Dungeons and Dragons world feedback plx.

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NazzerDawk

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Mar 21, 2011
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I'm beginning a campaign with some friends, and I am DMing it. Stop reading here if you are one of my players, PLX.

So, my campaign is called Flightwood Chronicles. It concerns a set of magic items with genuinely strange properties. Things like music boxes that induce the urge to dance, or a parchment that, when written on, translates all languages, but only to some unknown language.

These items themselves are generally pretty innocent, but no one is ever able to find out their origin. If you buy it from someone, they will always lead you on a wild goose chase of happenstance acquisitions, misplaced packages, and other merchants who lead you on just as much. Basically, they seem to have passed through an infinite number of hands.

But in reality they have their origin in a deep, dangeous forest called Flightwood, the kind of place where people go in, but either never come out or they come out insane.

The setup for the plot is that the players stumble accross the journal of a man who has been investigating these items... and also some similar items that aren't quite so innocent. Things like chains that bind creatures in time. Or goblets that cause drinks to become fizzy like carbonation... only drinkers will die in a few hours after drinking from them.

These items also cause horrible corruptions in creatures, like making innocuous dirtworms to grow to monstrous sizes and ruin the crops of a whole village, or making beholders grow more eyestalks and phase through walls.




Any feedback? I think this could be a pretty easy campaign to make somewhat episodic, and I can make it flexible: a new villain one week, a crazy monster the next. And players can have fun with the items I come up with.
 

PleasantKenobi

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Nov 9, 2010
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Sounds pretty good thus far. I mean, there is little to critique right now.

What I would say is that you have a good hook and room to introduce some very interesting items that seem innocent at first yet cause terrible problems. Problems the PCs can go on to fix.

Few questions:
Fourth Edition?
Campaign Setting? Faerun? Eberron? Homebrew?
Level?
And have you written up the first few session yet?
 

NazzerDawk

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Mar 21, 2011
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The way it works is the players are in this common traveler's destination and the populace is rioting. Apparently their crops are failing and the local governorship isn't doing much to help. It turns out that the first farm to have the problem had an infestation of dirtworms, homebrew creatures that are essentially worms that eat a bunch of roots. Well, they find out that this guy's got a burrow of giant dirtworms that are multiplying and spreading fast, and attacking everything they find.

After clearing the burrow they stumble across a place where the burrow merges with the farmer's basement. It turns out this young farmer's missing father was investigating the items, and the basement has a Beholder chained up and frozen in time (the players are encouraged to think it's just a statue to scare people away so I can have this come back in the story later) as well as a journal describing his pursuit of the origins of a satchel of arms and trinkets that he found in his far away travels. This leads them to.... they'll find out next session ;)
 

Da_Schwartz

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Jul 15, 2008
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Wait.. your going from dirt worms to a beholder? this must be 4th edition. lol. Word of advice, tone down the beholder bit, no reason to get so..epic so quickly, keep it simple and rely on your storytelling..not hitdice. Forcing in uncessaary monsters just for the sake of having something cool is a critical mistake. last i checked a 5th level party is no match for a beholder.
 

plugav

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Mar 2, 2011
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Sounds like something I'd play, I'm a fan of mysteries and episodic campaigns.

Da_Schwartz said:
Wait.. your going from dirt worms to a beholder? this must be 4th edition. lol. Word of advice, tone down the beholder bit, no reason to get so..epic so quickly, keep it simple and rely on your storytelling..not hitdice. Forcing in uncessaary monsters just for the sake of having something cool is a critical mistake. last i checked a 5th level party is no match for a beholder.
From what I understand, the beholder is just a... teaser, so to speak, they're not supposed to fight it.
 

NazzerDawk

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Mar 21, 2011
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The Gentleman said:
How do they get involved and not just leave?
They were initially just passing through, but its raining, their transport (a carriage) has been attacked by angry villagers, and the inn has no food but awful (and possibly spoiled) yam soup.

TsunamiWombat said:
Remember sometimes the best explaination for things is no explaination at all.
Exactly what I'm doing. They won't have a clue that the items found are even special, or why the beholder is there except for an NPC making a suggestion about why (though this suggestion ends up being wrong)
 

Benny Blanco

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Jan 23, 2008
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So I take it that the arc of the campaign is one which will eventually take the PCs to Flightwood? Presumably once they reach Epic levels?
 

NazzerDawk

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Mar 21, 2011
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Benny Blanco said:
So I take it that the arc of the campaign is one which will eventually take the PCs to Flightwood? Presumably once they reach Epic levels?
Yep ;) That's the plan.

Oh, and I made an insignia that they will be able to reveal on Flightwood relics once they get the right level ritual for it. This is the only way they can tell if something is a genuine Flightwood imitator, especially useful because as the campaign progresses, the items will become more popular among the populace of the world, and a lot of people will start selling fakes to cash in.