#campaign ideas

[dungeonsandkobolds]

Master Post of My Fave NPCs in My Campaign:

Old Man Riddles

(Can appear anywhere and it'll make sense)

Entire deal is he sits in a puddle of mud splashing about and throws mud at the party if they get a riddle wrong

Chester

(Again can appear anywhere without explanation)

A mimic that talks! He takes the form of a chest, you throw 10 gold into his mouth and he spits out a random, maybe useful potion. He does not know what any of the potions do

Sofa

Chester's best friend. Essentially a dog. Licks everything, but mimics are adhesive so he gets stuck to things a lot.

The Meat Traders

(Found on the road)

Curse by the meat witch to trade meat for meat. They can ONLY accept meat in payment and only have meat to trade.

Frat Boy Doomsday Cult

Having a massive rager to celebrate the end of the world. The world doesn't end. They fight with lacrosse sticks

Billy McGee

Local old man that does tours of the catacombs. All of his ancestors are in the your, having died of riding animals such as "2 dragons". When asked how they were riding multiple animals at once, his answer is "badly"

Thray

(Owns Thray's Curiousities)

Gay vampire that runs an Antiques Store. Refuses to uncurse the cursed items cause they're more fun the way they are. Beefs with all other arcane practitioners, currently banned from the wizards uni.

I'll add more as I remember more

[dailydungeondelves]

Gotta hold onto those ideas and not forget them!!

[honourablejester]

Spelljammer Campaign Concept

Since I’m space-ttrpg brained at the minute. One thing specific to spelljammer’s Astral Sea setting that I really wish they’d added more to is the idea that it’s full of dead gods. And live ones, yes, but it’s the gargantuan celestial corpses that I’m interested in. (Which sounds weird when I say it like that, but anyway). There’s a canonical city, the githyanki city of Tu’narath, built on one of these corpses, and apparently in older lore Red Wizards of Thay pulled an artefact that beat like a heart out of it. There’s an idea that some aspect of divinity or even life still resides in some of these vast remains, some spark of godhood that provides power and even some animation to a thing long dead. In whatever sense gods can die.

And. Look. That is a hell of a concept to just throw out there and dismiss in a single sentence and small sidebar in your new setting book. I’m mad about it. Anyway.

The Astral Sea is littered with the corpses of dead gods, strange and forgotten deities from thousands of worlds. Strange beings that have become strange places, islands in a silver vastness, sometimes still pulsing with the echoes of divine life and perhaps divine natures. Places big enough to build cities on. Or dungeons in. Big enough to explore. Searching for what?

So. Picture this campaign. A mysterious backer is approaching the crews of adventurous spelljammer vessels, sponsoring expeditions to strange places in the Astral Sea. Terrifying places in the Astral Sea. The remnants of what were once gods, and now are bizarre islands full of strange magic and the echoes of old divine domains. This backer is searching for something specific from these sites, these corpses, and, on top of actual payment, is willing to allow crews to keep anything else they find on these expeditions for themselves, provided they bring everything they find back and allow the backer to examine them and choose a single item for themselves. Upon receipt of this item, they will pay the crew what they owe, and allow them to keep the rest.

This is because it’s not an item they’re searching for, as such. It’s a shard. A shard of lost divinity. A fragment of celestial life, still throbbing at the hearts of vast corpses. The form it takes will be different every time. The form of the deity will be different every time, and so the seat of their last remaining fragment of divinity will be different also. It might look, and feel, like anything. But the backer will know it when they see it. And they’ll pay for it.

They’re not going to say this, of course. They’re not going to tell anyone what they’re looking for. But they’re sending crews out. Maybe they’ve been sending crews out for a while. No one ages in the Astral Sea, so maybe they’ve been on this quest for time without meaning. One shard isn’t enough. Not for their purposes. Many of them are so small and so faded, bare motes of potential after aeons of death. They don’t want a single fragment of divinity, this person, they need enough to make a whole one. A whole divinity. Necromancy of the rudest sort, a frankensteined apotheosis. If you eat the fractured souls of enough dead gods, sooner or later, won’t you become one yourself?

I’m picturing an eldritch lich, personally. One that’s been listening to whispers from the Far Realm for far too long. A puppetmaster being puppeted themselves, maybe. What forces in creation have an interest in the ascension of a frankensteined god? What would the results be of a god made of pieces, torn fragments, of so many lost and disparate and unwilling dead deities? Any and all deities. Good, evil, alien, of any and all domains, scavenged and consumed into a single, roiling whole. What sort of divinity would result from so traumatic a process? And what would that divinity then do?

But all that’s in the future. An endgame perhaps aeons or only a few remaining shards down the line. For the moment, what’s being asked is this:

Travel the Astral Sea. Find the body of a god. Venture into its depths. Bring me everything you find.

Now. I’m going to take objection to the description of the dead gods provided in Astral Adventurer’s Guide, and offer a different direction:

“The Astral Sea is also where one can find the petrified remains of gods who were slain by more powerful entities or who lost all their mortal worshipers and perished as a result. A dead god looks like a gigantic, nondescript stone statue that bears little resemblance to the divine entity it once was. Githyanki, mind flayers, psurlons, and other natives of the Astral Plane sometimes turn these drifting hulks into outposts and cities, many of which are hollowed out beneath the surface.”

A giant nondescript statue that looks nothing like the deity once did. No. Boring. Even Tu’narath still has six arms, so there’s some resemblance happening there. And besides. It’s just cooler, more fun, more interesting, if the dead gods do resemble what they once were. If they are influenced by what domains they once held. Because then … the universe is your oyster.

They’re all different. All these island corpses. These slain gods. This is the Astral Sea. These are the deities of a thousand worlds and a thousand species and a thousand forgotten realms. They might look like anything. Shaped by the echoes of the god’s nature and its domains and its species. The dead sea god that looks like a vast alien whale, whose gut is filled with strange waters and strange creatures, and into whose belly the party must venture. A forgotten deity of knowledge whose vast skull now contains a calcified, crystalline ‘library’ with aeons of knowledge written in light onto spun fibres of crystal. A deity of madness, darkness and despair whose corpse is a labyrinthine maze of passages that leech will and soul the further you venture into them, a lingering undead malice that doesn’t want you dead so much as maddened and undone. And your sponsor won’t care, so long as at least one of you makes it back, that shard of dark power clutched in your trembling fist.

Some of the bodies might still be guarded. Some of them might be inhabited, with cities and realms nested into their bones and calcified flesh. Some might be considerably more ‘alive’ than others. Some might be just stranger than others, deities so lost and far-flung and alien that nothing about even their inert remains makes sense. You have … an infinity of options here. Let your inner dungeon designer completely off the chain. These are the corpses of dead gods made physical, floating in an infinite silver sea of possibilities. There are no rules, not even physics. You could do literally anything you wanted here.

It'd make sense if the backer was sending crews to less well-known, and therefore perhaps stranger and more dangerous, corpses, just to be sure that no one had taken or destroyed what they’re looking for already. The more alive ones, more likely to still contain lingering power and divinity. So you have an excellent excuse to get weird up in here.

Basically, if you want a vast, eldritch, apocalyptic dungeon crawl, or series of dungeon crawls, in space, then the Astral Sea is very much the perfect setting. Although, yes, this is likely a high level campaign, unless you want to guide the party in with more accessible godly dungeons first. Even then it’s probably on the high side.

There’s also the shards themselves to consider. They’ll likely be potent magic items. You’re holding a piece of a god’s divinity in your hand. With powers probably themed to what the god would have been in life. Although they don’t necessarily need to be powerful. The divinity might be faded enough, shattered and torn by death, that it doesn’t do much externally anymore. Its power is intrinsic to what it is, not what it does. And maybe that makes more sense for how crews are willing to give them up afterwards, if they’re only mildly impressive amidst other loot.

Though that could be a thing. If it’s a magic item that you know for a fact your party will want to keep, and then that could bring them into conflict with their ‘backer’ before they ever maybe twig to the greater issue going on.

And there is a question of how and if they do twig to that. How would they find out the goals here. Are there other interested parties who’ve figured out what our backer is trying for? Or simply parties who are aware that they have been desecrating dead gods and who object on purely moral and philosophical grounds? How has society in the Astral Sea evolved around the fact that there are dead gods just drifting around?

How do living gods, deities with living dominions in the Sea, deal with the idea that there is a creature going around looting the corpses of their deceased forebearers? Grave-robbing in the Astral Sea can potentially be a couple of orders of magnitude more apocalyptic than the terrestrial equivalent normally manages, and I do love that.

(Or maybe it’s not apocalyptic. Maybe there’s nothing left in the dead gods that could actually make a new one, no matter how many you eat, and those few deities who are aware of our backer’s quest, deities of knowledge, perhaps, just look at them with pity for this obsession, delusion, of theirs. They don’t want them stopped because of the danger, but just because of the disrespect, the desecration. That, and the fact that eating bits of dead gods, while it might not make you a god yourself, still won’t do anything good to you, and perhaps there is a certain amount of not goodness happening that does need to be dealt with. Dealer’s choice.

Or perhaps the gods think that, and they’re wrong, and now you have to convince incredible all-powerful entities that there is a genuine threat there, whether they believe it or not)

I just. You can’t just put that out there, that this setting you’re casually sailing around is full of dead gods, and not … do something with it. Expand on it. Play with the implications of it. The Astral Sea is a vast, infinite celestial graveyard, and the remains of dead gods are locations you can interact with. That is a concept, and you can have a bit more fun with it than ‘nondescript statue asteroids that people can build on’ over here. Lingering echoes of what those deities once were, fragments of divinity, the sheer magical and theological potential of being able to grave-rob a dead god. Come on. You have divine corpses, in a setting where necromancy exists. Somebody’s gonna do something apocalyptic with the implications of that, you just know they are.

And in the process, you can get some really cool and weird dungeons to explore. Heh.

Spelljammer has such potential as a setting. The Astral Sea allows so many possibilities. How do you open with ‘you are sailing through a setting where you can make port at a god’s house or at a rock that is a dead god’ and just … park that there and leave it? Good god. Good gods. And bad ones, and weird ones, and completely inexplicable ones too.

I’m not sure Wizards quite understood how much they jumped the scale by bringing spelljammer back and putting it in the Astral Sea. So many settings have archmages and other people spend so many resources to try and reach the realms of gods, and in spelljammer you and your dinky ship can just sail up and knock on their door. Maybe not get in, but you can totally just heave up to any deity who has a Dominion in the Sea and at least knock. You can put your smuggler’s cache in a dead god’s skull. The deities are now, in this setting, significantly more interactable. If you want to try and necromancy a god’s corpse, that is a thing you can attempt.

Which is probably why they tried to tone it down with the whole ‘nondescript statues’ thing, that dead gods in the Sea are just rocks that people build on/in, but … Honestly? It’s still a dead god. You can’t undo the raw scale of that. And maybe you shouldn’t, either.

Nah. Play into the bonkers scale and setting implications of a potentially infinite number of god corpses just littered around the place, with the astral floating kingdoms and vacation homes of living gods keeping them company, and you in your dinky little boat sailing cheerfully out among them. Because that’s amazing, it really is.

Anyway. Have fun. Moving swiftly on.

[awindinthelantern]

Incomplete list of movies and TV shows that would make great inspiration/settings for RPG campaigns, or one-shots (dungeons crawls), for DnD, CoC, or others:

The Mummy (1999)

The Fall (2006)

The Cell (2000)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) / Poseidon (2006)

Baccano! (2007)

GoSICK (2011)

Ghost Ship (2002)

Fool's Gold (2008)

Blade Runner (1982) / Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Natsume's Book of Friends (2008-2017)

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Get Smart (2008)

Feel free to reblog with your own additions

[library-fae]

dnd really gives you an addiction

i want to make so many more campaigns now

im currently running a home-brew campaign inspired by greek mythology with some body horror mixed in

i want to make a borderlands inspired campaign, think that would be fun especially for character design

i want to do a zombie apocalypse campaign inspired by the last of us

and a campaign in space

and so many more

my worldbuilding brain rot is strong

[heyzebulon]

D&D campaign idea

Your start off with a classic fantasy setup: There is an evil necromancer threatening the kingdom who needs to be stopped and you are siding with the "good guys" ™️

Have a paladin - let's call him Sir Osric - team up with the players. Have him be super helpful and likeable, whatever this means to your players.

This will be extremely important later: get them to like Sir Osric

Get right to the action. In the first session the players fight the necromancer and are on the cusp of victory, the necromancer at the tip of their blade.

When Sir Osric betrays them. He takes the necromancer's artifact for himself - The Eye of Gul'Dan, Skull of Morrigan, Crown of Quicksilver, whatever.

When he takes the artifact, have all players make a CON saving throw and follow the rules for a Banshee wail. What does a Banshee wail do? Well if you fail the save it reduce you to 0 HP. Yeah. It's a CR 4 creature that can just drop everyone within 30ft.

Sir Osric now goes full murder mode, finishing off anyone who didn't already get dropped. Now an Oathbreaker Paladin, have him monologue some stuff about having planned to take the Necromancer's artifact for himself but he can't leave any witnesses.

This is important: all the players must die. Setup before the campaign that they should expect something drastic like this to happen.

After the players all die, have them describe their interpretation of death as per their character's beliefs, spend a little time on this. Settle in it.

Form the otherside they open their eyes again and behold the wicked necromancer ™️ who offers them a deal: Be raised as Revenants and seek your vengeance against Sir Osric.

If the players have questions for the Necromancer, have them explain that things have gone a bit "Scar takes over Pride Rock" back at Kingdom, their undead has been defeated and they are now fleeing to bide their time, but not before paying a visit to the only other people who know of Osric's betrayal.

Once accepted (hopefully by the end of session one) the campaign begins proper!

Revenants are amazing.

Revenants have one year to kill the subject of their revenge before the curse of undeath ends. So we're talking long-term projects here. Have your players craft magical items and form alliances with allies who would also like to bring down Sir Osric.

A year is so much time for the players to fuck with Sir Osric. He gets married? Crash the wedding. His first child and heir has their naming ceremony? Crash that too. He wants to host a jousting tournament? Reveal his affair during the proceedings.

And so what if he has a Royal Guard of Clerics slamming you with holy spells. If a revenant dies, they repossess a new corpse 24 hours later and the only thing that can truly destroy them is a fucking wish spell.

That's right, this campaign is a rogue-like! Just have the players hurl themselves at Sir Osric and ruin his life and the oppressive regime he has created in his image. And they have a year to work towards that final battle to actually kill him and put their spirits to rest.

[virovac]

Reading "The Horror from the Bridge" by Ramsey Campbell

It occurs to me that games ala Call of Cthulhu could have monsters and enemy encounters not directly related to the main plot, but are investigating the strange going on themselves.

Works especially well if the "big bads" are obscure and might have escaped the notice of or been forgotten by other factions.

"The horrors from the Bridge" seems to have had scattered populations and packed their populations in hibernation like sardines, and were also feared by at least rogue Shoggoths who went out of way to avoid them in ancient wanderings . The boogeyman of a larger mythos.

The fact that the villain expected interference and mistakes hunters passing by for rival cultists supports this I feel.

[my-forgotten-notepad]

DND Idea: The Thompson Extension

I have an idea for a dnd campagin; the Thompson Extension. A grand labyrinth of wild and alien chambers all sprawling out from underneath a lone home in some blue-collar all-american fictional city of Origin. Before I dive into recolouring it into a DND campaign/dungeon idea; I feel like its best to give a summary of the Thompson Extension first, to give a feel for the way the extension and the surrounding region could be used as inspiration for DMs.

The Thompson Extension (Made by Tiktok user baddreams1985) is a subterranean structure that spills out deep into the earth in ways that fail to submit to the rules and strictures of the laws of reality. The Extension was constructed under as of yet unknown means and is plagued by strange and terrible powers; often driving those exposed to madness or delusional compulsions. It was uncovered after Douglas Thompson was being investigated for fraud and tax evasion.

The building, The Thompson Extension, and the effects within both and the surrounding area are being constantly investigated as more and more strange and bizarre events seem to spawn from the Thompson family's actions and from the alien and nonsensical labyrinth of chambers deep beneath their home.

As the investigation grew, investigators gathered and cross-referenced data, journals, affects, and interviews of the people within the city of Origin; the results of which simply changed how the Thompson family was viewed, and potential leads for how the damnable extension came into existence. Such as Douglas Thompson's delusions of grandeur, his god complex, lying, thievery, cheating, and outright neglect of his home, wife, and children. Art over the intervening decades all seem to focus on prisons, mazes, freedom, transhumanism, and horses; a possible link to an urban legend known as the Skewbald Mare. The forests of Origin are home to several potent medicinal and poisonous fungi, mosses, and other forms of plant life; the majority of which engage and modify synapse and neurological responses.

Old video tapes and partially encoded diaries and letters provide investigators with the impression of several cults or paranormal societies acting in concert, but not all for the same goal; often clash and cause chaos in the pursuit of destroying their enemies. Some worshipping the Void and the Skewbald Mare, others fostering alien parasites that violate the human form beyond reason and description. There even being several layers and decades of bureaucratic and governmental corruption, abuse, and cover-ups to hide and obscure the length and enormity of the issues within the city of Origin.

Susan Thompson (nee Leefarr) seemed based off of journals seems to be a pained and utterly beleaguered housewife. Aware of the dire straits her family was in, the strain of her husband's neglect as well as the length and sordid depths of his shameless sexual escapades and ego. She found solace in her art; often small and rather abstract pieces reimaginings buildings, rooms, and the natural world that was always so visible from her kitchen window. After the family's dissapearance, some of her pieces wildly and hideously distorted, others quickly began to rot and the materials were swiftly tested. Each painting had trace elements of blood, bone, teeth, nails, hair and skin tissue within them; the all the material links back to a single individual: Susan Thompson.

In an interview with one of Susan's neighbours, Judie Sanderson calmly remarked that Susan went from boastful to frightened about her home in a matter of weeks. "She was acting real queer about it too! She starts telling me she's finally got her dream kitchen, a playroom for the kiddos, and even a new bathroom ... One fine day she comes over, looking like she's been up and put through the wringer. We were on my front porch, just sipping our coffee and she goes "Judie, it just keeps growing".... But she just looked at me with her eyes hollow like a burnt out Douglas Fir and says "If I sleep, it'll get bigger" The second-hand account from Judie Sanderson seems to strongly imply that somehow Susan Thompson was key to the development of the extension. This interview and the bizarre events surrounding her art seem to impyl that some force or power was or is capable to pull from her desires, conscious or otherwise and slam them together to fashion a new chamber, a new physical reality.

Damaged audio from Jack Caversham's attempt on Mr. Thompson's life only seems to highlight Susan's role in the extension's existence. "Susan! She is the beacon. The Celestial umbilical cord reaching into the heavens!... Her art, her unending passion, something you never even recognised is the key!" The recording shows that Jack worships the Skewbald Mare, believing that something akin to the Thompson Extension is needed to free it from terrible and near incomprehensible cosmic prison. The damaged audio only further strengthens the validity of Judie Sanderson's commentary and account; that somehow the governing power of the Thompson Extension originally pulled from Susan's artistic talents and vibrant imagination to fashion itself into reality; also meaning for horrors that dwell within the extension could also be linked to Susan Thompson's mind and creative capacity.

Tldr The Extension is a seemingly occult creation that was forged via unkown means (most likely via occult artefacts and dark rituals), the original construction of the extension seems to have been guided and nurtured by Susan Thompson's dreams, but radically spiralled out of her or Douglas Thompson's control. The Thompson Extension seems in some tangential way is connected to corrupt politicians, alien parasites, cults and an enigmated figure known as the Skewbald Mare.

Now here is the part where I take this massive baseline description of Baddreams1985's work and transpose it into a dungeon or a fully-fledged campaign idea.

Option 1) The Thompson Extension has all of its darker elements wiped clean (so no body horror, no psychological horror, no dangerous cults, no familial neglect or cheating etc) and the extension is simply a rogue experiment into the Far Realms gone horribly wrong (or right). Causing a breach between the Material Plane and the Far Realms, causing reality to warp and splinter; creating new rooms, making old ones larger, smaller as more and more of the corrosive power of the Far Realm continues to leak through.

Adventurers are then tasked by the colleagues of the archmage/scientist/professor who caused the breach to enter their home; delve deep within the unnatural extension; reaffirm the boundary line between realities and save their colleague. The Dm could utilise warped NPCs, highlighting that the players aren't the first group to be sent into the extension to repair and save reality, the extension could be a ploy by a malicious Beholder or a tribe of Ilithids seeking to carve pathways into and out of reality to better their positions for ensuring their dominate and dark future succeeds.

Option 2) This option is more or less Option 1, but instead of academics causing the breach and you needing to fix it; the violation between the Far Realms and the Material Plane is caused by cultists. Those that worship and seek the transformative might of the Skewbald Mare to enact it's will upon the static nature of reality.

This campaign can start off as a race against time before delving into a prototype of the supernatural labyrinth to prevent the Skewbald Mare from being unshackled. This approach would give players to investigate the cult and their motives as well as try and acquire the necessary tools to protect themselves from the cult and if needed; the Skewbald Mare itself.

Option 3) This option goes all in on the content of the OG work. The inciting incident could have been the result of a fantatical cult member and scholastic academic believing himself meant for grander, greater things than his menial role within both his institution and fringe movement of faith.

The cultist uses his powers and an expediently arranged wedding to a maiden of the goddess of creativity to set things in motion as he blasphemes and stains the house with his power and the dark power of the Skewbald Mare. But his actions are hopeless, impotent in some cases; so overtime the cultist begins to commit crimes, theft, charming, adultery, neglect and destruction; all to further his own ends. The cultist no longer wishes to serve the Skewbald Mare, he wishes to supplant the ancient beast; kill it and wear its might like fine silk robes and proclaim himself god.

His motives, actions, and their consequences draw great power to him, allowing for his darkest and most profane desires to finally become acheivable. But, that also meant his former colleagues and those he once called brother and sister knew of his shame and his sin. The resulting cloak and dagger campaigns, the black rituals and the resulting violent chaos; the cultist, his plagued wife and their two daughters dissapear and the nightmare labyrinth forged beneath their home begins to scream out to the world above. Each day, some new evil seems to spill out and plague the bodies, hearts, and mind of those within the citadel this cursed labyrinth lays beneath.

The local Lord; a bloated and conniving figure has bemoaned the fact that none wish to live within the region and that his wealth is drying up and his position politically, economically and socially is swiftly eroding away beneath him. The Lord quickly hires a band of adventurers to go into the region; offering whatever terms, upright and post-quest payment and title gifts to them so long as they manage to restore order to the region and finally put an end to the lasting remnant of the cultist's hideous work.

[villainsally]

Hear me out. In the beginning of a dnd campaign introduce a loveable npc (or multiple and choose the one your party likes best) and have them join the party. Its all fun and games until the beloved npc saves the party by sealing themself in with the big bad or one of their minions. Cut to later in the campaign, npc is assumed dead, when the party meets the big bad they see something strange, the beloved npc is there. But theyre.... Different. (zombie, mind controlled, whatever) party must fight the beloved Nov to get to the big bad. on the npc's final moments they see the old version of them resurface.

"thanks... For bringing me on one last adventure guys."

It will emotionally demolish your players. And if you wanna be extra mean, no resurrection spell will work on the npc. They can't come back. Or if they do its the zombie/mind controlled version. The party can't bring them back. All they can do is remember them.

[commiepinkofag]

instead of kiss-ins, there should be piss-ins. in every rotunda of every capitol building in every state with a 'bathroom bill'. piss on every federal monument. piss on the floor during a white house tour.

pissed off, or pissed on?

[wewerebeachdwarves]

D&D/TTRPG campaign concepts

want to narrow down what kind of campaign you and your players would like to play? try showing your players this list (or a curated version of it) and having them choose their top favourite concepts! alternatively, you can simply roll!

typical fantasy

dungeon crawl

hex crawl

curses

political intrigue

patrons

gothic

sandbox

seasonal

sailing/ocean

flying/sky

gambling

tailored to an all-1-class party

tailored to an all-1-background party

tailored to an all-1-alignment party

interplanar

post-apocalypse

collecting

blighted world

arena

take stock of the most popular options. how can you mix and match them, and do you want to? negotiate with the players, asking what (if anything) they refuse to play.

some examples of possible mixing and matching include:

sailing/ocean + blighted world = a world where only the ocean is safe from a corruption that plagues the land.

curses + all-1-class party = a party of druids has been cursed to lose control of their wildshape abilities, and must either live with it or try to find a way to reverse the spell.

dungeon crawl + interplanar = there's a portal the party needs to use, and they must go through numerous dungeons in different planes to find it.

gothic + patrons = the party has been hired by a vampire lord to perform various quests to further their nefarious plots. the party seems willing to play along... do they know?

gambling + arena = there's an artifact at the casino, and it's too heavily-guarded to steal. the party's best bet at making money locally is surviving the arena.

political intrigue + post-apocalypse = navigating the politics and wars of desperate nations in a time of great scarcity.

[the-writing-moth]

Mystery d&d campaign ideas consisting of a ghost city?

[awindinthelantern]

Campaign idea: instead of a 1920s/30s inspired setting based around the mafia and crime, run a 1920s/30s campaign where your players are detectives solving mysteries both mundane and otherworldly. Works with both Roaring 20s and Great Depression type settings. Have them team up with a hard-boiled private eye (film noir style) or a foppish dandy detective (Poirot style) who takes them under his wing and teaches them the ropes of sleuthing, the tricks criminals use to commit crimes, and how to outwit them. Have your players make a name for themselves solving crimes and get invited by a rich newspaper magnate to become journalists for his paper, which allows for trips around the country, continent, or world, exposing them to new locales and plot developments. This can also tie into a Cthulhu type campaign, which could start off mundane and slowly get creepier.

Ideas:

Have your players travel to a dust bowl-type setting and investigate the environment, find out what they can, and then return to the capital to print a story about what needs to change.

Have them travel to a frontier town which is besieged by masses of wild animals, and try to find a way to exterminate or route the attacks.

Have them travel to some exotic foreign land where an eccentric archaeologist (either Indiana Jones or eccentric professor style) has gone missing deep in the jungle or desert. Their exploring of the area reveals the ancient temple complex the archaeologist was exploring, complete with many booby traps.

Have them investigate the young son/daughter of a wealthy tycoon who has suddenly gone crazy (tinges of madness? possessed by the Great Old Ones?), and may need to be institutionalized.

Have your players be invited via personal connections to be journalists on the maiden around-the-world flight of the world’s newest and largest rigid airship. Dangers can include a sudden ocean storm that threatens to down the airship, and patches of its fabric skin ripping away and having to be repaired while in flight. (look of the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin for more details on this)

have your players investigate a suspiciously wealthy small-town politician who has secret connections to organized crime, and have them try to expose and thwart his and his partners’ businesses.

have them invited to a fancy soiree hosted by a famous matron of society. But at the party someone is murdered, and everyone else is a suspect.

have them investigate various murders and robberies with their detective guardians, who give hints to make it easier. Don’t be afraid to have the detectives occasionally be wrong and unintentionally lead them astray, though. Even great detectives have their off days!

Crimes to be investigated can take place in many different places. Great cities like NYC or LA, movie meccas like Hollywood, foreign countries with more rudimentary governing bodies who don’t have modern forensics or psychology, countries with rightwing ruling bodies who regularly use propaganda and don’t allow anything to cast them in a bad light, and more all make for great settings

throw in a World’s Fair or two, where the latest in technology and architectural and artistic movements are on display. Perhaps a state-of-the-art technology can be stolen from under people’s noses, another crime to investigate.

don’t be afraid to throw in a wide variety of supporting NPCs, such as tycoons and their heirs, artists, bohemians, gangsters and goons, genius architects (Frank Lloyd Wright?), doctors, nurses, morticians, society matrons, debutantes, annoying yet endearing daft playboys, prostitutes, fishermen, sailors, retired colonels, hotel staff, maids, femme fatales, jazz musicians, histrionic opera singers, movie directors, train conductors, children’s book authors, tin pan alley songwriters, torch singers, circus runners, hobos, elderly spinsters who never married, hardworking farmers, cowboys, sleazy politicians, factory workers, seamstresses, laundromat men/women, eccentric professors of dangerous animals, snake oil salesmen, and more!

Also, in the spirit of the campaign, try to broaden your horizons and listen to actual jazz and swing, not electroswing. there are some really good channels for vintage music on youtube. I also recommend the “Baccano!”, “Boardwalk Empire” and “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” soundtracks.

[postdungeon]

CTHONIC TERMINAL STATION

A High Magic Lowlives Megadungeon about following a derelict subway line owned by an immortal aristocratic family to it's logical conclusion.

Coming one room at a time this 2023 but lowlives will be plumbing it's depths as early as January.

Cover is a WIP, in that I literally put words on a public domain image with my phone.

Image source: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/stahlstadt/

[sleepy12ftpanda]

Complex Campaign Antagonist Idea

A time artificer falls in love with a himbo paladin who falls prey to a chronic illness. The artificer creates a device that would rewind his beloved back to life, but it can only work on one person, can only reverse the effects of one day, and needs a day to charge, so he relives their last moments together over and over again until he perfects his design to be able to refresh automatically. This develops into a plan of trying to find a cure for his beloved’s illness while counting the literal milliseconds lost between each startup of the machine before his husband is lost for good. He builds a castle full of traps and monsters around his knight to protect him from anything that would disturb the rewinding machine, and sets out to find that cure.

Word gets out that the castle holds “the treasure of a great lord”, and The Party comes under false information to plunder it.

[raddelusioncreator]

random dnd campaign idea: a spelljammer campaign where an aarokocra, tortle, and their intelligent pet giant hamster travel the wildspace following the voice of their god, Ca’an, to save animals of the different worlds. Garnering the strength of Ca’an to return them to their original planet.

“Lin, we need to hurry! Onward to the Spaceboat!”

“We’ll get their Min, we can’t leave Tucker behind.”

“But theres an animal in trouble!”

“I know theres an animal in trouble, gods!”

“Whatever.”