Ideas for a DnD campaign

[dementis]

The game i'm playing has our party recruited by a golden dragon in a guerilla war spanning an entire island between a green and gold dragon, we had to solve a riddle to find where an orb was to control dragons, but now there's all these double crossing deals going on between the party and NPC's working for the green dragon, basically whichever side we help the island will be ruled by an oppressive dragon, so we're all out to get the orb ourselves, AND we've all been cursed my a high priest of Wuken to build 6 churches in the name of him, if we don't do it in 6 years (in game) we die haha.

 

[DC_Josh]

A local noble contracts with passing adventurers to track down a stolen carriage. Twist is said carriage was never stolen in the first place but driven off a cliff for insurance money.

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

Have you thought about using planar/abyssal creatures and maybe trying to recreate/adapt 'At the Mountains of Madness'?

No matter how awesome this sound, it begs the question: how does one make up stats and rules for Shoggoths, which can spawn any limb and/or organ at will and squeeze themselves through every imaginable opening?

I'm fairly certain there are tons of monsters that essentially act as Shoggoths, they just aren't called that in the manuals. Chaos Beasts, Yugoloths, etc.

OT: I'm also a DM and generally my campaigns begin rather loosely. I'll create a lot of small potential plot hooks/threads for the PCs to pursue and let them decide how they want their game to go. Once they're following one particular thread I start weaving others, some that are related and others that just provide flavor for the world, into the main quest line they've followed. For example, my current campaign has turned into a "protect the world from a Daelkyr (Lords of the plane of Madness) invasion" with some political intrigue in the PCs' home base city concerning Sahuagin and fishing rights. The more you can throw in separate and unrelated quests, the more the world seems like a real place.

 

[WarCorrespondent]

A volcano of chaos has erupted from the dirt, an event that literally lifted people off the their feet momentarily.

The Adventurers need to get into the seemingly extinct volcano to save the world from death from an unnaturally massive eruption. The volcano reveals itself to be labyrinthine, with each area delving deeper into various levels with increasing amounts of foul gases, boiling sulfur and good ol' fashioned lava.

The volcano turns out to be a regular volcano with a powerful monster getting a perverse pleasure from using magic to make the lava vein more violent until it rends the land in twain.

 

[Issurru]

Well depending on how many people you have to play (and whether or not you play a character with them) You could always do a build your own base sort of campaign where the group needs to manage their own resources to start a guild or something akin to that (trying to remember what one of my old DM's did when I first started playing).

Like we needed to have people guarding our small base at any given time and we were free to do essentially whatever we wanted to do (he liked it if we talked about what we might plan on doing after the session so that it would be slightly easier on him). But we also had to go out and do mercenary work or something like that so we could gain the money we needed to purchase the materials and the help we needed to expand our base.

Since we only had 2 people (me and a buddy) he let us make extra PC's but that cost us a good chunk of change to do so, I think like 1k to make a level 1 character instead of always paying for help, and when we didn't want or need them anymore they could become NPC's we might run into or could hire if need be

 

[Strixvaliano]

I've always had fun incorporating the relics of a long lost technological facility hidden away deep inside a mountain. If the PC's actually found a way to enter the lower parts of the facility they could find genetic manipulation chambers with some of the older species of the world being tested on. From there I could wing it and have a mutant outbreak or play on more subtle aspects in my world on how some of the younger races (humans, orcs, whatever else I feel) could have been the result of some gene splicing.

Of course all of that tends to fall apart when the party runs ahead to tackle an encounter and the mage hangs back and proceeds to cast a fireball (unknowingly) through a hall full of highly flammable gas and ends up roasting everyone.

I also love to build around various traps and just things in general to throw the party off.

I had one player who loved to go lone wolf and run off ahead so he can be the ultimate hero and he didn't need no stinking party until he went down a corridor with a visible pit trap at the foot of some stairs leading up to an iron door that had water flowing under it. Needless to say he trys to bash the door and ends up failing but breaks it enough water pressure on the other side blows him back into the pit, which gets filled with water then the iron door slides down the stairs and traps him. He kept failing checks to bang loud enough on the door and the party just walked over him and let him die.

Another idea I used was a bunch of statues of a diety in a dungeon and when you placed a coin on them the coin would disappear and a bell sound would be made. The players wasted so much coin thinking it was some sort of elaborate puzzle before they realized they were just being very charitable.

A shiny glow under a bunch of collapsed rubble is a lot of fun to when players reach in thinking that it is something shiny or important and they end up stinging themselves with a poison dart or a scorpion tags them.

 

[almostgold]

Fantasy-setting zombie apocalypse. You're welcome, world.

 

[Schadrach]

Have a central character who gives them quests. Have said character secretly be a Gold dragon in disguise.

One day one of the party looks at him with True Vision (or whatever it was called).

Hilarity ensues. (also plot twist)

Gold dragon? Don't you mean half-fiend red dragon? That way once they realize who's been guiding them it becomes a whole other arc of trying to detangle what they need to fix to atone for their own fuck-ups when dealing with an evil plot hatched by a being whose thinking much much longer term than they could ever hope to be?

 

[zidine100]

Throw them a curve ball and make it in the my little pony universe.

There are worse jokes i could make.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Ice age. Re-skin all the 4e classes to be cro-magnon warriors, hunters, shamans, etc. Maybe re-skin on of the demihumans to be neanderthals. Basic weapons are stone and bone, and magic weapons can be metal from some forgotten antediluvian time. Include weather effects, survival skill challenges, and so on. Make it as much about finding a warm place to spend the night or something to eat as it is about getting loot

 

[Voodoomancer]

Have a central character who gives them quests. Have said character secretly be a Gold dragon in disguise.

One day one of the party looks at him with True Vision (or whatever it was called).

Hilarity ensues. (also plot twist)

Gold dragon? Don't you mean half-fiend red dragon? That way once they realize who's been guiding them it becomes a whole other arc of trying to detangle what they need to fix to atone for their own fuck-ups when dealing with an evil plot hatched by a being whose thinking much much longer term than they could ever hope to be?

A friend told me about the idea. The only thing of importance is of course one of the party looking at their boss and realizing he is physically larger than the room.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Try reading through some of the story set ups in the forum games/role play thread on the Escapist, it's only a few clicks away, and there are all sorts of genre mash ups, straight fantasys, steampunk (and even a My Little Pony story for some reason). Sure to give you some ideas.

 

[SouthpawFencer]

Keep in mind that I'm not familiar with D&D rules...

Have what appears to be a basic quest to clear out some goblins or other low-hp, mass-attack critters. Unbeknownst to the party (or the people hiring them), this particular goblin tribe is being ruled by a human (any class would do, although I wouldn't be opposed to the leader being a Sorcerer Lich named Xykon [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html]) with knowledge of the various strengths and weaknesses of the different adventurer classes, and has trained the goblins to counter them using simple tactics.

For example: When a big fight breaks out, wizards will cast all sorts of buffs on themselves (Bark Skin, Flight, Invisibility, etc). So the PCs hear a whistle blow and the goblins launch a massive attack, but appear to be split off in small groups and don't bunch up, so that area-effect spells will have limited use. When the melee fighters try to engage, the goblins scatter from them and try to avoid engagement. Archer and spear-throwers attack if they're not engaged, and evade instead of fighting if they become the focus of an attack. Once the magic-users finish casting their buffs and start to actively go on the offensive, a whistle blows again and the goblins all retreat. An hour or so later, this repeats. Continuously. Day and night. Every effort is made to prevent the magic users from resting long enough to recharge, and to prevent the fighters from avoiding exhaustion.

EDITS: Fixed a couple of typos, corrected some grammar, and expanded on the last sentence of the original post a bit.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

[quote="SouthpawFencer"