"Themed" Campaigns

[Darkness]

OK I can't take it anymore. I have to ask. What in the gods' name is that Ooi that you type in all the time?

His last name?

 

[Crothian]

Yeah, that's what concerned me about your comment of using only one class: The lack of certain abilities that D&D just kinda takes as a given.
But if you found a way to alter the game to make it playable, that's quite cool...

Yes, the lack of certain abilities makes this tough. With rogues, they have enough skill points to allow skills to really be the focus and that Use Magical Device skill is key. It was a heavily urban run game that allowed for sneakiness and well thought out plans. They had two melee rogues who would go for the sneak attacks, one ranged who picked off people, and one who specialized in Use Magical Device to use wands and be the artillery so to speak.

They Fighter one was more difficult becasue they could dish out so much damage so fast it was hard to get good encounters. Also, the healing was only potions, so if a battle got bad it was hard for them to recover. They had three melee specialists and one archer. We had a heavy hitter, a two weapon guy, and a spring attacker. The spring attacker was the diffrernce maker. He ranged all over the combat setting up flanking and taking advantage of everything.

 

[Psychotic Jim]

I don't know if this qualifies, but the campaign I am running now started off having all of the players playing the children of former high-level characters. They had to deal with always being in the shadows of their accomplished parents and also had to deal with some of their parents' more vengeful enemies. Oh, and their parents had dissappeared too.

One character, an elf fighter, always hated his paladin elf father and constantly had inferiority complexes for being compared to his monolithic predecessor all the time. And another player played an elven rogue whose father, a crusader priest, was always off adventuring and thus left her to watch herself on the streets. Later on, a player came in with an Oriental Adventures style fighter whose mother had been an evil Maho-blood cultist and whose father was a vile assassin which left the character with great guilt and adventured to make amends for the misdeeds of his parents. I called this campaign "In the Shadows of Giants".

One themed campaign I would like to run is campaign with all of the characters as students of the same wizard school- all arcane spellcasters of various specializations. This would be especially fun if the characters were specialists from opposing schools and departments that looked down at each other.

 

[Ezrael]

Well, I'm working on (haven't run it yet) a campaign set back 65 million years ago where the PC's will all be Lizardfolk, Kobolds, Troglodytes and various sub-species of Saurials. I was inspired to create it by a comment by Sean Reynolds and the fact that I've played a Lizardman twice in different campaigns. This particular campaign is kind of like throwing Harry Harrison, the Sleestacks and the Discovery Channel in a blender, but since the first session is still a ways away I have no idea how it will run (I'm really concerned that it not turn into 'Elves with scales' or anything like that) or if it's even workable.

In fact, I'm having a hard time deciding if there will be Wizards or Sorcerors in the campaign. I'm thinking of having Mind Flayers and Abomination Yuan-Ti as the main villains, and for a different flavor than a usual campaign I think using the Psionics Handbook as the only 'magic' could be interesting.

 

[tsadkiel]

Or a "Lost World" campaign, in which Dinosaurs roam free and human(oid)s are but scavenging savages?

I did something sort of like this in 2E, combining the Hollow World setting with Masque of the Red Death to produce a campaign about Victorian explorers traped in the Hollow Earth. The game featured dinosaurs, scantily clad cavewomen, a lost Roman outpost, an evil scientific genius . . . the usual stuff. Lts of fun. It'd work even better with d20, now that I think about it.

I've also set games in Oz, if that counts.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Themey delicious

I ran a cold war/imperialism game once. The world was split by conflict between an Orcish Khanate, brute force, and a Gnomish Imperium, magic and finesse. Both nations operated on a level of power that was unimaginable to other nations expect for when they recieved gifts or aid from one side or the other. Citizens from these nations were effectively more powerful than local governments and had no compunction about pushing people around except where the other power might interfere.

The players were all characters from 'third world' nations or nations allied with the Gnomish power, and were part of a massive colonial expedition to a previously unknown continent sponsored by some of the more powerful third world nations with help and advisors from the two superpowers scattered throughout the whole operation.

As a DM it was the most fun I ever had. The players were free to whatever they wanted in the 'new' world, more Australia then the Americas, but whenever an Orc or a Gnome showed up they were suddenly all finesse.

I also liked it because I was able to deal with fairly contemporary issues from a very different perspective and still preserve a very fantasy feel. And the Gnomes were bad asses. Despite being good, the players were frightened to death of them.

The game never reached fruition, sadly, as this was played just as 3E was coming out and everyone wanted to play. Eventually we had 12 players and that only worked for so long. Still a lot of those players refer to moments during the game as the best role-playing experience they ever had.

 

[Aeolius]

Does running a campaign set primarily underwater, where PCs are assumed to be native water-breathing races, count as being "themed"?

 

[F5]

I'm thinking of a Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now theme for my next campaign. The PCs go upriver to find and confront an evil warlord/outlaw, and find instead that things aren't as clear-cut as they thought.

I can see the scene now. "I love the smell of sulfur and bat guano in the morning..."

Sounds like fun.

 

[F5]

Currently: Legends of Hawaiki, Mythic Polynesia theme

* this could also fit into a PC as Village Leaders theme (ie the antithesis of the standard Adventuring PC as mecenary theme)

I'm actually working on something similar. What kinds of Polynesian elements are you using? IMC I've got a bunch of Pacific Islander imagery to play with, but haven't found a way to bring it all together into a "theme" yet. The humans of the campaign have tribal Culture Heroes/Ancestors instead of gods, the actual "gods" being scary, elemental forces like Typhoons and Volcanoes. There are Easter Island-esque stone heads that guard the entrances to an undead-riddles Underworld. I've replaced scrolls and wands with talismans and Tikki masks.
But all this stuff is still just flavor elements, with nothing thematic tying them together.
My initial thought was a cataclysmic volcano eruption that destroys a major city (echoes of Mt Vesuvius and Atlantis here), and the campaign focuses on the chaos left behind. How does that sound as a "theme"? Playable?

 

[hong]

I can see the scene now. "I love the smell of sulfur and bat guano in the morning..."

Lighthearted: "I love the smell of bat guano in the morning!"

Standard: "I love the smell of brimstone in the morning!"

Mature: "I love the smell of charred flesh in the morning!"

Vile: "I love the smell of woman in the morning!"


Okay, end of thread, no more to see here, move along.