Robin Laws D&D Campaign Idea - D&D Deadwood

[Glyfair]

During my blog reading I found this great campaign idea from Robin Laws' blog. He recommends using a non-D&D system admittedly (D&D doesn't do this sort of game well), but it is set in a classic D&D style setting though, and it sounds like it could be a blast!

Idea for RPG series: Gigantic dungeon complex full of treasure found in isolated wilderness. Adventurers travel from all over to plunder it, setting up bustling lawless town. PCs are not adventurers, but the leading figures of the town, who struggle to skim its wealth and harness its nascent political power.

Set in a default D&D world, with all of the attendant world elements that implies. To prevent it from turning into an actual D&D game, uses simple narrative rules set (HeroQuest, Fudge, Over the Edge, etc.) capable of handling political and social conflicts.

Occurs in a world of suddenly murky morality. Old alignment system, which used to be objectively verifiable, has now crumbled. Gods still grant power to clerics but have gone silent. People must now work out a new moral order of their own. Town is ground zero of moral ambiguity.

 

[Theron]

I've got a map for a setting like this sketched out. That's about as far as I got. Though I admit that most of my inspiration came from the desire to play a NPC elf who talks like Al Swearingen.

 

[Wraith Form]

Thsi almost, at first, sounds like Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure Into the Wilds.

....'Cept different.

 

[Mark CMG]

I ran a more straight forward Deadwood style campaign, using D&D rules, where gold was discovered just beyond the current borders of a kingdom, in the wilds where the kingdom was not ready to encroach, though that didn't stop the lawless and enterprising from heading out there.

 

[phindar]

My friend started the Age or Worms AP off in a Deadwoody town. I think he may have gotten the idea off this board, but that was before I started frequenting it. It kind of backfired on him though, because the Deadwood mining town was such an unusual, and frankly awesome place to set a D&D game, and the AP moves away from it fairly quickly, that I lost interest in the campaign once we left it. To this day (almost two years later), I still tell him any time he wants to run a return to Diamond Lake, I'd be at the table.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Cool idea. So what sort of events/encounters would this campaign have? My ideas:

- The sherriff is corrupt. PCs have to uncover his evil & fire him.
- High level party comes to town, takes over and begind wantonly slaughtering civilians.
- Party "strikes it rich" causing prices in town to triple overnight. The PCs have to figure out how to get the economy back under control.
- Someone/thing is stalking the streets at night, killing the employess of the town brothel. The madam threatens to close, sending morale into the toilet.
- Prosthelytizers come to town, preaching that consumption of alcohol is a sin against the gods. A tavern gets burned, one of them gets attacked, and things threaten to spin out of control ...
- Someone is animating the dead from the graveyard.
- After getting rich from an adventuring find, one of the churches in town tries to put a power play on the others, driving them out of town and coverting the entire town to the worship of one religion.
- A prankster with a ring of invisibility is running about town, causing chaos.
- An embassy from the wilderlands arrives -- the monsters are concerned about the rampaging adventurers, and want to sue for peace/damages
- Refugee monstrous humanoid populations pass through.
- A drought dires up the water supply, and the clericcs can't keep up with demand.
- There's a shortage of fine steel for weapons and armor.
- Someone sets up a rival town across the river, with lower taxes. Most of the town residents migrate .. .but then they begin disappearing.
- Ranchers want to fence land outside the town, to raise meat animals to feed adventurers, and come in to conflict with local barbarian tribes and their migratory herd animals.