Alternatives to "Save the World"

[Masada]

For the Epic game...

Perhaps it is time for a change. Have the players defend a village from certain doom in suicidal glory. Something like the movie The Magnificient Seven. Then make new characters... maybe the players with the best character suicides get to pass on some kit.

A favorite our DM pulled... dimension hopping. Take the PC's in to Shadowrun or something similar. You'll have to decide how magic will or won't work.

A variant of dimension hopping... journey to the Underdark. The real underdark, make it gritty. Introduce new monsters for which even Epic characters are not immune. Consider some evolutionary biology and think about what monsters that never see daylight might be capable of (long range attacks in total darkness, etc).

 

[Dausuul]

Edit: Most DMs, or GMs if you prefer, do not allow a party to accomplish any of the things you describe here. With at least three or four of the former GMs I’ve played under, it was purely a matter of the PCs were just supposed to be killers and destroyers, doing the bidding and suffering the abuse of the GM – and that was all. Any attempt to do anything else was at least sabotaged. The inn and tavern we bought was burnt to the ground, “to keep us adventuring” said the GM. “Good aligned” NPCs stopped us from distributing blankets and food to poor people in winter because “that was not our job.”

...Oookay. Those sound like some horrible GMs. Unless you've done some scientific polling, though, I'm going to have to take exception with your claim that "most GMs" do this; I've had a few like that, but - thankfully - not very many.

I'm not above giving my PCs the occasional plot hook upside the head, but if they want to get invested in the game world by doing something like buying an inn, I'm all in favor of it. That's the sort of thing that makes for fun campaigns. (It's also a gold mine of plot hooks.)

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Make the best of a horrible situation...

That is pretty much the premise of the Midnight Setting. The BBEG has already won and it is pretty clear that the defeating him is outside of the scope/intent of the setting. Instead the PCs are supposed to pick their battles (figure of speech, not necessarily combat) and make small victories which make life a little better than it was before.

 

[Set]

1) Riftwar scenario - a powerful force beyond all comprehension or hope of defeating has invaded your world and is consuming it utterly (Tharizdun, Galactus, Cthulhu, whatever), while your greatest gods fight a holding action, your epic party must seize as much of society as possible and move them to a safe place, elsewhere in the planes. The inhabitants of those planes won't likely be too happy at the sudden arrival of the surviving refugees from your lost world, and they must be dealt with somehow as well, to prevent the extinction of everyone from your world.

2) A growing Darkness - the plane of Shadow has long been seen as a dark and twisted reflection of the material world. It has grown more dark and dangerous, and spells to travel there are no longer safe to use. Undead shadows grow prolific, and attempts to eradicate them seem doomed to failure, as there are always some that dive into the ground and get away from attempts to destroy them. Society itself seems to be breaking down, and scrying has discovered a horrible thing. Fiends now walk openly in the plane of Shadows, and they are somehow infecting the shadowy duplicates of material people with some fiendish taint that carries over and taints the material-plane dopplegangers! As people's 'shadow-selves' become warped and twisted, they too begin to turn towards evil, and child-bearing women whose shadow-selves have been demon-touched give birth to Tiefling babies! The party must travel into the Shadow plane to try and stop this fiendish plot, but discover that it's to late. Purging the fiendish taint from the shadow-self causes it to die, and, in the mortal world, the corresponding person loses the will to live and dies shortly thereafter! Portents of doom begin to appear, and the epic party learns that some of the gods themselves are hastening the end of days, because they believe that the only hope now is end this universe and start over!

Does the epic party help the gods to destroy the universe, while the fiends of the pit attempt to stop the apocalypse (We were winning! You saw! We were winning...)? Do they side with the fiends and attempt to stop the impending end of days, believing that they've found another way to stop this merger between the fiend-tainted Shadow plane and the Material plane?

If there is a third option, will it involve the god of the sun giving his life, explaining his decision to end the world and start over, rather than commit suicide?

3) And he wept, for there were no more lands to conquer - 30th level and nothing to do. Bored. Epically so, even. And then the new universe is found during some Epic research, a world much like the Material plane, but inhabited by *things* too horrible to contemplate. They came from the stars and conquered this world aeons ago, and whatever man-like races once thrived in those cyclopean ruins are now gibbering mad things that howl and caper before their writhing oblivious alien masters. The Things have made some incursions into the Material plane, but never seriously, and the world certainly is in no danger, at least, not yet, but the rulers have come to the notion that perhaps this world can be taken *back* from them, and the monsters not just reacted against when they invade, but bearded in their own den... The Epic party is asked to invade this world, with their armies of followers and troops provided by a coalition of allied rulers, to secure first a beach-head, and then finally, to reclaim this lost world entirely for the races of man, driving the tentacled monstrosities back into the cold depths of space!

 

[Ktulu]

My overarching plot will be what happens in the wake of a falling empire. But the main story is simply WAR.

Ktulu

 

[Henry]

Prevent the party's Alienist wizard from consummating his marriage to the Lethe-dipped spawn of Baalzebuul who is unknowingly masquerading as a pretty halfling girl who is unaware of her true form: a giant maggoty-beetle thing.

Piratecat REALLY needs to do his Story Hour again... *sigh*

 

[Henry]

For our Planescape game, it's a "save the multiverse" style game, so no help for you there, I wager.

For our 4e Eberron game, I started with a "save the world", but we've actually digressed a bit to
"amass gold and fortune, and keep yourself alive from the threat you're on the run from" story arc. I do have some other plans in the works, but it's aiming more for "stop the pirates from running an operation that could set two nations to war."

 

[ejja_1]

Save the women and children first

I would think most adventurers would have thier own reasons for adventuring , some it's for the treasure some it's for the glory. And for some it's just so they can kick in the next door and loot the next corpse. I guesse im lucky, my Dm doesnt pigeon hole me into moral choices I don't feel like making. Instead he provides us with options and let's us figure out the rest for ourselves.

 

[Eric Tolle]

Crime.

In the upcoming 4E game I'm in, our group of wannabe crime lords are going to be competing with other Thieve's Guilds for a slice of the pie in a major city. My Warlord, a former minion, is tired of taking orders and wants to accumulate wealth and power with the goal of taking over the city, and eventually, the nation. He's not greedy, unlike his former boss; a nation is just the right size for him.