D&D General The campaign you will never get to run

[Li Shenron]

I’ve done that, and it was both fun and frustrating.

Every once in a while, one of the player-DMs (we all did double duty) would forget that some resource, spell or other MacGuffin was unique to one of their OWN characters, and the adventure would stall out because of a bottleneck that requried it.

Ah but I always use the "fade to background" approach for an absent player, so in such case you could always have the MacGuffin or key spell in case of a bottleneck

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Doesn’t work so well when you’re in a high level adventure* and the party is in a situation where there’s no possibility for said party members to re-emerge.

Especially if/when the setup explicitly excluded their participation!

(If I’m honest, the frustration was momentary, and quickly metamorphosized into humor.)

One guy was the most common offender. His highest level PC was the group’s most powerful wizard. Therefore he A) always picked the best spells for himself (logical) and B) always refused to share those spells with any of the other casters in the party (illogical). That meant a few spells were the purview of his and ONLY his mage, despite there being maybe 2-3 other casters who could have used them, even if not as well.

So there were a few times when he’d hoist the party on his own petard.

(No, he never changed across editions or campaigns.)


* and it was ALWAYS the high level adventures!

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I want to run a primitive world exploration game. The players are all from a human tribe, the classes are restricted to "early man/tribal" classes (no wizard, instead sorcerer and warlock. No shining knight paladin, instead restricted to barbarian, fighter, ranger; druids instead of clerics, etc.). As they explore the world, they may run into new races like elves and dwarves. As they explore the world, the players discover they aren't in a primitive world, rather they are in a post apocalyptic world and as they leave their valley to learn more about the world they find ancient ruins and skeletal remains of a people that look a lot like them. Suddenly it changes from primitive exploration to what happened to our ancestors.

I'd play that.

 

[Shiroiken]

I don't have any campaign Ideas that I'll absolutely never run... but I have far more ideas that I'll ever be able to DM

 

[Oofta]

An all dwarf campaign ultimately leading to search for a kingdom lost to dragons.

Pretty straightforward, right? Sure, except I always have at least one player who refused to play a dwarf. Which doesn't really work, because one of the things I want to do is take advantage of long lifetime and stretch the campaign over a century or more.

Float a similar idea about an all elven party and every player is already writing up a PC before I finish my sentence

Darn racist (speciest?) players.

 

[atanakar]

I have a little black book that dates back decades with many campaign ideas that will never be a thing. To many ideas not enough time.

 

[mrpopstar]

I ran a campaign where the PCs were characters in a history book, brought to life.

The gimmick was that, unbeknownst to the PCs, the world basically ended when the demon lord Baphomet conquered the whole plane. His savage presence causes text in books to turn to gibberish, and only one library bastion survived. In it was a copy of The Book of Lorem, which is the textual and physical manifestation of the Word of God.

A librarian wanted to see if it was possible to save the world, and found a history book about the group who initially found Baphomet's prison and inadvertently released him. She unbound that book, and spliced a section of the text into the Book of Lorem, which technically made the events in the history book Word of God. So the PCs, despite being long dead, were alive in the text, and could, like, learn things that were known at the time but had since been lost, and they could report back to the librarian, who would devise a way to fix things.

The first half of the campaign went well. The party, with the aid of a librarian, figured out how to fight back against Baphomet when he was released, and they banished him. But when I had the group learn that they were in a book, the players lost interest in my Inception-style plan to use a copy of the Book of Lorem inside their own book to go deeper, eventually finding God Himself and doing some weird stuff to rewrite canon.

Love this! -- When UA Sidekicks specifically called out librarians as experts who might join the party in adventures, my heart exploded.

 

[J-H]

Something involving the party having to find an inscription giving the party's Arcane caster the ability to cast Teleport Through Time.

 

[Blue]

I always wanted to be a dm+player in a campaign that lasts decades of real time where the levelling up pace is progressively slow, to the point of taking tens of quests to gain the next level, and the PCs growing old with the players.

You just inspired a new campaign idea that I'll likely never get to play.

Like you, I've wanted to try a campaign with years of downtime. I was just thinking about that and about keeping the characters to stay together-ish when I had an idea.

The players are actually Ancenstor Spirits / Genius Loci / some sort of local area benevolent spirits. They have class, background, skills/feats and mental abilities only. Probably starting at 3rd or 4th.

Every so often, could be years, could be decades, there is an dire threat to the community that they protect. Zombie apocholypse, magical drought, dragons, etc. I hand out a bunch people the spirits could possess, who already have race/class and physical abilities. Plus position, from a mayor to a locked up criminal. More than there are players.

The players' spirits possess the bodies, becoming multiclassed characters. They deal with whatever threat is out there. If they die, they will possess one of the others - you can raise the body but not put the spirit back in it.

After the threat, they go back to being spirits until years later the next crisis hits. They levelled their spirit side, and they have different hosts. Or maybe not all different. The town has grown and changed. There are likely legends of them from last time, though if those are good or not is up to what they did.

It would be a short campaign, say five adventures with the spirit leveling up 1-2 between each, and the stakes getting progressively higher, but also how the settlement prospers or not is a big result of how they did, so that's the real indicator of success or failure in the campaign.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Our long-running campaign actually had several subgroups within it. We played high level, mid level and even low level stuff within the same campaign setting. Sometimes, there were crossover effects as the efforts of one party or the other had permanent, large scale ramifications.

it would be cool to do another shared world like that, but maybe without the idea that the PCs would be used for anything beyond one-shots.

 

[Blue]

An all dwarf campaign ultimately leading to search for a kingdom lost to dragons.

Pretty straightforward, right? Sure, except I always have at least one player who refused to play a dwarf. Which doesn't really work, because one of the things I want to do is take advantage of long lifetime and stretch the campaign over a century or more.

Float a similar idea about an all elven party and every player is already writing up a PC before I finish my sentence

Darn racist (speciest?) players.

We played this! We had an all dwarf* campaign back in AD&D 2nd in FR. Later in the campaign, we went on a (published/Dungeon!) adventure where there was a diamond citadel in an active volcano. We ended up clearing whatever was in it and foudn tghat in our DM's FR it had been the last holdout of Clan Melairkyn. We all took oaths and restarted the lost clan with us as the elders. Lots of fun as we both adventured but also nourished and recruited a new clan, set up trade routes, etc.

* "Dwarves" included one dark elf who thought she was a dwarf that we had eventually accepted. shrug It was 30+ years ago. PC tee shirts, eh?

I played Morinn of the Mask, an urban bounty hunter who became a grand master of the crossbow. "Crossbows are good for ..." was a catchphrase. Sometimes it backfired, like we saw the unsuspecting "prisoner" in a vampire lair whom we thought was really a vampire trying to trick us. "Crossbows are good for detecting vampires". Shoot one wooden crossbow bolt into it's heart. End up apologizing for several sessions to the paladin of Lathander the vampires had captured. Ooops.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

I always wanted to be a dm+player in a campaign that lasts decades of real time where the levelling up pace is progressively slow, to the point of taking tens of quests to gain the next level, and the PCs growing old with the players.

What I'd like to do is similar - run repeated campaigns at normal pace, but in a world that evolves due to the actions of previous campaigns, with PCs and their descendants becoming key NPCs and historical figures. As I might be pretty settled for the next decade and a half, perhaps my current campaign is the beginning of this...

 

[Blue]

The Demise of the Lady of Fate
When I used to play 10-14 hours every weekend when I was a student, I loved the idea of a megadungeon. I've never actually played in one for an extended period, and never run one. This was inspired a bit by that idea, plus some Sluggy Freelance.

The Goddess of Wyrd, Fate, Destiny and Time has been slain. Time has stopped. Living beings generate a bit of Wyrd, but quickly slowed and stopped - unless they were in large enough groups. The three cities, a metropolitan area at the border of three countries, each with their own "city" though they have really grown together. This provided enough Wyrd/Time/whatever to keep the city and some surrounding areas moving in time, so they could grow food and such.

Recently, they have learned how to store time and radiate it out. So they can send out people into the never-changing areas of no-time. Young people seem to spend it slower, so the groups they send our are full of young people (i.e. the players).

Now, there are a lot of threats out there, but they don't "activate" until the party gets close. Might be a blizzard going on, captured from when it froze. There are creatures out there, and the stored time will "activate" them well before the PCs get close because it combines with the Wyrd they have already. For the same reason the PCs can remain active a good distance from the time lanterns.

Eventual goal would be to restart time. Now, the death of the Lady of Fate destroyed all prophecy and such, and the players would need to decide and enact if they want a world where such a thing (the providence of the gods to affect the mortal world) exists again, or if the world is free from the meddling of the gods.

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

The Goddess of Wyrd, Fate, Destiny and Time has been slain. Time has stopped. Living beings generate a bit of Wyrd, but quickly slowed and stopped - unless they were in large enough groups. The three cities, a metropolitan area at the border of three countries, each with their own "city" though they have really grown together. This provided enough Wyrd/Time/whatever to keep the city and some surrounding areas moving in time, so they could grow food and such.

Recently, they have learned how to store time and radiate it out. So they can send out people into the never-changing areas of no-time. Young people seem to spend it slower, so the groups they send our are full of young people (i.e. the players).

This reminded me of a campaign that I always wanted to run based on Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles. For those unfamiliar it's essentially a setting that encourages finding and exploring new dungeons. The world is covered in a substance called miasma that turns living things into monsters. There exist crystals that can ward away the miasma in a large area and each surviving city and town has one. However, in order for the crystals to continue to work they must be powered by another substance called myrrh. Myrrh is produced by special trees that mysteriously only grow in dangerous places that monsters flock to.

Thus every village sends out a caravan of adventurers carrying a chalice which has the ability to ward off miasma in a smaller area and can hold myrrh. Caravans seek out dungeons, fight past it's horrible denizens, locate the tree (inevitably protected by a boss) and collect the myrrh. Once enough myrrh is collected it's brought back home to recharge the crystal in an end of the year festival.

I would pretty much apply this structure to a D&D setting instead of using the Final Fantasy one. But it was always the tone that struck me as interesting. Despite this bleak, post-apocalypse feeling setup, the game still manages to have a warm, comforting and optimistic feeling when it needs to. There are sad moments like when you find a dungeon that was once a town much like the one you came from where the caravan never made it back. But it's balanced by a cute charm.

 

[Panda-s1]

I started this campaign so idk if it counts, but during 4e I was going to do a campaign where a group accidentally gets teleported to Sigil and can't go back home 'cause their planet was conveniently cut off from the rest of the multiverse. like history indicates that used to not be the case, but now the outer planes are regarded as a myth. this being 4e they'd travel across the astral sea on a ship to different worlds and try and find a way to get back home. unfortunately the group kinda fell apart after two sessions, which was okay, one of the players was new and decided they weren't into the d&d thing, another player who was new was kinda problematic anyway. also bait and switch campaigns are generally considered not the best idea, and I had to be like "lol just don't be attached to anything ;U".

never did plan out much either, tbh. though later I decided something bad was lurking on that planet (some kinda eldritch horror?), and they'd probably end up being the BBEG at the end.

 

[Xeviat]

Red Hand of Doom from 3E. I bought it when it came out, started running it, got to mid chapter 1, group fell apart.

Started it again, group got through chapter 1, fell apart.

Started rewriting it for 4E. Was really excited because it was easy to rebuild the encounters. Got 2 sessions in. Group fell apart.

Started rewriting it for 5E. Got halfway through chapter 1, it fell apart.

Trying to run it one last time. If it doesn't work, I'm throwing in the towel on Red Hand of Doom.

 

[pukunui]

Red Hand of Doom from 3E. I bought it when it came out, started running it, got to mid chapter 1, group fell apart.

Started it again, group got through chapter 1, fell apart.

Started rewriting it for 4E. Was really excited because it was easy to rebuild the encounters. Got 2 sessions in. Group fell apart.

Started rewriting it for 5E. Got halfway through chapter 1, it fell apart.

Trying to run it one last time. If it doesn't work, I'm throwing in the towel on Red Hand of Doom.

That's sad! I managed to get all the way through to the end of the second-to-last chapter. It was fun but a bit demoralizing at times, especially when we had a near-TPK to some blackspawn assassins. The end was also something of a pyrrhic victory, and none of us had any stomach to do the tacked-on Tiamat temple chapter at the end, so we finished it off with victory at Brindol.

I wouldn't mind trying it again in 5e, though ...

 

[MoonSong]

Red Hand of Doom from 3E. I bought it when it came out, started running it, got to mid chapter 1, group fell apart.

Started it again, group got through chapter 1, fell apart.

Started rewriting it for 4E. Was really excited because it was easy to rebuild the encounters. Got 2 sessions in. Group fell apart.

Started rewriting it for 5E. Got halfway through chapter 1, it fell apart.

Trying to run it one last time. If it doesn't work, I'm throwing in the towel on Red Hand of Doom.

Reminds me of the first adventure I made. It is a straight dungeoncrawl with goblins, dragons and lots of hidden rooms. No party has ever finished it whenever I tried to run it.

 

[Bitbrain]

Greyhawk-based 5e game combining Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Blades & Blasters for 5e by Seth Tomlinson, and Pathfinder’s Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars sourcebook into a full-blown campaign centered in the Sheldomar Valley.

Nothing has come of it, and I’m more than a little frustrated.

 

[pogre]

My never going to work idea is to have a military campaign based around mass combat. Players would be different military commanders & they would get to level-up and customize different army regiments. Combat would be based around swarm-style mass combat rules where regiments are represented as a kind monster with special traits. It would put the focus on trying to include as few special rules as I can to leave the system open. For example, there would be no rule stopping you from using single target spells on a regiment.

A mass combat campaign is right in my wheel house. I do run mass combat in my regular campaign on rare occasion, but a dedicated campaign would be a blast.