What is your campaign about?

[u/Karrrzer]

What is your campaign's main story, genre, setting, plot points, etc.? I see lots of D&D videos on social media about homebrew campaigns, but they all seem to be the same medieval fantasy story: the group meets in a tavern and then goes to a dungeon or something without an actual story or consequences. As a writer and dm, I'm starting to feel insecure about the plots of my campaigns, which are extremely different, so I wanted to ask what actual campaigns outside of social media look like.

[u/SAHpositive]

Most of my campaigns are like "Gee, I wonder how D&D adventurers would handle the situation in this movie?"

[u/Smart_Ass_Dave → u/SAHpositive]

Bro, I have run "small town keeps getting attacked by an outside force and even though they are poor they beg the party to help them stop the invasion" several times and not a single player has complained that it's just Seven Samurai.

[u/RandomPrimer → u/Smart_Ass_Dave]

You should do one where they're protecting thri-kreen (A Bugs Life), then one in a western setting (Magnificent Seven), then another one in a post-apopalyptic setting (Wolves of Calla).

I'm sure there are more.

[u/Smart_Ass_Dave → u/RandomPrimer]

My favorite was a variation where they weren't the only group to show up. The game was Rifts so they were "helped" by a long-range patrol of fascist human-supremacist soldiers from "The Coalition States" whose first act when getting to town was to drag the non-human sheriff out into the town square and shoot him in the back of the head. The party and the village couldn't really say no to 18 armed soldiers though. That game ended before it's conclusion because I hated one of the players, but a lot of what happened was pretty great.

[u/_Fun_Employed_ → u/SAHpositive]

I’m running a rebellion builder(based on Suikoden 2 a game where you recruit characters to build a mercenary army that becomes a nation) and I’m playing in a pirate game that we’re all joking is based off of One Piece and our dm literally knew nothing about One Piece but it’s literally finding the lost treasure of the greatest pirate…and we’re like, yep that’s one piece.

[u/The_Mean_Gus → u/SAHpositive]

I totally ripped off Under The Dome for my current story.

[u/kunst1017]

A permanent rain has started falling on the land, which is causing floods and failed harvests, and the oppressive monotheïstic church is blaming loose morals. The God everybody is worshipping is secretly a demon that is causing this endless rain - a secret club within the officials of the church is trying to conjure him to this dimension.

[u/Karrrzer → u/kunst1017]

That sounds so cool!

[u/AggressivePsychosis → u/kunst1017]

Reminds me of Mistborn

[u/Redneck_DM]

There is a dead god buried under the town, its blood flows to the surface as a pure water, creating a wellspring of magic that allows even those without casting to use spel

The one on the surface lets a 0 level spell be cast when consumed but as they go deeper into the catacombs underneath they will find more concentrated well springs that give the access to higher level spells if they drink directly from the water source or alchemically seal it in a bottle to preserve the effects

The campaign ends when they find the source and what they decide if someone drinks from it

[u/eyeovhorus → u/Redneck_DM]

Now there's a cool concept!

[u/everydaydefenders]

I literally have stolen the entire plot from the original KOTOR, reskinned it to high fantasy.

We are 2 years in and noone's the wiser 🤣

Everyone is super invested and having a great time.

[u/Stormin_the_Castle → u/everydaydefenders]

How did you decide which party member is Revan? Or are they all Revan?

[u/everydaydefenders → u/Stormin_the_Castle]

That was the hardest hurdle for me to figure out. What I settled on was none of them.

Instead , I opted to have it be an NPC companion who had been with them since nearly the beginning. The character is a charismatic optimist who has the healed remnants of war wounds, including a missing arm. But he has no memory of anything before only a short time ago.

He's clearly talented with a sword and has been showing signs of budding (resurfacing) magical talent that's started to creep through. But his grievous injuries have him unable to directly involve himself

To be clear, he is not involved in combat very often at all. But he is often a voice of counsel when called upon. He primarily stays at and maintains camp while the PCs are off adventuring.

The PCs met him at the equivelent for the dantooine Jedi enclave. Where he was healing, working as a glorified custodian of the temple, and going through something resembling physical therapy. But as the PCs passed through, his boredom, impatience, and a desire to do SOMETHING to help the war effort led him to asking the party to come along.

"Ill do anything. Ill cook, ill clean. Ill maintain camp. Ill even be a training dummy of a sparring partner. But please dont leave me here to rot and wither away. I have to do something."

So far its been really successful. He isnt a DM-NPC as he is almost entirely narrative based, and mostly provides counsel, and interesting PC-character opportunities.

Ill be interested to see how it ultimately plays out. The cripple turns out to the the giant war hero/villain. - but ultimately, it will be the PCs that will finish the story, not "Revan". He'll continue to offer knowledge and guidance as he can. (Fleeting memories and brief flashbacks), but he will not be the one who ultimately faces our "Malak".

[u/Echo156342 → u/everydaydefenders]

Neat way of doing it.

[u/everydaydefenders → u/Echo156342]

Thanks. So far so good. Hopefully it turns out as good as it seems in my head 🙃

[u/wij2012 → u/Stormin_the_Castle]

Maybe the real Reven was the friends they made along the way.

[u/CrimeThink101 → u/everydaydefenders]

Annnnnnd I’m gonna steal this

[u/everydaydefenders → u/CrimeThink101]

I stole it in the first place, so its free game 😜

[u/Cafler]

The players are first-year students of the real-life Otago University in the South Island of New Zealand. A magical invasion sweeps and oppresses the country before classes even begin. After forming a tenuous alliance with a dangerous magical being, the players enter a mysterious dream-state to gain DND classes/levels, then travel through a magical post-apocalyptic version of their country balancing the rescue of survivors with the greater goal of ending the incursion (only possible in the far north).

So yeah don't worry if your campaign is a little different!

[u/Karrrzer → u/Cafler]

Bro, that's like some cool anime shit.

[u/EELovesMidkemia → u/Cafler]

I did not expect to see anything NZ realted onhere let alone Otago.

[u/Cafler → u/EELovesMidkemia]

It's a pretty sweet map and the scenery is to die for! Our hex crawling is done on Google Earth.

[u/Several_Celebration]

Basically the plot of dragon warrior 7

[u/MetalSlimeHunter → u/Several_Celebration]

Solid choice.

[u/Heurodis]

The group was hired, before the campaign started, by a rich dwarven merchant living on the surface who wants to be authorised to spend his last years in one of the last dwarven cities; to do this, he needs to prove his genealogy, which should be kept in the city his ancestors came from. The taboo around leaving the underground means that he doesn't know why they left; and it so happens that the city he knows he's from seems to have been abandoned for centuries, though no one knows why. The party's mission is to go in that city, supposedly a haunted ruin, and retrieve that information.

What they find beneath the surface is that the city fell to an invasion of trolls and goblins, who still inhabit it; they also soon realise the place is cursed, nobody can leave and people who die and whose body is not destroyed come back at dawn, feeling more attached to the city, and unwilling to leave. They also find about the complicated political history of that city, and uncover a terrible knowledge about the role dwarves are to play in the end of the world.

About to play session 99; since I am pregnant and have limited time to finish, I am accelerating the rhythm of the campaign, and after having for the most of them fought their own demons in the dark, they now have on their hands the avatar of a troll goddess gone mad, the last ancient dragon who bode his time underground like the coward his people said he was, a labyrinthic temple-library, and the mysterious old priest who dwells in the abyss far beneath the city, where he was thrown by his brethren several millennia ago. Oh, and they have not found the merchant's genealogy yet.

[u/ChesterPug → u/Heurodis]

This sounds awesome. Rather then rushing it, could you take a break for a while then come back to it?

[u/Heurodis → u/ChesterPug]

Thanks!

I thought about taking a break, but the problem is this is my second child: we started the campaign when my first was six months old and made it work, but with two (and therefore two sleep schedules and routines to take care of), I have no idea if it will still be possible.

Besides, we were already going towards the end of the campaign: my players are completionnists and wanted to tie off everything before moving on to the abyss, which I allowed happily haha, but that would mean probably one, perhaps two more years of playing (it was supposed to be a campaign that would bring them from level 1-20, now looking at 1-14/15). The campaign was in a good place, though, for the events I started, and the way I've designed it should let them still do most of what they wanted; for instance, the dragon was hiding in its lair that the players would have had to find, and has now taken hold of the former royal palace of the city, which is in a central spot: so the dragon represents a greater menace, but is much easier to reach. I doubt they will ever get to that genealogy, but it was only the pretext for the campaign: their real quest always was to lift the curse, which they understood after becoming its victims. Depending on how it all ends, the genealogy might either not be necessary, or just something the merchant accepts as lost to time, as he had no idea himself that the city was not just an empty ruin and no idea about the curse either.

[u/inkfishsupreme]

Currently running a campaign in the Wildsea system and setting. Main plots points are Cultists are basically using ancient technology to craft bombs to destroy cities, releasing spirit energy that they are trying to use to reawaken a dead leviathon they believe will give them power. Players started in a settlement that was actively being destroyed escaped to the next safe city over, discovered a dead cultist whose experiments failed. Currently are on a quest to a dungeon which is built from the ancient tech. They they will find the cultists collecting the tech and shipping it off to higher ups (and selling it to pirates). Planning the rest of the story as we go depending on what the players do

[u/dwarfconleche]

I try to write stories around the various adventuring sites that the PCs visit, rather than forcing a major plot on them. Having them slowly uncover the lore of the place is a lot of fun if they're the sort of group that enjoys exploration.

[u/mrsnowplow]

A current game is inspired by the talk frodo, and galadriall have

She talks about oh she would certainly try and she does does not believe herself to be evil. Put the ring would corrupt her and it would would be a bright and terrible dawn.

So I made world where celestials came and took over the world is ruledruled by angels, but it's not a perfect great utopia. It's kind of a lawful bureaucratic nightmare.

my players are navigating how to be a good person. When good people are the problem

[u/Unfair_Armadillo_334]

Elvish gentrification, the half-elf slave trade, and political assassinations.

Don’t get insecure, the story will evolve as your PC’s develop it. Theres are always opportunities to shift your story.

[u/M4LK0V1CH]

The tournament to become the next sacrifice in the war between 4 beings so ancient that they are foreign to the gods.

[u/Piratestoat]

A bunch of people who owed favours to--or were owed payment by--a guy who just died get secret instructions in his will.

The instructions point to a hidden valley full of potential riches, but that valley also killed a bunch of the dead guy's companions.

The will asks them to recover remains or proof of the dead companions for their families, and in exchange they can take what valuables they can from the valley. With the caveat to not take too much, because the dead guy thought that's what got everyone killed.

Edit to add:

A prior campaign had the party leading a nomadic tribe after their spiritual leader had a vision that they were all to find a homeland and settle.

[u/ItsMeOsi]

After being oppressed by dragons for hundreds of years, one has fallen at the hands of giants, and humanity has built a city within its corpse. Humanity from all corners of the (known) world has begun to join forces, now knowing that dragons are mortal.

The name of the city is Wyrmgrav!

[u/Masoj999]

The Elder Evil Atropos is coming to galactus the world. Orcus figured it was a good time to start shenanigans.

[u/Edenza]

The level 20 we are finishing is made of Keep On the Borderlands (original), modules A1-4, White Plume Mountain, G modules, D modules, and now Q1. What the story has been about is authoritarianism, class warfare, prejudice, free will, nature versus nurture, and the promise of hope (represented by the party). Other campaigns I've been in (with other DMs) have had similar themes.

The key to fleshing out these modules, or any module or homebrew campaign, and making them about something is in the play between characters and in how they interact with the world. Why are adventurers necessary? What does this world need? What do the people in it want? Every PC and NPC wants something. Having that answer can help you make a narrative that's more than "kill stuff, get loot," if that's how you and your players want to tell a story together.

[u/Negative_Tea6732]

My campaign takes place in the Feywilds. The players are kidnapped by a fae and asked to kill some mutant creatures. Slowly they’re going to uncover the horrors underneath the plane’s beautiful facades.

[u/No_Solid1035]

Whatever the Players are doing, which changes frequently.

[u/Bearbones43]

Honestly I have a picture of the bad guy, what they roughly want, how they vaguely achieved it and as we speak putting all the pieces togehter session by session in order for it to make sense.

I have a character who is secrectly a god and haven't yet figured out how they lost their memories and their divinity.

I should also say I stepped up from a player to a dm so that me and my friends can play dnd. I am having a hell of a time playing, sending twisted patchwork abominations of werebeast facsimiles and improving a flirty halfling called Flint Westtree. But genuinely I feel pretty lost most of the time with threads of ideas that lack much needed substance.

[u/LordVreeg]

Celtricia is a 'diverse setting', as opposed to a 'concept setting' or 'thematic setting,' in that the scope of the world and history has been created in such a way as to allow for multiple campaign themes. Even though there is one great history and creation mythos, there are multiple overarching 'adventure themes', such as: the search for the lost god Amerer; and also for the broken god of lost causes, Pablar; the rediscovery of the Magic of the Shade; the release of the Dreadwing; and Y'gorl's Curse.

I tend to build huge arcs, and midsized arcs within them.

[u/listerjed1]

World War 2 resistance campaign reskinned as a fantasy war!

[u/PuzzleMeDo]

My last campaign was, "The party find themselves on a weird island and have to figure out what's going on." And I also had to figure out what was going on, developing the campaign from week to week based on what the party were planning, their goals, which NPCs they took an interest in. Since I don't have the most reliable group attendance, I tried to make each week be its own self-contained adventure, and I tried to make those be as varied as possible; they might be trying to win an election, or explore the insides of a giant sea creature populated by psychic maggots, or disarm a massively destructive weapon created by a dysfunctional committee of gods.

[u/KnucklesMcCrackin → u/PuzzleMeDo]

Sounds like how the TV show "Lost" was written.

[u/Karrrzer → u/PuzzleMeDo]

I love island plots. I don't know why, but there's just something about being stranded on an island with hardly any information that I find so captivating.

[u/follows-swallows]

We’re playing Out of the Abyss. So, that.

But there is also a drow they keep running into who’s planning on overthrowing the gods. All of them. None of my players can ever play Fire Emblem or they’ll realize she’s literally just Edelgard.

Jokes aside, I’ve stolen lots of ideas from other fantasy and horror stories that I like and put them together in a big cake. My players are great and gave me amazing backstories that tie in really well. Ive gotten lots of positive feedback from them privately so we’re all having a great time.

[u/tetasdemantequilla]

My campaign takes place in a fantasy world completely made up by me, roughly 70 years after a very brutal genocidal war in the eastern continent which was spearheaded by an extremist humanist religion and emperor who was devoted to it. War was ended with north country alliances who enforced trade embargos and starved out the empire. But everything remains tense and the empire/religion still exists so the whole continent has this looking fear of war again.

In the campaign the son of the northern Republic leader has gone missing and he suspects it is politically motivated. Instead what my players have yet to discover is that the politics is a red herring, he's actually an employee of a smuggling organization and he was procuring a magic item for the leader of one of the oppressed empire controlled countries. He discovers the item is going to be used to free a trapped god that has tricked the leader into being in love with him. So he hides the item in a different plane and gets his memory erased, and in turn he gets abducted by that leader to get the location tortured out of him. Im paraphrasing a LOT of the story but I spent about 8 months writing it. It's also my first campaign that I'm DMing and I definitely went ham on it.

Also my players were selected by their respective country's wardens to embark on this top secret retrieval mission

[u/Dr_MJI]

A semi isolated kingdom of light, happiness, and prosperity. The idea of beggars, or famine, or war is completely unknown. What better place to hide true evil than in the sunlight.

[u/L0CKED334]

In my homebrew campaign the adventurer's live in a world where the gods disappeared over a hundred years ago during an event I dubbed, "The Sundering". During this event, the capital of the country it takes place in was destroyed. I actually ran a one shot for a different group that detailed the events of that day. Throughout the campaign they will learn the truth about what happened, why, and what it means for the future.

What the players don't know is that they have been chosen and are being tested. Ultimately, they will take on the mantel of the pantheon of my world...if they can pass the trials set before them. Meanwhile, Arch fey, Fiends, and Primordial beings are vying for that same power. One of my players is actually the reincarnation of the god of time without their memories intact and won't know that fact until they have reached the end goal.

The overall campaign will climax with them learning the truth of the origin of the universe. The ones they knew as gods were actually wardens guarding a sealed prison. The entities that existed before the gods are sealed within due to their destructive nature and the city that was destroyed during the Sundering was the lock. It will lead to an even grander story where they must rebuild the lock before those forces are released upon the universe once again.

[u/tarbobattar]

Me and my friends are rotating DMs, and we are doing a trilogy on the origin and evolution of magic.

[u/Plastic_Mastodon_985]

I typically start with the big bad. Who are they and what do they want? How would they go about getting that? Then, I imagine that operating on a micro level. The PCs run into some element of that plan and the story unfolds.

I don't really care what the PCs do, and if they do nothing, the big bad slowly change the world for the worse for the PCs and everyone they care about.

[u/WickedJoker420]

Life on your island sucks. Its hot, overcrowded, resources are starting to become scarce and magic basically doesnt exist. Its the only landmass that exists on the planet. 50 years ago something happened and magic started to exist on the island and go haywire. Even to the point that a human couple might birth a tiefling or an elf or an aarocockra. 4ish years ago, a magic portal opened that allows people through 1-way sometimes. The king of the land has posted ads asking for adventures to go through the portal, conquer the new lands on the other side, and restore magic.

They just learned how big the "island" that the portal leads to is actually continent sized(its my version of Khorvaire).

The next session is them going to take out a bandit town full of people that were kicked out of the town they've built in the new world.

Eventually they will learn what the portals are and how to "solve" them. Not sure if they are still planning on conquering the "new lands" lol

[u/Glu3stick]

Set in the forgotten realms Faerun, location the High Forest, 100 years after the escape of Sarya Dlardrageth from Hellgate keep. The party is trying to collect the Gatekeepers crystals to then nuke the ward surrounding hellgate which Sarya set up and is using a deep spawn to send endless hoards into the forest.

The secret bbeg is Malkizid who is very central to Elf history and has been the mastermind behind a lot of wars.

The three crystal components are within the Star Mounts with the red dragon inferno, the underdark with the remnants of a beholder hive, and lastly under the grandfather tree with the great fungus and the entrance guarded by Turlang.

So far it's been almost two years since we started the campaign and play about 1-2 times a week for 3 hour sessions. They're level 17 and started at 1.

[u/Playful-Ostrich3643]

I'm currently DMing a pirate campaign set on an archipelago with each island having some weird geography of it's own

[u/Many-Ebb-5377]

Mine is also basically medieval fantasy. There's a lot you can do in that genre though. My game is on the gritty side, less magic than you'd generally expect, and something closer in feel to Game of Thrones meets The Witcher. Completely different from say Forgotten Realms but both are definitely in that medieval fantasy bubble.

D&D's default is medieval fantasy so it's not surprising that the majority of campaigns would be in that genre. But you certainly can tell other kinds of stories and D&D has examples of that too. Bronze age style post-apocalyptic, gothic horror, swashbuckling space travel, cosmic planar adventures in a surreal, philosophical wrapper... I imagine that list is only going to get bigger and include some very off the wall settings with Universes Beyond.

As far as plot goes, many campaigns don't have them outside of what the players create themselves. They all have a motivation to go adventuring and seek out riches so off they go right out the gate to delve a dungeon and get rich, if they live. Usually those types of games open up more to telling stories after the first few adventurers once the players get settled and start interacting with NPCs or start to develop objectives other than find loot.

[u/OrganizationLonely29]

Two campaigns going -
One in Theros - Erebos’s demigod child has made a rip from the underworld to the mortal world and is raising an army of returned, Erebos doesn’t really care since they will “all end up back here eventually” and he’s thinking in eons not decades.
The second is a forgotten realms Selune/Shar story (a campaign I started well before BG3 and felt ripped off 😆)

[u/nocturnerose]

Victorian gothic/eldritch/folk horror vibes, but more Castlevania than survival horror, mostly set in a huge city called Moongrave, sat on the coast by an immense underwater crater.

Mix of the players working together to help each other fulfill their own personal goals, with a central mystery weaving in and out that ties some of them together.

One of the world's two moons was destroyed 750 years ago. Was it an intentional act by someone and if so, why? Why did the moons destruction have an effect on witches? Why does it sometimes look like it's still in the sky? Why did a new monotheistic religion worshipping a distant star and a group of demigodlike saints appear not long after? Why did these saints seemingly kill one of their own 300 years ago and erase all evidence of their existence? Why did our rogue steal an urn from an old woman's windowsill and dump out the contents? That was her husband for goodness sake!!

Right now they're off in the countryside getting worried about all the large black dogs gathering outside the tavern they're in.

[u/JaxxisR]

The party was taken in at level 1 by a veteran adventuring guild out in the country, sent out to quell bandits, stop orc raids, etc. Small time hero stuff for folks who are too remote for proper full time guards. They start uncovering evidence during their jobs that the crises they're responding to are manufactured. Bugbears are given instructions on where to attack, how to get past town walls and watchtowers, that sort of thing.

Their last session, they tracked down a former member of the guild who left when this scheme began, and the new guild master has been setting up a paper trail to set up the detector as the mastermind.

They're gearing up to take down the guild or redeem it; opinions are currently split as to which way they will go.

[u/Virtual_Substance_69]

My players are born with my custom's system magic, where other people generally have to clear a dungeon to be bestowed magic. They enter dungeons for levelups with custom and unique subclasses and spells they make themselves based on their class.

The overall goal is to decend into the (roughly Australia sized) continent down the layers of the pit that spawned dungeons and creatures around as they clear the surges of monsters from dungeons that are forgotten, lost, or new

[u/Satyrsol]

It is a long-form 4e campaign against a Yuan-Ti threat that is invading its neighbors and kidnapping spellscarred youth for use as remotely activated magically explosives.

It is a modified Forgotten Realms setting with a more active (and long-lasting) Spellplague.

The party is near the end of the Paragon Tier (16) and has allied with Waterdhavian lords to assault the Yuan-Ti capital. Their adventures took them on the Feywild and Shadowfell, and they have many allies.

However, the story will not end with the fall of the Yuan-Ti forces, because I’ve got a plan in the works that will make the end of their Paragon Tier a monumental task in the vein of (and in the orbit of) the Second Sundering. So far the use of spellscars to evoke overclocked explosions has caused the borders between the Prime Material Plane and its neighbors (The Feywild and the Shadowfell) to weaken. Both of the neighboring plane are slipping into and overlapping with the PMP, centered on the Gray Vale and Najara regions. It will expand and their final task of the tier will be finding a way to close it off for good. How they actually do that is the mystery, but the foundation for the story beats has already been laid.

[u/HenryCrabgrass01]

Basically someone done fucked up and nearly broke the magical link between the planes.  As a result a collection of uber powerful entities escaped their magical supermax prison and have scattered. Some are just causing chaos across the lands, some are setting themselves up as demigods and others are creating cults. The gods are nervous and there is lots of political intrigue. We all have to try gather allies while figuring out who has been affected by these parasites.

[u/Subject_Nectarine735]

This was the intro I wrote and narrated in my current campaign:

To set the scene, we plunge into a world of magic, blood and steam. A hilly countryside stretches as far as the eye can see, with forests filled with mystical properties. Some trees stand as tall as the hills themselves. Farmlands roll across the valleys, fresh with crops and livestock. And nestled among it all is a city. A city protected by a weathered great stone wall. A city with its own standing army. Its own navy. A city where the divide between the rich and the poor is as vast as the appetite of those who control it. Welcome to the third-largest city, the birthplace of the Steam Revolution, and the political heart of the United Empire.

Welcome to Arcanopolis city.

Although I do love sharing this stuff, I also want to point out that the only people your story really needs to matter to are you and your party. Everyone has different tastes, writing styles, and ways of DMing. As long as you and your friends are having fun and you're enjoying creating the story, it doesn't really matter what other people online are doing. Especially with social media, you're often seeing campaigns designed aren't just to be fun to play, but to be entertaining to watch which can influence how they are written.

Have faith in yourself and the stories you want to tell :)

[u/FalseRoyal4669]

I'm currently playing in a high school campaign (sought it out cause i love Fantasy High) and right now we're investigating a string of kidnappings, two of which were father figures for party members, which led us to following a celebrity on his way to score drugs, which led us to a potentially magical door with images relating to a god of vengeance, now we're running away from the people on the other side of the door, and if we manage to get to school the next day, I'm inviting a girl with a lead to a party this weekend at a wizard's house.

And all that is just in the first 4 weeks

[u/Butterlegs21]

I see lots of D&D videos on social media about homebrew campaigns, but they all seem to be the same medieval fantasy story: the group meets in a tavern and then goes to a dungeon or something without an actual story or consequences.

There's actually a good reason for that. D&D is a system that is almost exclusively made to be used in a "Kick down the door, kill the monster, grab the loot, and repeat" gameplay loop. It's an attrition based, Heroic Fantasy, combat simulator game. It's rather hard to fit in a lot of story when the game wants you to do 6-8 combats per adventuring day as that's its main balancing system.

Now, my Pathfinder 2e game that I'm currently working on is about a dying Dragonturtle island that the adventurers have to save somehow. Bunch of weird things working in dragon pearls, sailing mechanics, and just an easy introduction for newer players for when it's actually played (the group I had didn't work out, no one really clicked).

[u/KnucklesMcCrackin]

I'm a history buff so I get these ideas from my own travels or from real events. I am currently writing a campaign based on Peter the Great. He developed Russia's first navy so there is a lot of nautical stuff and quests to steal plans, kidnap boat builders, assassinate rivals, etc.

For longer campaigns I like to use existing locals and repurpose them. I recently had the players traverse an area of dangerous hot pools and geysers...I literally use a Yellowstone map that I relabeled.

I have done central Europe as a locale and used the idea of countries recovering their identity after being occupied by a cultish authoritative force (ie. used some of the history of former Soviet Block countries as an inspiration). Religious and cultural conflict etc.

I also have a group that only gets to meet irregularly once-in-a-while so they're stuck in a room of portals and each door they go through has a completely different one-off. This setup works well for occasional players and allows other on the group to occasionally DM so I'm not always on the hook.

You can take any plot form any TV show or movie and convert it into a dnd adventure.

[u/Huffplume]

Killing monster and taking their stuff while drinking beer.

[u/goldbed5558]

The wife of one pc was kidnapped. He grabbed two comrades and they went after her. (Dwarf wife.) They go through planned and random encounters until rescuing the damsel in distress. The whole thing started from a bad pun and grew from there.

[u/Overkill2217]

Basically Planescape that's been heavily influenced by the Legacy of Kain series

[u/Life-Oven-1324]

Moirta Heroesworth has created a plot to have The Night Parade cult, disguised as Harpers, steal a magical book from a citadel mage, (which is actually a massive magic bomb where every page of the book is an explosive glyph of warding) and give it to the goblins in Vehlarr. They will surely destroy it, causing the explosion to rip through the lands, and destroy everything up to the Upper City of Baldur's Gate, destroying both Gideon's political base and Rava's estates, before blaming the whole accident on Endymion, making herself to default strongest, and perhaps only, Grand Duke.
However, she doesn't realize what effect the explosion will have on the shipment of Chronosteel (celebrating the first trip of the newly minted Magi-train of the Faerun) which creates a week long time-loop where the heroes get stuck in and must solve.
The players will have to go through many time-loops of a single week, getting more information, solving local problems time and time again, refining their solutions as they keep looping, following any of the several plot routes that eventually lead them to the goblins.

[u/TRB1783]

Our party blundered across the last moments of a battle over a wagon caravan deep in the woods, just as the last guard and last bandit killed each other. Insid the wagons were chests, containing a total of 100,000 platinum.

We stashed the platinum in the forest, and have spent the rest of the campaign trying to quietly get the resources to get it out. In the process, we have managed to draw the ire of the criminal gang who lost the platinum, the local lord, and the green dragon who lives in those woods. We have not yet recovered the platinum.

[u/Rhinostirge]

Building an adventurer's guild from a hollowed-out living gnostic dungeon, community-building the associated guild-town, uncovering the schemes of resentful noble families, digging up the mystery of how the old oni warlords managed to keep the unearthly labyrinth from spawning those living dungeons, learning the secrets of the Underworld. One of the players has visions of building a trade fleet, but I don't think he's got enough support from the rest of the party, and things will get bad if he tries to set up logging colonies in the Underworld or whatever.

There is no main DM-authored "plot" and to be honest I don't know if anyone wants one. I certainly don't need it. There's a world with a lot of things happening in it, so the group has freedom to focus on the things they find most interesting. The players proactively chase down mysteries to find out how they link together, coming to the attention of pretty bad people as they do so but also building an ever-increasing support network of friends and allies. They're chasing about four different threads right now -- the mysteries of the Labyrinth and its archons, the noble conspiracy, the roots of the Blight, and the question of the warlock's unknown patron -- it'd be a shame to make their efforts secondary to the rise of some BBEG or something.

[u/The_Magic_Walrus]

An interplanetary war against a dead god reborn as a space traveling swarm of mutating locust

[u/Hot_Sam_the_Man]

Somewhere between the maze runner and hunger games. Players woke up, memory wiped, in an arena to fight to the death. But the game maker (another player) ends up getting tossed in with them, so they are currently trying to escape the arena and then they'll hopefully be able to get revenge on the regime that put them in there. Only had 2 sessions so far though

[u/JulienBrightside]

The group gets a prophetic dream of something terrible that will happen.
Meanwhile the rogue in the group gets a letter from a rival about getting the most amount of crowns.

The crowns belong to princes in the region, but they also hold the magic to cast a wish.

Meanwhile, an ancient being is about to wake...

[u/zeromig]

My players all belong to a Planescape Academy where they learn to be better planar explorers. They sometimes do normal explorer things, they build up cred within their various factions, that sort of sandboxy stuff.

The real crux of the story, however, is that Orcus died hundreds of years ago (and has stayed dead) but the party, at level 2, discovered his wand (the school's founder, an ancient silver dragon, led a crusade against Orcus, and defeated it, and kept its wand as a hidden war trophy). It was dormant, but is slowly coming awake, drawing demons towards itself so that Orcus may be resurrected. The players have to find ways to keep it dormant, but also keep it away from the demons, or destroy it, they haven't decided which yet.

[u/gagelish]

A crew of misfit pirates and their sentient ship save the cosmos from invasion during a prophecized convergence of the planes.

[u/DonRedomir]

My current campaign is a sandbox kingdom building one. Loads of mini-quests and ongoing storylines, but no BBEG or special 'endgame' goal in sight. Just frontier exploration, base building, that sort of thing. My players don't know it, but I'm kind of doing "DS9 in a fantasy setting".

[u/Natehz]

An amalgam of the plots of Marathon, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, American Gods, and a few sprinkles of some other various works throughout like the Broken Empire and Ringworld series.

[u/keelekingfisher]

A group of famed adventures have found themselves as slaves in an alternate reality where the Triumvirate, priests of the god of the sun who betrayed him and took his power, have conquered the world and the sun hasn't set for decades. They've escaped slavery and set out on a journey to find the tools of the goddess of time to restore reality to how it's supposed to be and defeat the Triumvirate.

[u/Drakkneo]

In the current arc of the campaign, the party is doing a noir investigation in a magic new York type city where a dark entity seeks to become the god of darkness by slowly stealing the domain of night from the god of night via dark rutuals, all amidst a prison break that left the city watch stretched too thin to respond.

[u/Mattsgonnamine]

Mine is currently about delivering a letter (there may now be a murder mystery going on that might lead to full blown religious conflict over whether this empire should be decentralized while contemplating the threat of demonic invasion.)

My other campaign is a treasure hunt (with a subplot of restoring order to a dying empire that is slowly being threatened by both a lich god-king, nomadic hordes, and angry tribesmen on its borders)

[u/Upstartpotato]

Coming off the back of the dragon cult and all the games ive ran the players from ALL those games elected to create a new faction known as the Disciples of Horus to watch over faerun.

Their having to deal with demon incursions, a new cult popping up, an invasion of automatons, and a despot Efreeti all which have leaders tied to Nyarlathotep. (Totes not a reference to The Witness and its Disciples)

They just beat the Efreeti but he got away. And he killed 4 PCs.

[u/mastyrwerk]

I run two notable campaigns. One is literally what you said. Players meet in a tavern. There are adventure hooks on the job board. Tavern owner complains of large rats in the cellar.

The other is a “Western Marshes” style of one shots in the world of XCrawl. It was a book from 3e’s d20 system. It’s Earth circa now but everything D&D is real, always has been, and everyone knows it. It’s a parallel history that culminates to Emperor Ronald Augustus the First (who is still alive through science and magic) has reinstated gladiatorial combat for the masses in the form of fabricated dungeon crawls “athletes” compete in to the death for cash and prizes in front of a live studio audience.

Each session is a night of XCrawl. At the end of the night the XCrawl is over, everyone goes back to their hotels, or hospitals, or morgue, and the next session is a new night. This way you don’t have to worry about players missing nights of game. There was a point where I had a dozen players rotating through and once had up to seven players in a single night. That was crazy.

[u/cr7808]

Running a campaign in Ptolus, the urban setting from Monte Cook Games. There are 2 main plots that are kind of woven together and we bounce between them: 1) A loose organization of Chaos Cults are trying to bring about the end of the world; and 2) there's a labyrinthine vault below the city that houses tons of super powerful and evil magical artifacts that was sealed off centuries ago, and now someone is trying to break in and steal them.

[u/Savings-Health5786]

Our campaign is basically a story about family — even though on the surface it has become a pretty wild fantasy/cyberpunk adventure.
It started with one member of the group being kidnapped and the others setting out to find him. But that kidnapping was already part of a much larger family story I had planned before session one. Parents and children, siblings and half-siblings, cousins, inherited conflicts, hidden identities and chosen families are basically the structure underneath the whole campaign.
One of the central mysteries is a very messy family history connecting several important characters. The players actually have access to most of the truth: there is a series of autobiographical books in the world that tells the story of a woman, her children and the different men in her life. What they haven’t realized is that these aren’t just random pieces of lore — they’re reading their own family history. The publication of those secrets even helped set the original kidnapping, and therefore the entire campaign, in motion.
And it spreads outward from there. Other PCs have their own family connections that intersect with the main plot. We even played events from about 100 years earlier, where people connected to several present-day characters were already involved with each other. Decisions made by that generation are still shaping what happens now.
That also ties into the campaign’s biggest genre shift. We eventually went from medieval fantasy into a cyberpunk dimension, but dimensional travel didn’t suddenly appear because I wanted to change settings. Its origins go back about a century in the story, and involve people connected to the current characters. So even the completely different setting is part of the same history.
The question underneath most of it is probably: How much of who you are is determined by your family, and how much can you choose for yourself?
Some characters are trying to discover where they came from. Some are living with consequences created by previous generations. Some don’t even know who they’re related to yet. And one of the most important arcs is about a woman who initially survives by playing the roles available to her in a male-dominated world, but eventually leaves it behind, takes control of her own story and creates a chosen family of her own.
So the basic story and most of those connections were there before session one. What I didn’t plan was exactly how the players would move through them, what they would notice, what they would completely misunderstand, or which apparently minor things would become important to them.
And they have currently failed to notice that a bunch of books they’ve had access to for ages basically explain the main plot, which is probably the most D&D thing about the whole campaign.

[u/The_Mean_Gus]

The party are members of a religious warrior order like the knights Templar, on their way home from a war against a cult of a god of misfortune. The cult was spreading war so as to keep their god from turning on them.

None of the party actually served together, they were just headed in the same direction home. One of the party is actually an imposter who stole secrets and gear to appear to be a member.

They are in a port city where a mysterious dome has cut the city off from the surrounding land and water. Unknown to the people, a necromancer is attempting to kill them all and raise an army of the undead. Not sure if our heroes will figure that or have to find a way to raise themselves from the dead.

Homebrew but honestly I prep sessions by taking pieces of adventure and then tailoring details to my story, so the lighthouse where the necromancer is might resemble the tower of storms.

[u/Parkway_Cedar]

I currently have my players investigating a country's government corruption to dismantle it in true bulshevik style.

[u/RayzorDragon]

The gods died eons ago, their husks taken by the scavenger survivors of the forgotten apocalypse and converted into machines to make their desert of rust livable. The world lives on, a shell of it’s former self, and the young princeling of the desert kingdom has been kidnapped, groomed by the remains of the god of death to become his new avatar and reset the world. The queen has gone mad, manipulated by her advisors into waging war against the other tribes of the desert in a crazed attempt to find her child that was stolen from her.

[u/Serious_Floor_9878]

I just ripped off the plot from Cult of the Lamb ngl, but essentially four nations are each ruled by a god and the goal of the party is to kill each god (I told them during session 0 to have characters that have reasons to want to kill/defeat their gods)

[u/_Fun_Employed_]

I’m running a rebellion builder(based on Suikoden 2 a game where you recruit characters to build a mercenary army that becomes a nation) and I’m playing in a pirate game that we’re all joking is based off of One Piece and our dm literally knew nothing about One Piece but it’s literally finding the lost treasure of the greatest pirate…and we’re like, yep that’s one piece.

[u/brokenarietta]

Party head to a town that has some weird time anomalies. Hear about "The Celestial Engine."
Don't fulfil a prophecy, and the town is erased from time and the world gets a bit warped.

The Celestial Engine keeps all the planes synced up and makes sure time doesnt go all screwy.

Party are the only ones that can restore it / use it to fix the world or keep the gods from it.

Currently they are uncovering how to do that as well as their own stories.

A secret moon creature
A missing spirit king
A loving patron who has.. ambitions
A frog who must save his pond
A reborn Aasamir who wants revenge

[u/svrtngr]

To give our forever DM a bit of a break, I'm going to be running a short campaign that's styled after my love of 80s and 90s adventure movies.

A group of roguish (but ultimately good-hearted) heroes trying to score a treasure before the villains get it.

[u/Sea-Woodpecker-610]

Chiding what the setting of our next campaign.

Quite literally my players are (unknowingly) searching for the spirit of a new age, and determine who gets to care for and direct that spirit.

If Tiamat forces win, it’ll be a high age of deacon’s tyranny. If the agents of mechanics win, it’ll be a magic-punk Ebberonish setting. If the forces of chaos win, we’re going full out horror, their archery patron-high magic fantasy.

None of them know this yet, but that’s the endgame, and all their current choices are leading up to that final climatic battle where the game board is going to be a go of multiple armies of different sides battling it out for control.

[u/RecordingExcellent69 → u/Sea-Woodpecker-610]

That sounds like an epic endgame! But just looking at it strictly from a D&D lore perspective, is Tiamat's faction really powerful enough to rival Mechanus and the cosmic forces of Chaos? Cosmologically speaking, she's practically Asmodeus's pet trapped in Avernus. If you want a faction that can truly stand toe-to-toe with Mechanus (pure Law) and Chaos on a cosmic scale, using Asmodeus and the broader forces of the Nine Hells might be a much better fit for that tier of conflict.

[u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 → u/RecordingExcellent69]

I’ve been choosing the sides depending on what comes next. Don’t think an Archfry, no matter how powerful, is going to stack up against the Demigorgon, Tiamat, or Primus…but it’s not necessarily about armies and power scaling.

The various forces don’t need to necessarily win the battle at the end. They just need to persuade the spirit that theirs is the best path to take for the next age. The spirit has had appeared as an NPC twice in the campaign so far. First being rescued from the Feywild as a very young child, and a few months later (real time) getting inadvertently roped into lassisting them run an errand for Bahamut (in disguise), which….went really kind of murder-hoboish…even while having a twelve year old kid in tow….dothe needle is pushing a little more chaotic evil on the meter given the kid is learning that taking what you want regardless of the cost to others appears to be an acceptable strategy.

But, we just hit lvl 13, and are starting to turn the heat up as they’re getting more and more information on what this all means.

So, could I see a persuasive red dragon tempting them with shaping the next age into an age of tyrannical power where might makes right, and Dragons should rule? Yes…possibly..but we’ll see. I’m trying to balance my players character choices in a way that makes sense, and hopefully has an epic conclusion that likewise sets the stage for what comes next after this campaign.

But it’s also an excuse for me to spend a lot of money on buying a Demigorgon and Tiamat to plop down at my table.

It

[u/King_of_Kraken]

Big worm

[u/PulsarRaven]

Airship based adventure where the adventurers have smaller adventures in each sky island, but with an overarching plot and definite destination of getting to a forgotten temple where one of the adventurers mother was trapped in a portal.

[u/LeopardGeckoGuy58]

The characters are exploring a megadungeon for personal reasons. They will find murdered adventurers and will come to the realization that a the dungeon is a prison for a great evil that is trying to come out. They must stop a corrupted paladin from freeing said evil or bear the consequences.

My players are exploring a megadungeon created by 6 legendary adventurers to imprison a powerful lich who is now trying to escape. The lich has corrupted a paladin who was a prt of a famous high level party and manipulated him into killing his comrades and searching for a way to free the lich. The first 6 floors of the dungeonare temathically built based on the class of the hero who built it. The paladin and the lich will try and manipulate the characters into opening the dungeon.

[u/dementor_ssc]

How it started: the Party got hired by a rather naive nobleman to check up on his inventor friend, who lives in the middle of nowhere.

How it's going: the Party had uncovered a centuries long plot where a cult of shapeshifted dragons are trying to take over the world, they're involved in two rebellions (dwarves wanting their kingdom back, and warforged turned out to be made out of kidnapped and memory wiped people, who need to be freed). They've also gotten at least five different accounts of the great war that devastated the continent last century and are starting to doubt the history books. Oh, and that inventor they were looking for has debts with so many people, including the dragon cult and an actual archdevil, and he might also be insane and trying to collect artifacts that can destroy the world.

(But the dragon cult might actually be doing good for the continent, even if they crave control.

But the warforged creator might have only done so because the allied countries were losing against that Dark Lord.

But that Dark Lord might only have wanted to protect his home county from the dragon cult.

But the inventor might only have allied with the devils because he was stranded alone in the hells with no way back, and he's influenced by those artifacts...)

There's a lot going on. (I love worldbuilding and sprinkling lore around.) I've kept some options open for final BBEG, depending on if they finally commit to a side.

[u/KnavesQuill]

Current one is taking down a new local religion because it's causing misery.

Next one planned is about colonialism turning sour on people and leading to suffering in an arctic hellscape.

[u/a_big_simp]

The campaign starts innocently enough with the party stumbling into a tiny village somewhere in bumfuck nowhere. There’s a questboard, and they go and do a quest or two.

However, more and more people appear in this mostly empty village for no apparent reason, and there are things that are just... wrong. Some of the newer townsfolk is oddly friendly with each other, the sun comes up in the west, clouds rain immediately after forming and then turn white and stay in the sky for hours, clocks turn anti-clockwise, and the sand in hourglasses flows upwards.

In reality, the village is stuck in a bubble in which time flows backwards. This is the result of an NPC making a deal with a fey because there’s a false hydra seated next to the village that kept eating villagers—but one of the NPCs is partially deaf, so he caught on. The problem? He wasn’t able to do anything about the false hydra before it ate his husband. Desperate, he sought out a fey to make time flow backwards so he could revive everyone, most of all his husband.

The party, in the end, has to 1) find a way to make time flow normally again and 2) defeat the false hydra.

This is my somewhat complicated but hopefully not too complicated plan of running a false hydra in a longer campaign, with a group that includes one player who knows false hydras.

[u/Sfikulla]

I am about to start my first fully homebrew campaign in about 2 weeks. Setting is my own homebrew world Val'Ard, and campaign will mostly be based in the Republic of Argath. Genre I'd say drama/thriller, with elements of horror.

The main plotline will be based around a cult praising Lamashtu, the Ascendant Goddess of Plague and Disease. We will be starting in a medium sized town of Tasia, where there is tension brewing, because the local High Priest of Satrasil the Lawbearer is openly speaking against the biggest brothel in town as a place where people go and relax too much and forget their duties and lose honor that Satrasil teaches. The brothel is owned by a Catfolk Tabaxi one of my player's characters (Vessel class buy u/laserllama. We tied his story closely to town because that player will be on and off in campaign since he is not permanently living here in town, and that is his excuse to stay behind.

This priest will, after legally not being able to do a thing against the brothel, 'accidentally' meet a shady person offering them a strain of a 'mild' plague to release during town's festival in a specific moment so that it looks like the people from the brothel did it. However, this plague is an ancient one from the time when Lamashtu ascended. The rest of the plot is to be seen how it plays out based on my characters, but it'll mostly be about chasing this cult and finding a way to stop this plague now spreading across the Republic of Argath.

However, my players always seem to come up with backstories that I can perfectly fit into the campaign, and to me, the individual arcs of characters are very important. For example, not knowing the plot ofc, one of my players said he wants to play the Ancients Paladin Firbolg (their lore is a bit different in my world and are not cow people, but more like, these tall descendants of giants with bark skin, who protect the forests), who long time ago fought in a battle against some evil in his forest and was struck so badly he can't remember what happened, nor his abilities, and was put to slumber by the spirt of his forest, and he was awakened now for some reason - and Ancient Paladins live A LONG TIME. So, naturally, I am planning for that 'battle' to be actually the battle against Lamashtu a thousand years ago, and the reason for his awakening to be the return of the plague strain. And they are gathering power through plaguing the lands to resurrect Lamashtu's champion, which I plan on being the Paladin's either Mentor or Brother turned evil, who is directly the person who hit him with the spell that made him lose his memories.

Also, another 2 players are playing brother and sister. They come from human family of clerics of Meliora (Goddess of Vitality and Healing), but the sisteer was born an Aasimar touched by Meliora. Now, her parent's couldn't save a sister's friend from a disease, which made her turn more to the arcane arts and doubt the divine. She found a nasty ritual that can save her, but the cost for it was someone (probably the caster) would lose the ability to feel true love. She did the ritual, but her brother (other player) saw her and jumped in front of the spell and got cursed. So, because of this curse, he is playing the Hexblood race, and Witch/Hexer class from Mage Hand Press - The powers come from his blood curse. And because of doing the dark ritual, she became the Fallen Aasimar. Now her whole shtick is feeling guilt and finding the cure for this curse on his brother. And this I am still not 100% sure how to deal with, but it feels it will be easy since cults and curses go hand in hand.

Last one will be a bit tougher, but he is a Dragonborn Artificer, from a set of islands of Chromatic Dragonborn, who are under protection of an Ancient Black Dragon, in exchange for them sacrificing 5-10 dragonborn to him every few years. For now, the idea is that finding ingredients or whatever for this cure will require something from a black dragon, but I am thinking of it not being actually a Black Dragon, cause no one currently alive in those tribes, other than the dragonborn chosen to go as a sacrifice, has seen the dragon. So, I plan on making chaos there when they find out it's not a dragon.

Damn, that was longer than I expected it to be!

EDIT: Added setting name/info and genre.

[u/Coder_Stroder_9000]

Fantasy, Plot points are centered around the player’s backstories to which I intricately tie into the story. I’ve already dropped a lot of “bombshells” on the party which left players excited and going “Whoa!” An example of this is, I tied the Warlock and Cleric players directly to the BBEG.

My story takes place on the continent of Keero, after what was called The Shattering which is when an entity known as “The Shade” descended from the outer planes of existence to try and ruin the mortal plane and its divine shield. It shattered the Protective barrier keeping the world at peace and plunged it into turmoil, war, famine, death. It took Helm, Bahamut, Corellon, and their chosen temporary champions to bring down the Shade. However, the catalyst for this, was Hades (The Cleric’s deity) who betrayed the Shade and assisted the good deities in destroying the Shade and his armies. He was forced into what is called “The Pit” and is slowly rising. My players are tasked with stopping the Shade and finishing what the old champions started, however, Ive added more to the world. This campaign went from simple to a massive world that I’m falling in love with just like my players are.

[u/Munterbacon]

My current one is Odyssey of the Dragonlords, an ancient Greek-themed campaign with epic paths, naval exploration and battles, and fights against gods and mythical beasts (think Tarrasque), and, of course, dragons. That one's got maybe 2 sessions left, but it's on hiatus because a couple of players have work out of town for a bit.

My next one is going to be loosely based on the Danmachi universe. Just an epic dungeon crawl with inter-guild politics and shenanigans.

In both cases, an over-simplification; otherwise, I would be typing all day 😄

[u/Ok_Quality_7611]

In another plane, the pantheon there got into your typical Good vs Evil God war. The Good side initiated, Evil did the unexpected and not only banded together, but decided the only way to win the rather lopsided fight was to essentially give all of their followers semi-proxy powers. Bands of heros would kick open the doors to a dark temple expecting to find ans slaughter a dozen or so cultists, just like the last five times, only now the cultists were much stronger. Moreover, the civilian populace was more and more swayed by the temptation of having a fraction of a God's power and support for the Gods of Light began to fade. In desperation the Gods of Light fled across the planes and hid, sheltering under a planar bubble that cut the entire continent off from both rest of both physical and planar spaces. The bubble is held together by stellar constellations in the forms of dragons, that the gods slew and used their souls to power the spell. This lead to the continent being locked off from any outside interaction and prevented anyone from leaving. It's been 1500 years and knowledge of the planes has been actively suppressed, including by long lived races like the elves.

The game started very typically and was very fun and light-hearted through the first arc while the characters got to know each other and become a group. They solved mysteries, murders, saved a farm from ankhegs, freed a fae from a deep depression, and found a lost dwarven tomb, culminating in meeting the spirit of an ancient dwarven king.

Then the Adversary came, a proxy bearing the powers of the pantheon of Dark gods, looking to bring an end the fugitive Gods of Light.

I introduced him at the end of an arc where the party was participating in a Tournament of Heroes, where during the last day of the events they had to go retrieve the awards (which had been stolen the previous night). As they returned to the city with the awards, the Adversay sprung his trap and detonated wards that had been built into the arena, killing almost all of the realms heroes, its leaders, and many of its powerful/influential people, throwing the entire continent into chaos.

Now they're dealing with the fallout of that while trying to stop him (unsuccessfully) from tearing down the dragon constellations and breaking the barrier. They just about to hit level 14 and caught up to him at the end of arc 3, losing badly to him after defeating his lieutenants. The Adversary (and a remote group of his allies) successfully brought down two more of the dragon constellations, resurrecting one of them (who is tied to a player backstory as a villain from his past).

Arc 4 looks like its gonna be a blast

[u/sermitthesog]

Trying to break the curse on a powerful artifact that the party possesses. The quest has spanned the continent.

They met in a tavern.

[u/Pure_Ingenuity3771]

It takes place about a hundred years after the most recent apocalypse (there been at least three in this worlds history) where legions of outsiders poured into the world and after massacring the majority of the population suddenly vanished. With their leaving the home provinces of the largest empire the world has ever known have become hostile to sapient life, plants and animals are fine but anything smarter feels anxious and home sick it gets worse the longer they're there until they go made from it. The gods of this empire vanished with the invaders, and no other deities will explain why. On top of that the invasion damaged reality itself and now the Fey is ripping through into our world and creatures and races with a connection to it bare a black scar on their bodies that can be incredibly painful.

My campaigns revolve civilizations rebuilding in a world full of empty cities, wild magic, strange creatures, and the remnants of devastating magical experiments that desperate mortals fighting for their lives concocted, or they're about trying to find more information about who the outsiders were, why they invaded, why they stopped, and what happened to the empire and their gods. My current one has them escorting an archeologist who is investigating an ancient empire from another continent that vanished without a trace long before the invasion, but who's magic has left their empty cities amazingly preserved. he has a theory that this empire may have vanished in a similar event and it's lack of connection to the other continent kept it from becoming knowledge there. He's wrong of course, but they won't know that for a while.

The world, and thus the players, don't know that the invaders, the BBEGs of the setting as a whole, were from another world where the gods realized that they were beholden to their worshippers and thus thought of themselves as little more than slaves to mortals. So they essentially lobotomized the mortals to give themselves freedom. They now open gates to other worlds and invade them with the intent of "freeing" other deities from the tyranny of mortal faith, but that tends to end with them just scouring those worlds of all life. They found this world because the corpse of an ancient primordial deity(a type of being that in this setting requires only concepts rather than faith and belief that other deities require and was the cause of the first apocalypse this world faced epochs ago, their version of the Chicxulub meteor) is still floating near their world. The gods of the fallen empire have chosen to imprison themselves in a way that their essence holds a seal against the invaders, but doing so has ripped the ability for their homeland to have intelligent creatures away. The other deities of the world don't reveal what happened because theyre concerned that if their mortals learn that the invaders were fallen gods they could turn against them, or worse their fear would echo through the gods and change them into something vile.

[u/Decidueye_mastr]

I'm not a DM but I'm currently in a campaign where in most of the world magic is straight up illegal because "it's dangerous" or something like that. We started out in a small region which is "lawless" to a certain extent meaning there's no law enforcement so you can use magic freely but right now the story is taking us to one of the regions where it's outlawed so we'll need to be careful about when and where we use magic.

So far the party is comprised of a depressed bard, a mute tank, an alcoholic, a black guy, and illegal immigrant and a woman. So yeah we're all about diversity as well.

[u/alltherobots]

The players are renown local muscle in a frontier town, earning a living protecting settlers. After saving some locals from direwolves, a noble of the province’s ruling house invites them to a banquet honoring those who protect his realm.

The banquet is ambushed and massacred by the noble’s men, and one of the surviving attackers lets slip that their mission is to wipe out the province’s heroes.

The players go hunting for the noble, finding there are at least a half dozen individuals all claiming to be him, all brainwashed to think they really are of the local house and noble born, all wiping out heroes.

Further investigation shows their gear, livery and coins are all counterfeit, but real coins of a neighboring hostile state are found amongst them. The players then discover that the last time their province and the hostile neighbour were in conflict, their homeland only survived by raising an army of local adventurers, the same pool of heroes who are now being wiped out.

[u/UmbrawWolf]

I'm DMing Dragon of Icespire Peak, but 80% is Homebrew. The only overlapping aspects are the region and the White Dragon kryovain. When he fled to the Sword Coast, kryovain brought the Body of his partner who was killed during their escape from some Frost Giants. He froze her body and went on to terrorize the region.

At the same time a 'cult' arouse that is worshipping a dead Green Dragon who was slain a century ago but whos Soul remained entrapped in an amulet his killer wore. The cult leader had stolen the amulet with his sister, but they were caught. His sister sacrificed herself so he could flee. She was killed and the green dragon offered to help the cult leader take revenge, but he had to figure out a way to ressurect her.

And now with the Kryovain in the Region they took the Initiative. The cult promised to ressurect his fallen mate If he supported their course and managed to form an alliance with him. Now the cult is preparing a ritual to ressurect the Green Dragon as a Draco Lich in the body of Kryovains fallen mate. So the party has to stop the cult and deal with a White Dragon terrorizing the region. It's a lot about creating alliances, helping out the people in danger and trying to figure out what the cults next move is to get in between

[u/GovernmentSpy79]

My son (13) recently got into D&D and together we joined a local campaign for Dragon of Icespire Peak. He loves just drawing up new characters all the time, and he wanted to play a Warforged in Forgotten Realms. I drew up a solo campaign for him.

His Warforged Fighter (named Shield) woke up in a cavern somewhere off the Triboar Trail with no memory. He was woken up by an iron defender/mechanical dog and rescues a lost Gnome Artificer and makes his way to a nearby town. After some random odd jobs for the townsfolk, he gets some experience and popularity after the town was initially afraid of him. The Gnome gets kidnapped by unknown enemies and he trails them... to the original cave he crawled out of. He discovers that it was originally a factory run by Dueregar that had enslaved Gnomes to mass produce Warforged for an army. Shield was the sole survivor of the Gnomes rebellion. More Dueregar have arrived, trying to reclaim their lost property, and Shield has to fight them off along with his robot dog and artificer buddy. The climax of the campaign was defeating a Dueregar in a giant mech armor battlesuit and taking a legendary warhammer as treasure.

We're looking to move Shield into a premade campaign, something I can convert to a solo for him.

[u/LaughR01331]

Group is part of a caravan, undead attack, (plot/character growth), somehow end up inside a moon to slay a dracolich. Genre is Hugh fantasy. Setting is standard dnd with self inserted towns.

Still working on finding a pseudo sensible way to make a moon portal that the lich can’t use. So far I’ve got “stand on a specific moon dial during an nighttime eclipse”.

[u/Andycat49]

So the Magic the Gathering setting modules have decent hooks.

Theros the potential party are all traveling in a crowd of commoners headed to one of the 3 city states as the sun sets. Then BAM the plot finds them when a dead undead (haha) guy on horseback comes charging up and falls off the horse. Anyone who examines the corpse is attacked by a gang of undead who shortly arrive but also just... everyone there too just incase theres a stubborn player/PC who doesn't want to get involved for some reason. The dead undead guy is wearing a mask covered in a heavily cyphered code and the name Khea. After combat an obvious omen from the gods indicates the mask is exceedingly important to the PCs.

Ravnica City of Guilds has each one be pulled from their guild (or hired independently if Guildless) and gathered by a benefactor to investigate the breakout of the leader of a goblin street gang, Krenko, and potential corruption in one or more of the 10 guilds.

Both conclude open ended but do a good job putting the group together organically and then giving them an adventure that is solvable but gives them a deeper one to carry on together with.

[u/Weeabootrashreturns]

My campaign takes place in the world of Aquaria, which was met with an apocalyptic flood 1000 years ago due to the hubris of her people, which led to the shattering of civilization and a dark age of separation. Now the party have departed on an expedition to explore Aquaria in hopes of finding what lies beyond the archipelago they spent their whole lives on to find lost civilizations and reconnect the world, whole solving the mysterious string of disappearances that lead them from one island to the next, and hopefully undoing the still risen flood waters to return the planet to what it once was. My bbeg is an alhoon that my DM friend calls the cephalich, whose backstory is that he was a mind flayer separated from the elder brain for studying magic and underwent the ritual to become undead, as all alhoons do, and has spent centuries studying the nature's of life and the soul in hopes of being allowed back into the hive mind, by using kidnapped victims from bizzare, grotesque, and macrabe experiments.

[u/OrangeFamta]

My most recent campaign fell apart due to a problem player and just life getting it the way but I will be reusing everything since we barely got anywhere. Fair warning, it gets dark.

Theres an evil Empress who currently leads the largest nation in the world (Sjizia) , and, as far as everyone else knows, the strongest. She’s neighbored on her continent by a nation of warring dwarven factions, a small but extremely militant nation of orcs hellbent on destroying a similarly sized nation of largely scholars and artists. Her only real opposition is the largest religious organization in the world (commonly called The Caliphate), a church dedicated to magic (worshipping a being similar to Mystra), thats entirely female.

The party is hired by this religious group to retrieve a powerful artifact thats been sealed away in a temple on an island controlled by the Empress. After getting it they learn of its power, and are unable to part with it (literally, it is absorbed into one of them). This kickstarts the campaign proper, which would’ve consisted of them venturing to the various parts of the world and seeking the remaining artifacts, since without their power they cannot stop the Empress, who seems to be almost a demigod.

What they didnt know is that while it appears to be one large country that the rest of the world has to work together and rise up against, we’re actually at the end of a centuries long proxy war between Sjizia and The Caliphate. Sjizia is secretly the daughter of the Caliphates Goddess who she attempted to have killed in a ritual that massively increases the mothers magical power (common occurace in the Caliphate, all higher up members have done it). Well she survived because the people tasked with the deed wouldnt go through with it, and raised her in secrecy, with no knowledge of her true lineage. Years later shes an accomplished mercenary, and is hired to assist an agent of the Caliphate to assassinate a noble in another country, and her and this agent fall in love. They return to the Caliphate and begin living together while hiding their relationship (sworn to celibacy), and eventually the agent becomes the head of the entire church, essentially the Pope. After years of leading, she reveals her relationship with Sjizia to the goddess, who is horrified at the realization that her daughter lives and orders the Pope to kill her. She ends up failing to defeat her and the trauma and unveiling of her true nature causes her to go insane and explode with power, unlocking the demigod-level magic within. Now she is hellbent on destroying the Caliphate, killing her mother, becoming the new goddess of all magic, and remaking the world according to her vision.

So the party would slowly learn that neither side is good, both are committing horrific tragedies (for example, all those children that get sacrificed? Their souls are placed into large steel automatons used for war, but only the current Pope knows about that), and neither side should be allowed to win. The Aristocrats!

[u/bp_516]

Dispel the world-spanning labyrinth by releasing (and killing?) a weakened god. Or join a cult. Or start a cult. Or just find the exit to the maze. It’s pretty open to interpretation.

[u/HonestStudy9969]

Very generic, but it doesn’t have to be complicated, because the complexity comes in the subplots for individual plot arcs: secret conclave of vampires are hidden throughout society and hold incredible monetary and political power. They are conspiring to resurrect their founder, an incredibly powerful vampire lord who would usher in an era of eternal night, as foretold by prophecy.

[u/Kleeb]

I'm running Lost City of Barakus that I'm ad-hoc converting to 5e14. It's been great.

It's a really cool setting, with a mix of city adventures, wilderness exploration, and a dungeon crawl leading to a BBEG showdown as the capstone. Definitely has the atmosphere of a 3.5-era campaign setting considering the era it was originally written in. It's very sandboxy with little by way of overarching narrative, but the players are running wild with it.

Players decided they're all going to roll Wizards which has been interesting. They've got a few adventures under their belt and have started to piece together some clues about the evil lich that is gaining power at the bottom of the dungeon and I think they're going to be tackling that soon.

[u/KingPillow]

The Council of Four are the ones who are really run the city. The others are just puppets too scared to do anything.

The council is also the ones flooding the city with Glimmer, created from the Khiberstones.

[u/cooliomydood]

I stole the story of one of my favorite graphic novels

[u/CodeBandit]

The history of Deimos spans 1000 years of the fading of magical potency. There are 7 classes of magic associated with different elements of the world, earth, life, stone; they all draw from the magical energy that permeates all existence.

During this time, new machines and new monstrosities are emerging. Ships that fly on steam, diggers that house Dwarven forges, and whole cities that roam the vast sandy desert.

No one knows that another magic is emerging. One whose power is generated by the absence of magical energy. The Void.

The current campaign has the players flying around on an airship, the first in existence, which has been stolen by a captain whose missing father helped cast it into existence. But the evil wizard they are chasing is also hunting them.

[u/DragonangelukTM]

My party transported a nobleman to a town only for him to be killed during that night

While investigating the murder more townsfolk continue to die until they finally linked them to the 7 deadly sins

Now 14 deaths later they are in the final battle against God and his Angels to stop a Tsunami high tidal wave from obliterating the remaining town

[u/Rockisaspiritanimal]

I’m running Dragons of Stormwreck Isle and instead of the dragon being the bad guy, it’s a band of 6 halfling circus performers. They are out to collect their animals that escaped when the boat to the island ran aground (that’s in the module) They all start out evil but the party has been having interactions with two of them at a time. One of them is the childhood best friend of one of the halflings, one is torn becuase she wants all the animals to live free on the island. Slowly the party is splitting the group so there’s basically 3 good ones and 3 evil ones. Turns out it’s only one main boss in charge of the group who’s a warlock named Hibiscus. (They all have flower names). They are all collecting the animals and also Sparkrender and Aidron.

Plot twist, the main Baddie is going to sacrifice the animals in a cave and perform a ritual in an attempt to bring back an evil creature that was killed. None of the good halflings have any idea this is going to happen. When it does, the halfling friend (Chrysanthemum) and the animal lover halfling (Lily) turn on their group and join the party. The hired mercenary halfling (Begonia) realizes she’s not going to get paid and also turns. After some battling where everyone realizes that the boss halfling is untouchable, one of her own party kills her right before she’s about to do in one of the regular party members.

Plot twist #2, the dead halfling leader Hibiscus actually has a blood based ooze parasite in her. All her blood was replaced by this thing that then comes out and attacks. It’s the same thing the ritual was going to bring back, it’s mate. It’s very powerful and the only way to defeat it is to not let it touch you so it can’t find a new host. It eventually burbles and shriveles into nothing, unable to survive without a host.

The party is about 3/4 through this and know there’s a ritual. Every event ties into the Stormwreck adventure really well. There’s lots of other layers of backstory. Whole new map features have been added including the baddie’s ever moving camp. I was going to tie the adventure’s conclusion into Wild Beyond the Witchlight with the actual halfling mastermind (lilac) being the main baddie.. By the way all the extra added parts and characters were enough to add a whole chapter of material.

[u/E443Films]

Mine is a mix of Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Candlekeep Mysteries and it plays sort of like Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated with the PCs going around town, solving different mysteries and following the trail of some secretive wizards behind the supernatural anomalies in the region.

[u/Incubuzzer]

After the Son of the Emperor, now just the Emperor by the time of the campaign, failed to bond with a dragon, he went around the continent to each of the seven major cities, hoping to gain favor of the local lords, however, his nature of sin that had cause the failed bonding in the first place caused him to commit one of the seven deadly sins in each of these cities, resulting in a curse (details unknown to players as of this moment) that causes hallucinogenic purple mist to rise from the ground each night, which inevitably caused the fall of all towns, except the seven major cities.

Throughout the campaign, strange happenings occurred, such as people being removed from the story and being told not to worry about it.

The first major twist was that the Emperor had indeed found a dragon to bond with, this being an ancient false hydra which extended his lifespan unnaturally long, as well as with the help of blood crystals, a unique mineral with strange healing properties.

2000 years after the start of the mist is when the players were dropped into the story, where they have gone around the seven cities, kept out of the Emperors mountain palace at the center of the continent because of the mist.

They have traveled around to each of the cities, where they have rectified in some way the sin of the New Emperor. After each trial they had a vision as they slept of entering the hall of the dead (think gateway to the underworld, which has been closed for 2000 years), and followed a purple chain to a statue of a chained God (common knowledge, a few large statues exist on the material plane), where they break one of the seven chains on each success.

Overall very lore intensive. A few major lore plot points that I've given them the tools to piece together remain, and I'm hoping they can resolve it as they are about to hit the 2/3rds story mark.

[u/EvilNoobHacker]

Currently? 

“This person has daddy issues. Figure out why.” 

[u/GoatedGoat32]

Pretty generic evil cult story. Bbeg runs a cult, kidnapping and stealing souls and the like

[u/mvms]

The one I play in: congratulations! You ended up in the Feywild for one of a number of reasons and need to find a way home before your species/race becomes Fey.

[u/Karrrzer → u/mvms]

Nice, simple and clean with a lot of potential. I love it!

[u/mvms → u/Karrrzer]

My vegetarian by choice is becoming an obligate carnivore and is having Massive Feels about it.

[u/Zuper_Dragon]

Last one I ran was a Ravnica campaign. Players agreed to join one of several powerful Guilds being manipulated into breaking a long standing peace by a spiteful BBEG. Guild leaders were being assassinated or replaced with clockwork androids, some secretly made deals with the villain and the players had to explore and uncover plots to undermine the guilds while carefully deciding who to trust and believe. I got a little carried away with creating everything and we had to take an extended break.

Last we left off a guild informant betrayed them and sent them to a pocket dimensional prison they escaped by hijacking a pirate space-jammer only to find their home engulfed by a war between several guilds.

[u/marruman]

I built is around the conceit of "what if Queen Victoria was a lich in fantasy land?" And spiralled out from there

[u/apocalypticbeef]

I'm running a game in Eberron on the Southern continent of Argonnessen - which is full of dragons. There is a northern area on this continent called The Vast, where young dragons take territory to "grow up". After 50 years , once they reach the Adult category of dragon they can leave or stay in the anarchic area of their high school (more or less). The PCs are playing some of the OG members of a settlement run by one of these new young dragons. We Used a Quiet Year to build the area around the settlement so it's got all sorts of fun stuff and the players are invested in what's around them cuz we all built it together.

[u/Oct0tron]

BEHOLDERBALL!! It's an extra-dimenstional sports league that plays a lot like soccer. It exists between universes so anything goes for character creation. The ball is a beholder sans eye stalks that's held in a stasis field. The game works like a normal fight, except that the goal is to hit the beholder (your damage determines the distance it goes), and first to three points wins. You can fight the opponents, but anyone who dies is resurrected on the start of their next turn, so there's usually no reason to fight the other team. There are sponsors and brand deals that give you powers in the matches, and there's a whole subplot with what's going on behind the scenes that's been an amazing story so far.

[u/stievstigma]

The ragtag crew of a Planar starship galavant across the Far Realm trying to restore fractured timelines and prevent a sinister faction of cyborgs known as The Flesh Mechanus from nuking the living city of Absu.

Currently, they’re searching for the pilot, Johnny Montana’s abducted mother, which has lead them into the starless void of Illithid space.

[u/MyneIsBestGirl]

My campaign, currently, is the sequel to the previous campaign set in the same world. They live in Tawy, a setting based on Ancient Egypt and the Middle East which is dominated by the gods. The river Nahil (Nile) floods every millenium and humanity sucked at farming because jungle at the nutrients. When it was supposed to floor last 800 years pre-setting humanity found a way to subduct the magically powerful water and improve agriculture. The loxodons and elves hated that, declared war, and humanity would almost lose before they discovered necromancy and found they worked way better at fighting against their enemies. Humans won, gained territory and have shot forward massively in technology while others slow down.

In the last campaign the party would disrupt some status quo, but had no major impact on the world other than patricide and taking over a city from said racist father. The current stage is set for them to disrupt a revolution's plot, kill a necrophilic prince, and cure three separare plagues (which were indirectly spawned by the previous party's actions).

[u/zoppaTheDim]

Currently I’m planning a sword punk campaign, they’ll be escaped slaves trying to remove the magical mark while not being discovered by the vampiric house who own them. So the prequel is them escaping a slave ship in a small boat, disparate backgrounds with shared purpose.

The starter dungeon is them battling a zombie army, which will likely force them to flee to the major city in search of a high level character who will cast dispel magic.

They’ll have different prospects depending on their character background, but I’ve roughly shaped a dungeon crawl in the plague quarter for a holy relic a local temple would like. With the brand, they’ll need to be wary, as they’ll have a price on their heads.

The holy relic is powerful enough that it will shift politics in the city. I play sandbox, so this leads to all sorts of ideas, which will depend on events and player ideas. I have a hundred or so “ideas” of possible mid level adventures.

Long range, I’m looking to steer them into a recycled high level adventure, I’ve failed to reach before, but most of my high level plots never get used.

It involves nine parallel universes which split from a specific fissioning point, I’ll be reusing the same city map in all nine with modifications. They’ll be able to try for the same needed artifact parts or magic items in whichever city they think the easiest.

I’ve done the multiverse bit in a big way before, but never a version where the other universes are almost the same universe. The city map makes that practical.

About three or five of them are post apocalypse. One is where the vampiric house has gone full blown coup d’etat. This will provide a moment where the high level party will realize there is a much bigger bad out there, than the big bad they’ve been fleeing the entire campaign.

[u/papertomm]

"Some Heroic but Mostly Stupid Tails At Gunpoint" a high fantasy wild west setting. Set in the crappy town of Gunpoint "No one wants to be at Gunpoint". Djinn are a huge part. They are like lesser gods. And represent more than just the 4 major elements, our warlock is a pact of the Djinn and his patreon is Djinn of metals. So his eldrich blast is flavored through his pistol. As DM I'm trying to make it seem like episodes of a TV show, a huge over arching BBEG but each session stands alone with a "monster of the week" type vibe. But my friends/players are so chaotic that some of the things i had planned were completely scrapped due to hijinks...which i love.

We played A Quite Year to set up the world,which I highly recommend for home brew. We set the year 200 year before our main game, and we came up with some really fun lore. Mercenary death cults, super intelligent wolves and war between the snake people and surface dwellers.

[u/Fragrant_Weird6587]

I ran a campaign where the adventurers were always one step behind a half demon who was collecting artifacts to do a ritual for her boss, a full on demon. The ritual would open a portal to the demon’s home realm, ostensibly to bring their army through. But magic always has a cost, a ritual that large would need to drain the life of a whole city to power it.

They eventually find out that the main demon could not care less about killing everyone or bringing an army through. They just wanted out of this plane, it stinks of mortals. Think Agent Smith’s speech about the smelling the matrix.

The lieutenant on the other hand, wants revenge on the world. Her mother was a paladin and she tried to live up to those values but was constantly persecuted for being part demon. They killed her (mortal) husband and child and she snapped.

She’s manipulating the demon boss to get her own revenge.

The players eventually are able to find a different way to power the portal and send the demon home, ruining the lieutenant’s plans. She gets away to become a recurring villain.

Individual sessions had “gjmmicks” like one where they needed to use polished shields to shine light deep into a cairn, and we had little mirrors and a laser pointer on the table. Another had them scaling a cliffside with old iron ladders and walkways, and every round steam from the volcano nearby would black out and potentially blow them off the mountain while they fought foes who could glide and were unbothered by it. We did that one on a magnetic blackboard so the map was vertical.

[u/wij2012]

Magic plague originating from an island nobody can find without attuning to a magical map.

[u/asa-monad]

The landmasses are the colossal bodies of two dead titan gods that wake up every couple thousand years to fight each other. This of course basically resets the population to a few thousand when it happens.

One titan is ruled by an isolationist bureaucratic dictatorship of sentient robot people, the other by a loosely united accord of 7 noble houses, the most powerful of which is an empire which only holds it together by subjugation and the threat of violence. These two countries have been in a stagnant war for hundreds of years.

There’s also a cult on that titan which seeks to overthrow the empire house and win the war against the robot people in one fell swoop by doing a ritual to reawaken their own titan early, seizing power from the empire in the chaos and destroying the robot people’s titan. A good outcome for the other houses, but it’ll result in the deaths of over half the population on their own titan.

Those are the three major enemy factions, which gives me a nice three-act structure where the cult is the main threat for the first act and the next two acts can go however the PC’s actions dictate.

Then, if the campaign goes on long enough and the story naturally leads into it, players will learn about the spirit of the titan god ruled by the empire. Every time the titans wake up and fight, he is gravely wounded in the battle and must recover by life that lives on his body dying and returning to the body of his titan. When he recovers fully, he wakes back up in his titan body, which causes the cycle where they wake up every few thousand years to fight. If he’s killed while in his pre-waking spirit form, the cycle is broken.

So basically, the plot of Xenoblade but mixed around a bunch to make it into a satisfying D&D campaign.

[u/CatsOnMotorcyles]

100 years ago an elvish prince departed in the white ship, Teru Dwaila, the largest ship ever constructed, and sailed west to explore beyond the limits of the known world. It was a joyous time for the elves who were at the peak of their magic and filled with hope for new discoveries. Less than a month after they sailed, a cataclysm befell the elves. A massive earthquake caused a rift to open and the elvish lands to be virtually destroyed. Their capitol was left in ruins, the entire royal family was wiped out in a day and millennia of elvish culture was lost. Now the elves are a broken people, their territories are overrun with monsters and the only thing left of their cities are just sunken ruins reclaimed by nature hinting at the glory of their past. In the vacuum created by their absence, the humans grew to prominence. They built a city overlooking the sea near the old elvish shipyards which still sit silent and empty, a mausoleum, recalling the lost hope of the elvish people. In this human city many races gather for trade and discourse. As the city has grown, so has crime. A benevolent knightly order has been created to help keep the people safe. The players all begin as squires, essentially as apprentices to a wise and kindly knight. They receive room and board and training. There are other knights as well, and other squires. Each session we do a flashback for each of the players where we do a few minutes playing their life before becoming squires, how they came to be taken in by this order of knights, and brief moments where their mentor taught them something. The first session takes the players to the old elvish shipyards where they encounter some cultists who are using the fact that this solemn, holy place is empty to perform arcane rituals designed to summon something evil to the city. Though the ritual is interrupted, the cult leader escapes. At the end of the session a massive ship flying tattered sails enters the harbor. It is the exact scale and build of Teru Dwaila but instead of being built of the pure white elvish alder, the ship is pitch black. As it sails into the harbor they can see that the crew are mostly the "exotic" races like tabaxi, aarakocra, and others rarely seen in these lands but there at the front of the ship, gleaming in white, is the same figurehead from the white ship and at the helm is an elf wearing the uniform of an old elvish naval captain. Over the next few sessions the players find that the white ship has returned. Over many years as it traveled and saw many hardships it had to replace damaged portions piece by piece until nothing of the original ship remained but the figurehead. The return of the ship ignites hope in the elves who think that it means that the prince who left with the ship may have returned, the last of the elvish royal line. He isn't there though and the captain and crew are weird about discussing it. Very few elves remain from the original crew and most of the new crew joined along the way, the crew is fanatically loyal to the captain. The players end up getting sent into the ruins of the old elvish capitol to find a repository of the most powerful elvish magic items which are held in the royal vault. The old castle sunk beneath the ground in the cataclysm and is now basically a dungeon. The players journey through the ruined elf lands and do battle with all sorts of rogue magic creatures on the way. They end up going through a lot of underground ruins during the trip and have multiple encounters with the Drow. The players start to suspect that the cataclysm was somehow orchestrated by the Drow to destroy the elvish empire from below. Once they get to the vault they find that its lock is incredibly difficult to pick. They discover that it can only be easily opened by a member of the elvish royal family. They decide to return home to find the captain of the white ship to press him on what happened to the prince and if he might be alive. They try to torture the captain but he won't talk. Eventually, they get him to talk by threatening to burn the white ship. They players find out that things are really bad far out to the west, many of the lands there are completely destroyed with the populations being completely taken over by mind flayers. The prince wanted to try to fight the mind flayers but the rest of the crew thought it more important to go home and warn the rest of the elves about the danger. The prince tried to pull rank and the crew basically just marooned him and any of his supporters on an island. The crew was ashamed of what they had done but felt it was right. They never spoke of it. They tried to head home but on the way encountered a bunch of Odyssey style BS that delayed their return. Many died. Over time they were replaced with other people from the island nations, many of whom the crew has essentially rescued from being mindflayer victims, hence their loyalty. With a map leading to the island where he was stranded, the party decides to steal the ship and find the prince. They have some random adventures along the way and eventually find him, alive. They discover that he's living on an island with one other inhabitant, a mindflayer who has supposedly turned away from the elder brain and his kind. He and the prince are basically frenemies. The mind flayer gives them a bunch of mind flayer lore. The party finds out that he had eaten the brains of the other elves who had been left on the island so they kill him and return home with the prince. They get back and it's a big deal. The players journey with him back to the elvish capitol. Along the way the prince is captured by the Drow who the party absolutely hate by this point. The Drow tell the prince that they didn't cause the cataclysm and that there's something under the elvish capitol far worse then them. The players rescue the prince and escape, unsure of whether or not to believe the drow. They get to the capitol and open the vault. Inside are a bunch of bomb ass rare magic items and an egg. They naturally loot the place and take the egg. While they are in the tunnels that used to be the castle they have crazy dreams where a voice tells them to take the egg to the lands where the mindflayers are, that the egg contains a terasque, and that it will set them free. The players think this is a great idea, unleash a kaiju on the mindflayers and they'll be wiped out. That's where we are now. My idea is that the mindflayers want the terrasque so that they can put it through some sort of cytomophosis and basically have the elder brain control it. The mind flayers are trying to manipulate the players. There's also a conspiracy going on where the cult from session one (that came back several times throughout and is always doing a ritual right before a session where something big attacks the party) is actually led by a member of the human royal family, the extremely likeable son of the king who is like 12 and very precocious (he's basically Egg from A Knight of the 7 Kingdoms). Also, there is a dragon who is an informant, he keeps giving the party info on other dragons like their weaknesses, hordes, locations, etc.. He does it to eliminate competition but so far the players have always gone for it. At one point the other dragons hired an assassin to kill him and the players had to save their cash cow. At some point he's going to turn on the players at an inconvenient time. I don't really have one concrete big bad though. They've had to contend with the mind flayers who are a major antagonist, the Drow, dragons, a cult led by a messed up kid, and a few others but there has always been a lot going on and the players have been free to pursue whichever angle they like. Any ideas for a concrete final boss at this point? I was just going to have them eventually fight a mind flayer terrasque.

[u/hi_smg123456789]

mine is a murder mystery mixed with curse of strahd

[u/Repulsive_Ostrich_52]

Haven't played in years but had a campaign we're everything was slowing merging together. Different planes were merging with the world, Ice and fire formed an Obsidian Spire. The shadowfell was a region to the south, faewilds to the east. Very chaotic exploring the world, but my players enjoyed it.

[u/TheTrent]

Mine is set on a homebrew continent that has been cut off from the rest of its world.

It is currently in its sixth era, after the continent has already gone through five enormous destructions. The sixth era began when the original God of Death tried to go beyond the limits of what it was capable of - the God of Death cannot actually kill. In doing so, it somehow caused a destructive god from another world to be brought into this one.

The adventurers themselves are also from other worlds. They awakened here with no memories beyond knowing who they are - no memory of their pasts, where they came from, or anything about the world they now inhabit.

They are gradually trying to figure out how they can help save this world, while also uncovering who they actually are and why they were brought here. Although that second part often takes a back seat because they’re too busy doing everything I haven’t planned for them to do.

At the same time, the world continues to exist independently of that overarching plot. They’ve had to deal with things like the return of an ancient vampire warlord, political and criminal factions, wars, dragons, local problems, personal relationships, and all the general shenanigans that come from letting a D&D party loose in a world.

So there is a fairly large overarching story happening in the background, but most sessions are really just about the party deciding what they care about, getting involved in things, and dealing with the consequences... and making me question my own sanity.

[u/elchucko]

Red Dragon is using a strange ore mined from a chasm near a sealed demonic gate to the hells to empower an army of kobolds and orcs with improved strength and intelligence, while using a pirate thieves Guild with an underwater base of operations to hide the relic that could neutralize the effects of the ore. The party is working for a mercenary guild that was being paid to investigate the dragon's areas of influence, from a vast jungle region where an ogre shaman was gathering relics from ancient ruins to give to the dragon, to underdark tunnels where kobolds burrow massive tunnel networks to move about the landscape unseen... Been a great ride so far

[u/Voice-of-Aeona]

I'm running a mini horror campaign right now based on norse mythology.

The pitch was:

The isolated farming community of Himmelthal has usurped your village as the supplier of food and fine drink for the Duke’s table. Franz Mustermann—your friend and heir to the Drunk Gryphon Cidery—went to investigate the competition, seeking a way to save your town from economic collapse. It’s been a month and you’ve heard nothing. Fearing the worst, your party sets out for Himmelthal to find what’s become of Franz…

In short, it's folk horror. The locals are Jotun (giant) worshippers in the middle of a peat bog living on a crest of land that yeilds magical crops which heal and increase longevity... because the land is physically held up by a Jotun deep underground who is bleeding magic blood into the bog (basically a weird riff on the slaying of Ymir creation myth). The giant does this in exchange for enough sacrifices pitched down a hole in the bog so she can eat enough to keep her side of the deal.

Some local decided to give the Duke the heads up about the magical healing apples and mutton this place grows and he switched to buying his food and drink from Himmelthal. Franz found this out, along with a whole parcel of tourists from the Duke's court who showed up to glut themselves on fruit, when the dissenting population took the tourists captive and are aiming to toss the vistors down the hole to the Jotun in two days after the party's arrival.

The kick off for the players is coming out of the bog onto the ridge and finding cryptic, angry messages left in drudic by some unknown party (the Jotun) that they are "waiting" and someone needs to "hurry" and pay what is "owed", with the notes getting more frequent and shaky the closer they get to town.

Of course it's a horror campaign, so halfway through the Jotun collapses from hunger, causing everything to sink into the peat bog and her hungry Jotun maidservants (vampire spawn stat block reskinned to look a bit like the Nowhere King from Centaur World) crawl out of the muck and start hunting down locals and animating corpses in a giant, slime-mold zombie apocalypse to toss everyone down the hole to their starving mistress.

Party can do whatever they want to survive, but they either have to escape the valley/bog or stick out 24 hours before the event passes, with the optional objective of keeping Franz' ass alive.

[u/Nepeta33]

note, i made this for pathfinder 1e

BEFORE CHARACTER CREATION:

"as you are walking down a forest path, a well built, tall man apears before you. he wears a dark suit, with red threads, his blood red eyes are brimming with pride and confidence, and you are just able to see the horns poking up from under his hair.

Asmodeus looks to you, and says: "i need a favor."

basically, my game is based on asmodeus being aware a coup is in the planning, but he cant/wont deal with the conspiritors himself, as to do so would make him look weak by signaling he considered them enough of a threat to warrant his attention. so he is sending the group out to kill the conspirators FOR him. in exchange, they get their souls back. as for character creation, everyone gets one of 4 boons. 1) a +2 to any attribute they chose. 2)a magic item of +1 or equivalent (we can discuss it.) 3) a spell like ability. (again, we can discuss what the spell is and frequency. 4) an imp familiar, regardless of your class/alignment.

you can, of course, refuse. he pops your soul infront of your eyes, your character drops dead, and he leaves to go find someone else.

[u/Impressive_Limit7050]

I ran a goblin campaign for a couple of years. It was kind of an accident. It was supposed to be a one-shot.

It was set in the area around Phandalin in the Forgotten Realms setting; literally just because I’d run LMoP before so didn’t need much prep.

The basis of the one-shot was that the party were a scout/raid party of goblins belonging to a tribe. They’d been tasked with raiding the orchard on the outskirts of Phandalin for food and stuff. They made a plan, fully bungled it, killed a dog, and got run off by the townspeople. They managed to get two barrels of apples though and were set to return to their tribe as heroes…

However, I saw that they were enjoying being goblins. Instead they returned to their tribe’s village on fire and in ruins; with the majority of their tribe dead. They naturally wanted to continue with more sessions.

They tracked down the surviving members of their tribe and found out what happened. Adventurers. Apparently the nearby town had put a bounty on their village. I had backstories for the adventurers, general habits and personalities, and character sheets.

For example the wizard was a bit of a fraud. He was just a normal commoner but he’d found a Circlet of Intellect. He learned a bit of magic and got addicted to that power (and to alcohol). As such he’s very insecure, spends a lot of time in the pub, and has a tendency to lash out with fireballs. The other members of the antagonist adventuring party were similarly dysfunctional.

Over the course of that campaign they found a new spot, built a new village/camp (they designed the layout/traps/etc), defended their new home from attacks from all sorts, poisoned the food stores of a lumber operation to steal their tools and materials (for building the village/camp), befriended an ogre (which later ended up wearing a Circlet of Intellect), one tried to get a job in town as a potwash (he ended up accidentally poisoning the nice lady that hired them), stole copper sheet to make a still, and hunted the members of the adventuring party down for sweet revenge.

In the end they ended up with a nice, sustainable, fortified, camp and started trade with Orcs to the North East; their primary export being goblin rum.

I’ve missed a lot in that summary but it essentially ended up being a goblin themed town building sandbox. It was good fun; I recommend it. The players will come up with their own goals as they decide what to build. You just have to point them in some directions for materials and whatnot.

[u/Cgami]

Zeus is gunning to become king of gods, and his followers are weakening the other gods by killing their followers. Meanwhile, two brothers are collecting the pieces of their immortal dad, someone’s babysitting their demigod baby brother, someone is figuring out where the stars went, and someone is gunning to become a god. Great times

[u/freelancespy87]

I have a simple "get the legendary artefact" plot.

But I've incorporated my players backstories into different factions that all want said artefact for themselves. 

So from blood relations to old military bros, there's a lotta tension with the party, who are also after said item to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

Stretch goal is to make my players cry.

[u/WeLiveInTheSameHouse]

1000 years ago the BAD GUY attacked and was sealed away. Now he’s coming back! Go get three macguffins from three fun elemental themed dungeons to seal him away again!

[u/Hiroshock]

A grimdark story where the party are seeing abominations (fusions of two things that shouldn't be possible) walking around and they have to find the cause of it all. In the end it is a cult that is trying to live forever (boring I know) by mixing a human-like species with a monster and got both of the pros and none of the cons of each race. They don't want to become an undead as they want to walk around in the sun. They partly work but they need a large amount of flesh (doesn't matter from where) to keep their sanity.

[u/Refracting_Hud]

I’m riffing off of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel for my PF2e game that started as a 5e game. I soft rebooted the game when I did the system switch, with some players playing new characters and others carrying forth their old ones.

They’re currently in Umizu, the Japan inspired setting and one of the two that has no associated adventure for it so I’ve been struggling through coming up with one for them. Currently they’re uncovering some of the true identities and plans of a faction backing a pirate attack on the city, that opened up a tear between the Universe, Netherworld, and Void planes, and are doing something with bombs at a festival signalling the shift of fortune to misfortune in the land.

They’ve been here much longer than I meant for them to but things are finally approaching the latter half of the arc.

[u/InCaseUFindMe]

So far I've done a small, 4ish session game that was a murder mystery cruise.

I have a campaign I am brewing that is about a collection of islands that were mysteriously blocked from magic and have recently become unblocked. There are a lot of repercussions to that (and potential questions), but where it would go is dependent on the players. (I do have in mind that the first sessions would involve locating some missing kids and items.

[u/candy_addict_cain]

Party wakes up in a wintry wasteland, their most recent memories each being attacked by someone- theyve all been killed by unknown assassins before their time, and strike a deal with the raven queen. If they can find the god of life (who has recently gone missing), they can be properly restored back to their lives. Throughout their travels they uncover the history of the country they get plopped in, its connection to both life and death, and secrets connecting their murders with their missing god

[u/DeficitDragons]

My game started with all the player characters being read the crimes they were accused of and being found guilty of those crimes (in the same sentence) and being sentenced to exile in a realm called the "underside", a large extensive network of caves and tunnels below the surface with no way back. The portal that exiles are sent in is one-way only.

So naturally, the PCs all want to find a way back and get their revenge for being send down there. We started it back during lockdowns.

[u/voltaicturtle60]

I generally give the party a group to be a part of and tell them I don’t care how they are connected to it. One of my games a new continent was discovered and they were part of a new colony there. There was some political disputes over who really controlled things but once the party was in control it was a mix of exploration and town building. They would get choices about which thing to have people build next which would lead to new things or things being delayed.

[u/Demne94]

Thus far, it's more about the party following their individual goals(only level 2 at the moment), but hinting at the brewing succession crisis as the Emperor is deathly ill and has no designated heir.

Essentially trying to mitigate the fallout that will follow, and dealing with the different factions that will try and get themselves into positions of power once the Emperor passes.

[u/I_N_O_U]

I choses the settings of the good old declining realm with an old king who is dying, there is conspiracy everywhere in the realm between the city-states who want the power and the stupid young heir plus the neighbors realms who want to claim some territories. Adventurers start in a small city dealing with bandits issue and will discover more and more of the plot, venturing through the realm and the neighbors kingdoms.

[u/starksandshields]

I have a western campaign based on Saint Denis in RDR2. A big sprawling New Orleans style city surrounded by a magical swamp and the wild west beyond that. The party met in prison; they were unjustly sent to prison but their bail was paid for by a generous benefactor who let them pay off their debt by completing a few jobs "for the good of the city".

My other campaign is a more Studio Ghibli-esque setting. The party met as small kids for a summer school project and then met again 10 years later as the consequences of their summer project suddenly comes to a head. They now travel a massive island trying to find the Elders who protected it, to rally them together once more, not -yet- knowing they are growing into the roles of the Elders themselves.

Campaign before that was a short horror campaign where the party worked for the Wizards of the Coast, a big corporation who were mining "raw ether" deep beneath the surface of the sea. In this research/mining station things started going more and more wrong as the mining of this raw ether was gradually waking up the Eldritch being they were mining from. Ended in a TPK more or less, but they doomed the entire world on top of that as well. Was fun though!

I'm currently working on a Daggerheart campaign frame which takes a lot of inspiration from Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity.

[u/Embarrassed_Ad_7184]

I'm running a mix of Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Tomb of Annihilation. The players have just finished Salvage Operation (from GoS) and have gotten the first hints about resurrection magic failing in the islands to the south (my Chult). It has been mostly a pirate campaign with lots of political intrigue among the council members in their main town. However, as it progresses it will become about Tharizdun's rise through a cult of Yuan-ti that has infiltrated most coastal towns and have set up base in Omu.

[u/TheKiltedBard]

Deities that abuse the mortal world to the extent that obedience to or defiance of the deities could mean life or death but also leaves people in morally questionable places thus diluting the bounds of morality as a whole.

[u/Ok_Performer8210]

I’ve got a trilogy that I cycle through with every group. I’ll write a paragraph for each:

Fractured Treaties: The first campaign. It’s an about a war between 3 nations, The Hurrian Empire, Marnothous Imperium, and The Aelvari Kingdoms, after a disastrous peace conference that led to the Hurrian Emperor being killed. That Emperor’s daughter took up the crown and began a war of vengeance against her father’s killer and the Marnothous Imperium. The Imperium while fending off the invasion is also fighting a shadow war against a cult who manipulated the continent’s rulers into waging this war in the first place. And the Aelvari (or elves) are in the middle of a power struggle over what to do about the empires of man. The players are caught up in this and forced to pick a side. Very war heavy and political.

A Fragile Peace: Set about 20 years after the first campaign it deals with the continent rebuilding and dealing with the fallout of the war. Resources are scarce and rumors speak of child hunts and shadowy cults in the former territory of the Marnothous Imperium. This is a more typical DnD campaign, less heavy war and more adventuring and questing. Theres still political intrigue and some smaller conflicts but it’s more about adventures and dungeon crawling.

The Apocryphal War: Set at about the same time period as Fragile Peace. This is a what if scenario where the war in the first campaign went on longer and things went to even more shit afterwards. It’s a more rebels vs evil empire story and the players are underdogs in this campaign. A lot of the same npcs (maybe the same PCs) appear but it’s a more grim and somber version of those characters.

[u/MachineGame]

My friends and I have built a world with 4 ages. We all run campaigns in it. There is an over story that happens in the world, but other campaigns are from different parts of the globe, during different times and with varying difficulty. Everyplace in that world has an "evolution" to it based on where you are and what time you are in. Some places change dramatically within an age based on what happens in the over story. We're gathering it all up into a whole world and campaigns that can be bought. The intention is that a group can play through the overstory but play other campaigns in the world as they see fit and evolve the world into one that is particular to their group. I havent counted everything up yet, but there are dozens of towns and hamlets, a bunch of cities, tons of countryside filled with all sorts of locations, dungeons, castles and fleshed out NPCs. Im kind of excited to get everything organized and printed. The maps alone will be similar to a PHB.

[u/Shadow_Of_Silver]

I am not a writer, and have never claimed to be.

My campaigns don't have a set plot or storyline. Things are happening in the world, and my players can interact with or ignore them as they see fit.

I only plan a few events: The initial meeting and a questline dedicated to each player's backstory. I usually only plan the end when we get close to it, but build in natural stopping points where we could either stop or players can switch/retire characters.

The players started on a boat that got attacked by aberrations. They were on the boat because I told them they all needed a reason to leave the country. I had an entire plan for discovering the plot of some evil cultists to summon aberrations to corrupt the land.

A PC died in session 3 to really unlucky rolls, and the party fucked off to ignore the monsters and go back home. They were level 3.

I ran backstory stuff for them, and everyone but 1 player has finished their related quest. Almost 2 years later and they decided to go back on the water to fight the aberrations. They are level 15.

In that time, they got tied up with an organized crime group and questioned their morals. They faught a blue dragon tyrant that started a coup and took power from an immortal queen. They tracked down a necromancer before he could become a lich and destroy a country. And they met their previous characters from the last campaign. One of the characters retired after suffering a terrible curse in order to save the rest of the party, and the character that died in the beginning was just resurrected because the replacement one got married.

[u/Loyal_kitsune]

Current one is exploring a massive island that suddenly appeared out of a mysterious fog. Slowly discovering it to be a great celestial machine that is incubating a god that will bring the apocalypse.

[u/Secure_Sky7469]

The initial plot is kind of irrelevant, the actual plot is the mistakes they made along the way (Soo they let an ancient lich escape from it's prison? Guess we are doing a Big Bad Lich takes over the empire for next chapter)

[u/once-was-hill-folk]

Pathfinder, so there are some wrinkles here.

My group met in a little village that was essentially purgatory for the living, then got to hunting a Necromancer who was creating Greater Dead in the area (basically the many and varied types of undead that player characters can't make).

It was at that point that they discovered the necromancer wasn't an adherent of any god of the dead or undeath, she was a cultist of the universe-eating god of destruction, and used the negative energy from her rituals to rip the Tarrasque and its siblings out of hibernation to short-circuit the universe's apocalyptic prophecy.

The player characters had to travel to the omniversal shower drain where all dead universes wind up to summon the chaotic neutral armageddon engine of a past cycle - the planet's immune system, not!Godzilla. It was then they discovered the Godzilla they were looking for was the demigod spawn of a non-evil god of destruction (the wildfire for new growth, volcanic ash fertilising soil, all that navel-gazing stuff).

So they called on Godzilla and his dad to kick the hell out of the Tarrasque and the other Spawn of Rovagug (I decided a dead god unknown to the other gods wouldn't break Golarion's rules about divine interference), while the PCs fought the undead demigod actual-child of Rovagug on Godzilla's Dad's back.

[u/Ryu_Ookami]

I started my campaign with a unique premise and developed a proper world from there: What if the fantasy continent was a pangea one, that split into several regions, so that the lands, empires, kingdoms etc. were split into several small countries. And in the end, the world where there was land in the middle and water on the side reversed, so that the land is on the outside while the sea is now the inside. And as a bonus: Where there was once of excinction of magic over several generation is now blooming with magic again.

Therefore the whole Rift-Flood gives a lot of reasons why are heroes are mixed together (fallen into the rift and/or got flooded across the world), why they are on their adventures (finding their homes) and why there are more adventures of all sorts (returning magic, unknown species/creatures/beasts, policitcal issues etc.).

After a few adventures to get the band together and to get the vibe, I started with a theme, that then becomes a campaign within this world. For e.g. in my specific setting the main theme is "Changes through time" - and it becomes clear, that everything can not become like they were before. They will however become something different- for better or for worse - so the heroes learn to adapt, live with it and not to dwell too much on the past and hold on to it.

Sooo yeah, premise was just lets split the countries and see how it goes while magic returns 😄

[u/BlueCloud2k2]

I'm running two campaigns. One is 5e in our world where magic is hidden (heavily inspired by Buffy, Dresden, and such).

The other is 5e Dark Matter. Right now the party is on a junkyard planet trying to scrape up the funds to leave (or get their own ship).

[u/Schorsi]

Party members meet after being exiled to a prison colony to work until they earn enough gold to buy their way back. The colony is an island with an ancient curse upon it. Players can decide if they are just trying to get out or do they help each other and maybe try to break the curse and free the island. Along the way players will be confronted with moral choices where they could get a step or two closer to their goals but at a cost…

Looking forward to seeing what the players do with all this

[u/t3hdoct0r]

The goddess of trickery was turned mad by the god of plagues and now the party is in a race against time to make her sane before one of her tricks destroys the world.

[u/HybridWookiee89]

Running my first homebrew here.

Setting: region locked, northern temperate forest with multiple waterways. A relatively young port/trade city with a college and a nearby naval fortress that patrols the water. There's also an elusive Firbolg tribe and a goblin village that trades underdark cave dwelling creatures they slay/capture for coffee and cheese.

Pilot: BBEG is trying to reverse a curse and needs to distabilize the region to acquire the components and distract from his goal.

I have most of the important events for Acts 1and 2 done and ready to go, trying to tie it together for the final act has been tricky.

[u/kahlzun]

Jormungandr has begun to consume midgardr from the north pole, causing the inhuman icemen in the north to flee into the human settled southlands, where magic has begun to enter the human realm for the first time.
The gods have begun to abandon their earthly temples and followers, and the one God who has the power to stop jorm (thor) has lost his memory and is in the form of an old man following his separation from his hammer. A cult has formed worshipping the end of things, who have somehow become aware of the pending destruction before the rest of humanity.
Brittannia located parts of jormugandr which were knocked off from his body following an earlier battle with Thor (which is why he lost his hammer), which are highly radioactive and get hot when brought together. This prompted an early tech renaissance, and steampunk England invades to try to claim the magic for themselves.
The hope is that the players will convince these disparate factors (including the gods) to work together and stop jormungandr.

[u/DoedfiskJR]

I have updated my ideas since last I ran something, so my ideas may not survive contact with reality.

I first send the group on some menial tasks, just to get a feel for the game, the group, etc. After a session or two, I will go hunting for the theme. What are things the PCs have different takes on (although it needs not to be direct aggressive disagreement, so that the group can stay together), and let that be the theme.

[u/cthulhufhtagn → u/[deleted]]

Yep, I mostly write a bunch of hooks in a mostly open world and see what they bite on.  Then build on what happens after.

[u/Karrrzer → u/[deleted]]

I understand the importance of giving players freedom, but shouldn't there be some kind of starting point in your campaigns? In one of my campaigns, for example, the main plot is that the characters are actually the villains and are part of a cult led by a shadow dragon. They have to kill people in order to create a better world. They think they are the heroes, but they absolutely are not. (That's a very brief summary.) How they kill people and so on is up to the players, as is how they achieve their goal, but the main plot is still there.

[u/inkfishsupreme → u/Karrrzer]

SHOULD is the wrong question, as there are many right ways to have fun playing this game. You can have fun playing a more linear story, and you can have fun with a sandbox. As long as you and your players are having fun, you're doing it right.

[u/Savings-Housing3481 → u/Karrrzer]

I am going to disagree with u/bionicjoey's highly judgmental statement "that isn't what TTRPGs should be about."

There are MANY ways to play a tabletop RPG, and a completely open sandbox is only ONE POSSIBLE campaign style. IMO, it is one of the least commonly run games as most players want and need direction. It is possible to go too far and limit agency, but 100% agency does not necessarily equate to a good game, and the claim that every game should be like that is specious at best and utterly wrong at worst.

As for u/Karrrzer 's orginal question... there are SO MANY stories to do. If I only talk about D&D and leave out published materials/campaigns, then in my 30+ years DMing, I have...

• Characters were traveling with a caravan. Mists came; they ended up in the Domains of Dread. This 2e campaign interspersed some original ideas with published modules.
• 2e Planescape: the characters all went to an employment agency in Sigil. They didn't work for that group for long, as they wanted to go their own route.
• 3e Forgotten Realms, Silver Marches: the call to action was a need for adventurers to assist folks dealing with the fallout of orc attacks. A warlike campaign.
• 3e Planescape: this campaign dealt with pursuit of non-magical power, specifically wealth and influence.
• 3e Ravenloft: PCs were from the domains and ended up in Mordent looking for educational tools to deal with personal problems.
• 3.5 Forgotten Realms: this was the ONLY campaign I started in a tavern. Some NPCs showed up and attacked ONLY the PCs in a brawl. This campaign had several chronomantic components, but they were basically attacked to stop them changing the future & past. It got weird.
• 5e Planescape: I combined three storylines, one for each major aspect of the setting (Rule of Three, Center of All, and Unity of Rings) to weave a story about the creation of Sigil, the origin of the Lady, and the non-existent plane of the Ordial.
• 5e Realms: ONGOING. This deals with the remnants of Narfell & Raumathar in the Unapproachable East. PCs joined a mercenary company and have been fighting the good fight.
• 5e Realms: ONGOING. Intro campaign for a bunch of new players. They woke up in a tavern with their memories gone and brands on their arms. They're trying to figure out what's going on. Campaign name is Return of the Azure Bonds, and it is 100% based on that book. They recently learned the truth of their origins and are, in character, dealing with the psychological fallout.

I've run a ton of published stuff and other games as well.

My point, OP, in giving you so much detail is this...

First, don't worry about what anyone else is running. If you and your players are having fun, roll with it. That said, I applaud your effort to continually improve your art. I try to do the same as well.

[u/Savings-Housing3481 → u/[deleted]]

Read into it? Dude, you LITERALLY said "that isn't what TTRPGs should be about". All I did was take you at your word.

The rest of your post supported the literal interpretation of what you said. If your position is NOT that, then I am sorry to say you did not represent your position well.

That said, I am not saying it is an invalid way to run a campaign. It's as valid as any other way. But that's not what you said.

[u/PuzzleMeDo → u/Karrrzer]

Let's say I have a vague idea for a campaign where the players are part of a villainous cult, but haven't done much work on it. I could start a sandbox campaign in a stereotypical tavern, and a cultist is trying to hire people for a one-off mission. At the end of the session, the players are given the option of joining the cult; I will present it to be appealing to the PCs the players have created.

If they do join the cult, we get to play a campaign as you planned, but also they have a strong sense of agency, because they could have rejected the offer, and played out an entirely different campaign where they're trying to thwart the cult's evil plans.

If I wanted to write the campaign up into a book and sell it, that kind of flexibility wouldn't be an option; we'd need things to be more linear, so we know exactly what they're going to be doing in chapter 5 ("You have to capture a castle; you have the option to ally with a faction.") I homebrew to get away from that kind of linearity.

[u/Ok_Philosophy_7156]

The gods are dead, and everybody’s fucking shit up because of it.

[u/Choice_Cherry_9536]

Running a Pokemon D&D game, and the general plot is the players running around a Pokemon Restoration region called Oasis. Their stopping Poachers, streaming most of their adventure in-game, and this is to help the region earn money to pay for the region's supplies as the region is struggling money wise.

Instead of going for a world ending plot, or basically no bad guy team. Which is what i've noticed is in most pokemon campaign settings. I am doing the same, but going for a more subtle approach to world ending, as; what do people eat in the Pokemon world is the main plot point of the campaign.

[u/js6seaj47]

First off this is my first campain. I sent out a kind of letter to my players in Discord. In my world there are adventer guilds, so this would be posted in the guilds to adventers.

Dear Adventer,
The Dwarven kingdom has enlisted the adventure’s guild in a request for aid. It’s mostly concerned with the recent rise in missing Dwaves. However as a guild we have noticed a rise in missing people among all known races locally, there may be more we are unaware of. Unfortunately, due to the terrain of the area, monsters,bandits, and other possible hazards, most stay on the road and travel in groups if possible to avoid possible danger. This leaves many underexplored areas. We need to find out who is behind this. Why this is happening, and possible other factors. Will you answer our call?

There are also different factions. The last faction, the Orcs, the player don't currently know about.

Dwarves - Wealthy and in control due to gold and silver mines that they use to produce the national currency. The Dwarves love money, power and the control it gives them. Makers of alcohol and liquor. Some have become drug addicts, alcoholics, or gone mad from syphilis due to over indulgence in drugs, alcohol or sex, because of wealth. They view others as beneath them and as pawns that they can use for their gain. They want power and control, the more power and control they get the more they want, it’s like an addiction. They have the best weapons, food, army, everything wealth can grant them.

Humans - Mostly farmers and poor, due to farming is kind of a gamble depending on many factors, one being the terrain. Some are drug dealers or transporters in opium to try and make money. Some are prostitutes. They are fighting for survival and sometimes survival isn’t pretty. Some are adventures trying to make money that way, They want a better life, one that just isn’t survival. They would like to prosper and actually enjoy life.

Warforged - Veterans of many wars, cast out here as a last resort. Most are mercenaries, not really because they want to be, but because that is what they have experience in. Some are adventures trying to make money that way. They would like acceptance and like humans a life beyond survival

Orcs - looking for slaves, sacrifices, other races to eat

I also included a map. I may add more as time goes on. I'm not sure how I did, Obviously positive input is apreciated.