Abberation Campaign

[arcon]

I am planning on running a large abberation/horror campaign.
I've got my basic plot - Mindflayers planning to open a gate to the Far Realm

1. I just need help deciding what setting or region to use:

Forgotten Realms? What Kingdom?
Generic Medieval?
Ravenloft?
Urban?
Wilderness?
Etc


2. I want this to be a long running campaign. Does anyone have any ideas for low
level adventures that will slowly reveal the bigger picture?

 

[freebfrost]

First off, you might want to pick up the 2nd edition supplement, the Illithiad, for some ideas as you continue your campaign, along with the Lords of Madness book if you don't have that already.

Second, if you are looking for a horror type setting, I'd go away from the Realms - far too many powerful individuals there to truly convey a sense of horror. Eberron seems a good fit based on the plane of Xoriat, but if you're not a fan of that setting, go for something more generic. You might consider a Greyhawk game or the world setting from Goodman Games.

For the lower-level games, start introducing aberrations slowly and increase their presence as the campaign continues, until they meet their first mind flayer at higher levels. Make sure that they know the creatures they start to encounter are definitely "not natural," and make it clear that they need to discover the source of these aberrations.

 

[starwed]

You might want to look at the variant campaign rules in unearthed arcana; particularly the sanity rules.

 

[Kafkonia]

If you don't mind third party material, pick up Deniznes of Avadnu -- one of the coolest, and nicest-looking, monster books I've seen. They have plenty of choice aberrations and just-plain-weird creatures to incorporate in your campaign, such as a giant that tears itself open to unleash a swarm of tiny vermin.

If you don't have Heroes of Horror, you should definitely invest in it. It will help you build the sort of atmosphere appropriate for your campaign, and has a couple of low-level adventures that could easily be adjusted to accomodate aberrations rather than fiends/undead.

You may also want to check out some CoC adventures for low-level ideas.

 

[Ambrus]

I'd consider using intellect devourers as low level opponents. Although I'm not familiar with their 3e counterparts, in 2e they had the ability to take over the bodies of creatures and subsequently masquerade as those creatures by shrinking down, entering the skull of their target and eating their brains from the inside out. It'd make a great body-snatchers scenario as a group of intellect devourers, who work for the mind flayers, begin replacing prominent NPCs in the campaign setting. Even if the PCs kill the hosts, unless it occurs to them to bash in the corpses' heads, it'll allow the same IDs to return again and again. Eventually, as the PCs pursue these elusive and horrifying body-snatchers, they'll tumble to the existence and identity of the mind-flayer overlords who are pulling the IDs strings from behind the scenes.

 

[FunkBGR]

I would recommend two second-edition products - The Gates of Firestorm Peak, and The Night Below. Both are adventures, with aberrations, and in one case (Firestorm Peak) is the introduction of the far realm.

Night Below involves an aberration plot, and it's just awesome to see how the adventure plays out, and could really give some ideas.

Now that I'm thinking some more, you might try and check out the adventures associated with the Illithiad - Dawn of the Overmind and stuff. They've got some other creepy mcgee stuff in there.

 

[Merkuri]

You might want to look into Eberron. Before humans had fully settled the main continent of Khorvaire the daelkyr (powerful aberration lords) opened a portal from Xoriat (the plane of madness) and tried to conquer the world. The early orc druids managed to fight them back and sealed their portals, but those portals could reopen at any time. The Gatekeeper druid sect is dedicated to keeping the portals (located in the Eldeen Reaches) shut, but their numbers have been dwindling over the years and there may not be enough of them in modern times to adequately protect Eberron from the plane of madness.

There are still daelkyr and illithids in Eberron, but they have been driven underground into Khyber (aka the underdark).

I could see an illithid managing to get one of the portals open, and an army of aberrations would start pouring into the forests of the Eldeen Reaches, eventually leaking out to terrorize the entirety of Khorvaire.

 

[Graf]

I love Eberron.
But I think you should use Greyhawk.

For a simple and directed game with a clear villian and endpoint Greyhawk does the job nicely. You can allow a wide variety of pcs in a setting the most everyone understands but without the clutter.

Forgotten Realms is extremely problematic since you have to answer the question: "why doesn't elminster spend one of his combat rounds during the day teleporting into the mindflayer lair and dropping some uber-epic attack on them?" "why doesn't another one of 15-20 30ish level wizards do it?"

Eberron -is- a great setting and it does have a built-in mechanism for this (i.e. the Gatekeepers are growing fewer in number, Xoriat (the Eberron verison of the far realm) is coming back into alignment).

The problem with Eberron is that mind flayers serve the Dalkyr, so you can't use the Mind Flayers as the "big bad", and you have a lot of other powerful groups (The dragons, the quori, the Lords of Dust, Vol, etc) who would probably detect and try to 'stop' the attack.
It would be a good game but you'd wind up re-writing the setting to emphasize mind flayers and de-emphasize the other groups.

But Greyhawk has what you need (the basic DnD setting, mindflayers, etc) but without the epic existing plot structures that would make the story you want to tell excessively bagage heavy.
IMHO natch.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If you're looking for an adventure that starts off with Far Realm themes, you might as well let Mike Mearls start you off right at level 1 that way.

 

[Unkabear]

If you are looking into adding suspence and horror to your game I would suggest looking into the Midnigth campaign setting.