D&D 5E What is your favorite campaign story?

[Nevaroth]

What is your custom campaign story/setting? Or what is your favorite story/setting that you were a player in?


I can start with my campaign I'm currently DM'ing. My setting is this:

The party is lvl 10 and everyone has just been captured by a large cult, taken to their base (the ruins of an ancient city buried in a massive cavern), and is being held as slaves. The cult is trying to revive an ancient empire, and the dark lord who led it. The party's equipment has been confiscated, and no known help is coming. Everyone is being held in a large slave camp. The cavern is filled with many cultists and monsters. The players must use their wits and skills to escape. They'll find many friends and foes, and will have to make many morally difficult decisions. Will they be able to escape? Or will they fall to the empire's might?...... Or will they join the cult and help destroy the forces of good?



What is your story?

 

[Imaculata]

A few years ago I started a 3.5 pirate campaign called Pirates of the Emerald Coast. Half the players started imprisoned in a cruel Kturgian prison tower, in the middle of a raging sea, while the other half were part of a rescue team. The B team had to climb up the tower carrying a rope, to lift a chain up to the cell. This would allow a ship to rip out the cell wall and free the prisoners. The players managed to reach the cell, and free the other half of the party, and they freed some npc's too, who would become their future crew. But the Kturgian guards were alerted by the noise and started firing at them with muskets. Climbing down the way they came was now no longer an option. The only way they were going to leave the tower, is by fighting their way down.



So by overpowering some of the guards, and using what ever weapons they could lay their hands on, they eventually got some flintlock weapons to fire back at the guards. They fought their way down floor by floor, until they reached the bottom. But the guards unleashed their pet crocodiles on the players. And for level 1 characters a crocodile is a pretty dangerous opponent. It can kill a player in one attack. The players also had to deal with one of the prisoners, who had a Hydra-cult tattoo. They decided to kill him, before he had a chance to betray them. (in my campaign it's basically like having a Cthulhu tattoo. It's bad news.)

After escaping the horrors of the prison, they fled to Port Freedom, where the players started recruiting their first pirate crew. And they have been terrorizing the Emerald Coast ever since. They have met dozens of strange island cultures over the years, and made many friends and enemies. They have fought with sea monsters and avatars of evil gods. And now at long last they are right in the middle of the biggest naval battle so far. They must defeat the evil Kturgian pirate captain Karagoz, also known as the Hurricane of the North, and his fleet of pirate ships.

 

[JonnyP71]

Mine is a published module. I just love the Shooting Star storyline behind UK4 When A Star Falls.

 

[delericho]

What is your custom campaign story/setting? Or what is your favorite story/setting that you were a player in?

Over the years, I've run a lot of campaigns, but there are four I consider especially good for one reason or another.

The first of these was an unnamed Tolkien-rip-off that I ran while in high school - probably not a great campaign by any objective standard, but it was a huge amount of fun. It was also the last time that particular group of friends were all together, as after that people started to leave for college, jobs, or other reasons.

The second was a Vampire: the Masquerade campaign that spanned 5 years real-time and 2,300 years game time, starting with the characters as raw neonates in ancient Rome and ending with them witnessing the end of the world in 2,150 AD. This was the most ambitious campaign I ever ran, and featured amongst other things a storyline that was seeded in session #2 and finally paid off 4.5 years later. But by the end there it was seriously lagging, having just gone on too long. But, as with "Wheel of Time" by that point we were so invested in it that we just had to see how it ended.

The third was a 3.5e campaign using the "Shackled City" adventure path. Good stuff, and the highest I've ever reached in the level range - the characters hit 19th level at the end of the last session.

But probably my favourite is the most recent, another 3.5e campaign titled "The Eberron Code". This one opened in Morgrave University with the murder of one of the PC's mentors, and then unfolded into a huge world-spanning plot that took them to the Frostfell, Xen'drik, and the heart of the Silver Flame, featuring many of my favourite bits of Eberron lore, my favourite monsters and NPCs, and the Book of Vile Darkness. But I think my highlight was about two-thirds of the way through where the players spent an hour trying to work out their next step, and proceeded to lay out 90% of my plot with 90% accuracy - thus confirming that I'd done a decent job revealing it all, and also that they'd been paying attention.