Campaigns in a nutshell. Adventures in a sentence.

[Bohandas]

Sympathy

The PCs are hired by a powerful mage to aid in a plan for the betterment of society. This mage has acquired a large sprawling facility whose interior can be easily reconfigured. He has arranged this facility into an abstract representation of some complex and multifaced abstract societal problem (such as world hunger, or adult illiteracy), including stocking it with thematically appropriate monsters (usually undead, outsiders, fey, vermin, animals, plus constructs dressed in various costumes) and ensorcelled it with powerful sympathetic magic. By defeating the dungeon, the PCs can defeat the corresponding societal problem. After each complete dungeon run the facility is reconfigured for a new societsl problem.

The Mediocre Archfiend

The PCs are targeted by the demon prince of Manes (the lowest caste of demons). Much less powerful than the Queen of Succubi or the Lord of Balors, the Prince of Manes is only about CR 10 and rules his minions from a throne made oc chicken bones and dead rats. Attached below is a possible 3.5e statblock for the Prince of Manes. It has NOT been playtested.

Spoiler

Demeicro, Low Power demon prince

Demeicro
King of the Manes, The Prince of Dimness

Portfolio: Manes demons, stupidity

Similar to how Malcanthet is the Queen of Succubi and Kardum is the Lord of Balors, Demeicro is the King of the Manes (the most basic type of demon, Fiendish Codex 1, Pg 45). As lord of the weakest demon type he is one of the weakest demon lords possibly the weakest. This is one of the demon prince positions with the highest rate of turnover; He isn't the first to hold this position, he won't be the last, and he may not even be the only one (similar to how Malcanthet and Shami-Amourae are both Queen of the Succubi). He is also one of the dumbest of the demon lords and the demonic patron of stupidity, earning him the derisive title "The Prince of Dimness". He seems to think that this has to do with literal dimness and has developed some magical abilities to match.

He appears as a giant manes demon and is usually surrounded by a retinue of manes, In combat he has a tendency to throw these minions at people, using their acidic cloud death throes as a bomb. Sometimes he will go through several before realizing that an enemy is resistant or immune to acid. He dwells in a shoddily constructed fortress and rules his minions from a makeshift throne made of chicken bones and dead animals

CE Large outsider (chaotic, evil, extraplanar, tanar’ri)
Init: +2
Senses: darkvision 90 ft.; Listen +0, Spot –1
Languages: Abyssal; telepathy 100 ft.
AC: 15, touch 7, flat-footed 15 (-1 size, -2 dex, +8 natural)
HP: 95 (10 HD; 10d8+50); DR 5/cold iron and good
Immune: electricity, poison
Resist: acid 10, cold 10, fire 10
Saves: Fort +12, Ref +6, Will +6
Speed: 20 ft. (4 squares)
Melee: 2 claws +15 (1d6+6 Plus 1 Vile) and bite +13 (1d8+3 Plus 1 Vile)
Base Atk: +10; Grp: +20
Abilities: Str 22, Dex 6, Con 20, Int 9, Wis 9, Cha 9
SQ: acidic cloud, tanar’ri traits
Feats: Gruesome Finish (Exemplars of Evil), Improved Initiative, Multiattack, Vile Natural Attack (BOVD/Elder Evils)
Skills: Balance +4, Climb +19, Escape Artist +4, Hide +7, Intimidate +1, Jump +19, Knowledge (Arcane) +0, Knowledge (Planes) +0, Listen +0, Move Silently +9, Spellcraft +0, Survival +12, Use Magic Device +6

Acidic Cloud (Su):
When the prince of dimness is wounded for 5 or more HP with a slashing or piercing weapon acidic vapor sprays out in the direction the attack came from. Anybody standing in that square must make DC 15 Reflex save or take 1d6 points of acid damage
If the Prince of Dimness is killed, it dissolves into a cloud of noxious vapor. Anyone within 20 feet who fails a DC 15 Reflex save takes 2d6 points of acid damage

Charm Manes (sp)
Three times per day Demeicro can attempt to charm a manes demon. This works like the spell charm person except that it works on manes and only on manes.

Summon Manes (Sp)
Once per day the Lord of Dimness can attempt to summon 4d8 manes with a 60% chance of success. Alternately he can automatically summon 2d4 manes. This ability is the equivalent of a 6th-level spell.

Spell-Like Abilities
cl 10
At Will- Acid Splash, Daze (DC9), Greater Teleport (self plus 50 pounds of objects only), Mage Hand, No Light (BOVD)
3/day- Darkness, Delusions of Grandeur (Dragon #324) (DC11), Doom (DC10), Magic Stone, Obscuring Mist, Ray of Stupidity (SC)
1/day- Cone of Dimness (SC) (DC12), Desecrate, Feeblemind (DC14), Mind Fog(DC14), Stinking Cloud (DC12), Touch of Idiocy

 

[Orius]

Ted Bundy
A seemingly injured man asks for the party's help with some mundane task that he can't due to his arm being in a sling or something like that. If they agree he leads them to an out of the way location and tries to kill them.

Not to be confused with the washed up orc warrior with a lazy selfish wife who boasts about TPKing 4 parties of adventurers in a single module back in his youth.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything

A ship that the PCs are on is boarded by pirates who turn out to actually be completely non-violent conmen who use fear magic and illusions to get their targets to surrender. These conmen-pirate-wizards are several levels higher than the party to prevent them from being taken down in combat before the gig is up

EDIT:
I just realized that I just described high fantasy scooby doo

And you would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling kids!

 

[Bohandas]

Faerunian Ragnarok

Campaign set in a version of Toril that has been completely transformed by a series of cataclysms. To put an end to the wall of the faithless once and for all, the Eladrins allied themselves with the slaadi, the demons, and several chaotic deities to assassinate not just Kelemvor, but also Lord AO. Now the divine power structure of realmspace has been thrown into total disarray due to the top of the power structure being removed, the remaining gods losing the faithful that the wall gained them (placing multi-sphere pantheons like the Seladrine and the Mulhurandi gods in a position to take over), and stray bits of divinity from the destroyed overgod bouncing around all over and attaching themselves to random creatures. Additionally there's all sorts of undead running around all over due to there not being a god of the dead, foreign gods that were previously hedged out are flocking into realmspace, and the demons and eladrins have predictably turned on each other

 

[Bohandas]

Evil Twin/Evil Self

Some high level death-reversing spells like Clone, Reincarnate, and True Resurrection leave behind supernumerary corpses after the subject is brought back; The subject is brought back in a new body and the old body remains behind. As it happens, an old body left behind by one of the PCs has been animated by a necromancer (or, if it happens to have already happened in-game, by an undead's create spawn ability). This undead evil twin is now running amok.

The Dream Fortress

The players have to assault a fortress in the plane of dreams which is built following dream logic. It is entirely larger and taller than it needs to be. The layout is both maze-like and inconsistent. The rooms are an assortment of rooms from similar locations/buildings in the "real" game world scrambled, combined, rotated, mirrored, and repeated as nauseum. Many rooms have their own stairs and second floor that doesn't let out into the corresponding floor of the rest of the building; For example, someone's sleeping quarters might have a finished basement seperate from the rest of the building. Conversely, some normal levels of the fortress may lack normal access; for instance, you may need to go out the window and climb a rope hanging from another window, or you may need to climb up a pole that hangs down from a hole in the ceiling and terminates 7 feet above the ground like in Mario 64, except that this pole is also a very tall upside-down scratching post. There are many rooms that aren't needed and/or don't fit the purpose of the building, although their construction and decoration generally fit the style of the rest of the building. There are also many rooms that almost fit the purpose of the building or almost fit their own purpose but are slightly off or have some other additional unrelated nature; such as an armory for swordsmen that contains only bows, or a guard post that is also a busy restaurant. Many of the denizens of the fortress look like different people or things than what they are allegedly supposed to be, and often their behavior doesn't match either their nominal identity OR their appearance.

Volcano Erupting in Populated Area

A volcano is erupting in a populated area

Saintanic Panic [sic]
(adventure for modern or superhero games)

A fundamentalist preacher leader has drawn an army of brainwashed followers to himself using backwards messages hidden in religious music, now he plans to use them to take over the world.

Unlimited Days of Night

A vampire mad scientist is building a doomsday device to destroy the sun.

Lord of Moon Rock

A supervillain has stolen a bunch of moon rocks and is using them to control an army of werewolves.

Spoonerism

(superheroes or fantasy) Super-crime has been down so it's time to finally track down the prankster telekineticist who's been bending people's spoons while they're trying to eat soup.

The Neighborhood Gets Richer

(superheroes) Baron Upperclass is destroying the city with his his gentrification ray.

Metaprophecy

Panic over made up doomsday prophecy threatens to cause actual doomsday.

EPA Superfund Site

Chemical dumping in the swamp has given a bunch of the indigenous animals superpowers and now they're wrecking havoc.

The Other Side of the Borg

(superheroes) A race of assimilating cyborgs is turning all the Roombas and other household appliances into blood crazed half-animal monstrosities.

The IRS

(superheroes) The group's Batman/Iron Man expy is being audited by the IRS.

I'm Henry the Eighth I Am

(superheroes) A giant robotic Henry the Eighth is attacking the Vatican.


The End Of The World (As We Know It)

The end of the world (as we know it) exactly as described in the song The End of the World (As We Know It)

All Natural

A local organic farm is being propped up by a malevolent agricultural cult like the ones in The Wicker Man and Children of the Corn

Attack of the Killer Cabbages

(superheroes) The farm-cult from "All Natural" (above) eventually gets into a war with another evil farm of opposite approach to technology. This second farm is run by a Monsanto-like company developing a strain of genetically engineered killer nazi cabbages with which to take over the world.

Too Greedily and Too Deep

(superheroes) Fracking has opened a chasm into Hell

Vidconjuration

(Call of Cthulhu) A recording of someone reading an incantation from the Necronomicon has gone viral on youtube (ie. the plot of Fistful of Boomstick, Rings, and Scary Movie 3)

 

[Bohandas]

"You're Not Helping" OR "An Object Lesson About Murderhoboism"- The PCs have been hired to rescue certain captives from a group of slavers who are transporting their victims across national borders via a flying airship. However, in addition to dealing with the slavers, the party must also deal with a rival party who have been hired with the more open-ended mission "stop the slavers" and are now trying to shoot the airship down heedless of the safety of anyone in it.

The Facebook- Call of Cthulhu adventure in which the leader of the shadowy mythos cult turns out to be Mark Zuckerberg, whose business success has been driven by dark rituals from the Necronomicon and who named his website Facebook in honor of the Necronomicon.

 

[Bohandas]

The People of the Apovalypse

A magically powerful empire that supplies its citizens' needs through magic has chosen an extreme method of protecting itself from monsters which has had terrible effects on neighboring regions. In order to prevent monstrous beings from having anywhere to live or hide this nation is deliberately converting the world into a barren wasteland. This is obviously a problem for the world's other nations that can't feed their people with magic and also for the many non-evil wild creatures who have now no food or shelter. The PCs are one of several groups of gurrellias/spies/whatever sent to try and find out how they're doing this and to disrupt this nation;s destruction of the planet

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That could be an interesting alternative beginning to an Athas-style setting!

 

[MarkB]

Mordenkainen's Vampiric Mansion
Through an odd set of circumstances, an unfortunate wizard-turned-prospective-vampire-spawn was once buried within an interior garden feature inside his own Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion. The mystical connection between a vampire and their place of burial played havoc with the normal spell-duration restrictions of the Mansion, and when the spell ended the Mansion and its newly-vampiric occupant were cast adrift in the Astral Sea, bound together and doomed to slow decay.

The vampire, himself a formidable wizard in life, began to devise specialised ways for his abode to leech power from other extradimensional spaces, and for himself to feed. It started small - sometimes when a person reached into their Bag of Holding they would find their arm grasped in powerful hands as fangs fastened to their wrist. When their drained corpse was found, its hand would still be thrust into what was now a perfectly ordinary and otherwise-empty sack.

Now, after hundreds of years, he's perfected his craft, and when a group of weary adventurers retreat to the safety of their lavishly-appointed mansion, they may find that it has more and different rooms than they remember, as the Vampiric Mansion has locked onto it parasitically.

I imagine this as the ultimate high-level haunted house adventure. A party already weakened from a day's activities finds themselves locked inside their own mansion, its dimensions warping in unexpected ways under external control as a smart and deadly killer stalks its halls. To win free they'll have to fight their way from their own mansion into the heart of the vampiric mansion that's become bound to it, all the while fighting the architecture itself, as the vampire has become inextricably bound up to the house itself, becoming almost more a living location than an individual creature. A major aspect of the adventure would be a battle of wills between the party's spellcaster and the vampire, as each of them attempt to exert control over the shape of the mansion.

 

[Bohandas]

Big Trouble In Gepetto's Workshop- A cross between Pinnochio and Big Trouble in Little China. The villain is a puppet who has come to life and now wants to be flesh. In order to do that he must find a woman with certain prophecied attributes, marry her, and then kill her. And it just so happens that at least one woman that the PCs know has these attributes.

The above idea can also be adapted into a Mouseguard or Bunnies&Burrows campaign by swapping Pinnochio out for the Velveteen Rabbit.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I like that one. Very versatile- and with a little tweaking- a solid all-ages scenario.

i could easily envision this as a Tron type setting game as well, especially considering how many “rescue the Princess” videogames there are. Mario, Zelda, Prince of Persia, Donkey Kong, Popeye...the list is looooong.