What are some interesting ways to start off a campaign?

What are some interesting ways to start off a campaign?

The Party meeting each other in a asylum.

The city is under siege and the town administration ask for volunteers to defend it.

this, but make it a rehab center

You all start in a prison.
Your shift has barely begun when a new prisoner, a kindly Ogre, is brought to you heavily chained.

Everyone roll for damage

You awaken being hurled through the warp. With an abrupt stop you pop back into reality surrounded by strangers

Everyone starts with amnesia. They keep finding scattered journal pages through out their adventures as they progress, trying to piece what happened.

Had this happen a while ago.
>sit down at table with four other players in my club
>GM arrives, introduces everyone and verifies we all wrote at least one paragraph for PC backgrounds
>I wrote two pages
>GM starts the scenario by having us wake up in a laboratory strapped to tables.
>"Your vision slowly comes into focus. The immense pounding in your head is matched only by the raging thunderstorm crashing through the collapsed ceiling. You have no idea how long you've been here but given the state of your surroundings, you'd guess whoever put you here is not coming back."
>work ourselves free
>"Oh one more thing. Everyone pass your Character sheets to the person on your left."

So apparently we got body swapped by some mad wizard, and the campaign was our journey to set things right again. The DE rogue quit on the spot when he learned he would be playing a Half Orc barbarian chick.

That's fucking ingenious. I like it.

Oh man that's pretty awesome actually.

Start by giving everyone premades and redshirting them to some dungeon or cool boss to show how powerful the BBEG is.

Then give them back their character sheets and start as normal (tavern, prison etc)

Updated my journal

You find yourself suspended over a pit of glowing molten bronze, each of you are in your skivvies a deranged old wizard, you know you have never seen before, who look 20 points shy of a sanity score of 3 has his hand on a lever. He gives one final insane laugh and says.
"Farewell my old foes!"
He throws the level and you slowly descend to be bronzed...Permanently. Better escape Quick heroes.

Your party just won the War and hailed as heroes. But all is not happily ever after. Nobles are now envious. Vengeful enemies are licking their wounds. Your party are now well renowned. Small transgressions at the pub or ill advised one night stands can no longer be swept under the rug. The Prince, sees all this and summons your party to the Sublime Gate.

Grand tournament, top x winners get gold and glory, and the honer of going on a quest for the king

The PCs awake on a battlefield, corpses are strewn far and as they rouse the old man that looted what he thought were corpses hobbles away as quick as he can towards the treeline.

I've always been a big fan of having the PCs start as part of a caravan/group of pilgrims. A disaster happens/the caravan gets attacked/they get separated from the rest of the group, and they, being the more competent people there, have to help deal with it

It was an okay film

How many of you introduce your BBEG in the first session? I'm curious, starting a followup campaign with a half-new character group (other half are returning characters), all the same players. I'm a bit stumped, because if I follow up on old plot threads and NPCs from one campaign, only half the characters can be invested, even if all the players are onboard.

Although it is a valid method in storytelling, and it could be a good vessel to make it personal, I do it rarely.
I'd rather build mystery and foreboding around a BBEG. Maybe seasoned with a touch of Lovecraft.

My BBEG joined up after maybe 6 or 7 sessions.


He was in gasous form, got inhaled by a player and started requisitioning body mass to rebuild his own form. She ended up throwing her guts up and having the BBEG form it's body from the mess. The character has been on a quest to murder him for almost 2 years in game now. They've had a few skirmishes, but he keeps getting away.

Here are the ways I have started players in my homebrew campaigns:

>On a mission for a megacorp to a recently discovered planet they discover a portal deep beneath the earth with horrific things on the other side, but only one of them saw it before they had to escape the collapsing alien super-structure

>A university for wizards has put out a call for help, but when the adventurers arrive they find three remaining students struggling to close a portal to hell. After sealing it for now, they find out what they need to do to get through it to rescue the entire student body trapped on the other side

>Strange rumors of horrific murders and bad omens bring adventurers to the major capital of the southern part of the realm. While searching for information a massive explosion levels the temple district. The party witnesses a shadow cloaked in fire walking through the devastation. The PC priest of the group tries to stop it and it covered in severe burns (for the rest of the game). The gods walk the earth again.

>body swapped
>changed everything

I would have left too.

The PCs are having a gay orgy, when a man storms through the door and collapses in front of them with dagger in the back. They notice in his hand a crumpled, blood-stained letter.

>*survival

A bunch of ambassadors get thrown out of a third story window into a pile of pigshit

>You all meet at an inn.
In the plane of shadows

If this happens, I will immediately remake my character as Gary Busey.

You all start in a mansion as it burns to the ground.

Depending on how bad the GM was, I would've left too.

As you are sailing toward the capital of the island, the seaman on the crow's nest yells that he spotted another ship. It is approaching fast and has a black flag with a skull and crossed bones depicted on it: try as he might, the captain can't manage to give them the slip and the pirates start boarding your ship. Roll for initiative!

>You thought you were playing the character you wanted to play? HA HA

Yeah, I probably would have either left on the spot too, or if I was really bored, stay and try to sabotage the game until it falls apart, and then offer to run something for everyone but the prior GM.

>You all stand on the deck of the royal navy's finest ship, the Admiral of the navy is glaring at you. "Now, my first questions" He says. "How and why did you get on board my ship?"

A GM I had a while ago dumped this on the party in the first session, it actually worked really well

>The building was on fire, and this time it wasnt your fault

The party is part of their country's military, they're part of a rather large defense force against an incoming invasion, the attempted defense is a slaughter, enemies somehow surrounded(betrayal by a small group of high ranking officials) the defense force. Their allies die, they die. Their countrymen are slaughtered wholesale and their home is razed.

An unknown amount of time later they party awakens to a voice, "you unfortunate, tortured few, awaken, awaken and bear the vengeance of an entire kingdom upon your backs, find the ones that betrayed your people and slaughter them!"

Sometime later the party finds out that the king basically sold his soul and the service of his bloodline to the settings incarnation of vengeance, and they and a couple other groups were torn from the afterlife to seek revenge for their homeland.

All conscripted/recruited in to an army, you are with the final charge/attack of the Fort/castle/army and by luck or chance are in the same part of the army.

The characters can easily work out what they did before the war, but also what they have dnoe during the war and depending on the starting level of experience can be anything from canon fodder to the equivilant of special forces.

Start the party going to be executed for crimes they're not sure of, but leave certain clues it's because they knew too much.
No external intervention interrupting, just give them a chance to save themselves.
Hide starting equipment somewhere so they don't complain.

>behave like an adult, excusing yourself from the table and explaining your objection with the GM.
>Lol nope. I'm going to derail everyone's elses' game, proving how big of an asshat I am, then invite everyone BUT that jerkass GM to my game cuz it'll be better'n'shit. Surely they'll come to me because I don't ruin peoples' fun like that dick of a GM!

Veeky Forums in a nutshell.

I'm thinking about starting my new campaign on a starship, the players each have an assassin sent after them and they have to find out why and who wants them dead.

Nah, I'm usually pretty subtle in my dickery.

It sucks being an almost-forever GM sometimes, but it felt pretty good completely ostracizing my last GM and turning not only the group against him but spreading rumors to pretty much anyone interested in tabletop around.

I wonder if he resorted to going on Veeky Forums and roll20 to desperately try to find games :^)

Murder.

After a night of drinking to blackout and beyond, the party wakes up to find a body. More than enough evidence to convict in the room.

Isn't that kind of the plot of Dark Matter?

i just ran a mini-campaign where the PCs were all on a prison barge going to a work camp/prison island in the far north.

the barge gets blown off course, crashes on an uncharted island full of ruins. the PCs have to not only get warm weather gear, weapons, and equipment from the soldiers, but avoid both the surviving soldiers and the sahaugin/deep ones that live in the water surrounding the island that come ashore when the moon is full to do strange things at the ruins on the beach.

i've run the module twice, the first group picked off the surviving soldiers one by one until they were able to steal the last dinghy from the wreckage. the second group had an existential crisis and ritualistically suicided in front of the deep ones.

So you're a shithead. Right. Got it.

I didn't want to spend three hours before my players were motivated to chase plot hooks, so I started them out at a crossroads where they found a lost little girl. Everything snowballed naturally from that point.

>"You stand before a set of massive oak doors. Everything has lead to this moment. Every struggle fought, every obstacle overcome to bring you here. Beyond these doors stands the final test. Beyond these doors lies the BBEG's throne room."
>"As you look to your fellow adventurers, you're brought back to a single moment of clarity. That first time you all met, in what now seems a distant past, when your stories began...in a tavern..."

That'd be pretty rough for a whole campaign, but I did that once as Dm when the party fucked with a Djinni
It was a monkey's paw kinda deal, but reverted at the end of the following session

It was fun for a club game. Most people had private games running every couple of weeks out of their home, so running a game for the club itself was taken less seriously (most were one-shots or a few sessions long).
That campaign lasted a few months actually and it was a fun roleplay experience, as your character's backstory was the same, just their body (stats, spells, etc) was not. Playing as a Human Paladin trapped in a Halfling Bard's body was fun.
But I can see the frustration. Should have clarified that the game in question wasn't approached to heavily by those playing.

>The thunderous sound of rain pounds atop your heads, only thick sheets of leather hides separate your bodies from the soaking rain, but even the cloaks are having trouble protecting you from this downpour. The horses gallop blindly, a combination of the darkness and the torrential rain making it impossible to see very far, even now you all can barely make out the lantern lights of each other, and to even try and communicate you all must stick close together. You all pull your horses to a stop at what you think might be the top of a hill, it's here you must collect your thoughts. But you all know full well that they are hot on your trail, and resting for even a moment will mean that they are getting closer, even in this blinding rain they will find you, they always find you.

I had planned an Al-Qadim game for a long time that started something like

>Tell players to make characters
>Tell them not to get too attached
>Characters start at 20
>Storming the Vizier's palace
>Kick all the ass
>Bust in on the Vizier's ritual/wedding
>"What are you planning you evil asshole"
>"You really want to know? Let me tell you a story..."
>Give players each another character sheet
>Start at 15
>Rewind time a lot
>Have adventures
>Encounter BBEG
>"Let me tell you a story..."
>This repeats until they start at 5
>Once they defeat the BBEG in one layer, the story becomes clear and gradually unfolds back to where they started with their 'first' characters
>One last adventure

I abandoned it mostly due to logistics and not wanting to screw over players just to maintain the twist. But I remain hopeful I can try it someday.

How did it go?

Other, less ambitious ones I've used:

>They all met in prison for various reasons (vigilantism, "liberating" a brothel, routine inspection, etc.).
>An NPC is present who turned themselves in, and refuses to leave
>They soon learn why

>They all met taking shelter from a storm
>In the most tumultuous, lawless area of the province
>In a country divided by war, civil and abroad
>Political strains make violent outbursts and social conflict common
>They all bear witness to a murder
>The murderers are mysterious robed figures with a numbers advantage
>The victim is a thief carrying a conspicuous magic item and a sealed note
>Nearby is a cliff that the thief attempted escaping to
Don't try this unless you trust your players. All hell broke loose when the player simultaneously jumped in not knowing who was who, recognizing who was/wasn't their countrymen, and having a deadly precipice nearby.
and then a players' whole ex-gang came knocking, assuming they were making new allies

I've also tried the "introduce new player through a mini solo adventure that crashes headfirst into the party", but that requires a hell of a lot of patience and an interesting hook (like a thief stealing something of royal significance, etc.).

You deserve a high five honestly


In the face with a chair
At high speed and extreme force
Repeatedly

In the middle of the final, climactic battle.
After a few rounds, the scene ends.
This theoretical situation is what gets the group called together and employed by a king whose soothsayer saw what they just took part in.
The soothsayer, though known for previously accurate visions, is deliberately lying as part of her own plan.

Set the scene X years in the past.
The characters' parents (all of them, all in one room) are speaking about something.
Obviously, this requires a special setup.

A man with a gun walks into the room.

The best part about this is that with a few modifications I have a character that fits the bill for this nicely.

Somebody watered down their beer and now they are chasing after the criminal.

u mad, u little pussy beta? lmao

...

It'll be just like the special Olympics