Campaigns in a nutshell. Adventures in a sentence.

[Dannyalcatraz]

I posted this elsewhere, but it works here as well.

The plot for Paint Your Wagon involves a gold rush. After the mines start to play out, some of the craftier gold miners find an alternative source of wealth, specifically:

...Ben and a group of miners discover that gold dust is dropping through the floor boards of many of the saloons. They hatch a plan to tunnel under all the businesses to get at the gold ("The Best Things in Life are Dirty"). This brings the story to its climax when, during a bull and bear fight, the streets collapse into the tunnels dug by Ben and the others and the town is destroyed. A reprise of "The Ballad of No Name City" plays as the town is literally swallowed by the earth.

Switch the human diggers for a group of urbanized dwarves, cut off from their normal society but retaining the same drives & skills, and you have a fairly unusual situation...

 

[Orius]

Gnomes could work too, some of the crazy schemes of No Name City seem to suit them better than dwarves for sure. Maybe you could have a dwarf as the preacher that arrives in town instead. Or really a combination of dissolute dwarves, gnomes, humans, and half-orcs for the town. The French hookers become elves. Not sure what how to do the Mormon.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A human with an interesting new take on religion, perhaps?

 

[Psychotic Jim]

To serve a hag
Alternatively titled: How much will ya give me for this larva, Guvner?

HEROISM! The stuff that legends are made of! Fighting the good fight against the greatest depravity the world has ever faced! Impossible odds turned into epic story! Larger than life heroes take on the most earth-shattering villains! ...in this campaign, you'll have none o' that!

To Serve a Hag is a grimy Planescape (or outer planes) campaign for low-level evil (or at best darkly neutral) characters in the gutter. Congratulations, you've just entered lifetime employment working for a grand old lady, a Night Hag. Whether you've been bribed, blackmailed, cajoled, coerced, or even dragged along for the booze, you realize you've gotten more than you bargained for. No, you are not kill-everything mercenaries, no, something far... juicer

Your employer's business is so successful; she needs help hawking her wares. Yes, the lot of you are peddlers of the weird and forbidden, specifically, souls! Not just any souls- EVIL souls! Your chief commodity is larvae- the lifeblood of the lower planes, fiendish evil in its most basic form, sin made flesh.

All new soul peddlers begin in the most humble of beginnings, in a few safehouses within the worst dregs of the Hive Ward in the town of Sigil. There, you'll set up your business. And your mission, whether you choose to accept it or not, will be to claw your way out of the world of muck by making a proper business of your lemonade stand operations. Go boldly forth into more lucrative (but also more dangerous) territory, and you might even have a date with a lich or two!

But don't get any ideas about betraying your benevolent* contractor, for she's a canny one. At least not until you’re ready,that will be WAAAY down the line. For now, just worry about placating that disgruntled barbazu over there.

*Hey, she hasn’t killed you yet, has she?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'd have loved to do a Spelljammer-esque campaign set in a gas torus like in Larry Niven's Integral Trees novels or a similarly populated nebula...a FRPG set in a habitable, gaseous Dyson Sphere.*


*No, not the ones on the vacuum cleaners- that's a Dyson Ball. Spheres are like this.

 

[Orius]

I think most of us are nerdy enough to know what a Dyson sphere is.

 

[Celebrim]

The Black Tulip: Local heroes fight the boogey man, run errands for godlings, restore trade routes, save their community from the devestation of a goblin invasion and uncover some awful secrets, but are unable to save the community from itself - until they discover that an infamous bandit lord might be their best ally and that a trial whose outcome may remake an entire nation can be won with a flower.

The Goblin Prince: When a goblin half-breed unites the clans in a great crusade against humanity, a group of goblin outcasts and their henchmen set off to restore their honor, and along the way discover the greatest secret of the goblin people and that honorable action can be a very subjective thing when your masters are lying to you and cheating each other.

The Esoteric Order of the Golden Globe: When an uncanny tsunami destroys most of a port city, it unites an unlikely band of heroes who find themselves on the trail of an engimatic necromancer and a nihilistic cult dedicated to destroying the gods themselves. As evils long buried rise to the surface, the heroes must journey deep into the lair of a vanquished dracolich, deal with an invasion of deep ones, explore the crypt of a demi-lich, fight pirates, make their way into the heart of a legendary south sea island, and chase the cult to the deadly glaciers of the north to stop the cult from assembling their doomsday device.

Memories of Ice and Pain: An aging founding king is preparing for his death, but finds the unfinished business of his past haunts him and threatens to undo all the good work he has accomplished. A King's son gathers his friends to investigate a minor matter that soon spirals out of control. Now, with everything to lose and society collapsing around them, a new generation of heroes must dodge goblin assassins, fight an army of gnolls, defeat a society of scheming hags, and make a bargain with a deadly dragon in order finish what their grandparents begun.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

*No, not the ones on the vacuum cleaners- that's a Dyson Ball. Spheres are like this.

I think a campaign in a Dyson Ball might be pretty interesting, kind of like Fantastic Voyage with great flesh-eating mites and vast menacing dust bunnies.

 

[Evilhalfling]

An endless hallway, a key that opens 10 doors each day, go too far down the hallway and you travel back in time. Once in the past, you can only move forward.

The first session ended with the following:
Your lives would have been so much simpler if that had been the last time you had seen the key or hallway. History would have turned out so differently if the key had never come into your possession, or if you had been able to resist its allure. Perhaps this time will be different.

The PCs obtained the key in session 8. They entered the same day (of course). Then 1200 years earlier....
http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/277635-ten-doors-pick-one-tell-me-why.html