D&D General High Level Adventures Where the World Isn't at Stake

[Reynard]

You can run ToA without the death curse. I know of a few groups that took at the death curse and ran it that way. Without the death curse, the world is not at stake.

Is ToA a high level adventure? I assumed it was the usual "end at 13th level" thing WotC does with most of their adventures.

 

[dave2008]

Is ToA a high level adventure? I assumed it was the usual "end at 13th level" thing WotC does with most of their adventures.

Your correct. I was just thinking of the big bad at the end.

However, DotMM goes to 20th and as far as I know that one doesn't have a world shaking plot.

 

[dave2008]

PS there are few adventures on the DMsGuild that tie into Descent into Avernus that string out that book to 20th level. They are all based in Hell or the Abyss, so I'm guessing they have to do with outer plane issues and not some much World shattering (after you wrap up the original adventure that is)

 

[TheDelphian]

So pick one and go. I am not asking for how-to advice. Let's create a list of ideas.

Ok Don't have my books so will use some other resources. So might not have the original fluff for the monster.

Well Dragons are almost too easy. They threaten territories and someone has to deal with them or the classic there is something i need in their horde.

A twist I added was that dragons don't get bigger from age but instead they grow the larger the territory they control, have influence over, cause fear within etc. So stop them now before they get any bigger.

A skull lord or Mummy Lord may make a nice boss monster after wading through similar baddies to recover a lost person or thing. Maybe they slowly have expanded into something the characters care about a farm they saved at 2nd level or a shop keeper they deal with has a family friend or their old homestead is under attack.

A Hellfire Engine has been loosed to distract the heroes. I mean even if they know that it still has to be dealt with. A Iron golem could serve the same purpose.

Using the occasional good guy like a Planetar or Solar which I did while the players were traveling the far realm to retrieve a lost familiar, that was lost due to their own arrogance and screw up. The Planetar had gone insane as the players realize our plane caused the otherwise normal creatures (mostly aberrations) in the far realm to go crazy so visitors from our plane went crazy there. Was funny to have civil conversations with mind flayers and beholders who were normal and actually nice at times.

So basically a still crazy Planetar, could even be the ones my players sent back hoping he would normalize when he got back. Maybe he will eventually.

Leviathan ruining sea going traffic


Unfortunately many of the higher CR things are fiendish so monster are interchangeable for simple plots and individual motivations can be molded around a plot or be best expressed by their lair or home base.

Just a few to start

 

[Bacon Bits]

It is an hard thing to do because Hi lev pc needs Hi lev motivations.

Why? I've never met a player who wasn't motivated by (a) a good story, (b) the promise of treasure, or (c) the promise of XP. Those are about as base a motivation as it can get.

Why bother with problems that 10 mid level characters can handle?

Where ever the PCs go, they're going to face appropriate level encounters. That doesn't mean that their opponents are going to be interested in destroying the world. Maybe they just want to destroy one city.

Besides, what do the stakes have to do with the difficulty of the task? Where is that function defined? Why would there magically be 10th level characters around?

What you are trying to do has an understandable aesthetic, but crushes against all the rules of narration and, to be honest, it is not so realistic so suspension of disbelief will be stressed.

Why?

What was the Scouring of the Shire compared to Mount Doom? Was the Odyssey less epic of a challenge compared to the Siege of Troy? Was Ripley's battle with the alien queen on board the Sulaco less of a challenge because her epic dive into the depths of processing station to rescue Newt was a better story? Was Luke Skywalker challenged less on Bespin than he was at Yavin IV? If so, why did he lose at Bespin so completely?

You know what happens when you have to constantly escalate how epic your challenges are? You get Dragonball Z. Bigger stakes and bigger numbers to comic degrees so that you're forced to travel to alternate universes to find adequate challenges. Eventually you could destroy entire multiverses with a single punch. Worse than just being predictable, it's boring. Oh no, an evil cult is trying to summon a demon/ancient evil deity/previously unknown evil immortal. We have to stop them as quickly as possible with an arbitrarily tight time schedule that makes adventuring just trivially more difficult than it otherwise would be.

Forget that.

Hooks for high level play can be player driven:

• Establish your own city-state
• Become a demigod
• Resolve that nagging backstory hook
• Do something with that portable hole full of platinum and gems
• Find that Holy Avenger for your Paladin, that Staff & Robe of the Magi for your Wizard, or that Ring of Invisibility for your Rogue.

Or DM driven:

• Several nations need help stopping a plague or famine
• Good aligned kingdoms face a diplomatic breakdown, threatening the peace
• A new continent has been discovered over the horizon across the sea
• A servant of an good deity has been captured by denizens of the lower planes, and you must rescue them

Kingdom-level threats never really stop being good stories, and the PCs only get vaguely more powerful than they are at level 11. There's Teleport and then there's Wish, and that's essentially it. That's all you have to account for. All you have to do is increase the CR of the creatures.

 

[Quickleaf]

A close personal friend of the PCs wishes to remain in their world, but an impending planar conjunction, fey wedding, and/or "call of the sea" will soon forcibly transport the NPC to the other plane/realm... for who knows how long. The NPC asks their friends the PCs to help find a way for them to stay. This may involve investigating the planar conjunction and stopping/changing it, crashing the fey wedding, or undersea politics. The stakes are immediate and personal, but the scale/scope is inter-planar.

 

[Li Shenron]

What high level adventures with non-world-shaking stakes have you devised or played in? What ideas do you have for such adventures?

I know this isn't going to be much fun/useful of a response from me, but those few times I've played in a high-level adventure, I had the feeling that the world-end-threat (WET) was in fact attached to it because it's a trope. The reality is, NONE of those adventures needed to feature a WET to be high level, and by converse NONE of the WET stories need to be high-level.

In fact, being high level is mostly about being powerful in combat. The trope is, the high level BBEG wanting the WET can only be stopped by killing it in combat, and only high level PCs can do it. But if you look at real world history, how many BBEG who caused a WET were good at first person fighting? How many were defeated in hand-to-hand combat? Practically none. Their WET were caused by their immense political and military power, but they were probably equivalent to 1st-level PCs.

Another hint about how much level doesn't really matter, is that so many times those high-level WET stories in a RPG rely on something which is outside the rules: typically an ad-hoc artifact or ritual which will destroy the world/open a gate for invasion/unleash undead plague/whatever. That's because there is nothing within the rules which can really cause a WET (maybe only earthquake or meteor storm cast every day). Even Wish can't, unless the DM allows... an ad-hoc use beyond the rules!

So what is the technical reason why a 1st level BBEG can't have the same artifact or cast the same ritual, other than the artificial requirement that it must be high level because the adventure is high level?

My conclusion is that almost every story can work at every level (unless some challenge in the story requires a very specific spell, but even then in most cases you can modify this as it is often arbitrary), and what level of monsters you use is more of a gaming concern than a narrative one i.e. you use monsters of level X pretty much only because the PCs are level X.

For your purpose, try taking a few low level adventures and replace all monsters with high level ones, I believe in the vast majority of cases the story will make the same sense.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

As you might imagine, I disagree completely. Some of the best Superman stories are not about saving the world.

Let me explain: I don't exclude that it is possible to write excellent stories the way you are trying to do. I simply say that you must be very clever not to slip away from coherency. The very important thing to do is to find a motivation strong enough to drive 4 semi-gods away from girls and drugs.

 

[S'mon]

The very important thing to do is to find a motivation strong enough to drive 4 semi-gods away from girls and drugs.

Not all high level PCs are motivated solely - or at all - by debauchery.

IME most players want to keep playing their high level PCs, and they often have motivations such as building empires, amassing millions of gp, getting more and better magic items. Passive PCs may need some threat motivations but even these don't need a direct WET; maybe an old ally calls in a favour.

 

[Coroc]

Often, "high level adventure" seems to imply equally high stakes for the world. While I think the stakes should always matter to those involved in the adventure, I don't think the world needs a weekly threat of an extinction level event for high level D&D to be fun.

So let's brainstorm ideas for high level adventures that do not involve kingdoms, planets or planes getting crushed, or gods getting dethroned/killed and so on.

....

You are talking bout FR? (just joking )