D&D 5E (2014) Your favorite campaign you've never run

[GM Lent]

I have also always wanted to run a campaign based off of Glen Cook's Garret P.I books. I've come close, but since nobody else I know has read the books it's hard to get the enthusiasm up for it.

 

[GM Lent]

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.

I ran a Dark Matter campaign back in late '99 or so, and it worked out pretty well. Only lasted maybe 5 or 6 months of bi-weekly play, but it was fun enough.

I found the Alternity rules system functional enough, and some aspects of it made their way into 3rd edition D&D.

 

[Fractal Rabbit]

This is a great topic! I loved the idea a few pages back regarding the soviet style Halfling civilization trying to conquer and remake everything into a vast, socialist Shire.

Mind...blown. Awesome.

I've always wanted to run Ptolis or the Razor Coast (possibly combining them into the same world). I'm a huge fan of Monte Cook's work, especially the Ptolis/Arcana Unearthed period. Numenara is a cool idea but I can't seem to get my players interested in it. But I've integrated his Chaositech and When the Sky Falls books successfully into our long running campaign.

You can also add me to the list of DMs who have always wanted to run a campaign where the real players (with the best approximation of their real world stats) found themselves in a fantasy world as zero level PC who need to pick classes and survive and thrive.

 

[Ancalagon]

Another idea I toyed with was something based on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Strange_&_Mr_Norrell

 

[Ancalagon]

I ran a Dark Matter campaign back in late '99 or so, and it worked out pretty well. Only lasted maybe 5 or 6 months of bi-weekly play, but it was fun enough.

I found the Alternity rules system functional enough, and some aspects of it made their way into 3rd edition D&D.

One of the thing that bothered me about it was how it was strongly skill dependent, and you got more skill points for having a high intelligent, so the best way to have a best X (fighter, rogue whatever) was to max out intelligence.

I think a Dark Matter campaign would be best as a "medium length" campaign, it would be hard to maintain the tension in the long term.

 

[Gilladian]

Well, he WASn't in the original incarnation of the plot, but he COULD easily be described that way! LOL.

But there are two villains/fronts for this campaign idea - the evil politician-style guy, and the evil cult-leader-style guy. I'm sure I can find someone else to stand in for the cult-guy...

 

[GM Lent]

One of the thing that bothered me about it was how it was strongly skill dependent, and you got more skill points for having a high intelligent, so the best way to have a best X (fighter, rogue whatever) was to max out intelligence.

I think a Dark Matter campaign would be best as a "medium length" campaign, it would be hard to maintain the tension in the long term.

I don't disagree with your assessment, but it was something that never bothered me (as far as I can remember from a game I played briefly almost 20 years ago).

I absolutely agree that maintaining tension in a campaign over the course of multiple months/years/storylines is difficult at best - I hear of groups who have had long-running Call of Cthulhu (or even Ravenloft) campaigns and I a, blown away. I have no idea how they do it.

 

[steeldragons]

The arch-villains of the world (or across a large section of the world) come together in a "Legion of Doom" kind of situation to take over the world. Reaching into/across international and interracial politics, trade, religions, magic, etc... Kind of like where the Slavers series was trying to get do, but on a much larger scale.

Some might be NPCs the party faces at lower levels or they will get to know/face individually before the big organization is all revealed.

Despite being thwarted at several turns [presumably] as the party grows in power/experience, the BigBads succeed (in large measure, again, presumably while the heroes are chasing some red herring or taking care of some side quest) before the party gets to level 10 (or thereabouts). Then [at the more "superhero" levels] the game switches to taking them down/restoring what Good remains in the world.

EDIT PS: Oh yeah! Also, in my campaign world, humanity was first created as "the Five Tribes", each of which was devoted to one of the Elder Gods (now, mostly dead/gone) and identified by the colored glaze that was used/assigned to each: the White, Black, Red, Green, and Gold tribes of Men. One of them excelled in knowledge, wisdom, and beauty above the rest. The tribe of Gold, who was assigned/adopted by the elder god of knowledge/history/the mind (one of the few that still exists within the current pantheon), utterly disappears from the world's historical record centuries ago...there are no accounts, hardly even fable or myth, as to what became of them.

I've always wanted to do a "the Tribe of Gold [or "Golden Men"] Returns" but never have ...yet.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I have also always wanted to run a campaign based off of Glen Cook's Garret P.I books. I've come close, but since nobody else I know has read the books it's hard to get the enthusiasm up for it.

I played a Morley Dotes type character in such a campaign, and had a good time, but- save for the DM running it- I was the only person who had read the books, so it fizzled quickly.

 

[Savage Wombat]

After reading about MtG's Alara block, I devised a campaign around four elemental demi-planes, each of which was a world that had developed with one basic element absent. Life evolved there anyway - usually replacing the missing element with some native weirdness.

The dominant races on each plane were twofold - the native sentient race, and the normal D&D race that had wound up there and developed magic/technology to allow colonization of the plane.