wingsandsword
Legend
Some discussion over on the Fantasy & Sci-Fi message board about how Star Trek: Voyager wasted it's premise of two disparate crews brought together and having to survive together far from home got me thinking. Then I realized, the basic premise of that series could be turned into a very interesting low level or low magic D&D game.
Start a campaign with 3 or 4 players, playing rogues, bandits and generally disreputable types, a pirate ship or at least a smuggler, starting at level 1. At the same time start a separate campaign with 3 or 4 players playing a naval crew, responsible for keeping order, exploring, and generally representing their kingdom at sea, also starting at level 1. Both ships are in a sea far away from their normal homeland, but within normally charted and navigable waterways (like the Carribean to European ships). After 2 or 3 levels and a relatively short time (but long enough for the group to start feeling some sense of unity), they both separately discover or hear of a magical archway (of a scale akin to the Colossus of Rhodes) that has been discovered amidst ruins in an inlet of a small island that transports ships to a wondrous new and uncharted land that has been discovered that has untold riches.
Both ships enter separately but within a day or so of each other, and find the other side is the decaying capitol city on the other side of the world, uncharted and completely unknown, of an ancient Empire that has long fallen into factions, city-states, barbarism, and marauding foriegn powers. The two ships are in the same harbor when one of the marauding states launches a major attack, which destroys their archway home and strands them, as well as damaging their ships and killing most of their NPC crews (like the NPC captain of the Naval ship, leaving the low-level PC First Officer as the captain maybe). In the aftermath the pirates have found that their ship is sinking, although most of their supplies and equipment is salvagable, while the naval ship is relatively intact although it is in desperate need of more skilled crew as well as supplies and spare parts, things the other ship has in abundance. For either crew to get home would require them to work together to survive the long trip. A crew composed of half pirates & smugglers, and half of sailors and marines having to sail across the world to get home in a ship that is suffering increasingly poor and cobbled-together repairs, when they only have the vaguest clues of how to get back where they started from. The two campaigns merge into one.
New characters brought in would either be "offscreen" NPC crewmen who were promoted after the death of a main character, locals that became brought along for the ride for one reason or another (a guide to the local area, exile from an evil/intolerant society) or even lost people from their own end of the world who ended up far away themselves (other ships that were stranded when the new gateway was destroyed, victims of magical accidents, or long-lost explorers who became stranded somehow).
The DM has plenty of chances for this to be an "episodic" campaign, since the players are usually seeing cities, cultures, and islands that they may never see again, and only visit for a short time, and even recurring empires/kingdoms only last so long before they sail beyond their sphere of influence.
Preferably the campaign would be either relatively low level (to prevent them from teleporting home easily) or low-magic enough that teleportation spells are not normally available to PC's (like if it was based on the d20 Modern/Past engine instead of D&D).
Does anybody else like this idea for a campaign?
Start a campaign with 3 or 4 players, playing rogues, bandits and generally disreputable types, a pirate ship or at least a smuggler, starting at level 1. At the same time start a separate campaign with 3 or 4 players playing a naval crew, responsible for keeping order, exploring, and generally representing their kingdom at sea, also starting at level 1. Both ships are in a sea far away from their normal homeland, but within normally charted and navigable waterways (like the Carribean to European ships). After 2 or 3 levels and a relatively short time (but long enough for the group to start feeling some sense of unity), they both separately discover or hear of a magical archway (of a scale akin to the Colossus of Rhodes) that has been discovered amidst ruins in an inlet of a small island that transports ships to a wondrous new and uncharted land that has been discovered that has untold riches.
Both ships enter separately but within a day or so of each other, and find the other side is the decaying capitol city on the other side of the world, uncharted and completely unknown, of an ancient Empire that has long fallen into factions, city-states, barbarism, and marauding foriegn powers. The two ships are in the same harbor when one of the marauding states launches a major attack, which destroys their archway home and strands them, as well as damaging their ships and killing most of their NPC crews (like the NPC captain of the Naval ship, leaving the low-level PC First Officer as the captain maybe). In the aftermath the pirates have found that their ship is sinking, although most of their supplies and equipment is salvagable, while the naval ship is relatively intact although it is in desperate need of more skilled crew as well as supplies and spare parts, things the other ship has in abundance. For either crew to get home would require them to work together to survive the long trip. A crew composed of half pirates & smugglers, and half of sailors and marines having to sail across the world to get home in a ship that is suffering increasingly poor and cobbled-together repairs, when they only have the vaguest clues of how to get back where they started from. The two campaigns merge into one.
New characters brought in would either be "offscreen" NPC crewmen who were promoted after the death of a main character, locals that became brought along for the ride for one reason or another (a guide to the local area, exile from an evil/intolerant society) or even lost people from their own end of the world who ended up far away themselves (other ships that were stranded when the new gateway was destroyed, victims of magical accidents, or long-lost explorers who became stranded somehow).
The DM has plenty of chances for this to be an "episodic" campaign, since the players are usually seeing cities, cultures, and islands that they may never see again, and only visit for a short time, and even recurring empires/kingdoms only last so long before they sail beyond their sphere of influence.
Preferably the campaign would be either relatively low level (to prevent them from teleporting home easily) or low-magic enough that teleportation spells are not normally available to PC's (like if it was based on the d20 Modern/Past engine instead of D&D).
Does anybody else like this idea for a campaign?
