Just wandering if this sounds good, feel free to copy and paste
the campaign starts with the discovery’s of an archipelago. The characters sent their for different reasons, get intercepted by a ghost ship leaving them the only surviving crewmen, they wash up on the shore of the starting town( this serves as an into into ship combat. While their they are offered a job aboard a captains ship, they go to an island via treasure map, where they discovered an infected laboratory. This acts as a big dungeon, an each island has a unique dungeon on it, each with a special gemstone. Mishaps accrue from island to island by. When they find the last dungeon they discover the meeting place for a cult of lord of the ocean, this has been foreshadowed, a device sits in the middle, it has a special shaped slot for each stone they have collected. When the stones are placed in a beacon arises. This signifies to the cult that t is time to rise. The players are sent into a scramble trying to stop the flames(metaphor). It is now where in a characters dreams he starts having visions of an ancient evil. After the scramble with mishaps and the such, they come face to face with the cult leader, hear he summons his boss to the material plane. The boss is a leviathan with 20 levels In wizard, and cleric. If the fight seams lost the ghost ship shows up, grabbing the characters and sailing them away (which appears throughout the campaign). After the fight the ghost ship reveals that they died sending this thing back to its plane a long time ago. This is where the campaign would end for the most part.
This is just a concept
read the 10th comment for more final version, it’s just beginning.
The concept is fine, it just relies a bit too much on the players doing what you expect, when you expect. If they aren’t interested in those gems, for example, it falls apart. If they don’t visit all the right islands, it falls apart. If they decide not to place the gems on the altar, there’s no climax.
The end is the biggest problem. First, you shouldn’t decide, before the campaign even starts, what the final fight will be like, that’s pretty much textbook railroading. If you know how it will end before you start, what’s the point of the players even being there? It’s a good strategy when writing a story, not when playing D&D. Second, the ghost ship ex machina is un-fun. The PCs should be the ones who save the day, not the ones who get beat up and then watch while others come in and do it.
It's imaginative, but not very co-operative. Any story that ends with, "you all died years ago; but at least you won." is going to chafe your players. Players don't like being told that their characters just arbitrarily died. That's advice I would give any starting DM. It's an okay trick for C.S. Lewis (spoiler alert), but he was a novelist. In D&D, there are multiple writers of the story and they all have the right to affect the outcome. That's the agreement you all make when you sit at the table together.
I'd like some clarification about the ghost ship which attacks them at the beginning and then saves them at the end and then informs them that they're all dead. I LOVE ghost ships, so I want to keep it, but I think you're going to have to explain who's on it and what they're up to.
I think you're making an assumption that the players are just going to slot the stones into the machine without trying to figure out what the machine does. Maybe the Captain of their ship can be revealed as the leader of the cult.
Ok thanks for the feedback, I was just going to use the ghost ship as a last resort if it was going to be a TPK, as a meetsheild, but I see where you are coming from for everything else, thanks for the feedback
i just changed it to make the ghost ship more of an rescue ship then a battle one
The comment about it seeming all scripted out is not just about the ghost ship. You have every step pre-determined, and you seem to expect the players to do each one in sequence as you planned out.
An alternative way to do this is for you to script one side of it only -- that is, what the villains do. Here is their plan. Here is what they will do step by step. Write it out in steps, with alternatives. So if one part is stopped, they will try this. If another part is stopped, they will try that. And then have the players in the area, and they start hearing about what is going on, and then they decide what to do about the various steps and how to intervene.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I would add two points, first while there is nothing wrong with starting an adventure from being washed up on a shore, in computer rpgs this is almost cliche nowadays. As a PC gamer it would make me groan to start that way yet again. I'd prefer to just have the boat arrive safely and you start having just disembarked at the docks.
Second, you should consider the motivation that the party has to journey and risk their lives. A series of dangerous dungeons on different islands is fine, but why do the characters care? Perhaps the town is hiring investigators or someone has been kidnapped. Maybe the first dungeon reveals a plan to summon a great evil or to destroy the world. Perhaps one of the characters family member has joined the cult. The purpose of the party is really important, not just adventure for the hell of it, but having that goal in sight that makes the risk worthwhile.
I assume the built-in motivation is the treasure map. That's ok, but it relies on greed and/or curiosity rather than an actually urgent reason. It's not life-or-death, the world isn't ending, the PCs aren't even inconvenienced if they don't follow the offered treasure map shaped carrot. Now, they likely will anyway - greed and/or curiosity aside, there should be an understanding that if the players show up to play and the DM made a campaign to play though, the players should at least be interested in playing. However, it's generally better to have a sense of urgency, to make the PCs feel there's a deadline - even if you can move that deadline up and down as you see fit. Wertbag's suggestions above could work, or you could introduce a rival crew chasing the party, or there's supposedly something at the end of the trail the PCs urgently need, etc.
Second, you may want to keep in mind the possibility of failure. What happens if the PCs fail to find a stone, or can't solve a puzzle, or they all get killed halfway the third dungeon and nobody can make it back to town? Are there options to get them back on track, or plausible ways to have another party step in, or will you let the campaign be for a while and have the PCs go down another rabbit hole?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
It's imaginative, but not very co-operative. Any story that ends with, "you all died years ago; but at least you won." is going to chafe your players. Players don't like being told that their characters just arbitrarily died. That's advice I would give any starting DM. It's an okay trick for C.S. Lewis (spoiler alert), but he was a novelist. In D&D, there are multiple writers of the story and they all have the right to affect the outcome. That's the agreement you all make when you sit at the table together.
I'd like some clarification about the ghost ship which attacks them at the beginning and then saves them at the end and then informs them that they're all dead. I LOVE ghost ships, so I want to keep it, but I think you're going to have to explain who's on it and what they're up to.
I think you're making an assumption that the players are just going to slot the stones into the machine without trying to figure out what the machine does. Maybe the Captain of their ship can be revealed as the leader of the cult.
Thanks for the feedback, I love the idea about the captain. The ghost ship was going to be different adventures, who died years ago fighting the cult, and their trying to stop anyone from bringing the thing they tried so hard to differs back
Thanks for the feedback, I love the idea about the captain. The ghost ship was going to be different adventures, who died years ago fighting the cult, and their trying to stop anyone from bringing the thing they tried so hard to differs back
Well, okay! Now we're cooking! So if they're former adventurers whose ghosts are cursed to sail forever trying to oppose this cult - now you have an explanation for why they and the captain are always on a collision course and why the ghost ship might still show up as potential allies to the players at the end. The ship is trying to stop the captain and your players are just on the wrong side early in the story. Now we've got a little thread of internal logic we can build on!
So your players wash up in Shipwreck Harbor (which is a terrible name for a harbor, I admit) and this Captain needs a crew of scallywags to go help him follow his map to these stones. He hires people literally cast out by the sea itself because no reasonable pirate wants to hire on with this guy for some reason. As the players get to know the captain, they start to realize that he's a guy who wants to summon a giant magic squid. They decide how to react to that news.
I think these are the bones of a perfectly good campaign. One that could well make more sense than the pirate campaign I've been promising myself to write down for months.
Questions that we still need to answer: 1) How does the Captain think that a giant magic squid will help him? Will it give its followers control over the sea? Will it give whomever controls the machine control over the sea? Let's come up with a better reason for this guy than "he's a crazy cultist." - 2) In a setting like this, I can't help but think pirates; and pirate campaigns have lots of types of NPCs. There's usually pirate hunters (an official navy or a big trading company hiring mercenaries); rival captains and crews; exploration of the archipelago; dinosaurs; all that kind of stuff that link together the dungeon crawl islands and bring you closer to getting all of the stones in someone's hands so you can move in to your endgame.
After reading through everything this should be better
An archipelago has been discovered, and the Harpers are suspecting something is off. The characters have been hired to go in and investigate what’s happening. The ride their is uneventful besides for 2 things, a pirate crew attacking their ship, and a ship in the distance being pulled underwater. A lot of people in the town are suspicious, all for different reasons, but one person the harpers are most interested in is Captain Arnox. The harpers are willing to pay them heavily to join his crew and spy on him. If they don’t after two days of being on the shore, they find a treasure map, leading to the same stones the captain is looking for, leading them to be rivals.
the town is called “port gondalin” no one I play with reads Tolkien
the rival captain had a wife who died at sea, the “thing” absoarbed her memory and began luring him into the cult with visions of her
the “thing” the cult worships gains the memories of everyone who died in the archipelago. It is a option for a warlock patron
the treasure map leads to a dungeon witch kick starts the adventure
the cult has maps to 9 stones hidden throughout different stones hidden throughout the islands. They require the stones to summon their leader at the 10th island, which requires a special device. They are willing to have the players bring the stones to them if they can’t get them
the reasons the stones were hidden is a organization called the “golden gauntlet” swore to keep the cult from summoning their leader. The order had failed to do so 560 years ago which resulted in their founding members dying in the fight to kill the leader. The members were cursed to roam for eternity trying to stop the cult, they became ghosts on a ghost ship, they will attack any ship that has a stone in it. The golden gauntlet can be convinced that the players are trying to stop the cult, the ghosts can be reasoned with as well
Okay, yeah. This is an actual campaign. Now think about how level progression will work. How will you keep your players from walking into the hardest level dungeon island first?
the rival captain had a wife who died at sea, the “thing” absoarbed her memory and began luring him into the cult with visions of her
the “thing” the cult worships gains the memories of everyone who died in the archipelago. It is a option for a warlock patron
This is a super weird element of this world, which means it's interesting. I wouldn't have come up with that, not a chance. That suggests to me that we're getting close to your unique voice. I'd like you to give some thought to making memory a theme of the campaign. It's like the villain is the iceberg in Frozen 2 or something.
Like others have said, it's an interesting idea (especially with the changes you've made) but you need to think about what happens if your players do something unexpected (which they will). Like, what will happen if they sell the gems since they need to the money? Or what if they get the idea that "If we go straight to [final dungeon] we can just stop the bad thing from happening without having to do anything else!"
My suggestion would be to make sure that there are also other things beside the main quest to do and also that there are ways for the players to fail at leats a few of the main plot quests without the whole campaign being ruined. Perhaps they come to an island and the cult has already been there? No worries, they can then try to find the cultist who have that particular gem some other way or just have the cult show up with that stone in the climax.
I actually kind of like that ending bit with "you are already dead and you died doing the right thing a long tie ago" but I can see why not all people might like it. Maybe it turns out it was the ancestors of the PC who died a long time ago or that some pat of the original heroes have been reincarnated into the PCs? Or, if you do decide to go with the "dead the whole time" ending, maybe as a reward they characters can choose if they want to pass on into the afterlife or return to life?
Just wandering if this sounds good, feel free to copy and paste
the campaign starts with the discovery’s of an archipelago. The characters sent their for different reasons, get intercepted by a ghost ship leaving them the only surviving crewmen, they wash up on the shore of the starting town( this serves as an into into ship combat. While their they are offered a job aboard a captains ship, they go to an island via treasure map, where they discovered an infected laboratory. This acts as a big dungeon, an each island has a unique dungeon on it, each with a special gemstone. Mishaps accrue from island to island by. When they find the last dungeon they discover the meeting place for a cult of lord of the ocean, this has been foreshadowed, a device sits in the middle, it has a special shaped slot for each stone they have collected. When the stones are placed in a beacon arises. This signifies to the cult that t is time to rise. The players are sent into a scramble trying to stop the flames(metaphor). It is now where in a characters dreams he starts having visions of an ancient evil. After the scramble with mishaps and the such, they come face to face with the cult leader, hear he summons his boss to the material plane. The boss is a leviathan with 20 levels In wizard, and cleric. If the fight seams lost the ghost ship shows up, grabbing the characters and sailing them away (which appears throughout the campaign). After the fight the ghost ship reveals that they died sending this thing back to its plane a long time ago. This is where the campaign would end for the most part.
This is just a concept
read the 10th comment for more final version, it’s just beginning.
The concept is fine, it just relies a bit too much on the players doing what you expect, when you expect. If they aren’t interested in those gems, for example, it falls apart. If they don’t visit all the right islands, it falls apart. If they decide not to place the gems on the altar, there’s no climax.
The end is the biggest problem. First, you shouldn’t decide, before the campaign even starts, what the final fight will be like, that’s pretty much textbook railroading. If you know how it will end before you start, what’s the point of the players even being there? It’s a good strategy when writing a story, not when playing D&D.
Second, the ghost ship ex machina is un-fun. The PCs should be the ones who save the day, not the ones who get beat up and then watch while others come in and do it.
It's imaginative, but not very co-operative. Any story that ends with, "you all died years ago; but at least you won." is going to chafe your players. Players don't like being told that their characters just arbitrarily died. That's advice I would give any starting DM. It's an okay trick for C.S. Lewis (spoiler alert), but he was a novelist. In D&D, there are multiple writers of the story and they all have the right to affect the outcome. That's the agreement you all make when you sit at the table together.
I'd like some clarification about the ghost ship which attacks them at the beginning and then saves them at the end and then informs them that they're all dead. I LOVE ghost ships, so I want to keep it, but I think you're going to have to explain who's on it and what they're up to.
I think you're making an assumption that the players are just going to slot the stones into the machine without trying to figure out what the machine does. Maybe the Captain of their ship can be revealed as the leader of the cult.
Ok thanks for the feedback, I was just going to use the ghost ship as a last resort if it was going to be a TPK, as a meetsheild, but I see where you are coming from for everything else, thanks for the feedback
i just changed it to make the ghost ship more of an rescue ship then a battle one
The comment about it seeming all scripted out is not just about the ghost ship. You have every step pre-determined, and you seem to expect the players to do each one in sequence as you planned out.
An alternative way to do this is for you to script one side of it only -- that is, what the villains do. Here is their plan. Here is what they will do step by step. Write it out in steps, with alternatives. So if one part is stopped, they will try this. If another part is stopped, they will try that. And then have the players in the area, and they start hearing about what is going on, and then they decide what to do about the various steps and how to intervene.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I would add two points, first while there is nothing wrong with starting an adventure from being washed up on a shore, in computer rpgs this is almost cliche nowadays. As a PC gamer it would make me groan to start that way yet again. I'd prefer to just have the boat arrive safely and you start having just disembarked at the docks.
Second, you should consider the motivation that the party has to journey and risk their lives. A series of dangerous dungeons on different islands is fine, but why do the characters care? Perhaps the town is hiring investigators or someone has been kidnapped. Maybe the first dungeon reveals a plan to summon a great evil or to destroy the world. Perhaps one of the characters family member has joined the cult. The purpose of the party is really important, not just adventure for the hell of it, but having that goal in sight that makes the risk worthwhile.
I assume the built-in motivation is the treasure map. That's ok, but it relies on greed and/or curiosity rather than an actually urgent reason. It's not life-or-death, the world isn't ending, the PCs aren't even inconvenienced if they don't follow the offered treasure map shaped carrot. Now, they likely will anyway - greed and/or curiosity aside, there should be an understanding that if the players show up to play and the DM made a campaign to play though, the players should at least be interested in playing. However, it's generally better to have a sense of urgency, to make the PCs feel there's a deadline - even if you can move that deadline up and down as you see fit. Wertbag's suggestions above could work, or you could introduce a rival crew chasing the party, or there's supposedly something at the end of the trail the PCs urgently need, etc.
Second, you may want to keep in mind the possibility of failure. What happens if the PCs fail to find a stone, or can't solve a puzzle, or they all get killed halfway the third dungeon and nobody can make it back to town? Are there options to get them back on track, or plausible ways to have another party step in, or will you let the campaign be for a while and have the PCs go down another rabbit hole?
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Thanks for the feedback, I love the idea about the captain. The ghost ship was going to be different adventures, who died years ago fighting the cult, and their trying to stop anyone from bringing the thing they tried so hard to differs back
Well, okay! Now we're cooking! So if they're former adventurers whose ghosts are cursed to sail forever trying to oppose this cult - now you have an explanation for why they and the captain are always on a collision course and why the ghost ship might still show up as potential allies to the players at the end. The ship is trying to stop the captain and your players are just on the wrong side early in the story. Now we've got a little thread of internal logic we can build on!
So your players wash up in Shipwreck Harbor (which is a terrible name for a harbor, I admit) and this Captain needs a crew of scallywags to go help him follow his map to these stones. He hires people literally cast out by the sea itself because no reasonable pirate wants to hire on with this guy for some reason. As the players get to know the captain, they start to realize that he's a guy who wants to summon a giant magic squid. They decide how to react to that news.
I think these are the bones of a perfectly good campaign. One that could well make more sense than the pirate campaign I've been promising myself to write down for months.
Questions that we still need to answer: 1) How does the Captain think that a giant magic squid will help him? Will it give its followers control over the sea? Will it give whomever controls the machine control over the sea? Let's come up with a better reason for this guy than "he's a crazy cultist." - 2) In a setting like this, I can't help but think pirates; and pirate campaigns have lots of types of NPCs. There's usually pirate hunters (an official navy or a big trading company hiring mercenaries); rival captains and crews; exploration of the archipelago; dinosaurs; all that kind of stuff that link together the dungeon crawl islands and bring you closer to getting all of the stones in someone's hands so you can move in to your endgame.
After reading through everything this should be better
An archipelago has been discovered, and the Harpers are suspecting something is off. The characters have been hired to go in and investigate what’s happening. The ride their is uneventful besides for 2 things, a pirate crew attacking their ship, and a ship in the distance being pulled underwater. A lot of people in the town are suspicious, all for different reasons, but one person the harpers are most interested in is Captain Arnox. The harpers are willing to pay them heavily to join his crew and spy on him. If they don’t after two days of being on the shore, they find a treasure map, leading to the same stones the captain is looking for, leading them to be rivals.
the town is called “port gondalin” no one I play with reads Tolkien
the rival captain had a wife who died at sea, the “thing” absoarbed her memory and began luring him into the cult with visions of her
the “thing” the cult worships gains the memories of everyone who died in the archipelago. It is a option for a warlock patron
the treasure map leads to a dungeon witch kick starts the adventure
the cult has maps to 9 stones hidden throughout different stones hidden throughout the islands. They require the stones to summon their leader at the 10th island, which requires a special device. They are willing to have the players bring the stones to them if they can’t get them
the reasons the stones were hidden is a organization called the “golden gauntlet” swore to keep the cult from summoning their leader. The order had failed to do so 560 years ago which resulted in their founding members dying in the fight to kill the leader. The members were cursed to roam for eternity trying to stop the cult, they became ghosts on a ghost ship, they will attack any ship that has a stone in it. The golden gauntlet can be convinced that the players are trying to stop the cult, the ghosts can be reasoned with as well
Okay, yeah. This is an actual campaign. Now think about how level progression will work. How will you keep your players from walking into the hardest level dungeon island first?
This is a super weird element of this world, which means it's interesting. I wouldn't have come up with that, not a chance. That suggests to me that we're getting close to your unique voice. I'd like you to give some thought to making memory a theme of the campaign. It's like the villain is the iceberg in Frozen 2 or something.
Like others have said, it's an interesting idea (especially with the changes you've made) but you need to think about what happens if your players do something unexpected (which they will). Like, what will happen if they sell the gems since they need to the money? Or what if they get the idea that "If we go straight to [final dungeon] we can just stop the bad thing from happening without having to do anything else!"
My suggestion would be to make sure that there are also other things beside the main quest to do and also that there are ways for the players to fail at leats a few of the main plot quests without the whole campaign being ruined. Perhaps they come to an island and the cult has already been there? No worries, they can then try to find the cultist who have that particular gem some other way or just have the cult show up with that stone in the climax.
I actually kind of like that ending bit with "you are already dead and you died doing the right thing a long tie ago" but I can see why not all people might like it. Maybe it turns out it was the ancestors of the PC who died a long time ago or that some pat of the original heroes have been reincarnated into the PCs? Or, if you do decide to go with the "dead the whole time" ending, maybe as a reward they characters can choose if they want to pass on into the afterlife or return to life?
Just to clarify, the ghost pirates are DIFFERENT adventures who died trying to stop the cult, and if a PC died then he is part of the crew to