D&D 5E Your favorite campaign you've never run


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I've fiddled for a long time on a campaign that in my head I title "Tales around the Embers". Basically, the Goddess of Wyrd, Destiny and Time has died, and time has pored out of the world. Mortal magics have found ways to generate some, but it takes constant rituals. Three towns/small cities that were the settlements on where three pre-Loss borders came together, have banded together. In the generations since they have grown into one large city enclosing croplands and grazing lands, and rituals keep time within. Births seem to help to fill the area with time. The city knows it needs to stay together, but that doesn't mean that the old racial tensions are gone. Each settlement had it's own factions before, and now it's a mess of intrigue.

In the most recent generation they have found ways to create portable time lanterns, which can allow small groups to leave the confines for days, even weeks at a time, though they must return. Metal wearing out and other lack of resources forces expeditions, but elsewhere in the world time ran down and then froze.

PCs can come across bandits sitting in ambush from before the Loss, battles in the midst of being fought, explore castles frozen in time until they come and awaken them. I had planned that they would find that there was a war being launched between two of the countries, and choices to rescue these countrymen from being refrozen without time or to bring them back, with their fresh tension and more mouths to feed.

I had planned on it being a mix of exploration in the timeless and intrigue, diplomacy, and factions in the city. Depending on the players I could see major campaign goals being unifying the city or trying to find out what happened to the goddess of time and getting her portfolio filled, if they wanted more gritty, diplomatic, or epic storylines.

EDIT: One of the lines I wanted to play with is that there is all this prophesy around, and it didn't point to the PCs. But it was all now meaningless because Wyrd & Destiny were as shattered as time. Eveyone was free to make their own destiny, and as such even the gods trembled, unsure of the future and even if they will be replaced. This wasn't to be an obvious thread, but an underlying one about the PCs are as heroic as they want to be, and why the gods have become so distant.
 
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A campaign idea I played with was a take on a megadungeon. Basically there is an interdimensional haven called The Tower with Five Walls. It's a huge non-euclidian "tower" not made to human - or any consistent - scale. The room have five walls, each with a 90 degree corner. It goes down further than is currently occupied, but the top is known. It's a post-apocalyptic sanctuary with windows that open to bizarre logic and timings to various dimensions under siege, and is populated byt he people who have escaped into it. While there is jockeying for limited resources, escape has brought disparate people together and they know how to add more. But it is not self-sufficient by any means, and as windows open there are needs for people to go to these various troubled dimensions to bring back necessities. Some windows open regularly, others never have. The catachisms speak of when a window will open on a world not in trouble, but that never happens. Some wonder what draws the tower to such places, while others think the tower may be the cause itself.

Much of this would be explorations of various dimensions, time limited before the window closes. These would be a few that would be opened to fairly regularly that the people can cultivate plants, others would be rarer or occasionally new.

Each world has something. Perhaps one is overrun by spawning undead, another a playground of demons, a third somethign has killed everything but the beasts while another has once-recognizable who are now abominations.

There's a lot of prestige to go through a window, it's the most dangerous thing you can do and the only way to get some resources. But you know if you miss it it might be a while before it opens again, and if you bring trouble to the window it might get into the tower.

Depending on the players goals could go towards eventually exploring down the tower itself to figure out how to "pilot" it's windows to get to someplace safe, which would probably end up meeting the creators. Alternately it could involve cataloging the various dimensions until they figure out one where they can carve out a niche and recolonize it.
 


Oh - not D&D, but the Alternity setting "Dark Matter". It may be one of the best read I've had as a campaign setting. I never ran it because the Alternity rules themselves seemed... not quite right.
 

My unsolicited tip for running Dark Sun: Think Barsoom, not D&D Survivor in the desert.
I'm not that much into ERB, but I'm not that much into desert survival either.

My mental model would be pulp-y desert movies and REH-ish stuff.

EDIT: Agree with iserith and [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] - Dark Sun is clearly sword-and-planet style fantasy. My mental model for this sort of stuff includes quite a few comics from back in the day (maybe mid-90s Excalibur? It's been a while).
 
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A planet that is all water, but islands of land float above the ocean (maybe 1,000-2,000 above). These islands vary from the size of a village to some as large as a small nation. They float on magical currents and from time to time come close to or collide with one another. Effectively, each island can remain isolated for years and then slowly come into contact with or interact with whatever culture or creature inhabit an island. Presumably, you'd be able to see an island coming towards yours for weeks ahead of time, and legends would tell of encounters with islands in the past and what horrible or good things came from them.
 

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