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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 5653620" data-attributes="member: 14159">I once took a campaign and changed the entire tone of it in midstream. . .but it was part of the overall plot.The campaign was set, at least at first, in a semi-realistic version of Earth in the late 12th century, with the PC's being pilgrims on the 3rd Crusade.  Only one PC had any magic, and that was a wizard with a very weak spell list who had to hide his magic from the Church).  Foes other than mundane animals and various humans were rare, I think they dealt with undead once in the catacombs beneath Paris, and they may have encountered one or two mythological monsters along the way.Halfway through the campaign, after a long and gritty march across Europe into the Holy Lands, the PC wizard disappears one night, and he later comes back (in the same session, but a few nights later in-game) with a much more powerful wizard who wanted to reveal the truth about the world to the PC's to recruit them to a higher cause.In truth, the world was far more magical in antiquity, but magic had been dying over the 1500 years or so because of the acts of a primeval goddess of chaos that was devouring all magic and seeking to reduce the world to a dead-magic husk where mankind would never be able to stop her from one day arising and devouring all life.  The deity was a version of Tiamat (a blend of the literary Babylonian version and the D&D Dragon Queen) with Lovecraftian Cthulhu-esque aspects added on.So, the PC's are now working for an order of mages trying to preserve what magic is left in the world, along with the few surviving demihumans (a few hundred elves and dwarves living in isolation, as the dwindling magic made the birth rate for demihumans and monstrous races decline, and most monsters were hunted to extinction in the Dark Ages).The PC's ended up travelling the world, to fight the Cult of Tiamat to weaken her hold on the ley lines of the world to allow for a final battle where they would sever her ties to the magic of the world and let magic return normally.I strongly implied as the DM that our "real world" was the world that would exist if they failed: a world where magic and monsters are only legends nobody seriously believed ever existed, and societal and environmental decay are making the long-term outlook for humanity pretty bleak.In the end, when they destroyed the Temple of Tiamat on Atlantis, the world faded to white and when things came back, it was a 3e setting (this was my last AD&D 2e game), and as a postscript magic began to flow into the world, allowing Sorcerers to appear, the demihumans to slowly repopulate, and more and more clergy began to discover spellcasting instead of it being the very rare miracle-worker ect.</blockquote>

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