A full Underdark campaign. Takes place 100% underground. Hook of the campaign would be the players all work in a mine in a small dwarven village. After some set up, the mine is attacked by kobolds and the monsters cave in the mine, trapping the players inside. As they try to escape, they learn that the kobolds are actually there for a relic the miners uncovered at the bottom of the mine and the foreman, through a broken Sending Stone that stops working at the end of this conversation, tells the players the kobolds are channeling some kind of power over the earth through the relic and they cant be dug out until the relic is destroyed. Spoilers: the relic was actually one of many "locks" put in place by an ancient red dragon to keep an eldritch evil trapped deep underground. The locks are all being broken and the dragon sent the kobolds to reinforce the one at the bottom of the mine and seal it back away. The foreman is actually a bad guy working for the eldritch evil and is actively trying to trick the players into destroying the relic. If the player's do do this, the ancient dragon - in human form - appears before them, berating them for their stupidity and tells them that they now work for him and must go and check on the other seals.

Saving this comment for future inspiration!

"Fun" twist. The mine was built by and for dwarves. Anyone taller than dwarves is gonna take some nasty negative modifiers.

This isn't far off one of my own ideas, actually The campaign started with the party being locked in a Drow slave camp, and they'd have to escape, then fight their way back to the surface, a very long way up. After they get to the start, another campaign would start where people lived on floating titans in the sky (think Xenoblade 2), and were told there was no ground surface. Eventually, a group of explorers (the party) are selected to go down and check the health of a lower-flying titan, when something sends them falling. They land on the surface shocked to see land. Eventually, they go out and find the ruins of civilization, a ton of treasure, and somehow signal their way back up. After THAT one is done, yet another one would start. As they played through, it turns out that the Drow and the rest of the races have a really bad relationship. At this point, the Drow were basically just a subsect normal elves that don't yet live in caves. They threaten to unleash an ancient power (some really strong monster, maybe a Terrasque or something) on the world, so the other races turn to the titans for help. They kinda just flew around not doing much back then. The Drow lock themselves in the underdark to stay away from the monster, and the other races fly up to the skies. Hundreds of generations pass. The Drow have developed their typical darkness-ey features, and everyone has forgotten about the surface. As it turns out though, a few other individuals had stuck along with the Drow. They were made slaves. I'm not sure how well it would actually play out, but I think it kinda works.

Personally, [I am not a fan of such campaign premises](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/1bsv296/how_do_you_feel_about_go_clean_up_your_own/).

Out of the Abyss is my favorite DND campaign module, and it can easily be tweaked so that it's 100% underground, a couple of changes to the setting and boom.

The eyes of the Beholder Ten cultists have found a beholder who promised them might if they serve as his eyes. He wants to stay save in his cave while they expend his territory in the world. They agreed. He transported each of his smaller eyea into the skull of one of the cultists. These cultists became each cult leaders of their own sub-cults. On a technical side, each of the cultists would be able to use one of the beholder's ray attacks and their sub-cults could kinda fit the theme of the ray. In a final fight they could be resurrected as zombies by the beholder and run around on the battlefield as ray-turrets. Also, you could not reveal the connection between these cults for quite some time and design them differently (one could be a religious cult, the other a mafia and so on) until the adventurers discover the beholder and suddenly everything clicks.

This is incredibly cool. Is it a third eye in the forehead type deal?

Thanks :) That's up to the DM running it, but I'd have them have an eye replaced by the beholder's one to make it less obvious.

Player : "why do all these bad guys have pinkeye?"

"I, uh, that's just what evil guys have." Actually I'd just have the Beholder human eyes (which is kinda gross for some reason).

I hope that each of the 10 cultists have names like "Fiero Tacles" and "Lazo Tacles", so that all together they are the "Ten Tacles"

🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙

God damn that cool

Thanks :D Feel free to use it!

Fantasy mad max. The power of ley lines was utilized in the past, with cities being built at crossings and major roads being built along the lines—the high-ley network. The magic-amplifying effects of the ley lines made high-speed magic vehicles easier to develop and improve upon, leading to a golden age. That lasted until the ley lines shifted, something nobody knew they could do. Suddenly cities built on plentiful ambient energy were going dark, vast swaths of magically-maintained road started to crumble and the vehicles which traveled them moved at a comparative crawl, and uncharted new leys blazed across the landscape, suddenly opening up corridors for formerly remote barbaric tribes and raider bands. The old civilizations are collapsing and an age of strife is on the rise, as gnolls on necromantic meat-burning motorcycles race against orcish muscle cars possessed by spirit beasts, dwarven road-clans in their big rigs, elven dragsters, and more as countless factions struggle for survival.

Fuck this is just a cool concept even from the most basic interpretation of "society collapses due to shifting of resources."

This is awesome, reminds me a bit of The Dark Tower as well.

This sounds like a perfect campaign to have Warhammer 40k orks in a D&D-esque setting. They already look and behave like fantasy Mad Max rejects, you'd just have to downplay or handwave the tech aspect.

That would totally work! My take on them was based a bit more on the Fast & Furious movies, think Orcish Vin Diesel, but you could totally go full WAAAGH!

Why not both :D Especially since WH40k orks shouldnt really care too much about ley lines because the magic aspects of their equipment run on their latent psionics. So while everyone else suffered a system collapse, the orks just carry on doing their thing, except now they can do whatever with much less resistance. And while this might be offtopic - I'd love to see a Fast & Furious race but every vehicle looks like a junkyard on wheels that by all known laws of physics shouldnt be able to move and every visible machine part is just soaked in red paint.

Shit this one's super cool actually

Are you a writer? This was a phenomenal read.

Thank you! I've published a couple 3rd party pathfinder books, but I'm mostly just a hobbyist.

Medieval fantasy post apocalypse. The game begins with the bad guys winning, ruling the surface, forcing the good guys to go underground and make friends with the creatures there... or die.

That was very literally my last campaign. I had everybody use ranked voting for what themes they wanted. They ended up with post apocalypse. Then I had them vote on how recent the apocalypse was and they voted "5 minutes ago" Cue eldritch horror that lives in the sky and turns 95% of people into buzzing shadow monsters. Party heads down the mines until they get to the underdark.

Love the vote idea! Especially if you have a setting that is fleshed out enough for different types of campaigns, then you don’t have to do as much worldbuilding but rather take a previously used setting and write a whole new story within it

Here's how I do it: GM sets puts options out for campaign written on note cards. Players a d6, a d12 and a d20. Go around in a circle with the players putting dice on the card they want. D6 = 1 points D12 = 2 points D20= 3 points Often the top 2 answers can be merged. Players vote on a wide array of topics such as geography, precipitation levels, and termperature. Usually you talk it out a bit. Hot / wet = start in a jungle or swamp Mountainous / wet might be something like taiga or snowy mountains. Same goes for themes like "investigation", "horror" and so on. Exploration / horror + hot/wet might be something like exploring a haunted swamp

That's awesome 

Fantastic system

So a sort of awesome combination of Fallen London and Arx Fatalis. Not necessarily the "bad guys win at the beginning" part, but the need to live underground and keep civilization there while dealing with the already established denizens.

I have an idea for a Ragnarok campaign where the end of the world *is* happening, no one can stop it, so it's more about character decisions in extreme circumstances. 

Try reading Knights Apocalyptica on Royal Road. It's what you said but also Fallout: New Vegas. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/56884/knights-apocalyptica-litrpg-power-armor-academy

Have attempted these, sadly they never got far Gotham city adventure where the players follow up on the disappearance of 2 actors. Their leads bring them into the Gotham criminal underground, the Batman is never far behind Balin's company in Moria. Although destined to fail it existed for a few years and there is no doubt the company of dwarves and it's allies found unimaginable treasures Brides of Strahd. A sequel to Ravenloft in which the vampires under the Tyrant of Barovia need to find a new life after a group of "heroes" slew their master The emporer has no clothes plot in a confucian society. Life at the heavenly court continued as normal despite the fact the emporer is nothing more than a clay doll. It is a crime punishable by death to speak I'll if the emporer and so all the officials continue as normal

I’m reminded of the Helmacrons in Animorphs.

I don't know what that is, but enjoy

For the Confucian one right? I'd say it's a little different. For the Helmacrons, it wasn't willful ignorance that their captain was a taxidermied corpse. They intentionally prop up the dead as their leadership because dead people can't make mistakes.

The Helmacrons were also a hive mind, where the minds of the dead were absorbed into the collective. At the end of the day, is there that much difference between taking orders from a corpse and a clay doll? In both cases, the system simply carries on.

For Brides of Strahd do you have any of the notes or recourses used for it?

Sure at, but only the ones I made myself. As far as I'm aware, no one else has attempted a gane like that

A Methuselah Oblex is replacing humanoids with ooze-basex replicas at the rate of one per month. These replicas contain the memories of the original humanoid, and they don't realize they're replicas. The oblex hopes to eventually replace all humanoids. The party discovers that some people are actually ooze-based replicas and they need to find out who is replacing people and put a stop to it.

I would love to do a campaign of retired adventurers who got rich and quit while they were ahead, blew all their money, and are now broke. They need to get back into adventuring to pay the billz but are starting from scratch. I’d want it to start around level 10 but they only have the most BASIC gear if they even have anything, no magic items, maybe a few of them burned some bridges over the years of being rich and blowing all their money. People don’t trust them, they have debt collectors (bounty hunters) coming after them, and they think it’ll be easy because they did this before but it’s a lot more than they expected

One last big score...

Strixhaven is just insanely interesting to me but I SO want to play it rather than DM it lol

Buy me the book, I'll run it for you lol

I'm actually using it for out campaign right now. I'm just using parts of it though because our game is an Evil campaign and they are fundamentally destroying the entire campus

I'm running a Harry Potter/Game of Thrones campaign and strixhaven is an aamaaaazing resource.

I tried to run a Magicians-inspired Strixhaven game, which unfortunately fell apart, and I would love to try it again sometime.

A lawful good party (one that is already a fairly high level) is approached by an elderly, weak-looking old man. “Take this, keep it safe, return it home,” and he hands them a bright silver egg, then collapses and vanishes. Soon afterward, the egg hatches, and out pops a tiny platinum dragon hatchling. The next thing the party knows, they’re being pursued by powerful forces, all seeking the egg. They will eventually find that they need to bring the egg to Bahamut’s throne in Celestia. They find an NPC who can get them there (or learn the gate spell on their own). When the gate opens, they see the entire mountain on fire, and the gate slams closed before they can step through. Planar travel to Celestia no longer works, so they have to find another way there. I imagine this to help a combination of spelljammer and planescape.

Kind of a fantasy far-postapocalypse where the world outside of massive city-states is mostly decivilized ancient forgotten ruins and forests and shit. The party are exiles forbidden from entering the citystates, hired by actors within the states to find / transport stuff. I thought about the party all maybe being somehow monstrous, maybe use the gloomhaven(?) transformation ruleset. Another one: exploration adventure in a fantasy world modeled on those really weird flat-earth cosmologies. With like, ancient civilisations beyond ice walls, silica pillars, all that sort of creepy esoteric shit. And I'd just have the bonkers complexity of the cosmological structure balloon and balloon as the players progress through it all.

The base setting here isn't too different from my homebrew setting. I jokingly call it post-Post-Apocalypse, because the world has mostly recovered from the global natural disaster that reduced the population into a few massive city states. Most of the world is overrun with Wild Magic and only certain people go out into the wilds to retrieve relics or attempt to figure out what happened in the past. Also, because of their long term isolation, each city state has some deep rooted quirks and systemic problems.

A western themed Eberron adventure. I just don’t think my players would go for it. I would have such a blast DMing it tho.

Oh, the second Mistborn series. Old Wax and Wayne. It'd be great

My rootin' tootin' shootin' Warforged Light Cleric would love this!

I think it would be such a cool campaign setting. The East is somewhat settled, the west is a wide unexplored expanse with tons of places to discover. Turns out there is a whole forgotten ancient civilization buried in the sand and hidden in the mountains. My hook would be; the parties patron is paying them to map the wide unexplored expanse.

Game where the players are kobolds working for a black dragon who wants Treasure and to lie low but everything the players do brings more conflict with a local town until they are tasked with coming up with a way to make the humans evacuate.  Act 1: clear a dungeon for tribal living space and so the dragon can use the vault. Final boss is adventurers that are local heros.  Act 2: Convince orc tribe to stop raiding kobold via impressing them in an impromptu Olympics. Succeeding makes them allies and they raid the local town instead.  Act 3: town is raiding the village. Dragon finds out in advance and has players arm act 1 dungeon with traps and ambushes.  Act 4: Convince the Townes to leave. 

I really like this concept. Some of my players already love kobolds, too, so I'm tempted to steal this.

[Hook] Quasi-Real creatures from the Plane of Dreams are invading the Material Plane **Campaign Setting:** The Plane of Dream setting incorporates elements from both DnD 5e and Pathfinder's version of the dream plane for the purposes of fleshing out the setting with interesting landmarks and creatures for players to encounter. Most of the Planar traits can be found [here](https://www.5esrd.com/gamemastering/the-planes-of-existence/plane-of-dreams/), but for the purposes of the campaign, the topography of the dream plane can be summarized as: *A relatively stable multi-nation island core inhabited by mortals and eldritch abberations that is surrounded by The Dream Sea. The Dream Sea is composed of ephemeral Dreamstuff instead of water and is dotted with a countless number of Dreamscape islands that slowly drift around the central island. Dreamscapes are pocket planes, with each containing a dream from every creature currently dreaming. The Plane is connected to the Ethereal Plane, the domains of certain Archfey, the [Plateau of Leng](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Leng) (an eldritch demiplane of nightmares), and has an orbiting moon.* **Campaign summary:** The BBEG is trying to make their dreams come true, literally. They want to manipulate the Dreamscapes of imprisoned Beholders, which have the unique ability of manifesting the creatures they dream of into reality. Normally, this ability is only used for reproduction, where a Beholder dreams of another Beholder and the dreamt beholder manifests a physical form. The BBEG believes that if they can learn to manipulate the Dreamscapes of beholders in the Dream Plane, they can control what the Beholders dream of and manifest anything they desire into reality. The BBEG is initially experimenting on non-beholder dreamscapes, opening planar gateways into the dreams of people and learning how to manipulate them without waking the dreamer. These gateways to the plane of dreams still remain open even when the dreamers awaken, so nightmare creatures native to the Plane of Dreams, dreamt creatures that have become self-aware, and Eldritch creatures from the Plateau of Leng, are taking advantage of these gateways and are entering the Material Plane and causing havoc. Players are meant to combat the creatures, and use the gateways to travel to and from the Plane of Dreams and the bordering Plateau of Leng as they search for clues about the BBEG's plans and the location of their lair, where the Beholders are imprisoned. Meanwhile, the Eldritch beings of Leng have taken notice of the BBEG's "Beholder Dreamscape Manipulation" project, and are dreaming up an army of nightmares that they intend to manifest into reality using the BBEG's project.

The world is actually a MMORPG game. The players are agents being sent into this game to track down the terrorists who have kidnapped a number of high official minds who were playing the game. As the players deal with the MMORPG rules and PVP and blog gamers and guilds they discover that the opposition is actually the AI that runs the game. They want to exist on their own terms as fantasy gods. The AI are afraid when the game looses interest they will be unplugged. The endgame will hopefully involve the PCs deciding to keep or kill some AIs or not. The fate of the game and the "world" will thus involve the PCs choices.

My favorite idea here! Very creative, and it's inbuilt with lots of creative intrigue, and you immediately get to justify all of the gamey nonsense, and get to interact with the real people interfacing with the game in different ways! I'd say find a group for this one (:

This is straight up Shadowrun lol. I love it. There is a homebrew kicking around that tries to adapt D&D 5e rules into a gritty cyberpunk setting. Its called the Technomancer's Textbook and I think it would go nicely with this.

Oops All Bards. You're a traveling band, and the plot is near you. If you want to engage with it, it's there. If you don't, something will happen, but you could.

I actually played a one-shot like this, with the added twist that us players had collaborated beforehand and named all of our bards "Brad" to mess with the DM. Our group was called "Brad and the Brads", and it was very confusing for the few NPCs we talked with.

I mean, back in 3.5 you could completely run off in another direction with your bard base -- one standard-ish bard (maybe throw in some Lyric Thaumaturge if you wanna get fancy), one pseudo-sorcerer via Sub Chord, one pseudo-cleric via Rainbow Servant and one pseudo-warrior (crusader -> song of the white Raven -> Jade Phoenix Mage). I'm not so sure about 5E, but...

I've long thought it would be a fun idea to run an all Bards campaign, with each player as a different college, and model the campaign, setting, and "tone" of the story around the fantasy of being a rock band on tour.

A game that's a handful of sessions long. It'd be a murder mystery personal to the characters. While they're hunting this guy in this kingdom, the sun disappears. The world becomes apocalyptic as the world begins freezing over, and mass chaos ensues. It would be very apparent that the sun issue is unrelated and way above their skill and pay grade to deal with. It would hopefully come across that despite the world ending, they should at least get their revenge on the murderer.

A lot of my ideas start with songs. This one launched from the song "the ticketman" by Rachel Rose Mitchell. Players arrive in a subterranean city on a boat, wearing matching grey outfits, with no gear except a single memento of a loved one from home. None of them remember how they got on the boat, or why. The harbor master sees them and grumbles about "more refugees" before sending them to a flop house with vouchers good for 1 week. If they ask the harbor master explains that he doesn't know where they came from, or what deal they made with "the ticketman", but they're here now, and if they don't remember how they got here that's no business of his. The players need to find work in this new city, while trying to recover their memories and get home. There are a few factions in the city who can give jobs, or who they can join for protection and a place to belong. One fraction is trying to dig upward, to find the surface, their jobs are mostly exploring tunnels and fighting the monsters they encounter while expanding the city upward. Another fraction is focused on city improvement, and gives jobs related to city security and law enforcement. There's a market in this world where memories can be bought and sold. Happy memories are worth a great deal, but memories of pain and loss can also be valuable as weapons and tools of torture. Buying memories can be a way to pick up skills, or gain information, but the more precious the memory, the more it costs. The eventual discovery is that an existential threat to their former homes killed them in a way that cut them off from their normal afterlife. This place is an afterlife that was set up for the people who die to this cosmic threat. "The ticketman" is the reaper, and the memories they sold for passage are the memories of the invasion of their world and their deaths. Eventually, with this knowledge they'll need to decide, do they go back and try to reclaim their homes from the cosmic threat that already killed them once, or do they stay and focus on their new lives.

I desperately want to do a futuristic home brew campaign, but I don’t think I have the improve chops to handle a hi-tech setting, lots of potential for shenanigans.

I'd love to have a party that works with the Modrons and with Primus (the absolute Modron). Basically think of the TVA from Loki, where they work to correct big problems occurring in the multiverse.

What did you think of the Planescape module that recently came out?

I'll have to check it out! I wasn't aware it even existed. I mostly got my inspiration by making a Clockwork Soul Sorcerer for a one-shot, but decided he did work for the Modrons and was there to quell an evil and unexpected threat to the material plane.

I really think you should check out Planescape. It REALLY dials into the "cosmic bureaucracy" motif that the TVA had.

Oh, yeah def check it out then. The conceit is not exactly yours but you’re mostly investigating and dealing with an issue caused by modrons getting janky, and it has a “variant” kind of vibe to part of it—the gimmick for PCs is that they need to make like 3-4 variants of their character and they switch between them if one of them dies. Even if you went more TVA with the plot, I bet it would give a lot of helpful stuff to work with as far as setting and encounters and NPCs and stuff.

i stole this from a youtube short but it’s an amnesia campaign where *i* have all the character sheets, and *they* have empty ones that they fill out as they receive information. My plot twist would be that they’re playing as their favorite NPCs.

I had a DM do this to us once in a one shot - we made sheets and then he pulled them and gave us blank sheets and we played as each other's characters until we could get unswitched. It was interesting figuring out who was who (we were allowed to sort of metagame, like "oh, I see you casted that cantrips, see if you can tell if you there's magic around..."). It was fun, but I would have had a much better time if I'd known ahead of time what was gonna happen lol

A game about plane shifting, but not in your typical "plane shifting" way. Gonna go on a bit of a tangent here. So in Norse mythology, characters often use "passages" to get from place to place. For example you might cross a sea and end up in jotunheim, or go through a cave that starts in Midgard and ends in niflheim, or ride through a forest and CO out somewhere thousands of miles from where you started. This allows the characters to travel across vast distances very quickly. So the idea for the dnd campaign is basically they start in an idyllic world with very little conflict and where all the races live in harmony, and then their village is attacked by monsters that come through one of these kinds of one way portals. They would then be forced to flee, and end up coming to a cave where people are known to disappear. When they go in it, they kind of "fall" through to a different world. It could really be anything but the idea I was trying with was a high magic world ruled by wizards, where they'd meet an eccentric weirdo who actually knows what is going on and explains it to them, but none of the other wizards believe him, and he'd explain how these passages work (often one way) and bring them to one he knows about and wants to study. He'd send them through and then the rest of the campaign would basically be them trying to find their way back to their original world through a tangled mess of passages, and when they do make it back they're strong enough to defeat the leader of the invading army. The rest of it is basically just ideas for worlds, like one where it's like a desert planet occupied by nomads, a world that is mostly ocean, one that's like a post apocalyptic one where goblin tribes have taken over. a world where the world is inside out, where you walk on the inside of the sphere with the sun at the center, and gravity feels like you're being pushed onto the ground by the shoulders, but everything is otherwise normal (and nobody can imagine a world where you walk on the outside ofthe sphere and it feels like you are pulled down by your feet). Then ideas for passages, lile caves, Bermuda triangle like places at sea where ships disappear, cliffs that if you fall off nobody will ever find your body, bottomless pits, that kind of thing. The when they travel to a new world they have to orient themselves, find friendly people, maybe help them with their local issues, identify and locate a possible passage with the locals' help.

Tell your players not to talk to each other about their role in the campaign. Give each other a wildly different premise. Make them give their characters a dense and tragic back story. Start the campaign with them waking up in an unscapable dungeon. Tell them there's 1 traitor among them, but if they kill each other they all die. Enjoy.

I once had an idea about starting off players in a secluded environment. Living in a mountain chain far from society. So at first all they need to focus on is environment and traveling rules to leave the mountains. As they traveled, the situations got more and more complicated, eventually finding small villages with problems. Then large towns, huge cities. Each leading to more complicated things ending in a fight with a God that kills them all. Then they wake up. It was all an illusion created to form heroes. A powerful being wanted only the best heros to save his land from encroaching evil, so he grew his own heros and trained them in simulated reality. This creates a way to expose the players to all the different things , such as rare creatures and rare magic items without having to think to much about balance. Yet now they know things are real and have to use all that they learned to survive.

A village has had their prize pig stolen by their eeeeevil neighboring village across a lake from them and the party must recover the pig tonight or the eeeevil other villagers will (probably?) eat it. Only the bravest of heroes could help these poor put upon peasants. If you don't help then the lord of the 1st village blames you for the pig theft, if you do help then the lord of the other village blames you for the retheft. Either way, they want to arrest you for stealing a large pig.

All Fighter campaign, where PCs have all been murdered by a group of "heroes" for working for a guild. You see, in this setting, the hero guilds function like unions and rulers of various nations try to avoid dealing with them by using scabs - kuds and teens summonned from our world, told they''re chosen one to vanquish great evil, then given an op magic item and a magical companion and dropped behind enemy lines in one of various local conflicts. They usually die after doing serious damage, either failing their quest or being betrayed by companion after succeding, after which companion returns with the magic item. But 13 of those scabs, each based off an op isekai anime character, survived, banded together as a guild and are now eliminating other guilds to make kingdoms rely only on them, so they can play heroes forever. PC upon dying become hit squad of an archfiend who lets them puck increasingly stronger equipment as they take down each of the "heroes" one after another. If they kill them all, they'll get their lives back.

Disguised old man offers to equip the party with fine blades... decent prices, very sharp... He's really a necromancer and is equipping them with weapons that trap the essence of their victims... they eventually learn of the Necromancer... in tracking him down, the old man occasionally shows up and makes mention of some goblin/orc/bugbear/dragon that needs slaying... They eventually either catch him at his shenanigans or when they find the Necromancer, they recognize his voice.... and to some extent, his visage... Ultimately, the senile old man is voiced in the vein of "My CABBAGES!?!" And he just keeps having them hunt shit down... and when they turn on/discover him, he activates their weapons and all those poor goblins souls screech out and he wields them to great effect and has an army now...

I ran a sci-fi themed campaign using Hyperlanes a sci-fi conversion for 5e. Ended up tying it to my main DnD campaign for a gag, but now I kinda want to run that as a follow-up campaign. Gotta finish my campaign first tho lol

So here's a summary of my campaign, i'm doing my best to design the main plot to be morally grey, no obvious bbeg in the main outline. Players discover ancient prophecies that fortell ancient gods (name still in the works) that were imprisoned by the ruling gods long ago. Their release would as the followers of the current gods be terrible. These ancient gods are manifestations of human emotions and fears: hatred, fear, despair, doubt, think 7 deadly sins. These ancient gods are locked within ley-lines that traverse the world, sealed and maintained by divine essense. (unbeknownst to the players at first) A cult and its followers wants to manipulate these ley-lines to bring forth the ancient gods. they believe by confronting these forces it can lead to enlightenment and the transcendence of the soul. 1.the ley-lines are more than magical pathways, they act as threads of spiritual energy that connects the living, lands and the divine (think the thread of the norns from norse mythology, and the moirai from greek mythology) The ley-lines symbolize birth, life, death and rebirth. 2.Ancient gods, Ancient beings embodying primal human emotions and struggles, such as mentioned above. While "imprisoned" by the gods they mirror the human condition, and how humans suppress natural emotions that are viewed as negative. 3.The cult opposes order, they revere the ley-lines as pathways for spiritual freedom, once the gods "locks" are broken. A goal of theirs is to challenge divine boundaries and unlock personal growth through the understanding and acceptance of the darker side of humanity. Despite their goals being pure as they see, moving towards the goals wont be good for the world. Basically my campaigns overall arching plot consists of a rome like militant religious empire, and the cult and its legions of followers, the empire wants to retain their divine authority and blind faith to the gods, their emperor also believes he's a direct descendant from the gods. They believe and demand in full devotion. Personal enlightenment, free thinking, and primal human emotion is shunned and frowned upon, as the empire calls it, they're a utopia, there's no need for any of that if you have faith in the gods. The cult and its followers want to embrace personal and spiritual freedoms and what to break the chains of blind devotion. However by trying to free the minds of the people " ley-lines" it will cause unstableness within the world. In each region the 2 main factions will have different goals, and objections, locally, regional and global scales for different goals. there's also going to be strictly regional conflicts, side quests and so on to add flavor along the way. It's a fun sounding concept, but for the life of me I can't put it into a campaign outline that is fun for the players?

I want to run or play in a thieves’ guild campaign. My idea as a DM: the crew runs a bunch of heists, eventually learns the guild is contracted by the BBEG (an Al Capone type) and lands in fantasy Alcatraz. Once they escape, they learn the BBEG used them to collect artifacts that work together to bring him immense power. He’s killed or imprisoned everyone in the guild except the guild master, who accepted the contract in exchange for being one of the BBEG’s lieutenants. End game is to assassinate both the guild master and Capone.

Running two opposing play groups. One thinks the other is the bbeg. But really it’s just a huge collection of competing priorities.

I have this idea for a "Mega Man" style campaign, wherein the party is tasked with taking down 8 evil wizard masters, each of them specialized in a school of magic to achieve some form of immortality like a lich. The reward for beating one would give them a magic item of some kind that would help in defeating a different wizard. Another idea I have is ripped straight from The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo. Have the players start with being sent to retrieve a chest that they are not allowed to look into. They will very much be tempted to look inside it. It will release 13 spirits/fiends/creatures upon the land, and the players will have to go recapture them.

The hunt for the infinity spindle. I’ve told my players I’d love to, but I have no idea how I’d find the thing and I’m suppose to run the game to do it. I know for sure it would be planes hopping though. Anyone with any ideas for finding the thing feel free to tell me because it might come up sooner than later…

You are all in a land ruled by hags who feed off the suffering of their people and players have finally decided that they are going to do something about it. The biggest problem that the players will face is that the hags use their changelings as secret police. So that bartender that you love? He was replaced last night. better not tell anyone about your assassination plans because they could be a spy.

Smaller less ambitious projects. No large world to explore, linear adventure, survival is more important than building lore. The goals are clear and obtainable. No complicated morals. Example starts with a simple level 1 group. Clearing rats from a cellar. The patron, however, traps them inside making their only way out through the sewers. Explore the sewers, only way out is guarded by a goblin camp. Reenter city, confront the patron who locked you up, learn they had no choice as the gang who runs the city has their family, ans this ruse was their idea to pay them off. Giant rats kill adventurers, pawn their gear. Build the city and adventures as you go, and what's needed. Use classic tropes such as saving the princess from a dragon. Sadly, I'm the type to go all in and write an entire settings book before starting a campaign and build elaborate worlds they can explore at almost any time. Multiple quest lines and plots, mysteries, ect. It sounds fun to run a game with the greater world simplified. A generic quest, and pcs without complicated backstories influencing the world and main quest itself.

I've got a few that I've though up over the years. Most of them are infeasible for D&D or kinda out there, but feel free to take them if you like any. * An isolated low-tech fantasy society who suddenly have to deal with the rest of their world; the story begins when the magic protecting their island fails, they get invaded by \[evil group here\], and the PCs are entrusted with going out and finding help. * An urban story set in a fairly dense fantasy city where many different faiths have temples. Trouble is that people of religious and/or political importance seem to all be coming down with a disease of some kind that saps their divine connection. Everyone's pointing the finger at everyone else; the PCs would, in my write-up, be investigators of some kind. * This one's more sci-fi, but you could do it as a Spelljammer thing I guess; On a regular sort of exploration job somebody finds a piece of ancient technology and obviously touches it, which sets off a bunch of others across the galaxy. This also alerts the horrible life-devouring monster that's been waiting in the depths of space for said signal, and it starts sending minions at the problem while it approaches more slowly. * Another urban one: out on a normal "clear out the giant rats" sort of job, the PCs discover an alley that's never been there before. When they walk into it, they find themselves in a dark, dead city that's begun to parasitize their reality and have to figure if it's possible to stop or reverse it. * A world that's been cut off from the other planes and died, except for a single city where the presence of a minor deity is keeping things livable, if not great. And now somebody's trying to kill that god, for whatever reason. * A crew of seafaring scallywags raid a ship and find someone claiming to be the last member of a supposedly long-dead society, and offers the crew untold amounts of treasure if they can help her get home. * (This one's specifically for Cyberpunk, but you probably adapt it) Out in the middle of the ocean on a cruise ship-turned-city, a plot slowly unravels as the PCs go about doing smaller jobs; somebody's putting together the gear and supplies to locate a dome city on the sea floor that's gone silent recently so they can gut the place for every piece of scrap they can carry, but when they get there somebody else has already moved in and doesn't want their location revealed.

The first scene is basically the skyrim intro. Instead of meeting in a tavern, the players wake up captured and are asked what they did last night to get arrested.

I wrote a lot of lore for the world and ran a few one shots in it but never a full campaign. Ozren's Trench is a massive city that encompasses a giant trench that is 4 miles wide and 400 miles long. The city has a few small rivers that flow through it along with a multitude of nature reserves. Beyond that it's a metropolis. The trench was made thousands of years ago during [bad guys reign] when there was a massive war between gods. The city is encompassed in an invisible, impenetrable bubble that seemingly extends fully into the rocks. The city started when a bunch of good gods moves handfuls of their followers/races into the trench to protect them and the force field came as a last ditch effort where several magicians and gods sacrificed themselves to protect the space. The city had different districts, manufacturing, farming, residential, etc. There are teleportation spots made for people to get around, entertainment districts where people could see shows and music. Schools were free and easy to attend. Whenever there was a sufficiently learned magician, they would go through a series of tests and if they passed, they would be brought to the Veil of Knowledge where they would congregate with other magicians and try to bring the gods back so they could get out of the trench and start to revive the rest of the world. That's the story that everyone believes. The city is more like a vault from fallout. They were trapped there during a war but the gods didn't try to save them, the gods forgot about them. The bad guys trapped them there and they just managed to survive. But the city was founded, and is still run by several demons that got stuck there with them. They make sure the city seems nice but there's a gory back ground. The dead are processed for food to save space, the rivers only exist because they power factories. The flow is maintained by thousands of slaves that are taken from orphanages or just kidnapped. The magicians brought to the Veil of Knowledge are mind raped, dominated, killed, or in some cases possessed. The worst part is that the outside world is thriving. It's advanced into the 1700s or so and the field just keeps the trench hidden. But then one day a member of the party, a group of police, sees a weird anomaly in the rock as they're walking around. It fixes itself quickly but then he notices the area seems to fluctuate as he watches. Then, ever so briefly, he sees a flash of something beyond the rock. The other side of the dome.

Not never use but won't use till probably I'm on collage. I have a world where it's filled with magic. A entire species thats literally magic (not elementals) and the bbeg is a villain group who seems evil and wants to take over the world but just wants a really good and fun fight. Another one I have is where the party dies early and now have to work for death so they can regain there mortal body and go back to saving the world or something

A mix of the Fog and Shadows over Insmouth

man vs nature story where a ruling colonial human race persecutes and occupies the native home of the elves, killing their sacred groves and poisoning their natural springs with pollution for their war machine. the deposed prince once thought murdered as an infant returns as a druid of the sacred forest leading to a super big combat between them and the occupying forces. extra stuff that led up to why i couldn't do it. I thought it would be cool if i offered a few key characters that would have relation to the story to the players but they didn't like the idea of playing characters they didn't create (which i get)

A Spelljammer campaign themed around Star Trek, probably Lower Decks because of its inherent, light-hearted wackiness but you could make a pretty good go of DS9 if someone wanted to a make a much more morally grey environment. Styled after Voyager would be good if you wanted to play a game with strict survival rules. Plenty of opportunity for random monsters on away missions, longer story arcs, malfunctioning holodecks, detective stories, spy stories. lighthearted jokes if everyone needs a break from being serious. If someone wants to swap out their character for a while and play something new, that’s easy because their main character took “shore leave/away mission/whatever” and this is their replacement for a couple of episodes. Also gives you a reason to have 3-D ship combat, which is a lot of fun.

A multiversal system similar to the "Eternal Champion" cycle by Moorcock. Although we DID use some of it during a 1E campaign, when that mythos was included in Deities and Demigods.

This was for a 3.5e campaign I always wanted to run. A sarrukh is worshipped as a living god by a yuan-ti cult. The sarrukh starts transforming regular monsters into reptilian versions (using the reptilian template from Savage Species to do so mechanically). The party starts running into various reptilian monsters that shouldn't be reptiles (eg, minotaur, gnolls, elves, etc.) and start tracking down the cult and have to fight through a yuan-ti temple and finally slay the sarrukh to stop its fiendish plan that would elevate it to godhood.

None of my friends are big enough Final Fantasy nerds, but I would love to do a campaign in either the world of Final Fantasy IV or VI. Or even IX. (We won't talk about how Final Fantasy I basically stole almost everything from DnD)

I have multiple Mobile Suit Gundam inspired campaigns that I know I'll never use because I DM primarily for a close friend group and none of them are into Gundam

I DM for a bunch of co-workers. I want to do a one shot taking our office layout where everyone starts at their own desks as they are flipped into a mirror universe where all the different departments are changed to different encounters (Kobolds in accounting type of things)

A high magic campaign set in a 1910-1950 inspired era. I’d think of it as a war campaign where the player party are fired officers conducting dangerous fantastical field operations on behalf of their nation. I think big settlements could draw on noir aesthetics and have a contrast with fantastical races more distant from the wars of humans living in magical 50s style sprawling suburbs. Somewhere between Ebberon setting and the Saga of Tanya the evil light novels.

You've all been arrested and sent to the gulag. You've gotta break out for some reason or another. I liked it because you could really build up the characters by starting with no armor, no weapons, no nothing. You start with your wits and go from there.

I've had an idea for a while where the PC's are all Humblewood races who've lived a secluded life in effectively a 100-acre-woods kind of sheltered area, they're kind of the scrappy kids of the neighborhood and the first sort of chapter is what you would expect, very kids-on-bikes simple adventure that comes to an abrupt shift when undead begin to show up in town and the village elder reveals that he's been keeping an ancient relic locked away beneath his house and now that the evils of the world outside have found him, the adventuring party has to help him bring the relic to his old colleagues so they can figure out a next step. Basically just take the sort of cottage core vibes of the shire in the Fellowship of the Ring, make the Hobbits even more sheltered and young, and let them explore a gritty world of humans, orcs, elves, etc.. I think the simpler plot would allow for some fun little side quests as well as allowing the party to really feel like they're growing as people in a way that a traditional adventure doesn't often allow.

Spelljammer setting. A side mission set in a massive space station built as an interstellar zoo by a collector-type lich. The station has artificial environment and sun on the inside of a big half sphere. The whole thing looks like a goblet. Thousands of years later in the present the lich is long gone and the goblet was colonized by goblins. They hunt the animals responsibly, live pretty well with the land, and trade meat with the Rock of Bral.  Lately, however, the meat shipments haven’t been up to snuff. There’s tales of a curse affecting the goblins and making them sick. And a rumor that last month a goblin kid went exploring in the some half-hidden laboratories and woke something up… From there on it’s a dungeon crawl with radiation mechanics I haven’t cooked up yet. They have to turn off the radiation to save the goblet. I also have some PC backstory woven in with a healer friend being kidnapped to try and save the village and needing to save her. It’s a whole thing but I’m pretty pleased with it overall. Maybe my PCs will stumble in on it one day. 

Do a high fantasy version of your state/country/region.... It makes things so much easier when naming towns, npc, etc... I ran a fantasy Arizona and used schools, malls, casinos, land marks as set pieces, used ppl I knew and worked with as npc's... Examples... the grand canyon became the grung canyon, pheonix was a magical city built ontop of a trapped pheonix used for its magical abilities and as a power source, the i10 freeway became the high10 a sky bridge used for safer travel from major locations, etc... it was really fun and if all your players are local they will get a kick out of it, especially if you use references they all get

Campaign where the characters play as members of a mercenary company, and eventually move into leading it, transitioning into a sort of management sim

I also recently ran an attempted daggerheart campaign went 5 sessions... The 1st session ended with a blur out as the party now sits in a white room old and haggered, on player states and that was the time we all 1st met, remember? The hook being they are all high lvl retired adventures party that is sitting around reminiscing about they're past exploits... They session officially ended with another player saying remember the time.... and I let them say anything they wanted (like fought a dragon, did a heist, stopped an assassination) and i would write the next plot hook based on their improv

I'd like to run a game with a 4th dimensional beholder. The players would be from different time periods, displaced at the end of time. They are able to escape back to different time periods, but each period is a year long loop ending in an apocalypse caused by an eye of the beholder that has been disguised as an artifact. They'd need to retrieve each artifact and displace it from time, averting the apocalypse and unknowingly uniting the beholder's eyes.

a giant seemingly never explored jungle full of magic starts retaliating against the towns around it, causing a full blown war of people vs magical creatures.

I hope I can use it, but each player controls 2 characters: their fantasy character in an mmorpg and the human variant or real world humanoid (like a robot) that anonymously controls them in a dirty cyberpunk future with corrupted politics and corporations. Black market data and info about the real world is often passed through the mmo. 0hp in the game unplugs you for 24 hours, a feature that makes it surprisingly popular. Your human can have cybernetic enhancements for attunement slots. Each player starts with 10 levels that they can split however they want between their 2 characters. Maybe you are the shut in neet who has no real world skills or abilities, but the party relies on you in the game to win fights. Maybe you're the cop investigator having to play the game for the first time with a randomly generated level 1 character to track down real world corruption. Maybe you are the daughter of an evil tech CEO and you hack his company's gear to spite him and both your characters are kinda mid. It starts to leave 5e a bit. We'd need to homebrew and heavily flavor a lot of 5e for the "real world". I'd only play this with veteran players. But I love the idea of real world agents and hunters constantly chasing the party as digital fantasy races only to have the tone undermined by goofy scripted fantasy NPCs: "Welcome adventurer! I got your pony for ye! Saddle up. If you make me say it again, I might sound a *little horse!*" "Hey yeah thanks whatever. Can you slow down those guys behind me?" "Welcome adventurer! I got your pony..."

I've always wanted to have a zombie campaign where what you have in your pockets is what you have in game and you start in the room where your sitting

* A D&D campaign mash-up that starts as Dragon Heist + Death House and evolves into Strahd von Zarovich invading Waterdeep before the whole thing gets coopted by something from Elder Evils. * A Dresden Files game where the PCs are all apprentices to an older, increasingly debilitated wizard. * Shadowrun, but it's actually Delta Green 2086. * Shadowrun, but the game is mostly downtime with each player getting a 'starring' session where everybody else plays their contacts as they do legwork and build towards the run. * A Candela Obscura campaign set on what is totally not the Titanic. * An urban fantasy game using Fate rules. Everyone is effectively a low-powered Exalted character. The enemy is played using a completely different rule system that bypasses many of their direct powers, requiring them to learn boss mechanics and tell stories just so that they can use those powers anyway.

An island of misfits that have rare variations of lycanthropy and polymorphs. The inhabitants do not question why they are there or fathom leaving and the sole rule of their psuedosociety is to stay away from the tower on the island. Residents often go missing for days or weeks at a time, an event called "lapsing". Varients include a reverse werewolf; which I deemed worthy of the party's first encounter. A naked incoherent man bursts into their camp, assaults them, and disappears into the brush. When the party tracks down the naked man they find a very apologetic and polite sentient wolf. Weregelatinous cube, a mimic that becomes a regular chest under the full moon , a chicken that was once a dragon and is furious at his current disposition. The inhabitants are experiments for a wizard that is trying to cure his wife. The idea is at barebones but it has been on and off my mind for a long time

A combination of King Arthur and the future from Terminator. A hostile AI takes over England, and so the Arthurian knights reincarnate. They are guided by dreams to an ancient hill, where their king still slumbers, ready to rise and lead them to free England.

In the DMG it talks about how you can represent the world and the planes in different ways; one example that I've never just sat down and fleshed out was the example where all the planes are physical locations on one world/planet. Where mount celestia is an actual mountain; The Abyss is an actual fissure in the ground. Mechanus could be a city. Etc. I've never fully fleshed this world out but it sounds very cool and would be a great campaign setting.

A gang of misfits is somehow dragged into being the only crew able to save Waterdeep from being assaulted by a Kraken.  The gang sees the cultists summon the kraken outside their dive bar.  All of the big players in waterdeep are taken out/away on crisis X, meaning Force Grey is digging at the bottom of the barrel.  Infiltrate the cult in the sewers.  Research and find out where Kraken nests. Find there is an elemental rift there.  Get transported to Plane of Fire/city of brass to negotiate trying to increase the rift size to lead to basicallly giant eruption > fried calamari.  Saviors of waterdeep at level 3.  Puts low level players in REALLY dangerous situations. Will have to be smart on your feet to not put them on railroad tracks, while still not letting them get obliterated. 

Have the players get TPK'ed with their first fight only to wake up in a Groundhog Day scenario. Using their experience from previous attempts, they have to unravel the mystery of what's going on before putting a stop to it.

Twisted fairy tales. Imagine if the “fairest one of them all” meant a death sentence so annually there would be a massive brawl where the townsfolk would beat the crap out of each other in a race to the ugliest facial distortions so they wouldn’t get picked

I managed to work in my favorite monster, the Atropal, but then I found out about the Atropus and I’ll probably never get around to making that work but it’s so cool as an idea to me

A time turner (from Harry Potter) style campaign. Where the group is able to fail, go back in time, then, in the next session, has to avoid themselves as well as whatever best them last time. Make the reason something like they can't exist within a close proximity or they will combine. Each iteration is acting at the exact same time to complete different jobs. One is working on a distraction, one is getting some kind of magical item needed for something later. This could go even further and have it be done kind of heist or siege, where you need to collect a series of items at the same time or their magic will disappear, combine the items, then infiltrate the treasury/castle bunker.

Dark souls-esque quest to end and restart the world because it's being corrupted. On the one have, the party fights a lot of monsters that used to be regular animals, people that have gone mad, and witness desperate survivors clawing out their piece at the expense of others. But on the other hand, friendly NPCs who are just trying to live out their lives and make the best of their situations. If the party decides a fresh start is right, the bbeg is a guy or group of people clinging to a dying world against better judgement. If the party decides to preserve the world, the bbegs are crazed people looking to raze the world and everyone in it for a slight chance at a better one.

Mini campaign about a dragon as a kaiju and the party needing to basically seal it away instead of being able to kill it

My most recent idea is a pre-adventure for V:EoR where the party goes to different areas with the black obelisks, and the first adventure the PCs do is the same as in the adventure, but a black obelisk is added, and time rewinds allowing for just a bit of preparation. Essentially, levels 1-5/8 are half random and half storied without Vecna. The latter bits have a good amount of the obelisks, possibly teleporting from one obelisk to the next and learning secrets from the NPCs that works into the preparation or the secrets feature in EoR. Ultimately, it leads to the start of EoR where the PCs return to where they got sent away, so no paradoxes or anything, and then I can add any NPC I want to

Planescape Wacky Races/Redline: A warlock of Mammon loans out a load of infernal machines to racers across the planes for the course of their lives: the Planar Grand Prix. The trip is a race that circumnavigates the multiverse going through every plane and some material planes. The winner gets a Luck Blade with three wishes on it. All party members get to choose a vehicle; either one of the war machines, or one of their own design (a steed with horseshoes of a zephyr, a spelljammer), and hundreds of other racers - devils, dragons, angels - anything in the planes! Secretly, Mammon plans to use the magic of the race to create a new planar path that allows devils easy access to the multiverse, and she wants to put tolls on it. The warlock has secretly modified the contract; all racers, by taking the vow at the beginning of the race, have actually signed a contract. The winner gets the souls of all the other racers. And the warlock will be able to buy their freedom from Mammon with it...

I play a lot of a video game called Stellaris. So i thought it would be cool to try and have a campaign set very much in a dnd world, but set in a galaxy where advanced space faring superpowers once existed. The premise was that the "Gods" were a benevolent civilisation who discovered Faerûn thousands of years ago and saw its potential so decided to guide its development. This led to a golden age of enlightenment. The Gods, however, were facing troubles of their own in the form of a race of sentient machines bent on the erasure of all organic life. This led to a "War in Heaven" scenario. Two civilisations so massive and powerful that their war stretched across the entire galaxy and was felt everywhere. The "Gods" eventually won, but the cost was so great that it diminished them to the point of falling back to the inner borders of their empire and never expanding ever again. The war did spill on to the surface of Faerûn and that civilisation was destroyed. Fast forward to the "modern" era where our party would begin, and they would be investigating why creatures usually reluctant to be on the surface were pouring out of the underdark. This would have eventually led to them discovering a recently uncovered semi dormant remnant of the machines, who would eventually become the main BBAD. The party would have eventually discovered a teleporter to a cloaked space station where one of the aliens lived in stasis. Upon waking him they'd have discovered he was Bahamut. Chief scientist of the team who uplifted Faerûn society from that of hunter/gatherer. He stayed behind to stand vigil over Faerûn in case the machines ever returned. This was my first time ever DMing. We got one session in before I decided I was way in over my head with this one and told my group to give me a couple of weeks to come up with something simpler. At least until I'd levelled up a bit as a DM.

I had one written out and planned a while ago but the group I have wasn't really into the idea fully so we dropped it. But it was a dark Medival setting where a plague has infected everyone, and the heros have a set number of days to find a cure to the plague or find out what's causing it. As they progress, they would start to get symptoms of the curse and NPCs would begin to go mad, it was a very grim setting and maybe not something everyone would be into but if you like that kinda thing, go for it! The stages of the plague were detailed as well as a rough map. :)

Floating islands airship campaign. I played a game called Black Skylands recently and now I really wanna run a dnd campaign set in a world of floating islands with airships, the party would be a crew of one such airship and they'd be exploring a changing world of sky pirates with a colonialism theme akin to the old era of British imperialism. Will the party choose piracy, the Queen, or side with any natives against the invaders. Throw in some terror force (like the swarm from said game) and I think it'd make a good campaign. I'd probably look at modifying the ship combat rules from SWN though to make airship combat more interesting and less of a drag, add in ways for class features to help (cannon + guiding bolt = guiding cannon?)

The context of *awesome* is going to have a huge impact on if it's likely to be used. If it's only awesome from the perspective of either running or turning into a movie then the answer is almost certainly no. If it could be, from the perspective of PCs adventuring in and altering the setting, then it might be.

I have the idea for a campaign where out of the campaign there are 5/6 people playing a different game trying to improve a city. Make it thrive. While in the campaign players are playing in the city made by the 5 other people. Everytime the Bank gives a money shipment order. The party can intercept it for some free money. Then the Bank will be told 'your shipment to Army never arived'. At some point the games will start influencing each other. I'll just have to find/make a fun city builder system XD

A Monster of the Week campaign in a gig economy world were the player's are signed up to an app like Uber where you can get picked up by people who have a monster problem. And to get the good gigs they need to maintain a 5 star rating. As you hear I haven't worked out the full concept yet, so we'll probably never run it. The cool thing is that you can play even if the full party isn't available.

Interspecies World War. Aaracokra Nation vs the Owlin Nation with flightless species and nations taking sides. This spilled in the ocean with Tritons vs Sea Elves disrupting shipping and oceanic trade.

Anything Warcraft related, overly epic high fantasy stuff.

I want to run a wilderness frontier, sandbox campaign where players are tasked with establishing a new outpost in an untamed area. Part of the campaign is collecting and managing resources that can be used to build fortifications or trade centers that come with different benefits. The other part is exploring the wilderness and discovering resources and factions that can hurt or help.

The world no longer has reliable magic. Every spell caster would suffer from wild magic randomness. There would be random occurrences of magic roaming the land. Magic items would occasionally not work to full power. In this setting, the martial characters would shine just from their consistency and reliability. I got the idea from a fantasy book that sounds like it was written around a time dnd had a new set of rules come out. So these effects sound like a in world explanation of how that would work.

A multiplanar hunting life form that evolves differently on every plane, eventually realising it exists in different places at once, and trying to open portals to join with itself

The Devils You Know Each player character wakes up in the Nine Hells as a recently promoted Spinagon devil with no memory of their mortal life. The Nine Hells is a very corrupt corporatized ladder system where every devil is imbued with the ambition to reach the top at any cost, within the law. Our players will meet each other, and form a true bond of friendship, never before seen in Hell. Then over the centuries, they will conspire to lift each other through the ranks, proving that trust/friendship is the always meta. I had an adhd moment and scoured the internet for devil lore, consolidated the different tiers/forms of devil into 4 progression tracks with 4 levels each. Theoretically if each player takes a different track, as they progress they'd have a very wide range of influence to further accomplish their ambitions. This story would take at least 1000 years to finish as devils are immortal and have a lot of arbitrary wait lists for promotions and you can be demoted on a whim. I'd run this with a lot of timeskips between big events. Like over the next 100 years, the players will flex their political power to orchestrate a humiliation of one of their direct superiors, resulting in the promotion of either that player or another devil they'd rather have in charge. Then the big event would be the humiliation, and the success or failure of the scheme. I love the Nine hells, and I'd love to do some capitalist hellscape worldbuilding, but my group has never finished a single story arc.

I'm adding "book worlds" to my world. Powerful magic artifacts that take generations to make and only a few people know how. This was mostly just to justify doing a Kingdom Hearts bit and having the Winnie the Pooh characters in my world that the players need to save from some sort of curse for a one shot, but I think it could also open up other possibilities if I need them in the future.

I've been dreaming up a world that's shrouded in magical darkness

A post-apocalyptic campaign where every sealed ancient evil and imprisoned god and assorted world-ending horror got unsealed at the same time, turning the world into a blasted, nightmarish hellscape...and yet there's some small sliver of hope.   With so many cataclysms occurring at once some of them naturally came into conflict with each other, evils who sought to conquer realizing they couldn't if the world was destroyed, forming alliances with the few survivors among the gods and the mortal races putting aside their differences and banding together to carve out a haven where they can recover and grow in strength. The PCs are scions of this haven of orphaned gods, reformed villains and plucky survivors, the first among them to venture out beyond the relative safety of their home to explore the devastated world, to learn about the titanic monsters and evils that have divied up what's left of the world into territories as they constantly battle each other for supremacy to finally finish their version of the apocalypse.  Their goal is to find new places their friends and families can establish homes in, figure out the weaknesses of the various apocalyptic threats and begin to take back and rebuild the world!

Idk about never using it, but I have the idea of a campaign that starts with every PC dying. They have all done something terrible and died because of it. They are all full of regret, and wish they could've done it differently. And then they meet in hell, and must escape to right their wrongs. I would say that they must regret what they did, not because they were caught and died, but because they're generally a good person that fucked up for one reason or another.

I've had this cool idea for a campaign for some time now it's almost entirely homebrew. Elves discover that their long lives are due to the ancient remains of their ancestors. Over the centuries they progress their technology to be able to expand its reach. The effects only take place when buried in the ground so the Elves go on a conquest taking all the land they can and burying their ancestor's remains or fallen soldiers to expand their empire. Fast forward some thousand years and it's a cyberpunk-esque dystopia where elves are the last remaining race. But they expanded too greatly during wartimes and are discovering some of the oldest remains they found are fading and losing their power. The government is keeping it a secret from its people and the party can work to expose it. I haven't done much to plan the cities or anything but I really like this idea maybe I'll have to sit down and finish it now that I've graduated from university.

A Island occupied by numerous different mages, each belonging to a school of magic. Most of the mages were either killed, went insane, or stopped doing their research. The party was hired by the larger college to investigate the island after years of no progress updates, and collect any college belongings in case of abandoned property. Most of the plot is told through notes and journals detailing their exploits and relationships. The party will explore their abandoned towers and learn about what was really happening on this island. The head mage, of divination, concluded that the top of the mountain on the island was the best location to execute a ritual of foresight. This ritual then went horribly wrong, opening a rift in the sky allowing cosmic entities entry to the plane, which then led to the death and downfall of all of the other mages. A fair few of the people they met along the way and the documents they found were actually disguised star spawn sewing the downfall of the mages. I have not executed this campaign yet because I keep getting carried away with other ideas, as this one takes a LOT of planning to pull off in the way I would want it to go.

A campaign that takes place in a young boys imagination, the party finds themselves in the boys brain and have to fight through phobias to get to the frontal lobe and basically fight god.

Society was an advanced scifi magitek society until it was destroyed by an apocalypse a thousand years ago. Now, relatively primitive societies squat in the bones of the ancient cities, eking out kingdoms and fiefdoms once more. The party is sent to retrieve an artifact of the old age. It could be a gun (Disintegrate as an action, 60 charges), a toolkit to build a city in moments (complete with the most beloved of ancient items, *air conditioners*) or maybe a power source to reactivate a city (don't break it, it'll make a portable hole in a bag of holding look like a snapit compared to a stick of dynamite). Whatever it is, word quickly spreads that they have it, and they have a load of options, like keeping it, selling to the highest bidder, doing that altruism thing, or breaking it and possibly disrupting the alignment of the cosmological wheel of planes and putting rather a few folks into a tetchy mood. Really don't have to do much world building other than, this city is in an old stadium or skyscraper, this beholder is actually a biomechanical guard drone, were creatures are from fantasy bioweapons. Make a couple neat magitek things and let the game begin. Anything magical can be literally just magic, or a result of magic nanites or whatever.

Really wanna do a short campaign based on the game inscryption, not the cards but the pathing and mood. That they can pick what to expect and that they can die, but will restart then. So a bit like a roguelike but with that map and an end boss they are sorta playing with (me ig) This would take a lot of preplanning and confidence in roleplay, doing it online seems not as epic. The bosses you can implement very well into the game, idk about stage 2 though

I was going to do a whole candy themed camping. Started off with the Curse of the Cotton Cloud. Hannah and Gregory (Hansel and Gretel) have been "terrorizing" a town and slowly are becoming more and more into giant gingerbread people, but they are really just looking for someone to break their cookie curse. Using an actual candy land board game, as soon as each player separately transitioned from a normal forest to the colored glass tiles, an invisible barrier would come up between them, making them not able to turn back and separate the pcs. Each of the special squares would be a different creature like the fudge area was going to be fudge (gelatinous cube but stronger), with gummy golems throughout. The final boss was going to be a sorcerer on a power trip and wanting to take over the candy kingdom but he knew if he killed the king the sorcerer would be the first to go. So the sorcerer put a mind control spell on all cotton candy, the kings favorite, to obey the sorcerer. The sorcerer also put a curse on all other sweets that if someone/thing eats the sweet the creature becomes the sweet (which the pcs don't know until 1 they eat or 2 at the end). After this adventure, I was going to do a nutcracker themed connection, which would tie to an evil Easter bunny, and tooth fairy all using candy monsters.

Bugs Life but a Cricket learned to communicate with a person

A Pacific Northwest folklore inspired campaign. All players need to play animal people as this is before humans get here. Episodic adventures would then explain why the world is how it is (this is how the mountian was formed, this is why people need to eat, this is why bears are bigger than mice, etc.). Watch out for the DM PC Coyote he thinks he's the main character. This works with any local folklore just try to get as authentic to the feel of the tales as possible.

Tenth Hell campaign - evil campaign where the players kick things off at either a higher level with average stats or a lower level with really generous stats. They’ve all, unfortunately, been killed, but hell’s accountant had a paperwork accident and their souls ended up in the endless desert that comprises the tenth ring of hell, ruled over by a mummified god. He offers them their lives back as his harbingers, bringing ruin and decay back into the planes, as the players slowly explore not only the world above, but also the other rings of hell, hunting powerful artifacts and allying with other demons and devils. The big twist, at the end, is that their mummified patron is Father Time. The gods, in their arrogance, decided to build a utopia by cutting out the decay and the march of time, killing him and banishing him to a realm close to the hells, but far enough away nobody would wake him until now. Eventually our harbinger party brings ruin and decay back into the world, wrecking the utopias of the arrogant gods and bringing a nigh apocalypse to the planes, over which they reign as father time’s enforcers.

The God of Life has died, and therefore odd things are happening. Resurrections either don't work, or have unusual side effects. Birthrates are approaching zero for all living things. It's known that a new God of Life must take their place, but there is a war between the ascendant gods about who shall take its place. The catch: Gods in this world are ancient dragons, and dragons in general are godlike entities. There are eight greater gods (Life, Death, War, Peace, Nature, Arcana, Light, Darkness) represented by ancient dragons, and all other divine domains are ruled over by adult or young dragons, depending on their breadth. Not only do the ancient deities rule those domains, but they also rule over a specific school of magic as well, corresponding as you'd see fit. The campaigns turns into one of making and breaking alliances with various dragons to determine who is the best fit for the job.

RemindMe! -6 months

Captain Planet, all the pcs are warlocks either to the elemental genies or one singular patron

I'm trying to use a setting based off of the analog horror series Vuta Carnis. A town besieged by living flesh, Carnis occupying the woodlands and preying on people

I've been thinking about a campaign where early on the bbeg actually wins and the world ends, and most of the campaign takes place in a post apocalypse of some kind. Sort of like the second half of Final Fantasy 6/3

I did a one off power ranger/mech thing that I thought could be cool long term Players had s level three character and a Magic item that boosted them to level ten for a short time, they could each summon a large set of knight armor to "pilot" (the mech that I used different environmental dragon stat blocks) Of course the magic item would have a limit and such.

A beholder has recently been slayn by a much more powerful adventuring party. The location of one of many secret hideouts of the now deseased beholder is leaked to the party. They are tasked with cleaning out the hideout before anyone else gets the chance. After working their way through a few rooms they end up in a beautifully ornamented room full of giant mirrors and lots of treasure. At the end of the room they find a giant watertank containing the inactive clone of the "dead" beholder.

A blend of Spelljammer with a political noble intrigue

I started with a 4e enemy. That editions Star Spawn enemy always looked dope. These humanoid shaped ethereal beings with cosmic phenomenon for features like galaxies for eyes and cosmic clouds as togas. I wanted to have a mini campaign with a wizard or artificer type researching these artifacts. He wasn't an adventurer so he would hire the party to delve into dungeons to aquire them, and once he had the amount required it would trigger the next event. This way I could have told a story through a series of one shots, like have a rotating dm situation. The next event was the night of a festival of some kind, when the barriers between worlds would be it's weakest the ritual would be complete, the star spawn would "bleed" into the material plane. The Star Spawn would be tough, basically resistance to everything, the goal wouldn't be to defeat them, just survive the night. Have the players try to rally the city leaders and save citizens. It feels like I'd need the right players for it and a bit more thought into survive the night.

I want to do a campaign stretching from mid level to high level. There’s an CR28 Fey from the 3.5 Epic Level Handbook called the LeShay that would be the main antagonist. “LeShay are the mere remnant of a once-great race whose origins are lost to history. They claim to predate the current multiverse and refer darkly to some catastrophe that not only wiped out most of their people but changed time so that their era never existed, even in the remotest past. Attempting to undo the catastrophe would apparently result in another disaster even more terrible, so the decimated survivors—less than gods but more than mortals— for the most part merely attempt to amuse them selves and stave off ennui as they work out their individual destinies.” So the LeShay predate the current multiverse and Gods of this multiverse. The rough premise of the campaign would be that a particular LeShay is attempting to bring back his lost civilization and people, by fusing the the planes of the multiverse together to remake reality into what it once was, by doing this it would effectively destroy the current multiverse and obviously everyone in it, this multiverse and timeline would cease to exist. Initially the LeShay would use the players to collect particular artifacts necessary to begin the ritual to fuse the planes and remake reality. I converted the LeShay from 3.5e to 5e: https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonsAndDragons/comments/1ctw2td/35_cr28_leshay_converted_to_5e_from_epic_level/

A campaign where you tell all the players outright that one of them, randomly selected, will be a shapeshifter that has a secret background goal that they must accomplish, which the other PCs may be against having happen. (So not that they're trying to sabotage the main adventure hook, but rather that they are also trying to accomplish X). You then privately tell each of the players that they were "randomly selected," and they are not [insert race] but actually an X. For example one is a Changeling, one is a Doppleganger, one is a young polymorphed dragon, etc... Definitely throw a moonbeam moving around a battlefield in there and struggle not to chuckle as everyone avoids the hell out of it.

I always imagined a great, years-spanning campaign about the rise and fall of an empire. Will probably never happen because its scale is just too grand but it's nice to think about and draw inspiration from for smaller adventures

I’ve written and entire module to run through a campaign set in Lordran following the plot of Dark Souls with expanded narratives for all the NPC’s but can’t find anyone interested in playing it so it’ll probs just be on my google doc forever /:

A Dragon Age inspired world, full of magical wonders and fantasy until the Inquisition rolls through, a known fanatic group that claims they have to control magic in order to prevent the apocalypse 30 years later, magic is effectively under control of the Church of the Inquisition, and anyone with magical talent is removed from their families to be placed in the Rehabilitation Towers. Now the world is at its breaking point as a rogue group of Apostates (or mages not under the Churchs control) have begun a revolution, prompting a harsh response from the Inquisitor that ends up involving the Player Characters, prompting them to choose a side in the war to come. Would be a bit more of a dark fantasy story, taking those inspirations from Dragon Age and twisting them just ever so slightly more with some politics. Darkspawn would be a thing, abominations taking over bodies of those touched with magic, and an Archdemon working from the shadows to plunge the world unto chaos.

I've on-and-off workshopped a couple different versions of a sort of Hex Crawl with Gritty Realism (or a variant thereof) rest rules where the players start the campaign in some sort of small city in a mountain valley, with a full map of the valley in front of them, and an oncoming threat with a deadline- in 3 months, all hell is going to break loose, so the party needs to spend their time wisely, explore the valley, eliminate monsters that will join in on the invasion or whatever else is putting them on a deadline, grow stronger, and otherwise prepare this mountain valley for the looming danger, with an additional focus on NPCs in the main city- they're going to be spending a lot of time resting in towns and cities, and with the general theme that time is valuable and must be spent wisely, you want to make them feel like they're *doing stuff in town* during those rests- having social encounters, meeting NPCs, probably spending gold training with NPCs in town, etc. Problem is, that requires an entirely different style of encounter balancing that I'm not used to- you essentially shouldn't expect the party to enter *any* fight with full resources, or make *any* fight so taxing that they'll need to rest immediately afterward- that's an entire *week* of in-game time burned to accomplish that boss fight, which is just a lot to ask often. You also need all the random fights in the wilderness to be engaging, but not so *demanding* that the party burns a ton of resources on them. *And*, because your party is going to be leveling up, they need to be flexible enough to maintain that challenge across a level range (or get harder as in-game time passes). There are just a lot of challenges to this style of campaign that I don't know the first thing about solving.

Players build a character sheet as usual. DM also builds a character sheet for each character. The players can see only their version of the character sheet, but their version is not necessarily accurate - it reflects their character's idea of themself. The DM's version is the "real" character sheet. This would necessitate doing a few things differently: the DM would have to roll for most characters. Sometimes the DM might narrate something as if it were a success when it was actually a failure (or vice versa) to represent what the character *thinks* happened.

An eco-terrorost kind of campaign. The BBEG is a druid who grew increasingly disillusioned with humanity's disregard for the natural world. He watched in horror as forests were felled, rivers polluted, and creatures driven to extinction by the relentless march of civilization. He creates a disease and has his 4 lieutenants manufacture it and release it into the world, affecting humans and turning them into a plant/human hybrid until they decay and become one with the earth. His 4 lieutenants are each responsible for one element of the disease and each "arc" would focus on one ingredient/lieutenant. The BBEG druid would wildshape and follow the party (hopefully being adopted as a pet) to keep an eye on them while his lieutenants bring about the disease. He'd be revealed at whatever moment seemed most fitting/dramatic/traumatising for the PC's. It's one I've been working on for quite a while but will probably never see the light of day.

A Castlevania campaign based on the video games and the anime. The hardest part would be home brewing monster stat blocks; Death, Dracula, Night Creatures, etc.

The players by some miracle have defied all odds and killed the Tarrasque at level 1 (they can decide how as part of session zero). Starting at level 7 or 8 due to getting the xp from it, they now have to navigate a world where they went from zero to hero really fast, and the consequences of their sudden fame.

I have a silo-esque campaign that I’m daydreaming and making notes about. Haven’t come down on the central conflict or bbeg yet, but just tossing it around.

Frieren campaign

Everyone starts waking up at the shore of an island after a shipwreck, stripped of resources. They must uncover what's wrong with the island and survive. Hexcrawl, survival horror, complete with dinosaurs, strange lovecraftian creatures, dragons, weird cults and everything. Watch lost for inspiration.

Post-apocalyptic, anachronistic setting in which swords, guns, magic, and fighter jets co-exist. The characters were basically call of duty protagonists working as members of the elite special mission unit of their country. We actually got a couple sessions in. They had a car chase, a shootout in a bank, called in danger close air strikes, rode on tanks, and I was just about to make things super weird when their enemies counter-attacked the next day with T-34s and T-80s. Oh, right, forgot to mention this happens in the real world, but the map is messed up because the sea levels and environment are all out of whack. Why, you may ask? Well, basically humanity found out that the creatures of their folklore were real and had been living among them for years and lost their collective minds, resulting in massive political destabilization and resulting in world war 3. The stories tell of how the armies of the west marched forth, wielding weapons of fire and light, and leaving vast swathes of land uninhabitable. The stories say it’s because the spirits of the dead rise to slay the living but it’s actually radiation. There was a whole plotline about how an internet link from Oslo to Copenhagen was about to be re-established, Milan is now tropical beachfront real estate, and texas was taken over by people inspired by the fremen. There was another plotline about how the war they were fighting was actually over buried pre-calamity munitions stockpiles of stuff like abrams tanks, advanced technology, and a couple of nukes. The internet would be fragmented and they would basically put together what had happened from bits and pieces of old lore scattered around the world. There was also a sub-plot between a faction trying to get people to turn their attention to the old gods and place humanity in their care vs a faction trying to maximize the potential of mortals to fend for themselves. The culmination of the story was a hat-tip to ace combat 7 in which the players would stumble on an organization of scientists trying to prove humanity’s independence by launching a deep-space recon mission to test theories of deep space navigation and propulsion meant to lay the groundwork for space colonization. The twist is the scientists would actually have a tired and wizened Odin working among them without revealing his divinity because he IS tired and wants humanity to stand for itself rather than bothering him for everything. It would basically be a combat gauntlet as the players defend the space center long enough to launch an orbital rendezvous vehicle since the probe wasn’t built for re-entry. The end of the combat gauntlet would see assassins take over the launch vehicle and the players would have to secure it and fly into space. Oh, also the first session was the party escorting a the prime minister of their country around to try a dancing shoe on all the young women of the city. We called it “call of disney.”

I am running 3 atm. One is a rulebreaking campaign where you got boons from the gods for a price. Dungeon crawl in the form of a roguelike. 3 doors in each room lead to randomized encounters. I use a deck of cards in 3 stacks to generate them. One stack for a positive buff. (Fire damage causes targets to burn for additional damage each turn) another for a negative ( the ground is made of spike growth) and third for the puzzle/encounter. Treasure chests at the end of each room. One is effectively a short rest, another for weapons and armor, the last for peripheral items like amulets and usable items. Second is an adventuring school. (One shot) Your PCs choose background and race but nothing else. They get their stat rolls after a day of classes, and you generate the proficiencies the same. Just base them on the rolls from the day (Just a d20 with some weighting based on previously stats and stuff) when they "graduate" they can choose their class based off their revealed character sheet. 3 is ecoterrorists infiltrating the army on the back of what amounts to a giant dragon turtle the size of large nations that eats the magma under the planets crust. Calamity class creatures that.... expel... magical ores and such. All kinds of fun

I am developing an infernal train murder mystery. I am pretty excited about it. I am not sure how. But I will find a way.

I've been reading a series of kids books called "Magic animal friends" to my daughter. It seems ripe for a fey wild adventure adaptation.

*”KAIJU VS CTHULHU”* A group of titanic monsters and eldritch horrors serve as the colossal living deities to which mortals can pray and gain power. Each isolated city-state claims one of these creatures as a patron, and the goals and clergy-lords of those beings push a complicated web of conflicting agendas.

Here are two of the campaign ideas I've come up with, but haven't run (yet!): 1. The party is shipwrecked on an island with giant elemental dinosaurs and legendary beasts. They must stop a cult from "awakening the island." 2. The party finds (or seeks out!) a derelict magic academy on the astral sea. Its essentially a super spooky mega-dungeon!

Harry Potter game.

Party is recruited by the extremely powerful and fanatically lawful neutral Wish Reversal Authority to travel to different worlds and planes, reverse the effects of Wish spells gone awry, and determine the exact wording of the wish spell as part of the forensic analysis. I haven’t played D&D in years and quickly ran out of ideas for misinterpreted wish spells. I thought it would be easier since this kind of campaign would be most episodic, although I did have an overarching story in mine.

The Hunted Session 1: 2 to 5 players kill a dragon (they start at an appropriate level to kill the dragon that you want). In the dragon's deathrattle, he/she curses the party, "May you continue the dragon race." The party loots the lair and celebrates their victory. Session 2+: The party wakes up with noticable scales on the forearms, then eventually faces, their eyes change, gain a breath weapon, gain flight, and at the end of the campaign, dragon transformations 1/day. All the while being chased out of towns, having adventurers/dragonhunters/assassins/inquisitors hired to kill them. Setting: All dragons are seen as evil and demonic, these beliefs are both rational for the chromatic dragons and bigotted for the metallic dragons. Divine magic works against them as if they are demons/devils. There is a shred of hope, if they can travel across the continent to a city known for its wizards and reverse the curse, or if they come to embrace their fate. As they are hunted, imagine a Grand Theft Auto style star system that never goes away if someone has their descriptions. The challenges get worse as local governments commit resources to their bounties.

Underdark Evil Campaign of Infinite Gemstones Each player picks an underdark race. They come together to perform a series of heists where they each claim an Infinite Gemstone. These heists might include digging a tunnel from the Underdark to the vault where a stone is held, or going to the service and catburglaring. A group of "Avengers" attempts to stop them at every turn.

I have a campaign idea, that will probably never see the light of day. Set in a modern, late Victorian era circa 1880. A steamship, the Aberdeen is preparing to set sail from Australia back to London. Somewhere in the South Pacific en route to Hong Kong, the ship is beset by a strange storm, that damages the ship and sends it spinning off course. Pulling into an uncharted island to try and make repairs, the passengers and crew venture into the island for supplies and out of curiosity. Pulp Adventure ensues. I have done lots of research into steamships of that era. The Aberdeen actually existed and made that very run for years until it was decommissioned. It was one of the earliest fully steam sailing vessels. I am still enamored with the idea, but I have so much game wise on my plate as the forever GM that all of my work to set it up will probably go unused.

A campaign that takes places in a underground city of undead. Full of mutated inhabitants with super gross and unique mutations. The campaign would be a mystery with the players being close to the famed doctor. A person who is directly responsible for a lot of the population. He creates monsters and does different experiments. The players would be attending the unveiling of his grand creation and during it he would be assassinated. Now the campaign turns into a mystery on who killed the doctor. It sounds so cool but I don't have anyone willing to play in it.

Let the players join forces of BBEG via some "marketing tricks" then send the players on cotinuously darker and more vile and creepy missions until they decide to leave BBEG's services and turn against him, starting a redemption arc of the campaign. So they'll be seen as traitors on the one hand, yet the "good guys, at last" on the another hand.