Im the designated, newish DM for my group of newish players. I want to add this gimmick to the upcoming game to make it interesting because all the other games I've run never seem to turn out any good and i end up not wanting to continue them.
I'll give a summary of the setting and the idea i have in mind and hopefully you guys can help direct it so its as fun as possible for everyone at the game.
>Best way to run this type of campaign?
With a different system.
>typical faerun type fantasy world.
>raven queen in the shadowfell decides that she wants to quit her job of killing mortals when their time comes.
>thinks of ways to do this without having the other gods coming down on her like they did before.
>then one day a ancient red dragon falls into a portal to the shadowfell, and it cant find its way back out.
>it slowly succumbs to the realms dark influence, and turns into a insane shadow dragon under the raven queens control.
>the queen uses its shadow fire and her soul magic to create a item of terribly great and unstable power.
>the shadow mirror"working name". a black glass mirror that erased all other gateways to and from the shadowfell, making it the only portal to the shadowfell.
>but its true power was still dormant, the mirror required something else to fulfill its true purpose, creating a rip in reality to a mirror universe where time runs backwards.
>she plans to use this wormhole to travel back in time and consume the gods that imprisoned her while they are still young and vulnerable.
>but she needs the last ingredient, the souls of 1 million mortals from the material plane.
>she assembles a vast army of undead and sends them into the world with the dragon, they have orders to kill only the exact amount of mortals she needs and no more.
>the war spans for years and it gets to the point were every civilization of every race bands together to fight the undead, but for every soldier they lose, the undead gain one.
>the war is now at its climax, the raven queen almost has all the souls she needs and the population of the world drops to almost half.
>before she emerges victorious, a group of 4 legendary heroes make a final stand against her in her domain, one of which is a female warlock of the queen that has been serving the queen as a pawn all along.
>a epic battle ensues but when the paladin is about to land the final blow to the queen, ...
sorry for the wait, had to use the restroom.
>the queen transfers her soul from her dying vessel into the warlock, banishing the girl from her body.
>the queen, now possessing the girls body kills 2 of the remaining heroes, despite the paladin's best effort to shield them from her destructive ice magic.
>now only he remains to fight the god, but despite the circumstances he cannot bring himself to attack. he had fallen in love with the girl over there years of travel.
>mortally wounded from the queens relentless attacks, he steels his nerve and does what he believed needed to be done. he raised his holy avenger and struck the mirror with godly radiance gifted to him at the last second by a dying celestial.
>this last act killed both the knight and the celestial but managed to shatter the mirror's dark glass, causing a massive magic explosion that destroys a large potion of the queens domain, almost all of the remaining mortal army in the mirrored part of the material plane that the fight happened in, and the huge capital city in the range of the explosion.
>if it wasn't for the fact that the mirror absorbed the last 3 souls it needed when the heroes died, it would have been completely destroyed. but instead it lays dormant somewhere on the material plane separated from its many glass shards scattered through the world.
>cut to the present day, almost a thousand years have passed, the undead army and dragon have been finally destroyed and the world has made a slow but steady recovery from the catastrophic event.
>the population is healthy again and the residual factors from the war create a spike in adventuring companies, thousands of entrepreneurs rush to reclaim lost treasures, civilizations, ruins, and knowledge from the world.
>the queen is the lone survivor of the calamity, though it has left her in a weakened state. the mortals of the world regard her as their savior for preventing their demise. through impersonation and a diminished magic essence, she becomes queen of a nation..
>and she manages to avoid being detected by the gods for about 900 years. now she uses magic in secret to alter her appearance to look as if she was slowly aging over the years. she has also succeeded in covering up any evidence of the mirrors existence.
>she decides to go into hiding and let the people think that she died of of old because 900 years is long even for a elf.
>she commands a secret organization of elite soldiers who search every corner of the world for the mirror and its shards, hoping to restore the item and reach her original goal.
>but after the many years of tireless searching, only one of its 20 shards is recovered, its residual power is still capable of infusing its owner with a bit of power straight from the shadow fell. it is entrusted to her most skilled knight.
>various other creatures including people posses the other shards in all corners of the world. the shards influence makes them unwilling to part with its intoxicating power. but the mirror itself has yet to be found...
>somewhere in the kingdoms region, a group of fresh face adventures find a strange silver mirror during their first quest as a company"the players"
>the mirror is malfunctioning horribly. it will always find the party no matter how they dispose of it. and worse of all it will force the party into the SF every 3 days in the material plane, and keep them there for another 3 days.
>the mirror also gets colder the farther away it is to the nearest shard and hotter the closer it is. the players will learn that the only way to end the curse is to gather all the remaining shards and then free all the souls inside by striking it with holy light.
>now the party must track the remaining shards, use their limited time on the material world to prepare for their dives into the SF, and survive the countless undead, queens forces, and shard owners.
and thats it. i just wanna know if maybe its a little to railroady or some ways to make the SF interesting.
You're literally never going to give up shitposting, are you?
What are you talking about?
it sounds cheesy, boring, clichè and with a shitload of unnecessary background
This.
well can i ask what you would change or an example of a more interesting concept.
1) typical faerun fantasy world
Big no.
2) The monarch of the dead wanting to quit its job is a classical trope, but really "going backwards in time to kill gods that would retilate" is really really silly.Doctor-Who tier of silly.
3) the numbers. half of the world population is far more than 1 million.
4) the whole possesion skitch seems like fapbait. The mirror thing is just cringy.
5) random time intervals. 1000 years is a fucking long time, look how fast things chance.
6) the goddes hiding as the head of a state is retarded
7) random people imbued with godlike power was old in the early 2000
8) the whole mirror quest seems extremely railroady and hamfisted. Why the fucking planar switch every 3 days? Use something else, like shades of the lost souls trapped in the mirror manifesting to them.
(i would also go for a classic and make the shard explode, sending a tiny sliver in the body of each PC, killing them slowly since the mirror still tries to get new souls, so the quest has actual stake rather than the random curse)
Hey OP is the history a previous game of yours? If it is, keep it, for the sake of nostalgia. If not, there's a lot useless background info.
Idc how the mirror was created, or about the big red dragon. If ot will ever matter (i.e. he rises from the dead) then tell the players at the time, that 1000 years ago the undead had a dragon. But it really doesnt matter at all for general adventuring or the whole mirror schtick.
Also, it seems railroady and holy-centered, like some sort of biblical tale. Important to remember that the players don't need to "win". Set up problems for them and let them tackle them as they see fit. Maybe they want to help this queen?
Lastly, ill tell you from personal experience that the trope of "go around the world looking for X pieces of Y" is boring. Great, so i can write in my inventory that i have some object. Idc. Let me perform actions that change the world throughout the game, instead of holding it all up to a massive climactic ending.
Also, medieval fantasy is not time-travel friendly
>fragments of an evil deity have started possessing ordinary folks
>the possession expresses itself as a superficially beneficial blessing but slowly corrupts its host and everything around them
>for instance, the tongue of the deity gives its host a superior sense of taste but makes it extremely gluttonous
>meanwhile, people and monsters around it lose their sense of taste and grow aggressive in their search for something to sate their appetite
>when discovered and threatened, the fragment takes over its host, turning it into an abomination with the strength to defeat its aggressors
>one of the party's own members gets possessed by one of the fragments, but this one seems to be self-aware and does not exert any corrupting influence
>it helps the party track down and defeat the fragments so that the deity cannot be resurrected
>as it turns out, the fragment actually absorbs the other fragments as they are defeated
>a third party is aware of this fact and befriends the possessed party member with the intent to fuse with the collected fragments to attain goodhood
>the resurrection ritual is botched as the original fragment possessing the party member has grown fond of the party and defects
>finally, the party has an epic showdown with their former-"friend"-turned-incomplete-mad-deity
how run a good lotrian campaign?
by not using acronyms
how to run a lord of the ringsian campaign?
The problem here is none of this is actually gameable
You've thought of some massive over arching plot that spans literal millennia. This is almost impossible to translate into a cohesive game that makes sense and actually gives the players agency and choice.
As a rule you should plot situations not plots and should start very small and let things grow more complex.
When you sit down for the first session where are the players and what's the situation theyre in? What quest hooks do they have to latch onto? What dungeons exist to explore ? What monsters to defeat?
Those are actually gameable bits , the rest is just your novel.
I like this. Especially because the possessed PC retains their agency right through the end.
op here thanks to everyone for your input, the ideas suggested by these two anons particularly caught my interests. the idea of creating bosses centered around body parts is very flexible and i can already picture some interesting character ideas. like a petty thief that suddenly gets a super leg that turns him into the fastest thing in the land and now hes able to steel things and nobody could even see him do it.
also the idea of starting with a small world and building up is kinda a relief, this also lets me pick what to work on and prepare for by just looking at what the players seem to gravitate towards.
does anyone have any interesting idea's for body part focused NPC bosses?
what about a artisan with possessed eyes and imposingly good vision, hes able to make paintings so detailed that the human eye cant see alot of them.
in combat he'd be situated on a very elevated platform like the top of a mountain or lighthouse and he fires at the party from impossibly long range and inhuman accuracy with his musket. making it a race to find cover from his fire and avoid obstacles on the way to his location.
Now, I could just type all of it out, but I don't feel like it, so just look up Grandia II.
will do, reading the Wikipedia page right now
You've by this actually got a really simple and yet flexible open world gaming structure to work within.
Players start in X settlement , Neverwinter , Daggerford or wherever.
Get opening premise. You can either exposition this or run them through a mostly railroaded dungeon ' in media res' where the players are hunting down one of these monsters and get infected.
Players get prophecy/visions of the locations of these body parts.
Give them 3 to start and some basic info. Ones the eye, in neverwinter woods, guarded by undead minions.
You can add complexity by various external obstacles that get in the way. Elves in the wood dont like players poking around, think them responsible for the mutations. Etc.
When they defeat one part they get a vision to the location of a new one and still have the others they know of to defeat as well.
Stagger it in terms of difficulty so the later ones are harder but earlier ones get somewhat stronger if ignored.