Worst campaign setting concepts you've ever played

[Desdichado]

Pretty frikkin hilarious thread over at RPGnet :http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=53310&perpage=20&pagenumber=1

Anyone here have any really bad experiences we can all laugh at?

 

[Henry]

Superhero game a fellow GM ran, in which the villains possessed an unhealthy fixation with Hostess Fruit Pies and Twinkies.

Please don't make me speak any more of it.

 

[Nightfall]

1st time running 3rd edition. Our Dm ran Dragon Mountain as a 3rd edition type deal with us at 1st level. Needless to say after relentless assaults by kobolds and the fact we needed better equipment, (plus the party's only arcane spellcaster, sorcerer, ends up with a set of cursed throwing axes from the back of the DMG that he's not proficient with.), we try our luck else where. I, being the combat "monster" I was as a straight ranger dual wielding battle-axes, (Vangal kicks, you know I love them) kill a Greater Doppleganger and then end up being squashed by a Fog giant. It wasn't as good as it sounds.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Then there was the campaign involving the invisibility ring that was actully an ancient artifiact that we had to destroy before the evil overlord took over the world ...

 

[Desdichado]

OK, here's some quotes from the other thread for inspiration:

"One lesson I learned, don't combine romantic comedy plots with sanity meters and rules for seppuku."

"But then as I put the PCs through the paces of interglactic obliteration I began to have second thoughts. Did I really want to destroy the setting I had built up? What about all those cool NPCs I had going? In the next session one of the characters was finally going to go on a date, can I really leave that behind? Maybe I could salvage it after all. Maybe I overdid things just a tad with the missle wielding armored Shoggoths. "

"There was the AD&D campaign I ran that was a rip-off of the Wizard of Oz. You know, Dwarves for Munchkins and all that, with a high level Wicked Magic-User of the West. The campaign actually lasted quite a while to my regret.

I seem to recall the PCs killed the Dwarves/Munchkins to take their stuff and tore up the yellow brick road because they thought it might be made of gold. The PCs also killed the Wizard of Oz because he sassed them too much and set Scarecrow on fire because he gave poor directions. "

And then there was the campaign I ran, once again using AD&D, where the players wanted to play evil PCs. Lacking any ideas about plots for evil characters I gave them a mission to stop Christmas. The big finale was a showdown with Santa Claus and his battle reindeer deep in an ice dungeon.

Luckily, I can truthfully claim I've never been in a game with a concept nearly as bad as those. Perhaps my worst, which wasn't really that bad was one based on aliens where I gave every player (five, I think) two characters and only had one PC at the end of the night.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Or the one where my DM forced me to play a kleptomaniacal halfling-by-another-name, where there were no clerics and no such thing as free will. Every time we tried to go off adventuring in a direction he didn't like, we'd run into the "wandering army of dragon-men."

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

And lest I forget, the epic 1E god-killer campaign. We went through Deities and Demigods pantheon-by-pantheon until all the gods were dead.

I'd swear that the KODT cartoon where the adventure consists of the Monster Manual in alphabetical order was us.

 

[barsoomcore]

Okay, one of my cyberpunk campaigns ended when the players used the proton cannon they'd recovered from the bad guy to write their names on the moon. And I let them.

I suck.

 

[Desdichado]

I guess back in junior high we had some pretty bad games. They weren't so much bad campaign concepts as they were no campaign concepts though. We also went through the "kill everyone in Deities and Demigods" at one point, and the "PCs exist only to duel with each other" phase, and the "you walk into a cave and there's a goblin. After taking 3 hit points, you run away and heal. When you come back, the goblin is still waiting for you" games. Blech. But not funny.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Of course, this thread wouldn't be complete without a link to ab3's Web Page.

Check out the RPG.net rants if you haven't before. Hilarious.