Your Dream Campaign

[Reynard]

You have the right players (or right GM, if you are thinking of this from a player perspective). Your schedule is clear. You have the funds necessary to buy whatever you need. The only limitation is what you decide.

What is your dream TTRPG campaign to run or play in?

Difficulty: no celebrity or professional players/GMs/designers. This about what you would do.

Mine would be an open world "west marches" style super hero campaign in which I have enough time and all the appropriate tools to create a truly living, breathing supers city for any number of players. Crucially, the player heroes aren't necessarily part of a team and the players themselves might not even know each other and/or who is playing what character. Every PC would have both a full heroic life and a full secret identity life. Big events would of course happen in the city, but everyone would also have their personal stuff.

Basically, I want to run a Massive Multiplayer Super Hero Tabletop RPG (which admittedly would probably require Discord servers and VTTs).

What is your no restrictions dream TTRPG campaign?

 

[Shardstone]

It changes with the season. Right now, it'd be a campaign in Mythic Bastionland that explores every single knight and myth in the expanded book with several different knightly orders. I'd also love to be a player in an Icon game with a GM willing to put in the effort to make a 4E-inspired game like Icon sing.

 

[thullgrim]

Player - I want to be a player in a well run, lore heavy Earthdawn or WHFRP 4e game.
GM - I want to run a Ruins of Adventure type game as an above ground mega dungeon or Numenera as a setting with a different game system.

 

[GuyBoy]

For me:
A 50th Anniversary “Return to”- style of adventure, featuring a 5e update of Caverns of Tsojcanth and Temple of Tharizdun, with surrounding adventures linking to a Tharizdun-based overarching threat. Probably with a redemption arc for Drelzna as an NPC.

 

[jdrakeh]

I'd like to run or play in a "street level" supers campaign. Something like the television show Alphas.

 

[Deset Gled]

My first thought was that unlimited prep and play time would be the perfect scenario for a super crunchy 3.x game. But what the heck, if time and resources are truly infinite, let's go all the way to Rolemaster!

 

[Nightfly]

I think maybe I already did it.

Three years ago, when the country was shut down by a deadly pandemic and New York City was being rocked by riots, I decided I wanted to run the Pathfinder adventure path "Curse of the Crimson Throne." For those not familiar: it begins with a city rocked by riots, then transitions into a plot about everything being shut down by a deadly pandemic. I never wanted to run one particular thing as badly, for obvious reasons.

So I got a group together and we did it. My players seemed as gobsmacked by the topicality as I hoped they'd be. We managed to get all the way through to the end, completing all six adventures, too. I was pleased as punch.

 

[Yora]

Dragonbane as the main rules set.
The BECMI rules for dungeon exploration, wilderness travel, and domain management.
Red Tide for generating borderland towns, courts, and small dungeons.
De Bellis Antiquitatis as a mass combat system.

A Foundry campaign with 10 to 18 players who each have one to three PCs (plus hirelings) that make up a mercenary company seeking fame and fortune in a borderland region.
Adventures are either scouting patrols into the ruins around the current base camp West Marches style, with whatever 3 to 6 players can make it that day, or long range expeditions that will resume whenever most of the players on it can all get together to play again. (Which is why regular players will probably need two PCs at least. It might be some time before an expedition can resume, but you can still play patrols.)

The setting is a sparsely inhabited world of forests and mountains that I imagine as "George Lucas and Jim Henson produced an AD&D movie in 1989 l that was shot in the Sierra Nevada". Society and towns are like 6th century medieval, but the animals in the primeval forests are all big reptiles, huge insects and other arthropods, flying lizards, and fierce rodents. The nonhuman peoples in the wilderness are bug-goblins, ogre-sized stone giants, graceful harpies, gnolls, and fish men.
Civilization is very small with just half a dozen city states in an area the size of central Europe, but there are several layers of ruins from various different civilizations, each one more inhuman as one goes deeper down in time. The environment and local climate is controlled by the spirits of the land, which makes it very unstable and unpredictable on larger time scales. Large areas become useless for farming or surges in new predators destroy lifestock herds every few years or decades somewhere in the region, and there is nothing the affected people can do but pack up their things and find a new place that has recently become suitable for farming and has not been settled yet, creating a permanent Migration Period environment. This does include the few larger cities, which have all been build on top of older ones, and there are many more that are currently abandoned ruins, but might become great city states again some centuries in the future. Because of the regular disruptions and lack of continuity, history more than four or five centuries back is everyone's guess. But it's believed that this has always been the way of the world, and always will be.

The gods are forces of nature first and never appear in physical form or make any contact with their priests. Religion is primarily about understanding the gods' effect on the world and adapting society to make the best out of it. Get out of the way of destructive forces, but learn to benefit from the opportunities created by their passing. Priests usually see the nature and workings of their gods as examples how one should deal with life and have developed moral and ethic philosophies about emulating their divine traits.
In addition to the gods and spirits that are the driving forces of the natural world, there also still exist the Primordials who predate the first appearance of light and fire. They are beings of a world that is only darkness and water. Since the appearance of the stars and the sun, they have retreated deep beneath the earth and the bottom of the oceans, or far out into the Void away from the heat and light of any sun. They exist completely outside the ecological system of the natural world, and even on a supernatural level they are almost completely different from spirits. The world beneath the sun and moon is lethally hostile to them, but the further one descends into the depths, the more traces of their continued existence remain. The primordials draw heavily from the D&D books Lords of Madness and The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, and the games Darkest Dungeon and Bloodborne.

I'm hoping to get this launched by early summer.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Land grab sounds simple but can get complex with hooks and variations. Some ruins, underground, forest and city environments, organized crime, throw in some corrupt officials, a few murders and a cult. Has a lot of real-world history to draw from and use, Chinatown fantasy role play.

 

[aco175]

I don't know. I would like to be a player in something cool like an open west marches game that has little overplot and the PCs can go on all these small quests and the quests influence the bigger picture. Maybe have one out of several BBEGs emerge as the main villain depending on how the smaller quests go.

It would take a lot of prep to get the many smaller quests together and be able to have one party do things that influence another and still have PCs that can jump to another party while keeping things straight. Something played 4-5 hours per week over a couple years.