Rifts-Style Campaign Outline, critique please

[st33d]

Starting my second homebrew campaign. This time I'm preparing the world in advance.


A little background: I run open table games at a bar via a meetup.com group. Anyone can turn up and play D&D. I would drop people into an episodic plot, smoosh over the issue of how people joined the expedition into this mega-dungeon, and put off people asking to sell all the treasure I'd invented. It worked fairly well, and the last game was a fun romp backwards through all of the places visited in the campaign episodes.


I want to run something more tailor made for the open-table now. Please have a look at my Rifts-Planescape style world and tell me what you'd add to it, take away, or change. I've been sketching this out for a week or so now so I'm not objective about it - I really need an outside opinion.


Thanks in advance. (Cross-posted from /r/unearthedarcana, feedback is a bit slow in coming, don't know if that means I've written total rubbish or not.)

 

[chriton227]

I'll pull in the PDF to look at when I get home this evening. When you say Rifts, are you talking about the Palladium Games post-apocalyptic game, or the Trion Worlds fantasy MMO?

 

[st33d]

Ah yeah. It was more the portal aspect of Palladium Rifts, and the ease of bringing in any characters from any setting as opposed to crapsack world.

See - I didn't get feedback for a while, and then I got some confused feedback on Reddit. Which made me review what I'd written.

The whole slavery thing is fun for a few sessions at most - but if you pin anything bad on a player, they'll want to spend the entire game unpinning themselves. And I don't really want that - I want them to treat Nex like an exciting place they might call home one day. An abusive relationship isn't the right track.

I've attached my current revision: I've retooled it that the players are bounty hunters and Nex is like a black market realm that does shady deals. Instead of collars, I changed them to bracers - it's less threatening. I can hide a sinister nature in them without a player flat out refusing to join in from day 1.

I still need to flesh it out more, but I think my second draft is a bit better. "You're all dimension hopping bounty hunters", sounds a lot more exciting than, "you're all slaves."

 

[chriton227]

I like the premise. I look forward to seeing it more fleshed out. I can just imagine the reaction of the players the first time they stumble across the ethereal representation of the bracers.