Hi all!

I’m looking to write a campaign that takes place the day before the apocalypse, and I was looking for any tips, tricks, or inspiration.

Sincerely,

Aaron Firehand

soo..the idea here is that the end is inevitable?   or is the option of saving the day on the table?

either poses some pretty good story-line options

Yeah, gonna need more details, lol.

nature of the collapse

can it be saved or stopped?

consequence of failure?

consequence of success?

main story beats — the plot points at a high level.

an entire campaign in one day is going to require some form of time dilation, time travel, or something along these lines. Otherwise you're looking at one long rest being the way the world ends!

As others have said, you'll need to explain what the apocalypse is - are we talking a huge meteor, the return of the dinosaurs, volcanic eruption, the ocean swallowing the land, an eldritch being destroying the world with its mere presence, The Nothing from neverending story, or what?

Then, what do you want the players to be doing? saving the world? working out why it's ending? finding a portal to a multiverse where it isn't ending?

I’m really just looking for anything.

A whole Campaign taking place the day before the apocalypse sounds incredibly hard to pull off, unless the idea is that the apocalypse happens fairly early in the campaign and the focus then becomes surviving a post-apocalyptic setting.

I'll go ahead and offer suggestions for the latter, since in many ways every campaign is ostensibly set "before the apocalypse" as so many campaigns are about stopping a world-ending threat before it destroys everything.

I'd say, create one major town in the pre-apocalypse world. Have some idea for what the rest of the world is like, but you really only need to build one town that the players spend time in doing tasks, getting to know people in the town. There needs to be that contrast between the pre/post apocalypse to really hammer home that something terrible happened. Maybe the whole town gets destroyed, maybe most people survive... whatever happens, it's important that they care about at least one character in town before it all goes down.

Secondly, I'd say avoid having your players directly involved in whatever causes the apocalypse. They can be indirectly involved... maybe they're doing something to help a group who's trying to prevent it, maybe they accidentally release something that contributes to it, but if it's gonna happen no matter what it's best not to let the players feel like they've been railroaded into screwing up somehow just to facilitate it.

I think the other hard part is deciding what the apocalypse actually is in this scenario. Making it a worldwide plague might hit a little too close to home for some people these days. I think something that could be fun is to have two planes somehow merged... it's a nice, catastrophic event that can drastically change the landscape and can easily justify the sudden appearance of a massive variety of weird and crazy new creatures.

Here's my basic pitch... some powerful wizard loses someone important to them... a child, a lover, maybe even a cult leader, whatever. In their grief, they attempt to bring them back to life, but the magic to do so doesn't work, because that person has already moved on to a peaceful afterlife. So they go a little nuts... if that person can't be brought back, then they'll just bring the whole world to them. So they're attempting to merge the material plane with the heavens, but things go wrong. The wrong plane gets involved, and the transformation is messy and dangerous... the important thing is that this isn't just an apocalypse for the material plane, it's an apocalypse for this other plane as well. Maybe neither side knows what happend and they assume it was an act of aggression from the other, so the few survivors are now at war with one another as each side blames the other for what happened.

Anyway, I was mostly just spitballing because this idea seems interesting, but there's just so many ways to take the concept. I feel like once you at least settle on what causes the apocalypse and whether or not the players will survive into the post-apocalypse will really help to narrow down what happens next.

Time Loop.

Every long rest (or TPK) resets the day, but they remember it - and only them. The goal is to stop the time loop and free the universe. 

There are multiple pieces to the puzzle. If the reset happens without a goal, a piece being achieved (or at least, attempted) then they lose something. A memory, some max health, something precious. It's the consequence of remembering - the test of character to face the will to better the world instead of benefiting from anarchy without consequence or succumbing to selfish apathy. For that is the true nature of the event. The gods chose champions and must test them before pitting them against a real threat.

Somewhat cliché, but gives you something adaptable, and a potential to run "a day" as a one-shot on an as-needed basis without commitment to a long-term campaign, yet has campaign potential and the option to continue as a full campaign when the time loop ends and the real threat rises.

I dunno. Best I got with your description. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The problem with a time loop is how it applies to equipment.  Do expendable items refresh?  Does the fighter have to go find a magic sword every day?  Is the party expected to fight through the same enemies every time the loop resets?  That doesn't really sound like something that could easily be implemented or would be fun for players.

With time loops I think a good compromise is to have some means of marking specific objects as exempt from the time loop process. I think the way I would handle it is to give each player a limited number of stickers they could attach to objects to let them keep those objects on the next loop around. So the player could willingly choose to preserve mundane objects if they would be useful for a specific thing they're trying to accomplish, or they could just use them to make sure cool, useful magic items they find don't vanish or need to be reacquired on every loop.

Quote from TransmorpherDDS >>

With time loops I think a good compromise is to have some means of marking specific objects as exempt from the time loop process. I think the way I would handle it is to give each player a limited number of stickers they could attach to objects to let them keep those objects on the next loop around. So the player could willingly choose to preserve mundane objects if they would be useful for a specific thing they're trying to accomplish, or they could just use them to make sure cool, useful magic items they find don't vanish or need to be reacquired on every loop.

 This is a brilliant resource-management system for s time loop game. Consider it looted!

In HS our DM ran a 1st edition campaign where we basically played ourselves and in a cataclysmic event where Earth merged with Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Lankmar, and Krynn.  An amalgamation of sorts. 

He basically had a system to sort of figure out stats, STR was pretty straight forward because 1Ed STR chart had different weight rules.  The rest we kind of winged with a consensus between the players on who might be more dexterous, or charismatic, or intelligent (ex) slightly better score if you were on the honor role but considering 18 was supposed to be Einstein no one had a huge stat here), or wise.  Most stats were in the 10-14 range. My str being the exception at 17 (the only big guy playing and could lift a lot). 

Electronics fail the first night.  He had a old Dragon mag with gun stats for D&D rules, and guns worked for awhile after the merger, but eventually gunpowder fails as well. Creatures appear as well as people from those other worlds. 

The start of the game was each person waking up at home with the merge having taken place, and families vanishing in front of them, then having to get together as a group.  You had what you could realistically scrounge.  And each had early encounters where sometimes your best choice was fleeing. 

We get to meet up with a NPC from one of the other worlds once  all characters get together. Basically a GM run character that was a guide of sorts.  And the only caster as a multi-class cleric/mage since none of us could be spellcasters to start.

The first big encounter was bandits rounding up people from the town and those that merged over.   The next was getting the rescued people 100 miles cross country with a bunch of encounters along the way, to a city that merged into our world nearby that was a safe haven, which was the City of Greyhawk. 

From there it pretty much became a fairly normal campaign. 

I like the time-loop idea.

Maybe the party must get back to a machine that can loop them back so many hours, which gives them time to accomplish something before the inevitable end.  Or maybe the "world" could be conceptual, as in a person's world, or this world in this universe ends but could continue to exist on another plane of existence. 

The time-loop could be more of a timer, as in the party gets to reset the timer and extend things for another day, before the end comes.

If you want to get really deep, have the machine be the cause of the disaster. Leave subtle clues that each time they use it, something changes for the more chaotic or destructive. 

Start the campaign with them using the machine for the first time. Don't have the end start straight away. If anything, use it for some innocuous quests - so-and-so has been killed, go back and catch the killer. that sort of thing. Then have the end of the world creep up, and they use the machine to try and stop it.

Why not make it thirty days before the apocalypse? Give your players some more time to play around with before everything explodes.