D&D General What "lateral thinking" campaign would you like to see?

[Aging Bard]

Let me explain! We are all familiar with campaigns that have some key secret(s) that will be discovered in due course. I'm interested in more novel sorts of secrets, revelations, lost lore, buried knowledge, forbidden arcana, and so forth. Secrets of reality that may never be revealed and would be fine if remained forever hidden, but if revealed completely change the perspectives of the party. To discover these secrets should require lateral thinking: seeing the world in a new and unexpected way.

Here's my example, which I would love to see implemented and am working on myself. I'd love to see a campaign with a design philosophy similar to the video game The Witness. Spoilers are hidden, and do NOT look at them if you have not played The Witness and enjoy puzzle games, in which case you should play the Witness!

Spoiler: Minor Witness spoilers

No, I'm not talking about a campaign on an island of maze puzzle panels. The Witness has an overt game of puzzle panel solving, and a covert game that might never be discovered. You could play the overt game to its end and be completely satisfied. But once you see the covert game, you cannot un-see it; you can now play both games simultaneously, and the solution to the covert game is much more satisfying. That's what I'd like to see in an RPG campaign. A standard adventure path that conceals in plain sight a completely different campaign that is much weirder and ultimately more engaging, but which might never be discovered. A cosmic horror scenario is a logical choice for the covert scenario, but is not required. The covert scenario could be some warlord who is slowly and methodically taking over all of the realm, for example, and is leaving very subtle clues in their wake.

I am also very interested in hearing about settings and campaigns that you think already satisfy these requirements. Thanks in advance for your input!

The splendor falls on castle walls, and snowy summits old in story...Aging Bard

 

[Lanefan]

I've done things similar to what you've hidden under the spoiler tag, but to pull it off well I think would take a very long (by modern standards) campaign involving dozens of adventures, in order to give each storyline adequate time to simmer, emerge, develop, and - maybe - conclude.

In my case there'll be one or two obvious storylines to start with, and a few more hiding underneath which might eventually come to the surface as the campaign goes on; by which time there'll be a few more waiting beneath the surface, etc. What ultimately ends up getting run/played is largely up to the players, based on what they decide to interact with and-or ignore or miss outright, assuming they even bite any of the hooks.

 

[Krachek]

I think this is the most difficult campaign to run.
As a player it has been the most boring ones!
I can give some hint from the player point of view.
Players receive intel out of order, from different source and different level of accuracy.
These intel are received often weeks if not month away from each others.
if you add Npc that mostly don’t cooperate, false clue and bait,
The overall feeling for player is playing in a perpetual Fog cloud, unless the DM manage to give some free recap once in a while! That is the difficult part for the DM. Either you realign Players knowledge, or you let them build a totally different understanding that may make your punch and revelation completely meeh or even ridiculous.

 

[Blue]

There's a very old (back when Dragon magazine was owned by TSR) series called Dungeoncraft, and in it's part abotu world building, advice was "put a secret in everything you create". It doesn't - and mostly shouldn't - have anything to do with the campaign, or even plan on being discovered. But it's that extra bit of richness, that extra bit of "they do X" when it's not the most obvious, or whatever.

For example I had one campaign where the cosmology literally was that you can get from material plane to material plane through the elemental planes, and the material plane the adventure was taking place on was "thin-skinned" and easier to get to, which is why a bunch of different gods over the centuries had used this place as where to lead their chosen people away from genocide and other catastrophies. So no race was actually from the world. This was an unknown, though there are legends in the human/halfling kingdom about fleeting a war of annihilation against the elves in a fleet of 13 great arks, most of which made it to this land.

But it led to things like two completely different cultures of orcs - they weren't even from the same material plane. And a lot of other stuff that just subtly changed everything, from the dwarves "knowing" that all life outside their underground kingdom was killed in an earthquake (which was really them connecting through the plane of earth), etc. Plus lots of runes and relics from other races that no longer were here.

The only ones that knew-it-knew-it were the elves - each "court" was a steerable demiplane that visited other material planes for a few decades then moved on. The elves here were ones that stayed or were stranded when their court left - and it wasn't the court of elves that was involved in the war so knew nothing about it.

Had nothing to do with the first campaign in that setting, which lasted about 4 years. Came up in the second setting, whihc also had a new cout of elves connect - and they were the ones that had been battling the humans who had fled. But that was because the human nobility had fiendish blood (this started 3.0, before tieflings became commonplace).

 

[hopeless]

Or to introduce new plot elements when something in game makes them necessary?
I hadn't planned on a player character's parents playing an important part in the plot, but after he went with a Folk Hero Background and did absolutely nothing that merited that background I figured I needed to introduce something that explained that.
I did mention they can ask questions if they wanted (and mostly didn't which was why I ended up adding them), however I used a picture I used of the PC's father for a retired former royal guard and when asked said that wasn't his character's father as he had confirmed both his character's parents were dead.
No that was his father's identical twin brother who was fostered into the church as their parents couldn't afford to raise both.
Both grew up one a farmer who married a Sarenrae priestess who transferred over from the Dawnfather faith as she was being harassed by a cleric of that order.
The other raised in the Dawnfather faith became a Royal Guard and a Dragon Rider of the Gold Dragon Matthau.
That dwarven cleric saw them together mistook her husband for his twin and ordered the man be murdered except they killed the couple leaving their son an orphan raised at her Sarenrae shrine with the aid of a family friend who became his mentor.
The attempt to cover up the incident caused the founding of a new order called the Free Knights who became the de-facto protectors of the people and included former members of the Royal Guard who left in protest at the foul deed and cover up.
Three sessions in and he still didn't have a clue he was the literal inspiration for a new knightly order of whom he was a member.
That primer and a proper session zero might have helped but given how little details they gave beyond apparently both parents dead for three of them the fourth just didn't bother mentioning theirs just a mentor (which I managed to get them to agree to the Ladyhawke cast photo for the parents of the Paladin and the Cleric's mentor).

 

[Aging Bard]

I think this is the most difficult campaign to run.
As a player it has been the most boring ones!
I can give some hint from the player point of view.
Players receive intel out of order, from different source and different level of accuracy.
These intel are received often weeks if not month away from each others.
if you add Npc that mostly don’t cooperate, false clue and bait,
The overall feeling for player is playing in a perpetual Fog cloud, unless the DM manage to give some free recap once in a while! That is the difficult part for the DM. Either you realign Players knowledge, or you let them build a totally different understanding that may make your punch and revelation completely meeh or even ridiculous.

Yes, this is a very good point. I think you have to make the main campaign as engaging as possible so that the lateral campaign can truly go undiscovered, but that is a great deal of work for the DM.

 

[Aging Bard]

Or to introduce new plot elements when something in game makes them necessary?
I hadn't planned on a player character's parents playing an important part in the plot, but after he went with a Folk Hero Background and did absolutely nothing that merited that background I figured I needed to introduce something that explained that.
I did mention they can ask questions if they wanted (and mostly didn't which was why I ended up adding them), however I used a picture I used of the PC's father for a retired former royal guard and when asked said that wasn't his character's father as he had confirmed both his character's parents were dead.
No that was his father's identical twin brother who was fostered into the church as their parents couldn't afford to raise both.
Both grew up one a farmer who married a Sarenrae priestess who transferred over from the Dawnfather faith as she was being harassed by a cleric of that order.
The other raised in the Dawnfather faith became a Royal Guard and a Dragon Rider of the Gold Dragon Matthau.
That dwarven cleric saw them together mistook her husband for his twin and ordered the man be murdered except they killed the couple leaving their son an orphan raised at her Sarenrae shrine with the aid of a family friend who became his mentor.
The attempt to cover up the incident caused the founding of a new order called the Free Knights who became the de-facto protectors of the people and included former members of the Royal Guard who left in protest at the foul deed and cover up.
Three sessions in and he still didn't have a clue he was the literal inspiration for a new knightly order of whom he was a member.
That primer and a proper session zero might have helped but given how little details they gave beyond apparently both parents dead for three of them the fourth just didn't bother mentioning theirs just a mentor (which I managed to get them to agree to the Ladyhawke cast photo for the parents of the Paladin and the Cleric's mentor).

This is quite good DMing advice generally!

 

[Richards]

My recently-finished 3.5 campaign had an overarching plot from the very first of its 80 adventures: there was a gateway between Oerth (Greyhawk campaign world) and Gamma Terra (home world of the Gamma World game) that opened every couple of months for an hour or so. As a result, several Gamma World creatures had traveled into the D&D campaign world over the course of the five-year campaign, including "sonic yuan-ti" (hissers), an "avatar of Yeenoghu" (an ark), a jackalope (a hopper missing the gene that gave it chameleon fur), a man with strange markings on his face (a serf or "thought master"), an invisible, flying worm (a blight), and a healing automaton (MARCI - Medical Android, Red Cross International). The jackalope ended up being the riding mount of one of the PCs, a gnome fighter, but nobody figured out the connection between these strange creatures before we finally ran them through the adventure where they entered Gamma Terra themselves via the temporary gate (and then they stayed there for the next four adventures before returning to Oerth with powered armor and three mechs just in time to close out the campaign). The "secret" was designed to be revealed at the end of the campaign if the PCs didn't stumble across it earlier, and that's the way it played out.

I'm doing something similar with my 3.5 current campaign, wherein the five PCs are being trained as dreamwalkers, who can enter a person's dreams and interact with them, an important ability now that there's a dream plague crossing the continent that's putting people into a state of suspended animation while their minds are trapped inside a dream. Right now, the PCs have begun their initial training and have rescued the first two people who had been trapped in their dreams. As they progress through the campaign, they'll have opportunities to discover what's causing this dream plague and what can be done to stop it, but if they never figure it out it will be revealed to them at the right time.

Johnathan

 

[Aging Bard]

Here's another example. It might be better and more applicable than my first example. The board game Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (PLS1).

Seriously, this is going to be a YUUGE spoiler. If you have not played PLS1 (and your REALLY should, it's awesome), do not read the spoiler. But if you have played PLS1 I'll bet you know what I'm going to discuss:

Spoiler: HUGE Pandemic Legacy Season 1 spoiler

While the gameplay proper does not change that much, the reveal after month 11 that the players have been unknowingly militarizing the planet for the benefit of the now-revealed bad guys is an incredible moment. I never felt more like I was part of an epic television series. This is less ambitious than the first example but might be an easier D&D campaign to implement. The players think they are embarking on one mission but it is something else entirely.

 

[Aging Bard]

My recently-finished 3.5 campaign had an overarching plot from the very first of its 80 adventures: there was a gateway between Oerth (Greyhawk campaign world) and Gamma Terra (home world of the Gamma World game) that opened every couple of months for an hour or so. As a result, several Gamma World creatures had traveled into the D&D campaign world over the course of the five-year campaign, including "sonic yuan-ti" (hissers), an "avatar of Yeenoghu: (an ark), a jackalope (a hopper missing the gene that gave it chameleon fur), a man with strange markings on his face (a serf or "thought master"), an invisible, flying worm (a blight), and a healing automaton (MARCI - Medical Android, Red Cross International). The jackalope ended up being the riding mount of one of the PCs, a gnome fighter, but nobody figured out the connection between these strange creatures before we finally ran them through the adventure where they entered Gamma Terra themselves via the temporary gate (and then they stayed there for the next four adventures before returning to Oerth with powered armor and three mechs just in time to close out the campaign). The "secret" was designed to be revealed at the end of the campaign if the PCs didn;t stumble across it earlier, and that's the way it played out.

I'm doing something similar with my 3.5 current campaign, wherein the five PCs are being trained as dreamwalkers, who can enter a person's dreams and interact with them, an important ability now that there's a dream plague crossing the continent that's putting people into a state of suspended animation while their minds are trapped inside a dream. Right now, the PCs have begun their initial training and have rescued the first two people who had been trapped in their dreams. As they progress through the campaign, they'll have opportunities to discover what's causing this dream plague and what can be done to stop it, but if they never figure it out it will be revealed to them at the right time.

Johnathan

I'm a huge Gamma World fanboy, so I love this.