D&D 5E What is your "go to" campaign concept?

[TheDelphian]

I usually have a weird mix of things.

Mostly sand boxy but I have the players be members of an adventurer's guild. This provides structure and mission based stuff to fill in between wandering.

I also sprinkle the world with campaign "Secrets". Places or pieces of history that shape or affected the world. These are things it is nice if players sink teeth into but is not necessary for the game.

 

[MNblockhead]

I like to try different approaches, though I tend to start with a fairly generic fantasy world but add/remove some mechanics that support a particular narrative or style of play.

For example, my current long-running campaign is a large but contained sandbox. A mega dungeon. I use GP for XP, which really changes the dynamics of game play. There are a variety factions, a detailed history, and some overall plot lines, but the story is mostly created through play. It does involve quite a bit of downtime play, however, which not all players are going to be into.

My first 5e campaign was a home brew world where elves were for all practical purposed wiped out and arcane magic was banned. For that campaign, I used milestone leveling. There would be an adventure that would like for one or two 8-hour sessions. After which, surviving PCs would level up. Basically, the idea is that you had a party of adventurers who after a period of time, could be years, we called together once again. Bascially we played levels 1 through 20, with each level being one adventure. It worked well for for busy players.

Both of these campaigns worked well when you have players who cannot attend every sessions. It is very easy to bring in new guest players as well.

The only other campaign I ran in 5e was Curse of Strahd, because I was burned out with world building and creating all the adventures myself and I really liked the CoS adventure book. While I really enjoyed it, it was much harder to run with a group of busy people who might not be able to make every session. I had to work much more on moving the schedule around to try to ensure the entire group could attend most of the time. A full-on "adventure path" or more railroady adventure would would even harder to run. CoS was at least pretty sandboxy. But I would find it difficult to run most of the officially published WotC adventures for my main group.

 

[John R Davis]

Still fan of the town-wilderness-dungeon concept.

A lot of the stuff I create is filled with a lot of was is called " secondary story-telling". The PCs are not the first to explore the dungeon, as well as what they do, they also uncover previous incursions from years ago, decades ago or even centuries ago.

 

[pukunui]

I don't really have a "go to" concept, as I usually run premade campaigns. However, when I combined "Trouble in Red Larch" with Scourge of the Sword Coast and Storm King's Thunder, I framed it as the PCs being agents of the Lords' Alliance being sent on various missions. I quite liked that setup and would absolutely use it again.

 

[Derulbaskul]

Everything is an aboleth plot.

Seriously.

 

[aco175]

I tend to have some sort of basic "Save the Town" theme. Could be like the Essential box with a local dragon taken over and stirred up the orcs who have come down from the mountain to cause trouble. Something where the PCs have a home base town and find it threatened after a few smaller adventures or find out all at once. This tends to last to 6-8th level and then wraps up. The hooks in that part of the campaign tends to lead to other smaller 3-level arcs to finish things.

Another go-to is the episodic exploration. I like this one when players are more likely to come and go. Each week is a contained dungeon that wraps up and the PCs end up back at town for the next week. I had a campaign where searching through a ruined town to make it fit to settle once again. Each week had a new building or sewer or such. There was some larger problems lurking and the groups would get clues to find the demon or something. I had a farmstead turned inn as a home base about an hour from the town and the PCs show up there as treasure hunters or knowledge seekers.

 

[R_J_K75]

I liked running city settings, Waterdeep in particular. There were 2 table in Cities of Mystery and another from City Systems. I used them for years to randomly roll up street scenes that the players would run into along the way from point A to point B. It made for some interesting scenarios and really brought the city to life.

 

[delericho]

I would like to say I don't have one, because I do try to distinguish campaigns from one another. But recent history would seem to belie that: the has been a recurring theme of "you find yourself lost somewhere and want to get home."

 

[Inchoroi]

Um, I generally don't have a "go-to," except for a few prerequisites:

1. Long campaign. I hate short campaigns. Most can't really develop a character fully over the course of 3-7 session, and there's nothing to me more satisfying then going through the long campaign and getting that closure in the end. Thankfully, I have a pretty good group of players that have stuck with my insanity.

2. One Story. I'll have tangents and tied-on little subplots, but its all one story that is tied together. Everything makes sense, there's nothing there just because, and the only plot threads that aren't tied up are ones I intend to use for future campaigns (for example, the first statue of an ancient horrible wizard-warlord they find is the BBEG for not the next campaign, but three campaigns later).

The above means my campaigns tend to follow a fairly set formula as far as structure goes, since I have to make one story last for about a year, from level 3 to level 20. Outside of that general structure, just about anything goes.

 

[Agametorememberbooks]

I tend to like creepy-horror so I’m always trying to mix elements of that sort of dark fable horror into my games. I don’t beat my players over the head with it, but it adds a nice air of uncertainty that makes it fun. I mostly just like ideas that keep the game rolling along which is why we created our supplement.