D&D General Greyhawk: Snarf's Guide to Ready-Made Campaign Themes!

[MGibster]

I've started writing the first adventure of the campaign. It involves a silver dragon shapeshifted as an elf who brought her kid to Greyhawk to teach him about humans & demi-humans. During their field trip, the young dragon is kidnapped and mama ain't happy. After trying to find her son on her own, and destroying a few small buildings owned by a criminal syndicate, she decides she's out of her element and needs someone who understands humanoid life better than she does if she expects to find her son. Enter the PCs.

The power behind the kidnappers is none other than the kid's grandmother, Lashonna, a vampire silver dragon and one of the leaders of the Ebon Triad. I plan on putting together a dragon heavy campaign, and it looks like I'm inadvertently creating my own version of the Age of Wyrms. Has anyone read Age of Wyrms and is it any good?

 

[grodog]

I've started writing the first adventure of the campaign. It involves a silver dragon shapeshifted as an elf who brought her kid to Greyhawk to teach him about humans & demi-humans. During their field trip, the young dragon is kidnapped and mama ain't happy. [snip]

The power behind the kidnappers is none other than the kid's grandmother, Lashonna, a vampire silver dragon and one of the leaders of the Ebon Triad. I plan on putting together a dragon heavy campaign, and it looks like I'm inadvertently creating my own version of the Age of Wyrms. Has anyone read Age of Wyrms and is it any good?

Age of Worms is probably my favorite of the full APs published in the Paizohawk era (although I’ve not read Savage Tide in depth), despite me not being a huge fan of Kyuss as he’s presented (too much overlap with Vecna for my taste). I really like the wide variety of locations across The Flanaess where the adventures are set, and how classic NPCs and monsters are leveraged in the plot arc.

Combining and/or replacing parts of it with Maure Castle is how I’d run AoW whenever I get around to doing it, perhaps layering in more of Erik Mona’s “Absolute Power” series of Living Greyhawk modules too (which also loosely tie-in with the Maure Castle elements).

If you decide to run AoW, Paizo published a series of Wormfood articles in Dragon (one per month over the year-long campaign) to supplement the modules, and also a bunch of free web supplement downloads with maps, artwork, and additional conversion notes too. Mona wrote the AoW Overload overview article too, which is useful as a DM intro to the entire AP: https://paizo.com/download/dungeon/AgeofWormsOverload.pdf

Allan.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I've started writing the first adventure of the campaign. It involves a silver dragon shapeshifted as an elf who brought her kid to Greyhawk to teach him about humans & demi-humans. During their field trip, the young dragon is kidnapped and mama ain't happy. After trying to find her son on her own, and destroying a few small buildings owned by a criminal syndicate, she decides she's out of her element and needs someone who understands humanoid life better than she does if she expects to find her son. Enter the PCs.

The power behind the kidnappers is none other than the kid's grandmother, Lashonna, a vampire silver dragon and one of the leaders of the Ebon Triad. I plan on putting together a dragon heavy campaign, and it looks like I'm inadvertently creating my own version of the Age of Wyrms. Has anyone read Age of Wyrms and is it any good?

I played about half of it, about 10 years back.

It's fun. It has a couple of really good dungeon crawls (I'm not normally a fan of dungeon crawls) as well as non-dungeony adventures. A couple of years ago I used the Prince of Redhand adventure, which is basically a series of social interactions, in my home campaign.

When I finally accepted that the GM was never going to go back and finish the AP I read through the final adventures, just to see what they entailed... Oh boy, there are tough fights. Like, some insanely tough fights. I know why the GM didn't want to go through with it. Too much work.

 

[Maxperson]

Certain personages (Murlynd, Keoghtom, Heward, Daern, Johydee, Nolzur, Quaal and Tuerny) are quasi-deities. In effect, they have reached the steeping stone to "demi-god" status when you get removed from play. Powerful adventurers in Greyhawk eventually can ascend to quasi-deity status and then, eventually, to godhood.

Only 483 more days in this forsaken drink and I will be a god!!!

 

[arakasi]

I've started writing the first adventure of the campaign. It involves a silver dragon shapeshifted as an elf who brought her kid to Greyhawk to teach him about humans & demi-humans. During their field trip, the young dragon is kidnapped and mama ain't happy. After trying to find her son on her own, and destroying a few small buildings owned by a criminal syndicate, she decides she's out of her element and needs someone who understands humanoid life better than she does if she expects to find her son. Enter the PCs.

The power behind the kidnappers is none other than the kid's grandmother, Lashonna, a vampire silver dragon and one of the leaders of the Ebon Triad. I plan on putting together a dragon heavy campaign, and it looks like I'm inadvertently creating my own version of the Age of Wyrms. Has anyone read Age of Wyrms and is it any good?

I GMd the whole thing & I loved it. The entire back half of the campaign was the party being manipulated by Lashonna to take out her chief rivals in the Kyuss cult.

I played her as if she had come to regret her fall, but knew that if she openly turned against Kyuss, she would be obliterated. She came close to performing a TPK before the party's barbarian critted and forced her into her mist form. They never found her coffin, so she recovered and has been a recurring presence in my games since then.

 

[MGibster]

I'm reminded that when you start small try to keep it small. Every time I go to reference something from a Greyhawk product for the scenario I'm working on I get dragged into a rabbit hole of new information. I don't need to decide the entire campaign, just focus on getting through this one scenario. I find myself thinking, "OKay, the bad guys are going to take the kid to a city...." and then I spend too much time looking for an appropriate city.

I should check myself and decide on an overall campaign theme at least. Tough to write scenarios if I don't. #%#$^% it. I'm just going to make the scheming of Iuz behind everything.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Honestly, that's a perfectly good way to go in a Greyhawk campaign.

 

[MGibster]

Reading through the 1983 boxed set I came across this.

The fourth type of event is unarmed combat between wrestlers and pugilist. For these contests, which are very popular with the older generation, the combatants generally wear a wide assortment of garish and lurid costumes. These fights are strictly for entertainment only, and the outcomes are usually fixed.

Professional wrestling is alive and well in the free city of Greyhawk. I am going to have to incorporate this into my campaign somehow. There's also a sports rivalry between Grey University and the Bardschool, so I might have an opportunity to bust out my Blood Bowl miniatures by having an adventure where some of the PCs act as ringers in a match between the two.

 

[grodog]

Reading through the 1983 boxed set I came across this.

Quick correction: this is from the City of Greyhawk boxed set (1989), not from the 1983 setting boxed set: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Archive

Allan.