D&D 5E Creating a New Campaign World Based on Hope & Optimism

[BookTenTiger]

I haven't had a lot of opportunities to play D&D right now (newborn, Omicron, etc.), so I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about creating D&D settings. I've started to imagine a campaign setting that encourages characters to build a better world, and I'm going to use this thread to slowly brainstorm and create it. Maybe it's just the news, climate change, or having a newborn baby around, but I have been thinking a lot about making sure I've done my own part to make the world a little bit better than it was when I came into it. I think that would be a neat theme for a campaign too!

For now, I'm going to call this campaign setting Amnesis.

Here are some campaign themes:

• The main conflict of this campaign is corruption vs optimism. The heroes will be on the side of optimism, hope, and unity. The enemies will be forces of corruption, pollution, and dehumanization.
• The campaign setting will be medieval Americana. That is, the trappings of Americana in a medieval-technology setting. Think farms & forts instead of villages & castles. Bison and turkeys, pumpkins and corn, land barons and frontier towns. This will not be set in America, or even an analogous America, but it will draw from the visual and thematic vocabulary of Americana applied onto a medieval canvas.
• The setting will be made up of race-agnostic cultures. Instead of having the elf forest, the dwarf mountains, the halfling farms, there will be distinct cultural areas in which live members of any race or lineage. Communities will still struggle with xenophobia and tribalism, but their cultural identities will not be based on race.
• Adventurers will be tasked with making the world a better place. Gold found in dungeons will be spent on improving communities. As the world improves, characters will gain more access to magic items, allies, magical gifts, property, etc.
• The campaign setting is still very much in the D&D Spirit. There are orcs and trolls and dragons, dungeons and haunted ruins, magic swords and mimics.

As you can see, I just have the foundations of ideas, but nothing written in stone yet.

One of the most important things in this campaign is the main conflict. Everything is going to be based around corruption vs optimism. What's that mean for a D&D setting? I'm going to brainstorm what those two words actually look like, manifested in a fantasy world:

Corruption
Polluted farmlands
Polluted nature
Bribed and blackmailed leaders
Zealotry
Cults preying on the impoverished
Demonic temptations
Plague
Undead transformations
Spies
Doppelgangers and other shapeshifters

Optimism
Building communities
Agriculture
Harmony with nature
Light
Throwing off the yoke
Unity
Safe to travel
Bridging fractured communities
Restoring traditions
Celebrations

When I build a campaign world, I like to think about what is the world's present, its past, and its (hoped-for) future...

In this campaign setting, the past and present are corruption, and the future is optimism.

I could see in the past corruption being the product of war and strife. As the war ends, it leaves room for optimism to grow, if the old powers don't hold it back.

I’ll add more posts here as I figure out what this campaign setting looks like, what adventurers do, who the enemies are, and house rules I’d use to support the theme.

I'd love to read your ideas, too! How would you build or support a campaign setting in which characters are beacons of hope in a world of corruption, rot, and darkness?

 

[Yora]

With conflicts like these, it's almost always good to look at what scarcities are pushing people to be ruthless and selfish and exploit the world for their gain. Conflict usually needs a source of pressure that creates tension and makes people open to methods they normally wouldn't resort to.
If the overall idea is that things are improving, then the PCs work could be something that contributes to reducing the pressure. Which in turn upsets the people who have been used to use the tension for personal gain and don't want to lose their previliged position.

 

[BookTenTiger]

With conflicts like these, it's almost always good to look at what scarcities are pushing people to be ruthless and selfish and exploit the world for their gain. Conflict usually needs a source of pressure that creates tension and makes people open to methods they normally wouldn't resort to.
If the overall idea is that things are improving, then the PCs work could be something that contributes to reducing the pressure. Which in turn upsets the people who have been used to use the tension for personal gain and don't want to lose their previliged position.

That's a great point! Scarcities are really important, and can be solved in interesting ways in a D&D setting.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Campaign World

As I build the physical setting itself, I return over and over again to the central conflict of optimism vs corruption.

What does corruption look like in a D&D setting?

I can see the governing bodies of towns and cities literally corrupted by fiends and aberrations, trading their souls (and the fate of their communities) for power.

I can see once bountiful forests or fields corrupted by undead blight, mischievous fey, or strange mutations.

I can see once powerful cities reduced to ruin as greed and tribalism sundered the community.

Returning to the idea that this is Medieval Americana… A lot of early American storytelling involves small communities tied financially and culturally to a large city. You have frontier towns, farming communities, and other small outposts, all with roads or rivers leading to New York or Chicago or San Francisco.

I’m going to center this campaign setting around a single fallen city.

Vaulten Hall was once known as the City of Memories. Its fabled towers held libraries, museums, temples, and schools in which nobility and scholars studied under mentors both mortal and magical. Vaulten Hall was a city with a strict hierarchy: only royal families and wealthy landowners could attend the schools and access the great libraries. Over time, a fierce rivalry built up between the three Great Towers of Vaulten Hall: the Tower of the Mind, the Tower of the Heart, and the Tower of the Soul.

Meanwhile, the small towns and villages outside of Vaulten Hall were full of hard-working people producing the ore, lumber, and food needed by the merchants, scholars, and nobility of the city. These frontier villages were often harassed by fey, beasts, and monstrosities of the wild. Mercenary adventurers were expensive, and some landowners abandoned their tenant farmers to the forces of the wild rather than spend their precious gold.

Then came the war. Armies of undead, fiends, and aberrations appeared from across the sea, over the mountains, and out of the minds of powerful mortals. The wealthy city of Vaulten Hall fought back, often with soldiers drafted from frontier villages. But after decades of war, the Great Towers were conquered, and Vaulten Hall fell to the outside forces.

Now the city of Vaulten Hall is a ruin, patrolled by fiends, undead, and aberrations. The three Great Towers are portals to realms beyond this world.

The Tower of the Mind has become a portal to the Far Realms.

The Tower of the Heart is portal to the Nine Hells.

The Tower of the Soul is a portal to the Shadowfell.

The frontier villages outside of the city face their own strife. Decades of war drained their resources, ruined their fields, and killed off a generation of men and women. The new masters of Vaulten Hall are not interested in governance. There is no standing army to defend the villages, and there is no law to keep the peace. In this power vacuum have risen warlords, cultists, and zealots, powerful villains empowered by the fiends, undead, or aberrations. Communities once subsisting on mining, farming, or lumber are now pillaged for slaves, gold, and souls.

At the same time, the very land has been corrupted by the presence of these outsider forces. The forests teem with mutated beasts and plants. Farms produce poisoned crops, and the waters are fouled with the slime of strange tentacled creatures.

Into this world step the adventurers.

Adventurers carry within them the seeds of hope. Through their might, the corruption can be fought back, and a new world grown.

This is the campaign world of Amnesis.

 

[cbwjm]

This sounds a bit like mutant year 0, the part heads out into an apocalyptic wasteland to scavenge supplies while at the same time upgrading their home base, the ark. It's a cool concept and I quite like your setting idea.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Love it, very Legend of Zelda in spirit. Good job.

On thing (stolen from Ravnica) that I would love is a ''church'' where you can borrow money in exchange for a debt to be worked in your afterlife, like the Orzov in Mt:G. So if you die while indebted, you serve the rest of your debt as a spirit-servant.

 

[BookTenTiger]

This sounds a bit like mutant year 0, the part heads out into an apocalyptic wasteland to scavenge supplies while at the same time upgrading their home base, the ark. It's a cool concept and I quite like your setting idea.

Thanks!

I think town building is going to be an important part of this setting.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Love it, very Legend of Zelda in spirit. Good job.

On thing (stolen from Ravnica) that I would love is a ''church'' where you can borrow money in exchange for a debt to be worked in your afterlife, like the Orzov in Mt:G. So if you die while indebted, you serve the rest of your debt as a spirit-servant.

Oh I love that idea!

I was thinking of aligning the three main evils with different kinds of corruption:

Fiends: industrialization
Aberrations: pollution
Undead: greed

That "pay for a better afterlife" scheme would work really well with the greedy undead theme.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think a good source of inspiration would be Star Trek (especially Next Generation but also classic series). That is definitely a show that seemed grounded in optimism (and the plot from Star Trek IV could easily be ported into a fantasy world I think and connect to the themes you are describing).

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

That "pay for a better afterlife" scheme would work really well with the greedy undead theme.

Its even better than that: its ''get money now while you are alive, pay off the debt by slaving as a tortured soul''.