Currently working on my first campaign! I'm really excited. I'm homebrewing my own continent set in the same world as Faerun. Current year. I'm hoping to have 5 or 6 players too.

A bit of info on the land I call Averas. It's a large continent with 13 major kingdoms and two principalities. A diverse grouping of races. In the last century, there was unrest as one major kingdom, kingdom A for the purposes of this post, sought to dominate some of the surrounding smaller kingdoms. They had pushback from a large neighboring kingdom, kingdom B, and kingdom A was defeated. A couple of decades pass and the son of the defeated king takes up his father's ambition and reignites the conquest attempt, once again being defeated.

Now, my loose little idea seeds are these:

The young king becomes obsessed with restoring his pride and crushing those who put his conquest down. He explores every manner of trickery and lands on an unhinged wizard and starts tinkering with time magic.

While practicing it and trying to make it more powerful little things in the timeline change and as the party travels there are subtle hints in places they know/have been that they can pick up on with perception checks without giving away the whole game. They can realize something isn't right without quite knowing what.

I also have a big idea for down the road, level 20 stuff, but given the slim chance we make it that far I'm not worrying about it right now.

Thoughts? Advice? Better ideas? Recommendations on how to progress the story to my idea? Ways to strengthen and solidy my idea? Open to anything (except trolls).

Thanks! - Leah.

So I feel like a cool “final battle” could be something like this: the party has a run in with the king while he and his wizard are in the midst of a magic ritual to reverse time to that one mistake (whatever it may have been) the king made leading to his defeat so they can go back and make the right choice and continue their domination of the lands. Either A.) the party succeeds in stopping the ritual amidst an epic final battle, perhaps atop a wizards tower or something, it’s epic and grand and yay they saved the day. Or B.) the ritual succeeds, an epic battle takes place but they have suddenly been transported backwards in time (they stay their same level and as they were in present time) and now they have to stop the king from correcting his error, which he will have foolishly given up this information during their battle in classic over-confident villainous monologue fashion “you fools! You really think you can stop me from blah blah whatever” lol. This does pose the possibility of being stuck backwards in time, so you may want to come up with some kind of way they can get back. Maybe the ritual circle is still atop the wizards tower and they just have to do the ritual themselves to get back, but that leaves the possibility they just abandon this timeline altogether and now you’re in a timey wimey mess and this is why I don’t mess with time, lol. But...it could work...

the final battle/ritual could involve them having to light 4 torches to complete it, or several human sacrifices that require their blood, who knows. Something that will add another interesting element to the battle aside from just killing the bad guy. They can actually win by not killing him at all, as long as the ritual is stopped, whatever it may be.

then you’ll just have to come up with the adventure leading up this point. I recommend a bullet point outline of events that can easily be corrected based on player choices and be ready to change your plans or have things go awry and just go with it.

good luck! Hope this helped or sparked some ideas.

Oooh the wizard's tower idea instantly gave me a mental image and I love it. Very interesting pointers, and lots of potential! Thank you!

Time stuff is... tricky. And mindf**ky. Perhaps instead of screwing with alternate timelines and paradoxes and all that garbage, the prince and the wizard could be attempting to bring the past to the future. It could be a ritual similar to Mighty Fortress, with the ruins of the once great castle of kingdom A slowly restoring themselves, starting out as a thin outline and slowly gaining material form. Perhaps the prince also attempts to gain the power of the warlord king of kingdom A by sitting in the throne the whole time, allowing the king to manifest in the same place as him, merging their souls and bodies together. The final battle could be waves of semi-corporeal ancient heroes, villains, wizards, and warriors, topped off with a final battle with the ten foot tall, four armed adamantine-armored hulk that is prince plus dad.

Ooh, interesting. He can be trying to pull the past army to his. But wait what does that do to the army in the past?

Instead of pulling them from the past, I was more imagining taking a copy, basically grabbing a blueprint from the past, and then over time filling it in with magical energy. Pulling something directly from the past would be incredibly difficult and destructive. By copying a blueprint from the past and then conjuring the matter out of magical energy, they can achieve the same thing without royally f**king the timeline.

Lol, Averás is the name of the god of the wind in one of my homebrew settings.

To answer your question, you should probably have the king be a competent fighter, but not a good one. The guards and court mage should be the real challenge. The guards would likely fight to the death unless they had a reason not too, while the wizard (an archmage?) would fight until severely wounded (reduced to 40 hit points or less), use time stop to cause as much chaos as possible, and then escape with the king using teleport.

For the signs, the characters might notice that not all of the tax money is recorded as being used, or something else along those lines.

Great mechanics pointers, thanks!