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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 3507529" data-attributes="member: 14159">(Not the real names of these campaigns, by the way)Seven Years on the Inside. . .It began as a normal AD&D 2e campaign in 1997.  We were told up front that it would take seven years to complete, but it would be broken up into seven distinct one-year plot arcs (which would serve as natural stopping points for players to leave or enter the game).  It seemed like a normal enough D&D world, but there were some odd things about it, and before the end of the first game we had figured out an awful lot.  It was set on the inside of a Dyson's Sphere, and it was set in the distant future, around the year 4,000 A.D.  Magic was rediscovered in the 21st century, leading to a second renaissance, as space exploration began augmented by magic.  Demihumans and most monsters were created by genetic engineering.  Eventually, a project to use magic to augment technology to make a Dyson's Sphere functional, and a massive Dyson's Sphere is constructed to serve as a nearly limitless home for mankind. . .but something went wrong when they were migrating inside and civilization regressed backward in technology and when the campaign is beginning it's equivalent to the early renaissance.However, the God of Creation in that setting is Lawful Evil and his virtually immortal high priest learned what his real alignment is (he fools everybody into thinking it's Lawful Neutral),  concludes creation itself is corrupt, and wants to destroy the entire universe as fundamentally flawed so a more pure universe can be created afterwards.  He's engaged on a plan that will take millennia to destroy all creation and slay all the gods to return the universe to total oblivion so that it will be pure again.  The first six plot arcs are parts of an ancient prophecy about a series of champions that will thwart him throughout the ages and protect humanity, and the seventh is when those champions and their allies come together to slay him, but also purify creation as well.It was played through over all seven years (It converted to 3e when it came out, and later to 3.5.)Historic Final Fantasy. . .It began as a semi-historic game set during the third Crusade in 1189 A.D., very low magic (only one PC spellcaster, and that was a Bard).  For about the first half of the game it was low magic and gritty.  A single troll could be the focus of an entire adventure, as rumors of it abound and typical foes were more like saracens, wolves, bears, and bandits.  Then, on the eve of a major battle, a true Wizard Teleports in and takes the PC's to a hidden keep in the Himalayas, revealing that there is an order of Wizards that is trying to prevent magic itself from fading, and that the Crusades are symptoms of a greater disease of hatred affecting all humanity that is poisoning the source of magic itself.  So, with the help of an airship and its dwarven pilot, the PC's begin exploring the world and the elemental planes looking for relics that will help them fight the coming storm.  Eventually they prevent magic from dying, but they have set the course of civilization to prefer magic over technology, (and they incidentally converted the world from 2e to 3e, since the campaign was running when 3rd edition came out). The World of Insufficient Light / a.k.a. Vampiric SuperheroesA Vampire/Original World of Darkness LARP I was in for years.  It started out as a basic Vampire LARP with maybe a dozen players.  It got more popular, as word spread around campus about it, over time it got maybe 50+ players.  The ST's were also pressured into allowing lots, and lots, of stuff.  So, before too long we had Werewolf PC's infiltrating the Vampiric Elysium, Vampires with loads of Wraith allies, some Awakened Mages as recurring NPC's, Mediums/Psychics/Hedge Mage Ghoul PC's, and every "I'm special too" splat of vampires were there (Salubri, True Brujah, Cappadocian, ect.)  Somehow, despite being filled with 8th Generation Ancillae True Brujah combat monsters with Potence 5, Fortitude 5, Protean 5, and Temporis 5, my lowly 11th Generation Neonate Tremere with Movement of the Mind 4 and Biothaumaturgy 2 was the only PC to survive from the first session to the last (The LARP ended with Gehenna, where the ST's rewarded me for surviving so long with a high Humanity by letting him read from the Book of the Red Sign and become mortal again)Masquerade breaches were routine and massive, and handwaved away with implausible deus ex machinas.  A typical one would be an incredibly powerful Revenant is out to kill the vampires who killed him.  Vampires decide on a showdown when they spot him on main street (fortunately this wasn't actually played out on a main street, but a back alley of campus), and whip out heavy machine guns and rocket launchers.  Then somebody drives a truck bomb filled with ANFO into the revenant.  The revenant is untouched, but the building he was standing behind is in rubble.  Vampires are picking up cars and throwing them like Frisbees at him, and the revenant is shrugging off damage that would incapacitate a tank.  Eventually they do enough levels of damage to make him retreat.  So, to deal with a square block of downtown being levelled in a running firefight that looked like something out of a comic book, they spend a few points of Media influence to plant a story about a truck crashing downtown, hitting a gas line and causing a gas main explosion and the truck was carrying loads of LSD so everything everybody saw was just a hallucination. . .really!Laurell K. Hamilton's World of Darkness Saw/CubeI've started several threads talking about this campaign.  The GM is a big Laurell K. Hamilton fan and had never GM'ed before (to tie this all together, she was the PC Vampire with the Wraith minions I mentioned and she NPC'd Lilith in the Gehenna plotline of the above-mentioned LARP).  The campaign begins with a group of assorted starting mundane humans in the World of Darkness  (an Iraq War vet who was a Navy Corpsman, a Chinese Herbalist from San Francisco, a Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney, and a Medical student from Virginia) all being called to a will reading at a huge manor in rural Maine.  There we find we're the only living, non-supernatural relatives of some vampiric elder that has been missing for decades and now presumed dead.  We get his entire multi-billion dollar estate, and his various vampiric and lycanthropic relatives are furious at this and nearly start a supernatural WWIII as we're spirited out of there by the Ghouls of our deceased ancestor.  However, one of these relatives owned a special "labyrinth" which he would torment us with.  He has us captured and thrown into a massive maze/dungeon beneath Sicily.  It is at least three miles on each side and 1000 feet tall, with 4 levels (some rooms are up to 200 feet tall in places with 50 foot pits) and the layout of the floors changes every few hours.  The only way out is to go through various puzzles and morality traps (akin to the Saw movies) with him watching.  We manage to escape (not by the way he wanted us to get out, instead it's a deus ex machina of my PC Awakening as a mage and being able to teleport us all out), and we find ourselves hated worldwide by vampiric, lycanthropic and mage politics (and apparently mages and werewolves swear fealty to their local vampiric princes, and mortal politicians do too but they keep it secret).</blockquote>

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