I dont necessarily know what I would do if I tried to design it ahead of time, but I do know what I did do in the closest real world experience I had.
I ran the following campaign for about 10 years, bridging 2E and 3E. It covers 2 generations of PCs but is essentially one long campaign.
(We currently still play in the same world but it is that world's "modern age" and us a super hero campaign using M&M and inspired by golden and silver age Marvel through the lens of Ellis, Morrison, Waid and Busiek. Anyway...)
The first PCs were young would-be adventurers living in a backwater village on the edge of "civilized" lands. The village was established by adventurers so there was an annual coming of age ceremony involving going on generally pretty minor and safe quests. But one of the village leaders (each of whom got to define a quest) put in a truly dangerous one. The PCs drew a simple quest but when they returned to discover a group of their friends had drawn the bad quest, they hiked off to the Haunted Castle to save them. This set the tone of the PCs being not only self motivated but positioning themselves as people destined to be important in the billage.
The campaign went on and grew in scope. There was the issue of "asian elves" and a doppelganger conspiracy and gods that had been locked out from the world and the local ruler grasping for magical power from the past. It all came to a head at the end of the 2E era when the PCs woke the apocalyptic Great Beast of the Earth (an impossibility large and powerful red dragon) which existed to knock down civilization whenever it dared rise.
The PCs defeated the creature but there were many questions still unanswered. That generation retired and some 20 years later their children went on the same ritual adventure and found themselves tangled in all those dangling plot threads. The difference was that the older generation existed as NPCs and provided an emotional foundation for this campaign. When siblings died, as adventurers sometimes do, there was real gravitas and honest pain.
The same themes suffused the campaign and they uncovered the true nature of the doppelganger conspiracy and the missing "10th God" (there had originally been one for each alignment). They made contact with the farther reaches of the campaign world, from the conquistador halfling Hin Nation to the lands of the pharaonic God King and so on. Eventually in order to protect the world from the mad god of magic they were forced to shut their world off from arcane energy and let it slip middle Earth like into a mundane world. But they won.
It is important to note I planned very little of this. Almost everything emerged not only from play, but from saying "yes" to my players.the very first session I said "No elves and no ninjas" and one player immediately made an elf ninja. Instead of shutting him down I ended up agreeing and adding a whole history and mythology to the game that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
I ran the following campaign for about 10 years, bridging 2E and 3E. It covers 2 generations of PCs but is essentially one long campaign.
(We currently still play in the same world but it is that world's "modern age" and us a super hero campaign using M&M and inspired by golden and silver age Marvel through the lens of Ellis, Morrison, Waid and Busiek. Anyway...)
The first PCs were young would-be adventurers living in a backwater village on the edge of "civilized" lands. The village was established by adventurers so there was an annual coming of age ceremony involving going on generally pretty minor and safe quests. But one of the village leaders (each of whom got to define a quest) put in a truly dangerous one. The PCs drew a simple quest but when they returned to discover a group of their friends had drawn the bad quest, they hiked off to the Haunted Castle to save them. This set the tone of the PCs being not only self motivated but positioning themselves as people destined to be important in the billage.
The campaign went on and grew in scope. There was the issue of "asian elves" and a doppelganger conspiracy and gods that had been locked out from the world and the local ruler grasping for magical power from the past. It all came to a head at the end of the 2E era when the PCs woke the apocalyptic Great Beast of the Earth (an impossibility large and powerful red dragon) which existed to knock down civilization whenever it dared rise.
The PCs defeated the creature but there were many questions still unanswered. That generation retired and some 20 years later their children went on the same ritual adventure and found themselves tangled in all those dangling plot threads. The difference was that the older generation existed as NPCs and provided an emotional foundation for this campaign. When siblings died, as adventurers sometimes do, there was real gravitas and honest pain.
The same themes suffused the campaign and they uncovered the true nature of the doppelganger conspiracy and the missing "10th God" (there had originally been one for each alignment). They made contact with the farther reaches of the campaign world, from the conquistador halfling Hin Nation to the lands of the pharaonic God King and so on. Eventually in order to protect the world from the mad god of magic they were forced to shut their world off from arcane energy and let it slip middle Earth like into a mundane world. But they won.
It is important to note I planned very little of this. Almost everything emerged not only from play, but from saying "yes" to my players.the very first session I said "No elves and no ninjas" and one player immediately made an elf ninja. Instead of shutting him down I ended up agreeing and adding a whole history and mythology to the game that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
)
