D&D 4E Preparing for 4e - What campaign will you run?

[Toben the Many]

Well, the title says it all.

For those of you planning to run 4e, what are you planning to do? What kind of campaign do you have set up? What are you cooking?

For myself, I'm not overly fond of their fluff, but I love their crunch. So what I'm doing is working on a campaign that is Sword-and-Sorcery meets the Wild West. Fighters will have QuickDraw battles out in dusty streets with their swords. Wizards will be akin to railbarons with access to mysterious Dark Towers which spring up out of the desert wasteland. The Dragonborn will be one of the Native Peoples who live out in the wastes and I'm going to change the Tieflings to "Changelings". Not the Eberron Changelings, the Changelings of legend.

If Bards are one of the core classes, they'll become Shysters - gambling types basically.

Anyhow, what are you all wanting to do? How will you get set up for 4th Edition?

 

[~Johnny~]

After years of DMing in which I built absolutely everything from scratch, I've found that using published campaign settings and even published adventures can free me up to focus on making things fun for the players. I used to spend all my time creating interesting worlds, mythologies and maps. But my players seem to have a better time when I put that energy toward preparing nuanced characters and tactically challenging battles.

So with 4e, I'll be taking the next step and doing something I've never done before: using the "default" D&D campaign setting. I like the general "Points of Light" concept, and I'm perfectly cool with dragonborn, tieflings, and the new pantheon. I suspect this will also help me save a lot of conversion time.

So our adventures may take the PCs to exotic lands, pocket dimensions or different times, but the PoL world is the new "vanilla" for my next campaign.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

I have not made really much progress in my long-though world.... I will probably continue, and perhas put a slightl darker edge...

 

[Cmarco]

Well, I'll likely be running a monthly Living Forgotten Realms game, as soon as I can, really. However, for my weekly game, I suspect I'll use my homebrew setting, where my players are very familiar with the territory we'll be covering. However, I've been working on a way to make my world a little more dark, dangerous, and unpredictable for the PCs, and 4e is really opening up some exciting possibilities. I'll probably advance the setting timeline a bit (some of the changes I've been wanting to make for about 5 years really call for a timeline advancement)... The world I've put together is somewhere in the vein between Mystara, the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and Dragonlance... you know, a sort of generic fantasy world, but with a history/theology/feel all it's own. I have to say, the possibilities that come with the timeline shift (and all the things that can happen in that time), are making me really excited to get to work on all sorts of cool new stuff.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

all in all...

-animeish a bit - but I aim for a darker feels, seinen-like for the fans

-catfolk race... thinkering how to make it a bit more PoL

-Conanesque approach to religion - an 'all-star' pantheon

-much default D&D witrh races and most other bits....

-... but aiming for less used cultures and historical bits - may use Nyambe and Al-Quaidim to fleshen the continent where the catfolk live

-A few alternate classes, possible to add some future optional material - and the world is psionic.

-two orc subraces, one LOTR-like classic, one more Warcraft-like

 

[Creamsteak]

I'll most-likely wait till Eberron comes out to change my home-game over. Online I'll be working on L4W.

 

[Dog Moon]

Well, I think the Points of Light idea might actually work very well with the Underdark sort of campaign that I was thinking of running. My idea was that the group is given a small village to run. I'm thinking maybe they were part of a noble's house that was almost utterly annihilated in a coup and their only ally, another noble house, helped them out by hiding them in this village. This way, they must help this small village against the growing forces of darkness spreading out towards the center of the kingdoms [a darkness everyone is pretty much ignoring because it is currently fairly minor], build it up into a defensive position, while attempting to stay hidden and also finding out why the coup occurred.

 

[Hjorimir]

I'm seriously considering compiling all the fluff from 4E and making a bonafide setting out of it.

 

[Jack99]

I'm seriously considering compiling all the fluff from 4E and making a bonafide setting out of it.

Same, I just need to find the time while prepping for my weekly 3.5 game which will last till 4e comes out (or longer, should 4e turn out to be horrible).

 

[reanjr]

Homebrew, trying to take into account everything that has been gleaned from their previews. Rather than the ancient fallen empire that is so common in campaigns, I am using an empire on the verge of collapse run by Hobgoblins. Other races are lower class citizens that cannot hold office or power.

Humans, Dwarves, Elves are formed into an alliance based on mutual oppression. Tieflings are high-ranking servents to the Hobgoblin empire. Halflings are like gypsies. Orcs rule over a loose confederacy of nations that are in alliance with the Humans, et al. Eladrin I am going to treat as aborigines (in the technical sense), still holding sway over secluded vales and such. Dragonborn - well I can't figure out a place for them yet.

Clerics and Wizards are both extra-governmental organizations with political power. They are somewhat analogous to Catholics (wizards) and Protestants (clerics) but without the religious zeal of hatred. Thes organizations are one of the few places non-Hobgoblins can hold power.

Still working out a lot of stuff. Should be interesting to try to keep up with the new info as it comes in and try to get a fully-functioning campaign by release date.