Before delving too deep into this idea and the lore books of Forgotten Realms to see if what I am envisioning is even possible to create, as a homebrew campaign, I would like to discuss and hear out some ideas on how to transform the Forgotten Realms setting LOGICALLY into a world devoid of all moving and conscious life.
As I currently see it, Gods should be restricted from interfering with the world in order for a catastrophe to take place which wipes away (almost) every living and non-living thing in the material plane. As if a shield existed to restrict movement and energy between the material plane and other planes. My wish is to create a setting where mid-level PCs start exploring to find out every village, town and dungeon is completely empty. Structures, traps, spells, plants still exist, everything exists as if it all worked well just yesterday, but for some reason, today, all conscious beings have been wiped off the plane. It's a raw idea and in need of a lot of background to realize, but that's why I am here, turning to people who know Forgotten Realms and it's logic better than I do.
What could be the catastrophe? Why couldn't the gods stop it? Do they even exist anymore? Is it reversible? Are there few giant monstrosities roaming the plane, consisting of previous life and insight into the catastrophe?
As I see it, it could add a new way of playing the game, with almost no focus on classical NPC-guided story-telling, but a way to research, forage, explore, find out about previous omens given to the living, make them learn about the forgotten realms IRL but also in character. Opportunities to create conflict and hope in finding out if there are others like them who somewhy didn't get deleted. Hope it's not too abstract of an idea to keep on building on.
In the battle of the gods the god Theoricles in an act of vengeance caused Oxygen levels to fall to 3.23% and all oxygen dependent life died. the Oxygen was replaced with CO2 which caused the planet to warm up quickly and the 36.2% of the worlds oceans evaporated. This resulted in an Eden environment and the world became overrun with jungles. Oxygen was replenished and back to livable levels after a couple years
The three pillars of role playing games are exploration, social encounters, and combat.
You've pretty much eliminated social encounters. Although you could have the party encounter the occasional other survivor after going dozens of sessions without.
It sounds like you've eliminated most of the monster manual too. Does the catastrophe just eliminated intelligent creatures or all living creatures? What's left? Constructs and awakened plants? Undead? Are there still beasts? What about monstrosities and aberrations. I would recommend you keep as many as you can, or the combat pillar will be quite limited as well.
If you're going to minimize social encounters and combat, you better make sure your players really like exploration.
I’d make sure you got player buy in before you really got too deep into this. There’s a big segment of D&D that’s about killing bad guys and taking their stuff. If there’s no bad guys (which is to say no combat), that eliminates a whole pillar of the game. Pity the player who makes a fighter for this campaign. And if there’s no NPCs for role playing, well, there goes another pillar (sorry high cha characters, you won’t be needed) You’d need a group that’s really, really into exploration and solving the mystery, along with some intra-party rp. Personally, not that it matters, it would not be for me. I think you could pull something like this off with the D&D ruleset, but it wouldn’t feel much like D&D.
Maybe you could do it for a session. Or even half a session. Everyone is gone, the PCs fiddle around for a day, then they go to sleep, wake up again and everything is back, and they’re the only ones who remember. Now that could be a mystery to solve. To add tension, it could keep happening, once a month or something, with the world gone for a longer span each time. The PCs need to figure out what’s happening and fix it before everyone they know and love is just gone forever.
I’d make sure you got player buy in before you really got too deep into this. There’s a big segment of D&D that’s about killing bad guys and taking their stuff. If there’s no bad guys (which is to say no combat), that eliminates a whole pillar of the game. Pity the player who makes a fighter for this campaign. And if there’s no NPCs for role playing, well, there goes another pillar (sorry high cha characters, you won’t be needed) You’d need a group that’s really, really into exploration and solving the mystery, along with some intra-party rp. Personally, not that it matters, it would not be for me. I think you could pull something like this off with the D&D ruleset, but it wouldn’t feel much like D&D.
Maybe you could do it for a session. Or even half a session. Everyone is gone, the PCs fiddle around for a day, then they go to sleep, wake up again and everything is back, and they’re the only ones who remember. Now that could be a mystery to solve. To add tension, it could keep happening, once a month or something, with the world gone for a longer span each time. The PCs need to figure out what’s happening and fix it before everyone they know and love is just gone forever.
Or take a page from The Neverending Story / that one Star Trek: TNG episode. Parts of the world are gradually disappearing as if they never existed. That far off city where there was supposed to be a lost artifact, now no one has heard of it. An NPC born on the outlands is nowhere to be found one day. You have only weeks before the boundary reaches the first of your PCs' home town.
The three pillars of role playing games are exploration, social encounters, and combat.
You've pretty much eliminated social encounters. Although you could have the party encounter the occasional other survivor after going dozens of sessions without.
It sounds like you've eliminated most of the monster manual too. Does the catastrophe just eliminated intelligent creatures or all living creatures? What's left? Constructs and awakened plants? Undead? Are there still beasts? What about monstrosities and aberrations. I would recommend you keep as many as you can, or the combat pillar will be quite limited as well.
If you're going to minimize social encounters and combat, you better make sure your players really like exploration.
That's a great explanation. Exploration should be a huge theme yes, and talked through with the players before creating such a setting. Thank you for that, I'll put some thought into keeping the combat pillar intact somehow.
I’d make sure you got player buy in before you really got too deep into this. There’s a big segment of D&D that’s about killing bad guys and taking their stuff. If there’s no bad guys (which is to say no combat), that eliminates a whole pillar of the game. Pity the player who makes a fighter for this campaign. And if there’s no NPCs for role playing, well, there goes another pillar (sorry high cha characters, you won’t be needed) You’d need a group that’s really, really into exploration and solving the mystery, along with some intra-party rp. Personally, not that it matters, it would not be for me. I think you could pull something like this off with the D&D ruleset, but it wouldn’t feel much like D&D.
Maybe you could do it for a session. Or even half a session. Everyone is gone, the PCs fiddle around for a day, then they go to sleep, wake up again and everything is back, and they’re the only ones who remember. Now that could be a mystery to solve. To add tension, it could keep happening, once a month or something, with the world gone for a longer span each time. The PCs need to figure out what’s happening and fix it before everyone they know and love is just gone forever.
These are great thoughts, damn. Especially the periodic dissappearing. Mystery solving just seems to be a whole theme that I haven't had the chance to explore yet in my DM-hood.
Thank you for the answers, I've already gotten more inspiration to brainstorm this campaign! If I finish with a specific setting and/or story, I'll post an update.
The idea instantly reminded me of this video. It's a pretty well thought out world, and it's possible you could do similar. It could be that some of the citizenry voluntarily became undead to survive the horrors that was the apocalypse, or otherwise found ways to persist in the world, and hence maybe there are still enemies, friends and quest givers to find in the rare live settlement.
Or perhaps, this could be a setting where Orcus, demon prince of Undeath, conquered Faerun, and transformed it into an entire world not dissimilar from his own layer of the Abyss, Thanatos.
Thanatos. If Orcus had his way, all planes would resemble his dead realm of Thanatos, and all creatures would become undead under his control. Under its black sky, Thanatos is a land of bleak mountains, barren moors, ruined cities, and forests of twisted black trees. Tombs, mausoleums, gravestones, and sarcophagi litter the landscape. Undead swarm across the plane, bursting from their tombs and graves to tear apart any creatures foolish enough to journey here. Orcus rules Thanatos from a vast palace known as Everlost, crafted of obsidian and bone. Set within a howling wasteland called Oblivion's End, the palace is surrounded by tombs and burial sites dug into the sheer slopes of narrow valleys, creating a tiered necropolis.
- 5e Dungeon Master's Guide (page 62.)
I will be the last creature when I am done. The cosmos will then be perfect, free of the braying abominations that are all other living things.
- Orcus. (Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes)
The bloated Demon Prince of the Undead seeks to end all life in the cosmos, replacing the living with immortal, undead creatures that answer only to him. In this grim future, the many suns of the Material Plane are extinguished, and all hope has faded away. All that remains is the eternally static realm of the living dead. Orcus is the universe's staunchest advocate of stagnation. He sees the activity of life as noisy, crude, and maddening. It rakes at his senses like the claws of a rat scratch across a hard floor. In his view, the universe can know peace only when life's incessant hum is replaced with the peace and quiet of the world of the dead.
- Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (page 29.)
The party would contend with a world of the dead and the damned. Zombies, demons, vampires and all manner of monstrosities plague the land; what remains of the old world is little but crumbling structures and monsters tough or hardy enough to survive in a land of the hostile dead.
Quests could be given by tiny tribes of survivors, hiding away in the world. Perhaps wards or illusions can protect a tiny town or fortress of survivors. The Underdark could potentially survive. The drow, backed by a rival demon lord/goddess in Lolth, could be a resistance force in a sense. Maybe when push came to shove, they may even ally themselves with other humanoid survivors to resist the monstrosities that swarm the world. Maybe the players could get quests from spirits that still haunt Faerun, with many trapped on the material plane and unable to reach the afterlife. Maybe a temple still holds a faint presence of a god such as Selune, Lathander or Tyr, who begs them to thwart Orcus's hold over the world and save those few poor souls who remain. They are the last hope who could unite the survivors and restore Faerun to life.
Of course that means the whole world isn't completely empty though.
As someone who knows a bit about FR, if you want to be lore compliant then the "catastrophe" can't come from within. Nothing in the known Realmspace (and the upper and lower planes as well, to be honest) is powerful enough to achieve what you want to achieve.
You can toy with the idea of Far Realm though. Something ancient from there, perhaps? The gods have zero knowledge and influence when it comes to things from that plane.
What are the advantages of running a game like this? I just don't really see what the fun is. It looks to me that this would wipe out all social interaction, eliminating one of the most fun parts of the game.
You have no NPCs to give quests or guide the players. So what do they do? Why do they bother doing it? What is the point in exploring ? There is nobody to help, and nothing is threatening the players. Why not go live in the most luxurious palace you can find? If I was playing this game, I would locate a comfortable cottage where I thought I could grow food, and then sit there refusing to move.
The biggest issue is going to be food. All the food is going to rot, and nobody is producing any more of it. Players are basically playing a scavenging vs. starvation game. But once they find a big cache of preserved meat and grain, they basically don't need to do anything for a couple of years.
This might work better as a small section where the players are transported to a mirror-world demi-plane and have to escape it, but I think you're going to struggle with this for a whole campaign.
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Hi.
Before delving too deep into this idea and the lore books of Forgotten Realms to see if what I am envisioning is even possible to create, as a homebrew campaign, I would like to discuss and hear out some ideas on how to transform the Forgotten Realms setting LOGICALLY into a world devoid of all moving and conscious life.
As I currently see it, Gods should be restricted from interfering with the world in order for a catastrophe to take place which wipes away (almost) every living and non-living thing in the material plane. As if a shield existed to restrict movement and energy between the material plane and other planes. My wish is to create a setting where mid-level PCs start exploring to find out every village, town and dungeon is completely empty. Structures, traps, spells, plants still exist, everything exists as if it all worked well just yesterday, but for some reason, today, all conscious beings have been wiped off the plane. It's a raw idea and in need of a lot of background to realize, but that's why I am here, turning to people who know Forgotten Realms and it's logic better than I do.
What could be the catastrophe? Why couldn't the gods stop it? Do they even exist anymore? Is it reversible? Are there few giant monstrosities roaming the plane, consisting of previous life and insight into the catastrophe?
As I see it, it could add a new way of playing the game, with almost no focus on classical NPC-guided story-telling, but a way to research, forage, explore, find out about previous omens given to the living, make them learn about the forgotten realms IRL but also in character. Opportunities to create conflict and hope in finding out if there are others like them who somewhy didn't get deleted. Hope it's not too abstract of an idea to keep on building on.
Thanks!
In the battle of the gods the god Theoricles in an act of vengeance caused Oxygen levels to fall to 3.23% and all oxygen dependent life died. the Oxygen was replaced with CO2 which caused the planet to warm up quickly and the 36.2% of the worlds oceans evaporated. This resulted in an Eden environment and the world became overrun with jungles. Oxygen was replenished and back to livable levels after a couple years
The three pillars of role playing games are exploration, social encounters, and combat.
You've pretty much eliminated social encounters. Although you could have the party encounter the occasional other survivor after going dozens of sessions without.
It sounds like you've eliminated most of the monster manual too. Does the catastrophe just eliminated intelligent creatures or all living creatures? What's left? Constructs and awakened plants? Undead? Are there still beasts? What about monstrosities and aberrations. I would recommend you keep as many as you can, or the combat pillar will be quite limited as well.
If you're going to minimize social encounters and combat, you better make sure your players really like exploration.
I’d make sure you got player buy in before you really got too deep into this. There’s a big segment of D&D that’s about killing bad guys and taking their stuff. If there’s no bad guys (which is to say no combat), that eliminates a whole pillar of the game. Pity the player who makes a fighter for this campaign. And if there’s no NPCs for role playing, well, there goes another pillar (sorry high cha characters, you won’t be needed) You’d need a group that’s really, really into exploration and solving the mystery, along with some intra-party rp. Personally, not that it matters, it would not be for me. I think you could pull something like this off with the D&D ruleset, but it wouldn’t feel much like D&D.
Maybe you could do it for a session. Or even half a session. Everyone is gone, the PCs fiddle around for a day, then they go to sleep, wake up again and everything is back, and they’re the only ones who remember. Now that could be a mystery to solve. To add tension, it could keep happening, once a month or something, with the world gone for a longer span each time. The PCs need to figure out what’s happening and fix it before everyone they know and love is just gone forever.
Or take a page from The Neverending Story / that one Star Trek: TNG episode. Parts of the world are gradually disappearing as if they never existed. That far off city where there was supposed to be a lost artifact, now no one has heard of it. An NPC born on the outlands is nowhere to be found one day. You have only weeks before the boundary reaches the first of your PCs' home town.
That's a great explanation. Exploration should be a huge theme yes, and talked through with the players before creating such a setting. Thank you for that, I'll put some thought into keeping the combat pillar intact somehow.
These are great thoughts, damn. Especially the periodic dissappearing. Mystery solving just seems to be a whole theme that I haven't had the chance to explore yet in my DM-hood.
Thank you for the answers, I've already gotten more inspiration to brainstorm this campaign! If I finish with a specific setting and/or story, I'll post an update.
The idea instantly reminded me of this video. It's a pretty well thought out world, and it's possible you could do similar. It could be that some of the citizenry voluntarily became undead to survive the horrors that was the apocalypse, or otherwise found ways to persist in the world, and hence maybe there are still enemies, friends and quest givers to find in the rare live settlement.
Or perhaps, this could be a setting where Orcus, demon prince of Undeath, conquered Faerun, and transformed it into an entire world not dissimilar from his own layer of the Abyss, Thanatos.
The party would contend with a world of the dead and the damned. Zombies, demons, vampires and all manner of monstrosities plague the land; what remains of the old world is little but crumbling structures and monsters tough or hardy enough to survive in a land of the hostile dead.
Quests could be given by tiny tribes of survivors, hiding away in the world. Perhaps wards or illusions can protect a tiny town or fortress of survivors. The Underdark could potentially survive. The drow, backed by a rival demon lord/goddess in Lolth, could be a resistance force in a sense. Maybe when push came to shove, they may even ally themselves with other humanoid survivors to resist the monstrosities that swarm the world. Maybe the players could get quests from spirits that still haunt Faerun, with many trapped on the material plane and unable to reach the afterlife. Maybe a temple still holds a faint presence of a god such as Selune, Lathander or Tyr, who begs them to thwart Orcus's hold over the world and save those few poor souls who remain. They are the last hope who could unite the survivors and restore Faerun to life.
Of course that means the whole world isn't completely empty though.
ORRRRR alternatively! Spellplague 2 electric boogaloo
(Can't believe I just used that stupid meme, I'm so sorry)As someone who knows a bit about FR, if you want to be lore compliant then the "catastrophe" can't come from within. Nothing in the known Realmspace (and the upper and lower planes as well, to be honest) is powerful enough to achieve what you want to achieve.
You can toy with the idea of Far Realm though. Something ancient from there, perhaps? The gods have zero knowledge and influence when it comes to things from that plane.
What are the advantages of running a game like this? I just don't really see what the fun is. It looks to me that this would wipe out all social interaction, eliminating one of the most fun parts of the game.
You have no NPCs to give quests or guide the players. So what do they do? Why do they bother doing it? What is the point in exploring ? There is nobody to help, and nothing is threatening the players. Why not go live in the most luxurious palace you can find? If I was playing this game, I would locate a comfortable cottage where I thought I could grow food, and then sit there refusing to move.
The biggest issue is going to be food. All the food is going to rot, and nobody is producing any more of it. Players are basically playing a scavenging vs. starvation game. But once they find a big cache of preserved meat and grain, they basically don't need to do anything for a couple of years.
This might work better as a small section where the players are transported to a mirror-world demi-plane and have to escape it, but I think you're going to struggle with this for a whole campaign.