Campaign help

[Fat Albert]

Ok im about to start a new campaign with a group of new players. The story will be something like this: The PCs start out in a small village where a mage, who has settled at this village to conduct his research in peace, has hired them to retrieve and artifact from somewhere(havent decided where yet). After the PCs accomplish this he will tell them that something is not right in the universe and will send them to meet his other mage friend for more information. Once they go to this guy he will tell them that an evil god or demon is gathering an army to attack the material plane. The PCs will have to infiltrate the plane and stop the invasion.

Ok here are my problems:

I was thinking of having the mage friend be the mage in The Valley of the Mage but since i dont know much about Greyhawk, i need to know if this would work.

Would a different setting besides greyhawk be better for this campaign?

What plane would be best for the invasion and what god or demon would orcestrate this invasion?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[arwink]

I know nothing about greyhawk, but one of the real joys of planar invasions is that the multiverse tends to be very equal in its approach - all worlds are fair game

The traditional choices are demons, especially folks like Lloth, Graz'zt and Orcus, who make cool big-bads.

A more interesting choice would be to leave aside the Evils altogether, and plan an invasion of chaotic types from Limbo - Slaad get no-where near the love they deserve. The advantage of this is that the slaad aren't likely to have centralised leadership, so even if the PC's kill one big-bad there's still the possibility of several others going about their own plans. Lawful creatures work for this as well - formian invasions are equally as frightening as demons, and are usually slightly easier for lower level parties to handle.

One idea, if you really want to throw the Pc's a twist, is this: the second mage is planning the invasion. He originally started as a good wizard, but has secretly drifted towards evil due to the influence of an evil artifact he was studying.

He can summon demons no problem, but only for limited time and not in enough numbers to form an army. So he gets his old friends to send him capable adventurers, then sets about getting them to gather the components of an ancient gate that will let hundreds of demons cross over.

Nothing like putting the Pc's in the midst of a war that they themselves are partially responsible for starting

 

[Sharack Bladestorm]

Invasion of different sorts

Two other sorts of invasions come to mind --

1, The Unlife - Terry Amthor's SHadow World had as one of the background villians this evil? or perhaps chaotic? or just all consuming force called Unlife. Sort of an anti-life, undead spawning, all-corrupting essence/energy which can cause all sorts of havoc, perhaps be wielded by unpleasant sorts and such

2, Extra-planar or Elemental invasions - The old Torg game had a nifty mechanic where people attempted to change the reality of particular areas to match their particular religion/culture/world (some parts might be Egyptian, some Celtic, some Horror etc.). I used that sort of "conversion" process for an invasion from the Elemental Planes. Agents of Elemental dieties were attempting to "taint" the magical places of the world (in my case, I was using Rolemaster's Earthnodes and essence flows). Their plan was to replace the local dieties with the Elemental dieties and related influences...

Ciao,
Sharack