D&D 4E What will your first 4E campaign look like?

[Doug McCrae]

Points of light, natch. An old world with many ruins and weird decaying cultures, like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun or Vance's Dying Earth. I love that stuff.

 

[hong]

It will not have halflings.

 

[tombowings]

It will not have halflings.

Just so negative, aren't you?

 

[hong]

Just so negative, aren't you?

It will also not have tiefling tails.

HAW HAW!

 

[NaturalZero]

I always wanted to run a darker version of the Wizard of Oz. Id make pregen characters including a female human wizard (her powers come from her silver/ruby shoes) with a rottwieler familiar, a warforged fighter with an axe, a cowardly shifter and an alraune (homebrewed plant race).

I may choose to implement this for 4E at some point, with each of the characters filling one of the 4 roles. Id probably make Dorothy a warlord, the tinman warforged a fighter, the shifter some sort of striker and the scarecrow alraune a controller (druid perhaps?).

 

[tombowings]

It will also not have tiefling tails.

HAW HAW!

But that's just a cosmetic change.

 

[breschau]

Nice thread.

I'm going to go real old school. I've got a list of random names I'll use for places. Another list for NPC names. I'm going to use the points of light setting as an excuse to roll up the map as we go, creating the world as it comes. I know I'll want the points of light idea of ancient civilizations, and a lot of exploring of ruins, but it's all up to the dice. I'll use Keep as the starter and branch out from there. Once the books come out the players can reroll or mod the characters if they like.

I really like Al-Qadim and Dark Sun, so I'll likely throw in a few bits from each. I love the Aztec feel of the city-states, that fits in great with the "corrupt humans" described ever so briefly in the Races and Classes book. So there will definitely be an ancient city-state of corrupt humans with mass sacrifices for the power of the king. Templars running the place and such. And I'll throw in the city of the undead from so many sources. Ancient ruins that appear empty during the day, but various undead come out at night, hopefully when the party is resting and dividing the loot they find.

Don't want to throw out too much but you get the idea.

 

[tombowings]

The game starts in a society approximately equal to that of europe in the 1600s - there is some banking and musketry, but no steam-trains. There are great universities where arcane magic and natural philosophy are debated, and complex political maneuvers involving the church, the nobility, the guilds, and the rising merchant class. Or they did once, in the golden age. That ended two years ago.

The PCs and perhaps 20,000 other souls are the last remnants of this blossoming empire, as the ravening dead have overwhelmed the rest of the sphere. At first it was just an endless supply of infectious, Romero-style zombies, but new types of undead have arisen. Faster, stronger ones from 28 days later. And finally higher forms, undeath-spewing monstrosities cobbled together from a thousand corpses. None of them are intelligent or directed past the hunger for living flesh, but they're slowly beating down the walls, and there's not enough weapons in the world to kill them all. It's the whole rest of the world out there.

The only option left is to leave. The Arch-Professors of the Arcane college have put together a ritual to tear a hole into another world. A clean world, a fresh one, free from the undead scourge. And over the course of three long days, all 20,000 people in the city form a baggage train and take what they can into an uncivilized wilderness.

THe adventure really begins here, in a world that has never known empires, kingdoms, steel, stonework, or law. The initial PCs will most likely be humans, tieflings, dwarves, or eladrin. The civilized peoples. The new world will open up some new options - savage lizardfolk that worship the great firebreathing beasts that rule the wilderness here (dragonborn), wood elves that seem to bear some relation to the eladrin of the homeworld, and maybe others.

It'll be crazy, resource-poor, everything will be wild, untamed, new, unknown, and dangerous. That seems appropriate to a new edition. The fledgeling colony will need a lot of help to survive, and PCs will have their pick of all kinds of missions. There might even be faint remnants of a precursor civilization, an entirely unknown species that could have left some dungeons behind.

I expect it'll run like a combination of the british colonial period and Lost, maybe some Stargate thrown in, along with my own peculiar DM-style of mixed lovecraftian horror and Metal aesthetic.

This is a great idea, one of the best ideas for an adventure-exploration type game I've seen in a long time. If you don't mind, I'm going to steal the basic premise of this for my own upcoming 4E campaign.

 

[InShambles]

If I had a group to run 4e with, I would use the Points of Light setting. What I would like to do run a dungeon big enough to bring characters from first to twentieth level. The players would be summoned to the capitol city to speak with a Baron who is having problems with humanoid tribes. They would depart from the city to a Hamlet in the Barony a couple of day ride. A Ranger in the area will advise them and show them the source of the trouble. Sticking up from the ground is a “Death’s Head” which is basically a fancy dungeon entrance. The dungeon is magical and literally sprung up over night causing the local humanoids to start getting rowdy. If the dungeon gets too monotonous, there will be role playing side quests back in the capitol. I will probably only develop a few dungeon levels per session in case the players what to scrap the whole thing to do something else. Ultimately, the main goal of the campaign will be to re-enforce the new game rules.

 

[Orius]

I will be running a dungeon delve to start with for two reasons
1) the new players do not have to worry about role-playing. It will ease them into the DnD. And the older players will have a chance to experiment with the new 4e combat rules and get used to them
2) it showcases some of the new things about the 4e system and characters before I role out my actual campaign. it gives people the opportunity to change their minds on their race or class etc.

Talking with my wife last night, she suggested we run the Temple of Elemental Evil (which she sadly has never gotten to play) as our first 4e adventure/campaign.

If I was going to run a 4E campaign, I'd pretty much throw out any sort of fluff, background, or complex exposition. I'd start by updating my 1st edition AD&D expansion of 'Keep on the Borderlands' to 4E, and plan the entire campaign as an extended series of dungeon delves. Lots and lots of combat. Lots and lots of foes. Lots of silly beer and pretzels fun.

What I would like to do run a dungeon big enough to bring characters from first to twentieth level.

Interesting. That's 4 posts today that want to do basically dungeon crawls first with 4e. Not that I think it's a bad idea, cause it is a pretty eas way to learn the new rules.