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

[Stogoe]

My first campaign will mostly be implied PoL. The PCs will start in a small village on the northern edge of the vast, feyhaunted wilderness, and the southernmost reaches of the empire of Teraz. But it is an empire in name only. Grey-skinned soldiers from the capital arrive once a year to take the tribute for their immortal god-queen, but otherwise they are unknown in the realm. At the moment, the god-queen's armies are focused on concerns other than trade routes and peasant squabbling.

(So, I get both an evil empire and lots of uncivilized expanses in the same area. Hooray!)

My tieflings band together in caravans on the outskirts of cities or in insular neighborhoods, and my dragonborn are obligate nomads, calling no place home for long. The dwarves were driven long ago from their cavernous strongholds and have taken refuge in human society. The rest of the races are pretty much as described.

But no goblins. Mothers tell stories of goblins to children who won't go to bed, but no one in a hundred years or more has ever seen goblins come raiding.

Will the PCs push south, into the wilderness? Or will they resolve to topple the god-queen, for good or ill? Or something else entirely? I'm not sure, but I'm looking forward to it.

 

[hong]

My first campaign will mostly be implied PoL. The PCs will start in a small village on the northern edge of the vast, feyhaunted wilderness, and the southernmost reaches of the empire of Teraz. But it is an empire in name only. Grey-skinned soldiers from the capital arrive once a year to take the tribute for their immortal god-queen, but otherwise they are unknown in the realm. At the moment, the god-queen's armies are focused on concerns other than trade routes and peasant squabbling.

(So, I get both an evil empire and lots of uncivilized expanses in the same area. Hooray!)

My tieflings band together in caravans on the outskirts of cities or in insular neighborhoods, and my dragonborn are obligate nomads, calling no place home for long. The dwarves were driven long ago from their cavernous strongholds and have taken refuge in human society. The rest of the races are pretty much as described.

But no goblins. Mothers tell stories of goblins to children who won't go to bed, but no one in a hundred years or more has ever seen goblins come raiding.

Will the PCs push south, into the wilderness? Or will they resolve to topple the god-queen, for good or ill? Or something else entirely? I'm not sure, but I'm looking forward to it.

When will you be introducing the goblins?

 

[jye42]

For my first 4th edition campaign i was thinking Forgotern Realms starting in a small town in the Dalelands the players will have grown up there. for the first adventure i was thinking a small army of hobgoblins (100 or so) come to town and demand to speak with town elder they then take the town enforcing curfew, harsh regulations .etc an npc close to one of the characters a parent or mentor asks them to sneak out of town after curfew and seek out elminster at his tower. they have to fight hobgoblin patrols, bandits and maybe some wildlife on the way, maybe have a side quest on the way to save a farmer for some creatures of some kind (the intent is for them to be lvl 2 when they finaly arive at there destination) they find elminsters tower abandoned and nothing but a few misc magic items and a note. "Sorry i couldent be here, had to contend with larger problems elsewhere, but i think you will have found on your journey here you have the strength you need to deal with the problem yourself, help yourself to anything you need - Elminster" then the come back to town kill the hobgoblin leader and many others and save the town.

comments, ideas, sugestions?

 

[jeffh]

A thinly disguised stringing together of elements from, inspired by or twists on the various Final Fantasy games. Lots of world travel, largely in airships, with lots of smallish themed dungeons, elemental crystals at stake, and so on. Big war as backdrop, world-shaking cataclysm halfway through the campaign optional. Halflings => Moogles.

The feel should be about right. (I'm replaying Final Fantasy VI, not to mention starting to think about modding it, so that's kind of where my brain is.)

 

[Dinkeldog]

I'll be looking at either a new campaign in my current campaign world looking at a different region. My current campaign is basically about a war of unification as people who are fleeing persecution in the Old Empire have colonized a new area and broken away. Now they're trying to convert the indiginous population to their way of life. The other option is to go to the Old Empire and have a group try to spark a rebellion against the leaders who are following evil gods.

 

[Agamon]

Here's the overview I wrote for myself as I started my brainstorming. There's much more to it than this, but this is the gist:

Human cities magically sealed off from the rest of the world for many hundreds of years. Magic is pervasive in life; food is magically grown, water and air is magically purified, raw materials are magically replenished, disease is non-existent. Travel between cities is through magical teleportation devices and there are long-distance communication devices, as well. No one has ventured outside any of the cities in over 2000 years, and what lies beyond is now legend and myth.

As the campaign begins, the magic that powers all of this disappears. Cities no longer have contact with each other and inhabitants must fend for themselves both in terms of finding food and shelter as well as fending off the things that have lived in the untamed wild for centuries.

I see I have to amend this a bit. The loss of magic is due to an attack. As the magical walls come down, each city will be attacked by an army of goblins and gnolls, led by tieflings. The PCs will need to flee if they want to live, perhaps in the city, most likely in the surrounding wilderness. What they do from there is up to them.

 

[ironvyper]

Brothers grim err land.

My first campaign i plan to use the feywild and points of light concept to thier fullest.
The towns and villages that are all far apart are the remnants of an older empire that fell to civil war and humanoid invasion centuries ago leaving no organized government in its place. So each small town or village is on its own.

The land inbetween is the realm of the fey. Elf mounds, fairy circles, dark curses and evil fairy creatures are the norm. I am not sure if they are calling them abberations anymore but i was gonna re-imagine alot of the aberations and some small giants like trolls and Ogres as dark fey, or creatures twisted by fey magic. And they roam the night.

To go with that feel i was gonna use some actual old fairy tale fixes from folklore as true, so that u might put up a circle of salt to keep out zombies or spirits, powdered iron to keep keep demons at bay and lead to block magic and such. Really stick with a dark fairy tale feel. Maybe having a sidhe king trying to evict humanity from the geographical region as the big bad guy of the campaign.

 

[Cmarco]

My setting will be getting a bit of a timeline jump, to a point where good faltered (the heroes of previous editions have bludgeoned evil pretty hard, after all), and evil rose up in a big way. It's a little like a cross between Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Mystara. A lot of the heroes of the old days will have either passed on, gotten too old to be out 'venturin', or some such thing. Some empires and kingdoms are struggling to keep themselves together, old villainous organizations thought long vanquished are beginning to rise again, wars are exploding across the landscape.

As for the first campaign we'll be running in the setting, I'm still working on it, but it will involve investigating the ruins of a small keep which was smashed up by giants a long time ago. Something else has moved in, and is operating out of the place.

 

[WyzardWhately]

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.

Please do! I'm a huge fan of cross-pollination.

 

[Steely Dan]

It will not have halflings.

Yours and mine both. It will also not have orcs (or half-orcs).