What are your top three action/adventure movies? What do you like especially about each one? Can you think of any way to combine the elements in a way that seems new? A big part of coming up with plot ideas is to find inspiration.
Usually adventurers are trying to stop evil plots, not good plots.
...then again, I've known players who like to ruin any plot.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Adventurer's guild in a tavern. Best way to go. You can link adventures if you want to, but it's simple and good cause you don't have to. Make different tiers and let the adventurers climb up the guild. Make a cool lvl 20 character who is the guild master. Maybe warlock, wizard, sorcerer or rogue.
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'The Cleverness of mushrooms always surprises me!' - Ivern Bramblefoot.
1) Players get trapped in a time bubble which transports them to the far distant future. The world they know has disappeared and other races are now supreme, with humans being primitive tribes only (planet of the apes). Can they find an advanced human civilisation? Can they get back to their own time?
2) The players live in a world that has vessels similar to Lyrandar Galleons from Eberron. The design and construction of the vessels is tightly controlled by one nation and guild. Another nation or freelance artificer has discovered how to make the galleons, but needs to obtain the requisite dragon shards. The players have been employed to find a supply. Where do they come from? What will the opposition do to stop them getting dragon shards? What will the players need to do to obtain a supply?
3) As a variant on the above the characters employer has built the first Lyrandrar Airship, and needs a crew for its first flight. Things go wrong and the crew get blown far from the known world (and wrecked). How do they get home (Star Trek voyager)?
4) Something is going wrong with magic. Spells don’t always work, sometimes magic items lose their enchantments. What is the cause? How can magic users restore their powers? Can the characters stop this happening? (Larry Niven’s “The Magic goes away”)
Try begin a Campaign where the players are so lost in the middle of a Swamp, and they have to manage to find either a safe place or why there are here.
The rest of the Campaign I left it at your own will................. so don't overfill the terrain with too many monsters.... hahahaha.... :)
I'm having a war between Orcs against the elves, dwarves and humans. While the war is going on, a cult called Leviathan is trying to subjugate the world. The players start in the world knowing about the war, and they are geographically close to the fighting so they may join the fight if they want to go in that direction. But the main campaign will be to introduce them to the idea that there is something out there that goes by the name of Leviathan that is pulling the strings in the background. Sooner or later they are expected to engage Leviathan and get back to the war later.
I feel this is something like the LOTR. There was the big picture war campaign unfolding while the Journey of the Ring to Mount Doom was the real story.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Really depends on the group, what style do they like? Are they new or experienced? What genre are you aiming for?
One technique is to give multiple missions that are time sensitive but with different groups demanding their task take priority. For example a small village who want the party to investigate missing hunters, attacks on their fishing grounds and an old witch in the nearby swamp. The town meeting gets heated with people angrily saying why each task is most important ("save the hunters, who knows how long they will last?", "Protect our food, most people haven't had more than a snack in the last 3 days, no point saving the hunters if they come back and everyone's starved". "All pointless distractions, if the witch isn't stopped and people keep disappearing then well fed or not the town is doomed").
With no right answer and someone always annoyed no matter what they pick.
I'm running an Eberron game and my players are mercenaries working for house Orien. Orien are building the lightning road to Droaam and at the first pahse players are busy cleaning up monsters and bandits from the rail's path. That's a good excuse to throw a bunch of unrelated fights with diverse set of enemies to get a good gist of what players are capable of. Every once and then they get hints of some forces running false-flag perations, trying to instigate Breland-Droaam war, staging monster attacks on brelish settlements and human attacks on monster settlements. Once they're high level enough I plan to do a train attack where players get to confront the Emerald Claw who were behind those attacks.
Players could foil the plan completely if they act fast, but most likely they'd defeat the terrorists but they still kill a lot of people on the train and plant enough false evidence to get journalists quastioning "official version" of Emerald Claw attack. From that it could go to players either trying to avert the war by going all espionage and intrigue or getting involved in it if they like fighting squads of war trolls. From what I gathered they enjoy the fightporn more than investigation, so it's probably going to be a war arc.
What about the published modules? There are awesome adventures going back to the original AD&D maps. The Temple Of Elemental Evil and Tomb of Horrors are two from the best of all time list. Depending on the game edition you may have some tweaking to do for 5e. Some already have been updated. There are public domain ones too, offered by DDB, Roll20 and other sites. Try the local gaming shop or see what others have they may want to give you or trade. It doesn't all have to come out of your head...
I've recently had two campaign ideas, but as I'm about to start a game I'm really excited for I hopefully won't be able to use them for a while.
Idea 1: The players are in a world where in order to decide what the next Era is like the gods choose champions and those champions lead kingdoms/mercenaries and try to kill all opposing champions. The opposing champions would depend on whether the gods were arguing over good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. If the gods are arguing about good vs. evil then the party must be all good and neutral, or all evil and neutral and must defeat the other side (whether that be the good or evil champions). The players get to choose whether they're average people in this world just trying to survive the God War, or if they are champion hopefuls trying to impress the gods. If they become a champion of a god they get an epic boon.
Idea 2: The world is compromised of 4 or 5 kingdoms at constant war and a penal colony separated from the rest of the continent by a mountain range. The PCs are accused of crimes and sent to the penal colony (whether they actually committed the crimes is up to the player). The penal colony is a harsh desert with various predatory wildlife and even worse people. The penal colony has a few towns but those towns are run by whoever is the strongest in the area and their gang, making them places of barely constrained chaos and hotspots for crime. The penal colony is secretly the ruins of the continent's former greatest kingdom and the last of its royal bloodline is trying to bring it back. The players can try to take over the penal colony and have each of them run a city but if they do that they'll eventually have to deal with the rise of the former kingdom, or they can run into and try and help bring back the kingdom (this could be for gold, glory, revenge, or really any reason). Alternatively, they could just try and survive the penal colony and have a more survival-horror game.
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call me Anna or Kerns, (she/her), usually a DM, lgbtq+ friendly
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I've been having trouble as a DM with making a good plot and I'm seeking a tad bit of guidance....Any Suggestions?
What are your top three action/adventure movies? What do you like especially about each one? Can you think of any way to combine the elements in a way that seems new? A big part of coming up with plot ideas is to find inspiration.
Are the players evil?
Usually adventurers are trying to stop evil plots, not good plots.
...then again, I've known players who like to ruin any plot.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
A recommendation
Try using a villain related to one of the pcs then try to groom a player into a villain
Adventurer's guild in a tavern. Best way to go. You can link adventures if you want to, but it's simple and good cause you don't have to. Make different tiers and let the adventurers climb up the guild. Make a cool lvl 20 character who is the guild master. Maybe warlock, wizard, sorcerer or rogue.
'The Cleverness of mushrooms always surprises me!' - Ivern Bramblefoot.
I'll worldbuild for your DnD games!
Just a D&D enjoyer, check out my fiverr page if you need any worldbuilding done for ya!
1) Players get trapped in a time bubble which transports them to the far distant future. The world they know has disappeared and other races are now supreme, with humans being primitive tribes only (planet of the apes). Can they find an advanced human civilisation? Can they get back to their own time?
2) The players live in a world that has vessels similar to Lyrandar Galleons from Eberron. The design and construction of the vessels is tightly controlled by one nation and guild. Another nation or freelance artificer has discovered how to make the galleons, but needs to obtain the requisite dragon shards. The players have been employed to find a supply. Where do they come from? What will the opposition do to stop them getting dragon shards? What will the players need to do to obtain a supply?
3) As a variant on the above the characters employer has built the first Lyrandrar Airship, and needs a crew for its first flight. Things go wrong and the crew get blown far from the known world (and wrecked). How do they get home (Star Trek voyager)?
4) Something is going wrong with magic. Spells don’t always work, sometimes magic items lose their enchantments. What is the cause? How can magic users restore their powers? Can the characters stop this happening? (Larry Niven’s “The Magic goes away”)
Try begin a Campaign where the players are so lost in the middle of a Swamp, and they have to manage to find either a safe place or why there are here.
The rest of the Campaign I left it at your own will................. so don't overfill the terrain with too many monsters.... hahahaha.... :)
My Ready-to-rock&roll chars:
Dertinus Tristany // Amilcar Barca // Vicenç Sacrarius // Oriol Deulofeu // Grovtuk
look to history, especially around wars.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
I'm having a war between Orcs against the elves, dwarves and humans. While the war is going on, a cult called Leviathan is trying to subjugate the world. The players start in the world knowing about the war, and they are geographically close to the fighting so they may join the fight if they want to go in that direction. But the main campaign will be to introduce them to the idea that there is something out there that goes by the name of Leviathan that is pulling the strings in the background. Sooner or later they are expected to engage Leviathan and get back to the war later.
I feel this is something like the LOTR. There was the big picture war campaign unfolding while the Journey of the Ring to Mount Doom was the real story.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I see were your going with that
what kind of campaign do you want to run? i run horror campaign i write - will be happy to share with you if you want
Revenge campaigns are always fun.
Really depends on the group, what style do they like? Are they new or experienced? What genre are you aiming for?
One technique is to give multiple missions that are time sensitive but with different groups demanding their task take priority. For example a small village who want the party to investigate missing hunters, attacks on their fishing grounds and an old witch in the nearby swamp. The town meeting gets heated with people angrily saying why each task is most important ("save the hunters, who knows how long they will last?", "Protect our food, most people haven't had more than a snack in the last 3 days, no point saving the hunters if they come back and everyone's starved". "All pointless distractions, if the witch isn't stopped and people keep disappearing then well fed or not the town is doomed").
With no right answer and someone always annoyed no matter what they pick.
Mercenary work from one town to another
pros
-good for world building
-plenty of space for player shenanigans
-ability to link it into other plot threads
cons
-impersonal
-large amount of tropes
-players might want a more epic/heroic start
Mostly nocturnal
help build a world here
I'd give you my current one.
I'm running an Eberron game and my players are mercenaries working for house Orien. Orien are building the lightning road to Droaam and at the first pahse players are busy cleaning up monsters and bandits from the rail's path. That's a good excuse to throw a bunch of unrelated fights with diverse set of enemies to get a good gist of what players are capable of. Every once and then they get hints of some forces running false-flag perations, trying to instigate Breland-Droaam war, staging monster attacks on brelish settlements and human attacks on monster settlements. Once they're high level enough I plan to do a train attack where players get to confront the Emerald Claw who were behind those attacks.
Players could foil the plan completely if they act fast, but most likely they'd defeat the terrorists but they still kill a lot of people on the train and plant enough false evidence to get journalists quastioning "official version" of Emerald Claw attack. From that it could go to players either trying to avert the war by going all espionage and intrigue or getting involved in it if they like fighting squads of war trolls. From what I gathered they enjoy the fightporn more than investigation, so it's probably going to be a war arc.
What about the published modules? There are awesome adventures going back to the original AD&D maps. The Temple Of Elemental Evil and Tomb of Horrors are two from the best of all time list. Depending on the game edition you may have some tweaking to do for 5e. Some already have been updated. There are public domain ones too, offered by DDB, Roll20 and other sites. Try the local gaming shop or see what others have they may want to give you or trade. It doesn't all have to come out of your head...
I've recently had two campaign ideas, but as I'm about to start a game I'm really excited for I hopefully won't be able to use them for a while.
Idea 1: The players are in a world where in order to decide what the next Era is like the gods choose champions and those champions lead kingdoms/mercenaries and try to kill all opposing champions. The opposing champions would depend on whether the gods were arguing over good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. If the gods are arguing about good vs. evil then the party must be all good and neutral, or all evil and neutral and must defeat the other side (whether that be the good or evil champions). The players get to choose whether they're average people in this world just trying to survive the God War, or if they are champion hopefuls trying to impress the gods. If they become a champion of a god they get an epic boon.
Idea 2: The world is compromised of 4 or 5 kingdoms at constant war and a penal colony separated from the rest of the continent by a mountain range. The PCs are accused of crimes and sent to the penal colony (whether they actually committed the crimes is up to the player). The penal colony is a harsh desert with various predatory wildlife and even worse people. The penal colony has a few towns but those towns are run by whoever is the strongest in the area and their gang, making them places of barely constrained chaos and hotspots for crime. The penal colony is secretly the ruins of the continent's former greatest kingdom and the last of its royal bloodline is trying to bring it back. The players can try to take over the penal colony and have each of them run a city but if they do that they'll eventually have to deal with the rise of the former kingdom, or they can run into and try and help bring back the kingdom (this could be for gold, glory, revenge, or really any reason). Alternatively, they could just try and survive the penal colony and have a more survival-horror game.
call me Anna or Kerns, (she/her), usually a DM, lgbtq+ friendly