Ideas for Fantasy Campaigns

[Reynard]

What are some ideas you have had -- whether you ran them or not, invented them or stole them -- for fantasy rpg campaigns that weren't about a) adventuring for fortune and glory, or b) saving the village/kingdom/world/plane?

I have always wanted to run an honest to goodness expedition campaign. From the initial planning stages through the logistics and onto the exploration, a campaign that mimics the real life 18th and 19th century expeditions into parts unknown (hopefully without the colonialism).

Another I would like to do someday is a generational campaign in a specific village over the course of centuries. Every generation would have a single, procedurally generated event or "story" and the players would really be taking on the roles of family lines more than individual characters.

What atypical fantasy campaigns do.you want to.run or have run?

 

[innerdude]

I've always wanted to run a "Godfather with swords and spears" campaign, where the point is for the PCs to become the ultimate medieval crime lords.

For some reason, never found quite the right system or context to run it.

 

[jdrakeh]

I ran (almost two decades ago) a campaign of soldiers (D&D classes, of course) trapped behind enemy lines after a war went badly for them, fighting their way back home. I'd like to revisit that somebody, although today I think I'd use Rolemaster or, potentially, Harnmaster Gold bereft of the setting-specific material.

 

[pemerton]

In the BW game where I'm a player, my PC's goal is to learn what happened to his order (he is the last Knight of the Iron Tower) and to restore the fortunes and honour of his family and its ancestral estate.

 

[payn]

A campaign of ghost busting using Paizo's haunt rules. A haunt is sort of like a trap, but they can be very elaborate. A haunt can be temporarily disabled, but only permanently put to rest through a ritual unique to the origin of the haunt. You can use a Ouija board to discover this ritual and perform it. Typically, PCs will disable haunts temporarily and move on to their goals. This campaign permanently disabling the haunts would be the goal.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What are some ideas you have had -- whether you ran them or not, invented them or stole them -- for fantasy rpg campaigns that weren't about a) adventuring for fortune and glory, or b) saving the village/kingdom/world/plane?

I have run games where the framework was that the party were members of a caravan. In most cases, they were simply about traveling the world as mercenary guards.

One of my better variants on that was a one-shot where they party were guarding a Princess on her way to an arranged marriage to seal a brokered peace accord. The party had to avoid all kinds of forces intent on gutting the treaty by capturing or killing the princess, including an assassin in the caravan.

I ran one campaign where the PCs were hired to obtain rare spell components and ingredients & supplies for crafting magic items.

I wanted to (but never did) run a campaign in which the PCs were members of an elite squadron within a large fantasy city. The Special Wizardry And Tactics force, a.k.a. S.W.A.T.

I ran one campaign where the party had been kidnapped across dimensions to be used for sport hunting, After their escape, they had some typical FRPG type adventures, but their overarching GOAL was simply to get home.

 

[gamerprinter]

If I told you, I'd have to kill you!

Just about everything I've come up with over the past 7 years or so as far as adventures, settings, maps and illustrations go, I end up publishing. Anything I might say, I'm liable to end publishing...

 

[Dioltach]

I set up a campaign in Renaissance Italy, where the PCs were supposed to watch over the baby Vampire Slayer until she grew up. Unfortunately the campaign unravelled, but the idea was fun.

 

[Bluenose]

I'm currently running a game that's in part a police game, where the PCs are official representatives of the local ruler assigned to a backwater village to make sure everything runs smoothly (by which they mean, taxes get paid and nothing that requires sending out large numbers of troops/priests is needed. Sometimes they're collecting taxes, sometimes they're drilling the local militia, something they're investigating drug smuggling, sometimes they're performing bizarre rituals handed down from hundreds of years ago, and sometimes there's a real mystery which requires research, cleverness and the ability to fight the bad guys.

I want to run a game where court intrigue is the focus, where finding a good marriage and advancing your status is far more important than heading off into the wild and risking your life in some mouldy old ruins. Blades in the Dark, but with nobles and their cliques instead of thieves guilds.

 

[Grantypants]

I wanted to do a 5e campaign that was all about finding and using new spells after existing spells mostly stop working. The party would be spellcasters only and every class would be able to add new spells to their spellbooks somehow. They'd function like wizards learning from scrolls but the process would be dramatically reskinned to match each PC.

I also wanted to do a megadungeon campaign that's really about organizing the other adventurers into a labor union and fighting for better adventuring conditions.