Yora]

the Heart of Darkness (D&D 5th Ed.): A Planescape campaign that quietly ignores the most famous planes and instead focuses on the more obscure ones between them, particularly on the chaos side: Beastlands, Ysgard, Pandemonium, Carceri, and Gehenna. The party starts as refugees from a dying Prime world that discovered a portal to the Outlands in the area near Glorium, Bedlam, and Curst. Bleakers, Doomguard, Dustmen, and Signers appear in the new refugee town looking for new recruits.
Meanwhile an Arcanaloth learns about a giant Sphere of Annihilation buried in the ice on the lowest layer of Carceri and wants to find it. Anarchists think nobody should have control over such power, and Doomguards see it as the perfect tool of their cause. And a rogue Asura of the Free League tries to gather an army of bariaurs in Ysgard to claim the sphere as a weapon to fight evil.

On further thought, I should continue working on this campaign right now!

[Sparky McDibben]

On further thought, I should continue working on this campaign right now!

You should! I recently had to run an adventure in Gehenna (PC failed their save vs prismatic spray) and I had the damnedest time finding gameable material about the place. Would LOVE to see your prep notes / reference sources!

[Sparky McDibben]

The Necromancer King is defeated by a band of unlikely heroes after conquering a big chunk of the world, most of his army crumbles to dust.

I have a similar pitch inspired by Dimension 20's Escape from the Bloodkeep! My take was they spend levels 1-5 working for the bad guy, and after the BBEG gets ganked have to make their way out of the Darklands! I'm really looking forward to WebDM's Weird Wastelands supplement; the structure, monsters and environments look tailor-made for this.

[Yora]

You should! I recently had to run an adventure in Gehenna (PC failed their save vs prismatic spray) and I had the damnedest time finding gameable material about the place. Would LOVE to see your prep notes / reference sources!

I'm basically picking up right where I left here.

Planescape being very scarce on actual stuff to do is something I noticed as well. There aren't really any ongoing conflicts other than the ultra generic "it's the blood war" and "the factions have ideological disagreements". The philosophies of the factions are often quite interesting, but don't actually lead to any call of action. The only exception are the Anarchists, who try to bring down any governments as a matter of principle. (With no plan whatsoever how that would improve things, which works for the satirical aspect of the setting but doesn't provide plot hooks.)
The main box is also extremely vague on this, only mumbling a bit of making the campaign about themes and belief, but not giving any examples of how that might supposed to look like.

The very rough arc I have in mind for Gehenna is going to the Teardrop Palace of Sun Chiang to find important tools or records in the biggest black market in the multiverse, which allows them to break into the Tower of the Arcanaloths to find the location of the hidden forrtess of the main villain. And the best way to get inside is going through the realm of Shargaas.

My approach is to leaf through the available material and just pick out some really cool sounding locations and interesting characters and use them as starting points to create my own content. With the extremely vague and broad strokes the setting books are written, it almost feels more like a big box of toys from which you can pick to get your own setting going. But you don't really get a fully developed world like with Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun.

[Bohandas]

"The Steamroller" or "Why Doesn't Elminster Just Solve Everyone's Problems"
A level 20 party go through as many low level adventures as they can, one immediately after another and without resting

[Anonymouswizard]

"The Steamroller" or "Why Doesn't Elminster Just Solve Everyone's Problems"
A level 20 party go through as many low level adventures as they can, one immediately after another and without resting

I like this, just due to it showing exactly why I shouldn't be making those arguments.

Still gonna make them.

[LibraryOgre]

To Be A Wave: A Tale of a Twenty Goblin Winter

For Legend of the Five Rings

The basic concept is that, about two years ago, the old Emperor died, leaving one youngish (post-gempukku, but before he turns 20) son as the new Hantei. Coinciding with the death of the old emperor, there was a wave of assassinations across the empire, leaving many samurai ronin. The players will be these ronin, of whatever background they like, during a "Twenty Goblin Winter"... an event declared by the Champion of the Crab Clan, where anyone coming with 20 Goblin heads is adopted into the Crab Clan.

See, I figure that something important has happened in the Empire. The new Hantei has announced that Hantei I came to him in a dream, and told him to seek a wife outside the Crane clan. This throws EVERYTHING into chaos, as you can imagine... the Crane have taken a heavy blow, and pretty much every other clan is now grooming potential future Empresses. I'm also considering having the Emperor disappear from Otosan Uichi and wind up on the border, a nameless samurai fighting the goblins during the 20 Goblin Winter... in a perfect place for the PCs to stumble on him, not knowing who he is.

Some ones I've already played with:
3 Cranes. One a young woman, who was kicked out of the Crane clan for a made-up offense, when the 20 Goblin winter was announced, in the hopes that she would become Crab, thus allowing the Crane to throw their weight behind her (since she wouldn't technically be a Crane anymore). With her are one or two other Cranes... her father (or other elder relative) who followed her into exile. He is complicit in her being "dishonored", and is hoping to make sure she gets the 20 heads necessary to be a Crab. The other is her admirer, who followed her into exile because he could not leave her side. Wonderful, tragic, Crane story.

A Yasuki, maybe former Crab, maybe former Crane, who was too cowardly for seppuku (the fault was his own; he'd be a ronin for reasons other than the assassination), but now is desperate to get back into a clan.

A Gaijin, washed up on Rokugani shores a few years ago. His pronunciation is barbaric, his ways are strange and foreign, and no one decent will talk to this meat-eating, fork-using swine. But he can use a sword, and so he wants to be Crab.

An eta, perhaps some trade like butcher or whatever, who wishes to raise himself above his station.

[Sparky McDibben]

To Be A Wave: A Tale of a Twenty Goblin Winter

For Legend of the Five Rings

I hecking LOVE Rokugan! Literally the first campaign setting I ever read was Oriental Adventures for 3rd edition. So this is a premise I need to add to my bag of holding!

[LibraryOgre]

Another one, for AD&D:

You were a high level, very skilled, fighter. something like 9th or 13th level. Then you dual-classed into thief, where you are 1st level. And ventured off to the Caves of Chaos, alone.

You have the HP of your high level fighter. You have some gear... your 3rd best armor (your leather armor that you slept in), your best long sword, some miscellaneous magic. But you're a 1st level thief. And you're alone.

[thorr-kan]

Mahabba, City of Silence

My love for Al-Qadim (2E) knows no bounds. But what I'd like to run is a rogues-only campaign set in Mahabba, the City of Charity, more often called the City of Silence. It's a member of the League of the Pantheon, but it's basically occupied by the other members and its own military in response to a series of semi-popular uprisings by adherents of the local deity's religion. 2E has *A LOT* of rogue subclasses. Basically, play it like Northern Ireland occupied by the Mafia.

Omerta prevents me from expressing my love for this idea.

If you dig deep enough into enough settings and Dragon Magazine, 2E will give you rogues who are arcane casters, divine casters, NWP masters, socialites, light warriors...

With rogue XP tables in 2E, you level up fast. So you'd gain power, but you'd lack staying power.

[SimonMoon6]

Here's another idea. It's a bit on the generic side, so it could fit with a variety of game systems and settings.

The Villains Have Already Won

One annoying thing about a lot of game settings is that the heroes are usually trying to do little more than maintain the status quo. I get particularly annoyed by this in superhero settings, since the PCs end up always having to be reactive rather than active, making it hard to have any sort of sandbox setting though I have tried my best (one time I created "newspapers" with various articles mentioning plot threads that the PCs could investigate, but the PCs are still "reacting" not acting).

So, what if the villains have already won?

The Dark Lord has conquered all the major cities in Generic Fantasy World, even the elves and dwarves and stuff. Or, the aliens have captured and/or killed all of Earth's superheroes during their invasion, with the world's countries now completely subjugated by the aliens. Or, the stars were right a few years ago, so Cthulhu woke up and now everything is bonkers; monsters roam the streets and everyone's going insane when they're not being killed.

The closest existing RPG I can think of like this is TORG, where the invaders have already invaded and taken over vast swaths of land, but haven't quite managed to "win" yet.

Basically, the idea would be that the long term goal of the PCs would be to get rid of the enemies, but that's going to take more than one adventure. In fact, it may not ever happen. But the PCs can disrupt the enemy and try to weaken their strangle-hold over the world. Maybe they can free some captured humans and escape to the safe underground, with that being the most that they can hope to accomplish most days. But simply fighting the enemy armies is not even an option because they are too powerful and numerous. They can try to ally with other pockets of resistance but the danger is that maybe those other resistance groups are secretly enemy agents in disguise.

A similar version that I've had in mind for a D&D game in particular is...

Civilization has been Annihilated

While the low level PCs are journeying to a city, suddenly an amazingly powerful enemy from another universe takes action. He drops city-sized Spheres of Annihilation (with slightly different properties) onto every significant city on the entire planet, all at the same time. Small villages are unaffected, but every single city with spell-casters higher than 6th level... they're just gone, leaving just a vast round hole leading down into the ground. And then the invader's armies appear through portals, huge armies of minotaurs, centaurs, and other beast-men come rampaging through the countryside, easily defeating what little resistance is left. There are no high level NPCs who can now save the PCs. There are no magic shops selling high level magic items. The only hope for the world rests in the hands of the PCs who need to level up as quickly as possible to try to take down the enemy forces.

Maybe I would be nice and say that part of one city survived because one wizard was magically forewarned, enabling him to concentrate on his city's giant sphere of annihilation and move it slightly off center... which wasn't enough to save the wizard's life but did save one neighborhood in one part of the city where maybe one or two high level NPCs lived.