Campaign Concepts You've Got On Deck

[TwoSix]

1) Dark Sun using Worlds without Number, with a focus on exploring Tyr's underbelly and Cronenberg-esque body horror created by halfling geneticists from the Blue Age.

2) Eberron game focused on a sect of Gatekeepers in the Shadow Marches, where all the characters are druids or possibly gestalt druids.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I’d love to run a very small group (2 players at most) game where the players are gish duelists, wandering around fighting duels and learning new techniques.

 

[Schmoe]

The Delve - an episodic, beer-and-pretzels game consisting of just a single city, surrounded by wall that keeps at bay the Void. Once a week, a gate appears in the wall that leads to some sort of realm or dungeon within the void. The gate only remains open for a few hours, and those who don't make it back before the gate closes are lost forever. Within each realm, though, are astral shards, which can be thrown into a strange well at the center of town. At first the character options available in the town are limited. Only the 4 base classes, limited items available in shops, just a few races, etc. However, as more astral shards are thrown into the well the nature of the town changes, and more options are available to the players. I envision a high-turnover game with lots of dead PCs, room for TPKs, and the players keeping a varied roster of characters to have fun with new options.

The Thracian Odyssey - A campaign that starts with the Caverns of Thracia, but with a community of escaped slaves in the ruins of Huvat Vexx. The PCs become the saviors of the slaves, but when the Forgotten King is awoken the PCs must activate the pyramids to save them, thereby transporting the city and the slaves into a forgotten cavern deep below the earth. There the PCs must lead the community of slaves through the Land that Time Forgot to a safe haven.

The Endless Stair - Some sort of plane-hopping romp through the outer planes and places stranger still, as the PC's chase down a thief who stole one of the Seeds of Creation, while trying to avoid the Inter-Planar Continuum Consortium agents from vaporizing them and selling their dust to the Circle of 9.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think I'm going to gin up an OSR Spelljammer/Planescape mashup. I have some keen ideas about using nexus points, rooms full of doors, to facilitate travel rather than endless sailing through the void. With a seccession of galactic builders and various states of environmental stuff and despair the nexus points themselves can become adventure locations. The idea of portals and doors also lets me pull in a lot of Planescape stuff. It'll probably be Black Hack based, with some Into the Odd and a couple of other things thrown in.

I also want to dial it back from being a high level idea to something a little more hardscrabble and nuanced. So maybe mix in some Firefly, and a little H. Rider Haggard. Plus maybe a touch of Guardians of the Galaxy. I am going to call it Planejammer too.

 

[cbwjm]

It might not be a particularly exciting concept, but I'd like to run the thunder rift modules and have players who are all townsfolk from the rift. Afterwards I can either set up additional adventures in thunder rift or have them head out into the wider world.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I've got an odd idea that's been rolling around in my head...

At the beginning of the campaign, the characters have a Level Limit of 5. The characters will retire at the end of 5th Level.

Then the players roll up new characters in the same world and region as their old characters, perhaps even inspired by their old characters. Time has passed, and we see the effects of the first characters on the world. These next characters have a Level Limit of 8. They retire after 8th Level.

The next characters have a Level Limit of 10. Each time we roll up new characters, we start again at 1st level, but leveling up in the previously-experienced levels is faster.

The next wave has a Level Limit of 15, then 18, then finally 20.

By the end of the campaign, the players have each gotten to experience at least six different characters, each growing upon and expanding the world-building set by the previous wave of characters.

 

[Shiroiken]

I always have more ideas than I could ever run because I keep coming up with ideas during my campaigns! My current campaign is entering its final arc, and I'm taking a sabbatical for the first time in 5 years. I figure I'm going to figure out which idea I want to do and start fleshing it out before the next DM's campaign ends. All of them are for 5E D&D, because that's what my group plays.

*A Game of Thrones style campaign based in the failing Great Kingdom. The PCs will be serving one of the lords, and with the slow collapse, these outlying fiefdoms are rife with potential shenanigans. Probably going to introduce the Iron League, putting the party on the spot to continue to serve the Great Kingdom or push for rebellion. This might possibly put them at odds with their lord too.

*An Epic Quest where the party will traverse the length and breadth of the Flanaess, allowing me to show off the various areas of interest. The party needs to find/assemble the McGuffin (possibly Rod of Seven Parts) to stop some catastrophe (no idea).

*A Barbarian North campaign similar to the Epic Quest, but smaller in scope. I've already introduced the 5 Blades, and this would continue that arc with the PCs assembling them to prepare an invasion against the weak southerners.

*A War campaign highlighting the ongoing struggle of Furyondy and the Shield Lands against the evil Iuz and Horned Society. Not sure how this one would lay out, but I haven't used Iuz yet, and I feel I need to soon.

*A City of Greyhawk campaign exploring the free cities in and around Greyhawk. Probably social in nature, but more underworld than the GoT campaign idea.

A completely new setting than Greyhawk (*shudder) which allows me to design something that is consistent and fits the rules of 5E. Got a vague idea in mind that will probably be more exploratory in nature.

*Rokugan adapted to 5E. Love the setting, and would probably run a modified post-Day of Thunder where the "niece" of the emperor rises to power instead of Toturi. Spoiler: she's not actually blood related, as the imperial father was a cuckold.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm contemplating a handful...
Dune: The Jihad of Mu'adib. PCs as local leaders during the jihad. I'm not certain whether to use Burning Wheel Jyhad, to port Jyhad to Burning Empires (which isn't hard) or to wait for Modiphius' Dune 2d20. Each has the tools needed. The goal is to rebuff the Jyhad. this could be a short-form

Sentinel Comics: A matrix of Pane... Pane, of course, being a pun on his powers... He creates barely visible walls of force that look like panes of glass, and uses them to inflict pain on others. Should be 6 to 8 sessions.

Sentinel Comics: Laika's Revenge: The ghosts of animals sacrificed to advance Space Exploration come back and torment the people of the city. Both groups - One group has a former cosmonaut hero, and the other group has a ghost banisher cop...

A Ribbon of Sky: A fantasy campaign set in a ring of air around a neutron star, but with some of the assumptions of Spelljammer in place (but not the inter-sphere travel). Inspired by Niven's The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring.

Heading for Home: It's 2000... you're in Poland. WW III started 3 years ago, and HQ just said, "Good luck, you're on your own!" Waiting for the backer alpha on T2K 4.

I've not got a campaign concept yet, but Talisman Adventures rules look good. I'd have to work up session 0 on it with the players.

 

[Raduin711]

I would like to do a campaign where I flesh out and explore the undersea races of D&D. Sea Elves, Tritons, Locathah, Merfolk, Sahuagin, etc. Why do so many of them mistrust surface people? How does an aquatic society work without the technology of the world above (forged metal, liquid materials.) This would be done from their own perspective rather than the perspective of air-breathing visitors. Less focus on ships and piracy and more on undersea caverns and aquatic environs.

 

[Aldarc]

There are a fair number of concepts I would love to use for a campaign, but I also would not mind turning some of my past one-shots into campaigns:

Paranormal 1840s Vienna: A supernatural investigation society set in Vienna during the 1840s, or at least before the 1848 Revolutions. It's crazy how many peoples and present day countries/territories were part of the Austrian Empire during that time: Austria, Hungary, Transylvania, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Lombardy, and Venice. So you are basically throwing the supernatural and paranormal in the mix of a multi-ethnic empire that was ready to tear apart with nationalist movements. So throw paranormal monsters and investigators from all around Central Europe into the capital city of Vienna - using real city maps of Vienna from 1840s (and players familiar with present day Vienna) - and have at it. My major issue has been with deciding a system: Dresden Files Accelerated (as per the original one-shot), Vaesen (YZO Engine), Monster of the Week, or Urban Modern Fantasy (essentially a modern, urban fantasy version of Dungeon World).

Fantasy Renaissance Not-Venice: I ran a one-shot of Fate for an ex's friend that I set in a fantastical version of an off-brand Venice in an off-brand Europe with magical elements. The original one-shot involved a young, black sheep scion of a noble family (player 1), his duelist surgeon retainer (player 2), and his associate banker/treasurer (player 3) trying to gather the ingredients in the city for a spell for his older sister (a priest/exorcist) so she can seal a portal to the Spirit World in a monastery on an abandoned island that his family had acquired for their shipping business. Demonic spirits of rage and terror were bleeding into the world and feeding on the spiritual energy of the deceased monks who had died in a siege from a rival city-state about half a century earlier and the spirits were possessing island monkeys and raising undead. It was a load of fun, but I would love to go back to this setting for a proper campaign.

It was inspired by The Lies of Locke Lamora, Borgias/Borgia, Medici: Masters of Florence, and Assassin's Creed 2, but also with magical elements, such as the city never flooding due to a pact made with the merfolk who live in the lagoon, a Spirit World, and alchemy. As you can't understand Medieval or Renaissance without a Church, I needed a RCC analogue, but I also wanted to avoid tip-toing around Real World Religion, so I created the Church of Angelic Virtue. It was a Church centered around venerating the ethics of seven angels/spirits who are believed to embody the seven virtues that most reflect the Divine Will of the Creator. If I would re-run this, I would naturally consider Fate, but I also lean towards running it using Cortex Prime, especially as I could make the 7 Virtues into a trait set.