ReportedHanson6
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Dominaria: Campaign/Adventure ideas
- Thread starter Dannyalcatraz
- Start date
havard
Adventurer
Interesting, I have just been exploring the same idea here. Dominaria as a D&D Campaign Setting sounds pretty interesting 
-Havard
-Havard
GX.Sigma
Adventurer
Lately I've been rather obsessed with creating a Mirrodin campaign, as it's something most players have likely never seen in an RPG. My main difficulties have been reconciling the lore (questions like: what is water? can living creatures eat metal? do hexplates regrow? where do golems come from?) and laying out the map. An interesting wrinkle is that there's no money in Mirrodin: gold is worthless, and nearly everyone is an isolated tribe.
I'll share my progress if people are interested.
I'll share my progress if people are interested.
Feel free to share!
I would try something about conquering terrain... more land = more mana = more power for your master planewalker or your faction... Adventures would involve traveling and fighting to consolidate power in Urborg volcano or the Great bayou, maybe variations defending your land and blocking your enemies form aquiring new land...
Great trips to hidden places to obtain rare enchantments or spells (cards) seens interesting... maybe you need to invade the Sengir castle or Urza´s Tower to disenchant a great artifact that is freezing the whole kingdom (winter orb?)
Campaign arcs could be about fighting one planewalker of each color... maybe starting with the obvious black, corrupting evil.. and them fighting against chaos and the barbarians... probably using some philosophical themes for each mana color. (keeping calm and controlled to fight red... Instincts and rage should be used against blue...)
Just my two cents
Great trips to hidden places to obtain rare enchantments or spells (cards) seens interesting... maybe you need to invade the Sengir castle or Urza´s Tower to disenchant a great artifact that is freezing the whole kingdom (winter orb?)
Campaign arcs could be about fighting one planewalker of each color... maybe starting with the obvious black, corrupting evil.. and them fighting against chaos and the barbarians... probably using some philosophical themes for each mana color. (keeping calm and controlled to fight red... Instincts and rage should be used against blue...)
Just my two cents
While that "conquering" theme probably wouldn't fit my style, there is a kernel in there I could use.
Doing mission for a true Planeswalker- collecting this & that, recruiting certain allies, finding artifacts, or establishing bases of operations for other agents- all could be very flavorful ways of linking the party to the background world.
Which makes me ponder...how should Planeswalkers appear to the PCs? Regular but powerful members of the world's races, or something more abstract?
Doing mission for a true Planeswalker- collecting this & that, recruiting certain allies, finding artifacts, or establishing bases of operations for other agents- all could be very flavorful ways of linking the party to the background world.
Which makes me ponder...how should Planeswalkers appear to the PCs? Regular but powerful members of the world's races, or something more abstract?
Wik
First Post
Hm. It's been more than a decade since I've played MtG, so consider this more of a thought exercise.
But what if you just accept that it's going to run like a D&D campaign set in Dominaria? Really, I think that's a good place to start anyway, since if you get too weird, you run the risk of alienating players. Instead, if you want to make it like MtG, why not focus on what makes Magic so... magic-y?
In other words, why not tie the characters to the cards?
Okay, so your background is tied to a land card. Are you from an island? Throw an island card onto your character sheet. Ditto for mountains, forests, and the like. And I'm sure there are still a lot of weirder land cards that PCs could hail from. Whether you want those cards to be represented by traits is up to you.
You can throw in spells as cards, and give them to players. Rather than putting fireball on your character sheet, you have a fireball card. And of course, when you cast it in play, you tap it.
Magic items become Artifacts, and summons are now actual cards that the summoner has access to.
If you want to be really creative, you could have players actually have a "deck", and they get to play one card each turn in addition to their actions - laying a land card, channeling energy, and performing various spell effects. You could devise some sort of subsystem using magic cards to correspond to RPG events. How you'd do it would take a lot of work, but it's doable, I think.
What I'm getting at is, it's a losing battle trying to make the setting of M:tG work if you divorce it from the cards. It'd be like trying to convert Greyhawk into a diceless setting. Or converting a record like Dark Side of the Moon into a novel.
But what if you just accept that it's going to run like a D&D campaign set in Dominaria? Really, I think that's a good place to start anyway, since if you get too weird, you run the risk of alienating players. Instead, if you want to make it like MtG, why not focus on what makes Magic so... magic-y?
In other words, why not tie the characters to the cards?
Okay, so your background is tied to a land card. Are you from an island? Throw an island card onto your character sheet. Ditto for mountains, forests, and the like. And I'm sure there are still a lot of weirder land cards that PCs could hail from. Whether you want those cards to be represented by traits is up to you.
You can throw in spells as cards, and give them to players. Rather than putting fireball on your character sheet, you have a fireball card. And of course, when you cast it in play, you tap it.
Magic items become Artifacts, and summons are now actual cards that the summoner has access to.
If you want to be really creative, you could have players actually have a "deck", and they get to play one card each turn in addition to their actions - laying a land card, channeling energy, and performing various spell effects. You could devise some sort of subsystem using magic cards to correspond to RPG events. How you'd do it would take a lot of work, but it's doable, I think.
What I'm getting at is, it's a losing battle trying to make the setting of M:tG work if you divorce it from the cards. It'd be like trying to convert Greyhawk into a diceless setting. Or converting a record like Dark Side of the Moon into a novel.
Wik
First Post
Make each PC an agent for a different planeswalker. And have each player describe their planeswalker. Going with my earlier idea, you could even have each player hand you a 60 card deck representing what THEIR planeswalker is capable of.
You could even have each PC describe their planeswalker's villain. So the guy with a Red/Black planeswalker could have a villain that is a Blue and built on counterspelling. And so on, and so forth.
Hell, as they do things for their planeswalker, you could even reward the players with cards representing their achievements. And you could have major villains be planeswalkers... and when PCs beat said villain, you take away cards from that villain's deck.
This, of course, leads up to a battle royale. Either a game where each player runs his planeswalker's deck (and you control the BBEG's deck, or something), or one-on-ones where each planeswalker faces his end foe.
Some of what you suggest are things I'm doing in some form, like items being Artifacts, or using the cards for inspiration. The PCs will even power their supernatural abilities with "colored mana"- in HERO terms, END Reserves with some campaign-specific rules. They'll even be limited to 4 uses of (most) pores per day.
However, some actually wouldn't work for mechanical reasons- one of the reasons I'm taking a break for the mechanics side is that "counterspelling" in HERO, while quite effective and well-supported, functions a bit differently than it does in M:tG, so I have to figure out what I can do as RAW HERO, and what will require some HRing.
So PC design can be linked to the cards, but letting players design their PCs on constructed decks would have to be tempered by the realities of HERO's system.
That said...I COULD make your idea work a bit more by borrowing a page from Zelazny's Amber and do as you suggest, making M:tG cards as "Obvious, Acceccible Foci" for certain spells, like summons.
Hmmmmm...
However, some actually wouldn't work for mechanical reasons- one of the reasons I'm taking a break for the mechanics side is that "counterspelling" in HERO, while quite effective and well-supported, functions a bit differently than it does in M:tG, so I have to figure out what I can do as RAW HERO, and what will require some HRing.
So PC design can be linked to the cards, but letting players design their PCs on constructed decks would have to be tempered by the realities of HERO's system.
That said...I COULD make your idea work a bit more by borrowing a page from Zelazny's Amber and do as you suggest, making M:tG cards as "Obvious, Acceccible Foci" for certain spells, like summons.
Hmmmmm...
John Q. Mayhem
Explorer
My brother and I put together a game set in Zendikar, one of the more recent planes. There were cycles of cards that depict various expeditions and adventures, and we were taking turns running adventures based on the cards. We used monsters from M:tG, and we could just throw down the cards to show the players what they looked like. It was pretty awesome.
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