Campaigns in a nutshell. Adventures in a sentence.

Bohandas · Nov 27, 2020

The Delivery- Encounter. The PCs encounter a very obviously powerful and malevolent being (such as a fiend or high level spellcaster) who nonetheless gives them a powerful, but not very useful to them, magic item for free. If asked he will explain, truthfully, that he does not expect the PCs to survive their quest to defeat the BBEG, who is the item's intemded ultimate recipient.

EDIT:
In A Similar Vein- Encounter. Another encounter with an incongruously helpful evil character. This time they are offered healing by a Sibriex demon. Who does all the healing via highly invasive (even when the would is superficial) surgery, . Without any anesthetic. Or handwashing. Or properly sharpened tools. The wound repair is mechanically as goos as magic, but leaves gruesome scars and a high chance of infection plus a will save is required to get through the operation without either squirming and making the woulds worse, or else developing a pathological fear of slashing weapons that can cause them to become shaken in combat

Bohandas · Dec 6, 2020

Load-bearing Golems- A certain dungeon has a LOT of golems in it. These golems generally don't move from their initial squares, and it's a good thing they don't, because they're part of the support structure of the building. If the party gets it in their heads to destroy too many of them, the whole building could come down on their heads. The same goes if they confront the big bad in the wrong place; if it's clear that he's going to die he'll order the golems to move. The party has to confront the villain somewhere where most of the golems are out of hearing range. Ideally this adventure should occur at low to mid levels or else killing enough golems that the building collapses will become the adventure's objective (with the party simply being resurrected afterward)

Dannyalcatraz · Dec 6, 2020

Bohandas said:
Load-bearing Golems- A certain dungeon has a LOT of golems in it. These golems generally don't move from their initial squares, and it's a good thing they don't, because they're part of the support structure of the building. If the party gets it in their heads to destroy too many of them, the whole building could come down on their heads. The same goes if they confront the big bad in the wrong place; if it's clear that he's going to die he'll order the golems to move. The party has to confront the villain somewhere where most of the golems are out of hearing range. Ideally this adventure should occur at low to mid levels or else killing enough golems that the building collapses will become the adventure's objective (with the party simply being resurrected afterward)

Kind of like a FRPG version of Don’t Break The Ice.

Dannyalcatraz · Dec 10, 2020

The Tokens

A Modern Fantasy/present day sci-fi campaign idea that borrows from Michael Moorcock’s Sailor on the Seas of Fate, Neverwhere, the Sliders TV show, and the classic movie, Warriors and it’s spiritual successor, Judgement Night.

A group of friends out on the town get lost in the maze of streets downtown. Then their car breaks down. And because nobody is getting a solid signal on their cellphone, they decide to find the nearest bar or whatever is open to call a tow truck, friend or Uber. They stumble on The Player’s Ball, of all things, and decide to party just a little bit more before making their call.

A scuffle breaks out, which then becomes a gunfight, so they run for the exits just like everyone else, and find themselves near a subway station.

Still lost, they decide to take the subway- who knew the city had a subway system?- to a more familiar part of the city. They purchase some of the odd-looking tokens, and board the grafitti-cloaked train when it arrives.

When they reach a station that has a familiar sounding name, they get off, exit the station into the moonlit night, and start heading in a direction that seems correct up until someone notices the moon doesn’t look right.

...and neither does the second, smaller moon.

The train system is crossing dimensional boundaries to other versions of their city. And the mazelike underground stations don’t always have the platforms well marked, so finding the way home will be difficul.

Sometimes the friends are just ordinary citizens in these “otherverses“. Sometimes they’re thrust into adventures as heroes...or villains.

Bohandas · Dec 13, 2020

You Break It You Buy It High level party looking to stock up on gear and supplies and that the DM thinks he may have given too much stumbles into the domain of the god of commerce, which is a mazelike store of shifting aisles that it is very difficult to find the way out of and is filled with belligerant animated objects and related constructs. The building rearranges itself and attempts to keep them from leaving until such time as the total of the items in their shopping cart of holding and the expenditures from the store's you-break-it-you-bought-it policy exceed 10-50% of their coins

Bohandas · Dec 25, 2020

Santa Claus-
A group of high level characters have to suss out a way to deliver a very large number of packages in a short amount of time (note that you should not have them try to do the full santa claus job of deliveing things to all the boys and girls around the world because they can't. I did the math and assuming that he starts and ends at the international date line, giving him about 36 hours to work with, has unlimited access to Quickened Teleport and Maximized Time Stop, and only delivers to children who are Lawful Good, D&D Santa would only be able to process a population of about 2 million children (36×60×10×5×2×9=1944000), I'd dial down the goal for their plan to maybe 200-2000, (and obviously wouldn't play out the whole thing round by round, although perhaps I might play out some snags they might hit along the way and see how much time that ends up costing them)

Anthropology
Paranoia game where the twist is that there was no cataclysm. The computer is just broken. Furthermore, one of the player characters' secret society affiliation is that they're actually an anthropologist from Outside who has been sent to study the people and society of Alpha Complex (who are referred to as "mole people" by the character's outside contacts)

Crossover
Basically, the idea of this campaign is that Alpha Complex from Paranoia is actually part of the Demiplane of Dread from Dungeons and Dragons. Either the PCs find their way INTO Alpha Complex, or else it starts out as a normal Paranoia game and they somehow find their way OUT OF Alpha Complex at which point the twist is revealed things suddenly get weird.

Dannyalcatraz · Dec 25, 2020

Paranoia as a demiplane of dread? I like it!

Bohandas · Dec 31, 2020

The Shadow over Nickelodeon
Horror themed Toon adventure which takes the PCs to the lovecraftian city of Innsmouth. As the adventure progresses Innsmouth takes on a stronger and stronger resemblence to the city of Bikini Bottom from Spongebob Squarepants.

Dannyalcatraz · Dec 31, 2020

Bohandas said:
The Shadow over Nickelodeon
Horror themed Toon adventure which takes the PCs to the lovecraftian city of Innsmouth. As the adventure progresses Innsmouth takes on a stronger and stronger resemblence to the city of Bikini Bottom from Spongebob Squarepants.

Somewhere out there, there’s a fanfic cartoon of one of the characters going on a horror movie rampage. It was pretty well done.