My last great campaign.

RangerWickett · Feb 28, 2005

My current campaign has not been up to my standards. I started it on a lark after my previous campaign died, with the intention of having some quick planar dungeon crawls. But my explanation for why the party would want to go to these planes was piss-poor, and no one bought it. I managed to sort of salvage it, but things look like they'll end on only a mediocre note.

I have run 8 campaigns so far.

In numerology, 9 is the number of completion. Two of my campaigns were great, one was really good, and the rest have been varying shades of okay. Only one (the one that died last fall) was bad.

If I had to guess why the two that were good worked so well, it would be because of the characters. Each game, at least to start, had a steady set of 4 PCs with a clear goal that involved travel. The only time those games suffered was when PCs changed. So what I want to do is come up with a campaign that will last at least a few years, with a core focus and both short and long-term plot threads. And I want players who can stay with me for the whole campaign.

This thread will be my brainstorming thread for the next few days. I won't be starting my campaign until I have a steady job that I'm willing to stay at for the long term, because right now I'm working at a grocery store and I don't know if my willpower will keep me here or force me back to Texas so I can go to grad school. But if I do stay here, I want to start the campaign before GenCon.

My idea for the campaign?

In my world, I have an 8-tiered elemental/planar/spiritual thingy. Earth-water-air-fire-time-life-space-death. So far, by my reckoning, I've done Death twice (my current campaign and the one that died before it). The one element left undone is Time. So when I end this current campaign, it will end with the destruction of the timeline, and the scattering of the world into unconnected realms of time, which can be traveled between.

I want to run D20 Chrono Trigger.

Ankh-Morpork Guard · Feb 28, 2005

RangerWickett said:
I want to run D20 Chrono Trigger.

And now, so do I. Curse you RW, I have enough games already!

RangerWickett · Feb 28, 2005

The first idea I had was to run the game in 8 different timelines at once. The players would make characters in each, and I'd interweave everything. Then I realized that'd be way too complicated.

Instead, I'm thinking of a quest of sorts. There'll be 8 timelines that basically equate to the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and Millennium. Each time period has a feel similar to what I perceive to be the 'feel' of that decade. 30s is a little desperate, 40s is heroic, 50s is paranoid, 60s is benevolent, 70s is trippy, 80s is greedy and morally corrupt, 90s is hedonistic, and Millennium is unguided. Some will be action fantasy, some will be horror, the 70s will be comedy. We'll start in the 60s, in some sort of sheltered timeline where things are still relatively intact, and as dangers threaten that world, we'll learn that we need to go to other timelines to save the entire world.

Most of the timelines will be disparate and far enough apart to have almost no overlap (except for maybe one immortal figure). But two timelines will be only 15 years apart, so the group can see how things used to be, and try to figure out how they become so bad in the future.

RangerWickett · Feb 28, 2005

Okay, the first think I need to figure out, obviously, is how they'll be time traveling. There will be numerous timelines that exist as sort of shards of the universe, so I suppose you might just be able to physically travel between them, but that's too easy. There needs to be some reason why the party has to do this, and not someone else. The adventure needs to be personal to them, and they have to know they're the only men for the job.

Any ideas? Toss open the floodgates of ideas, and let the replies trickle in.

DragonSword · Feb 28, 2005

You said that the timeline of your world has been shattered into different shards of time, so perhaps the only way to bring everything back together is for someone to forger a path between the different planes. OR, what if the PCs have flashbacks/dreams from before the timeshattering event took place, involving family members, wives, children, who have been cut off from them across the time periods, even though they can't remember them.

I'm not so big on time travel myself, but I hope these give you some ideas to find what you're looking for.

Ravellion · Feb 28, 2005

The characters meet at a new age fetival or seminar of sorts. All were sceptics, but recently have received visions of their own lives falling apart. One will lose his loved ones in a car crash, the other will lose all his money etc. They discuss these visions, adna re given an option to change it. A wizard of sorts offers to help them, sending them back and forth in time and asking them to change certain parts of the timeline, so that they will not suffer their bad fate. In the end though, this wizard was not benevolent at all - he wanted to physically destroy time, and sent these visions to the PCs in the first place.

Rav

FCWesel · Feb 28, 2005

RangerWickett said:
Each time period has a feel similar to what I perceive to be the 'feel' of that decade. 30s is a little desperate, 40s is heroic, 50s is paranoid, 60s is benevolent, 70s is trippy, 80s is greedy and morally corrupt, 90s is hedonistic, and Millennium is unguided.

Wow RW, wow. This sounds like a neat idea, indeed. I especially love the feelings to the above mentioned you gave. I did have a thought as I read them, "How could the seven deadly sins come to play in all this?" I mean you don't have to get religious about it, and all.

Stormborn · Feb 28, 2005

RangerWickett said:
Okay, the first think I need to figure out, obviously, is how they'll be time traveling. There will be numerous timelines that exist as sort of shards of the universe, so I suppose you might just be able to physically travel between them, but that's too easy. There needs to be some reason why the party has to do this, and not someone else. The adventure needs to be personal to them, and they have to know they're the only men for the job.

Any ideas? Toss open the floodgates of ideas, and let the replies trickle in.

OK, Well, the gods can't be happy about this. Someone did something unforgivably stupid or evil and it fractured time. Perhaps the God/Personification of Time is dead or dying (it would be a nonlinear event so the verb tenses get iffy.) Killed either in mallice or ignorance, but the results are the same. Things are getting wonky.

The Gods got together and tried to fix it, but the best they could do was stabalize certain eras, but the far future and the far past have already begun to disolve, and it is only the collective will of the godhead that is keeping the 8 temporal regions stable.

What will they do? One of the gods discovers that the only beings who can fix the problem are the ones who caused the trouble in the first place: the PCs. Only thing is - the PCs did it when they were at Epic levels and that particular even is on the edge of the stable set. So the gods find them when they are more plyable - at first level or whenever your campaign starts - and explain to them what's going on.

At fist they may only explain that they have been chosen for a special task - probablly within their own era. A certain quest must be accomplished (so their latter selves in the fragmenting time line don't do it). Once that's done they may get a better idea of what's going on. But the gods save the info about their great crime - and then one era they run into the Big Bad - who just happens to be an evil version of one of them at a higher level.

If you have a group where PCs come and go you can simply explain that the adjustments made so far have altered things beyond the gods ability to predict, the original group is now different, and things have been altered to adjust for that.

This could be very interesting, to run and play, but also very complicated.

The other possibilty is to say that the event that is destoying time has wiped out their personal timelines, so that they never existed. The people they know don't know them. Their mothers miscarried, or they were killed in childhood accidents, and now their lovers treat them like strangers, their homes are occupied by others, and the only people who do seem to recognize might be their mother or father, who treats them like a ghost or a cruel joke.

That would be motive to me.

Epametheus · Feb 28, 2005

RangerWickett said:
I want to run D20 Chrono Trigger.

Nice.

Alright. Well, then: what made the world go kablooie?

My advice would actually be to go along the Lavos/Cthulhuesque route -- something Other entered the world, and Reality simply broke under the burder of trying to support Its presence. Now, It doesn't have to be a god or anything like that; perhaps It exists in a sort of blindspot possessed by the gods. They know It's around, and It's screwing everything up, but they're unable to directly act against It in any way, or even interact with It.

This is where mortals come in -- mortals can interact with It. It exists in someway in all time periods. There are almost certainly horrible consequences for those who sucessfully contact it, yet there are always rewards for dealing with the devil... Anyways, it is within the power of mortals to cast It out of a time period, to physically manifest It in a time period and fight it out, to bargain with It... And to travel to where Its true essence is, and kill it/cast it out for good.

The idea of the PCs being people who've been cut off from the time stream is a nice one; perhaps all mortals who've been cut off from Time have the capability to travel between the eras and meddle with events. It is these people who can potentially oppose It and reclaim the timestream from It. An easy way to make the PCs more special is to establish that the people who are still part of the time stream have no clue that anything is wrong. They can still interact with It, but they cannot grasp Its true significance.

If your players know each other, encourage them to at least consider coordinating backgrounds. It makes life so much easier when the players come up with their own reasons for why the group is travelling together.

Impeesa · Mar 1, 2005

I've wanted to run d20 Chrono Trigger for a long time. The difference is, I wanted to do it with Midnight.

I was going to do it with a god of time that went back to before Izrador's fall and 'stowed away' on the mortal plane. Countless millenia later, Izrador slowly but surely devours the essence of the entire world. Our god of time travels back and relives the intervening time over and over again. It takes a long time, but hey, it's not like he's going anywhere. After countless times, he decides on a particular group of heroes who can potentially stop Izrador before the future he's seen comes to pass. He creates anchor points for them at certain points in time, which they can use to get around without him. These are at certain key points (present day as detailed in the book, the last war, far future, etc). The players can amass power and do various things to weaken Izrador's power base farther down the timeline. Eventually, they can take part in one of the major conflicts and hopefully set him back for good.

Not too relevant to what you're looking at, I suspect, but since you brought it up I thought I'd share.

--Impeesa--