Which monsters (or closely related groups of monsters) make the best campaign theme?

BOZ · Aug 29, 2005

I was thinking about this one. which monsters, or races, can have a campaign (or a large part of a campaign world) based around them - exclusively, or just largely so?

Mind Flayers are a great example of this. not only do they have their own lands, but they also have a lot of closely associated monster types (just look at Lords of Madness for example! ulitharids, illithidae, urophions, and more!), resources, and more.

the Drow (though often maligned for their overuse on this point) are another excellent example.

Giants (hill, cloud, fire and frost especially) also work really well for this point.

Sahuagin are a great example for undersea campaigns.

others?

Dannyalcatraz · Aug 29, 2005

You can just go NUTS with Undead, especially with intelligent undead who can create minions...

I just LOVE it when the corrupt lords and other enemies the PCs have slain over the past few months of gaming show up as undead minions of the TRUE villain. Its even better when the party's fallen comrades also show up as brain-gobbling soul-suckers!

They work in virtually any setting, any terrain, any environment or plane.

Since they are the same temp as the ambient surroundings, they are harder for those dependant on infrared vision to spot in darkness (if you use that rule).

Infernal Teddy · Aug 29, 2005

Orcs

Githyanki

A Lich and his dog... errrr... skeletons

F5 · Aug 29, 2005

I haven't gotten to run it yet, but I've been building up a campaign with dragons as the central theme/baddies. I think it will work pretty well, but even focusing on the low cr dragon stages, it's shaping up to be pretty high-powered...

Voadam · Aug 29, 2005

Mind flayers and giants are tough to base a campaign around. Mind flayers can be behind the scenes for low level play, but giants are really tough to base a campaign around when you start at 1st level. Diamond throne has giants from level 1 but they are a 1 HD medium race that has paths to getting bigger through racial levels.

ThirdWizard · Aug 29, 2005

F5 said:
I haven't gotten to run it yet, but I've been building up a campaign with dragons as the central theme/baddies. I think it will work pretty well, but even focusing on the low cr dragon stages, it's shaping up to be pretty high-powered...

Dragons are great. You can use a variety of minions, kobolds, lizardmen, I've even used reptilian ogres. Dragons are also a wide range of CRs. In my current game, I have an area controlled by a family of black dragons, and the youngest ones have been trying to expand the territory by making their way out. That way, the PCs can fight younger dragons while working their way toward the more powerful ones if they so choose (they havn't yet).

Plus they're iconic to the game.

Psychic Warrior · Aug 29, 2005

Dragons, Demons and Undead make, to me, the best campaign theme vilians. There is a lot of range (use anything from Kobolds to Lizardmen to humans for Dragon minions, any race can be corrupted by the touch of demons and the undead have an inherent cool factor to me that make basing a campaign off of them easy).

I have acutally played in games that combined all three!

Cavalorn · Aug 29, 2005

Let's see... we're talking about creatures that are ambitious, have an agenda, are intelligent enough to form plans and are varied enough in their abilities to make fighting them an interesting experience. I'm surprised hobgoblins aren't used more often.

Here's a thing about the Drow, the Githyanki and the dragons. They all have environments that mean they can strike at pretty much any conceivable target. Drow can come from beneath, Githyanki from the Astral and dragons from above. A successful campaign monster should perhaps live in the kind of place that allows it to mount an assault without trekking across miles of ground to do so.

I'm sure that the 'next Drow', whatever they prove to be, will have a habitat that conjoins with the material world in a similar way.

A'koss · Aug 29, 2005

The Far Realm is always been a favorite around here as well as Giants. Githyanki, as mentioned, are a cool race to base around an invasion. Fiends and undead are always welcome. I once had a beholder empire in one of my old campaigns but that's a playground for only the extremely high level.

A Ragnarok-style setting can be fun too, with warring divine beings and their semi-divine armies turning nations on their heads as they get caught in the crossfire.

I'm quite enjoying the theme of my current low magic game where the bulk of the "day-to-day" threats are simply from non-magical beasts based on Earth's early mammals. The BBC series called "Walking with Beasts" (which, unfortunately, they've removed the bulk of that excellent website) was a great inspiration for a world where humans really have to share their world as they are greatly outnumbered by the local predatory (and unusually intelligent) fauna.