Burnt-out DM needs a push. Quickly!

[jdavis]

Plan A: With a gold rush town it would be easy to stick in a spy who has been following them, or even a spy who is there to watch the Widdow for weakness and notices the PC's marching back and fourth hauling stuff. A couple of Evil Rogues slipping down into their dungeon and setting up shop, complete with traps and a couple of hired thugs as guards, heck and maybe even their boss, say maybe a 10th level blackguard who would like to take over the whole area by flooding it with monsters. Heck he could of known about the dungeon the whole time and just been waiting for them to do the hard part. After the a fight and some trap avoiding have a face to face and then have him teleport away to set up a cliff hanger ending for when you do start up again.

Plan B: A young Green Dragon just happens to be looking for a new home after his mother gave him the boot. Oh look a nice hole in the ground, move a little dirt here and there and I have a new home. When the PC's get back from town they find out that more than goldilocks has been sleeping in their bed.

 

[Priest]

and Clerics.



I second that



Real question is do you have someone else in your group that can take up the reigns of the Campaign or Not, I would just hand the campaign off and play awhile.


Priest

 

[Sanackranib]

Yes, I'm burnt out. There's no denying it anymore. At Sunday's (tomorrow's) game I will declare to my players, this will be my last DM-session for a while.
I don't want to abandon the campaign, just take a break. We've all had some great times with it, me included.
I still feel I have to come up with something for Sundays game though, as I've already promised my players that and I don't break promises I can in any way keep!
Problem is, my players finished off their last quest during Friday's (yes, yesterday!) game. Killed BBEG and adopted his old dungeon stronghold for themselves. I now have but 14 hours (8 of which I plan to spend sleeping) to come up with a nights worth off gaming material, preferably without starting anything major. I'd really like to supply something that could be done in one evening, rather than a cliffhanger, so as to minimize the pressure on me to restart the campaign.

The players are a half-orb ftr, an elven archer, an elven wiz and an elven sor, all lvl 8 and with highly questionable ethics. Yes, it's a highly unlikely group, I know. Any ideas at all? Please?

The story has revolved around the arcanists lately, so something for the fighters would be best. The half-orc in particular deserves more attention than what he's been getting lately. Poor guy, stuck with a bunch of elves all the time...

I know there's heeps of both helpful and creative people on these boards. Just hope you read this post, people!

BBEG's twin brother shows up with the reinforcements - sorry we're late boss!

 

[Leopold]

what about cavein's, rock falls, traps left over? Hell make the place start falling apart. Have the PC's go back to town to get loot and have some BBEG2 show up and say "Oh this WAS your place?"

or have the place was once a shrine for a LG god of war and have the paladins and clerics come marching in with a writ from the king/emporer/duchy saying "We have come to claim this land back from the evil that was there before it!" If the PC's resist then therefore they must be evil and not want it back. Moral complications ensue...

 

[Happy Monkey]

I have recently gone through a similar burnout. Happened when the players didn't want to go on an adventure I had been leading them towards. Bad dm

Took time off, watched the all black rugby tour instead on Sundays and before that got a player to run an adventure... it sucked.

Now I wing it, only fleshing out npc motives and get the players to map, i.e. no more maps are given.

My villains have plots that span decades+ so I have made it clear that it is up to the players to decide their direction otherwise the next planned adventure will occur in d6+4 years (game time).

This seems to be working fine, I hardly ever need to prepare a dungeon and they are getting involved more in the politics. Like I said, they do much more interactions than crawling.

I do prep fighting npcs quite a bit, equip them and think of reasons to fight the pcs, oh and good battle locations. The players have tromped off lately to fight Yuan-ti and intend to join the local army for a castle assault!

If you feel you can wing it a bit, let the players lead. Keep notes of all the crazy stuff that happens though because everyone wants there to be consequences.

 

[Jolly Giant]

First of all: Thanks a lot, everyone!

I'm just back from the today's game, and everything went great. The PCs really did all the work for me tonight! They spent most of their time digging around to learn the BBEGs background and motives, trying to figure out why he doublecrossed them and of course getting all his stash identified. This of course meant all the answers they were looking for was stuff I had worked out weeks ago, when first making BBEG. They also spent some time and resources getting some much needed restoration spells. The spectres had drained the fighter down from level 8 to lvl 2, the archer from lvl 8 to 3 and everyone but the sorceress had taken some serious WIS-damage from being repeatedly groped by allips.

On twist occured that added some unexpected action to tonights game, however. While they were still in their weakened state, they discovered the BBEGs elven serving wrench, who was now trapped in the dungeon with them. I had totally expected the PCs to just let her go off, once she had convinced them she had just been an unwilling slave to BBEG. But no! They were about to let her out when they suddenly decided they didn't want anybody other than themselves to know the location of their knew hidey-hole and promptly attacked her. As a I said, the PCs have highly questionable ethics...

They were both confused and surprised when I told everybody to roll for initiative. "But I'm just gonna poke my sword in the maid!" the half-orc protested. Sorry lad, you don't kill a rogue 5/assassin 3 vampire that easily...

I thought for sure this would be the end of the entire party. Looking on the bright side, I figured it shouldn't be a big problem for me to get a break from DMing after yet a TPK-session. I had completely forgotten about the archers 'Hand of Glory' being able to cast 'Daylight'...

So the evening turned out ok. Thanks again for all your input, everyone. I'll definitely bear your advice in mind when the campaign starts up again, sometime after new years. Until then I'll only have my lvl 13 campaign to DM... (don't worry though, I've got a whole bunch of material ready for that group! )

 

[Mark]

heh heh heh ...and you were worried...

Now that you have the extra time, shouldn't you be writing a story hour for that thirteenth level shindig? Given that so few companies put out material for adventures beyond mid-level, I'm sure a lot of folks would be delving into it for ideas.

(Glad things went well! )

 

[Jolly Giant]

Now that you have the extra time, shouldn't you be writing a story hour for that thirteenth level shindig? Given that so few companies put out material for adventures beyond mid-level, I'm sure a lot of folks would be delving into it for ideas.

I just might do that, Mark...