What's an appropriate Fantasy campaign-level plot that isn't:

Climate change.
Completely natural cyclic phenomenum that means nations/states are competing for agricultural land, dealing with nomadic hordes, etc.

>Climate change
That's probably the lamest premise for the campaign I've ever heard.

Shit starts happening, but rather than by actions of a villain, it was kickstarted by a mishap or accident.
For example some wizards blasted a hole into an alternate realm and also died in the process so they couldn't revert it. Alternately adventurers do it and then run the fuck away because that's what adventurers would do. Either way some alien plague seeps out and starts to convert the world's flora/fauna into one of it's own realm. In the meantime monsters come out of that dimension. In the meantime bunch of kingdoms blame each other for it and a war might happen. In the meantime social unrest has led to some pogroms on magic users.

Players want to deal with it because the world is going to shit or because somebody influential pays them for it because it's hurting his business, or maybe one of the players inherited a patch of land in the middle of plagued land. One way or another, what they get is 'DEAL WITH THIS SHIT PLEASE' but at first they need to learn what is even happening, and then find a countermeasure.

The Sun god has died so the sun is stuck in his chariot, just over the horizon. After a few hundred hours, a neverending sunset is neither fun or romantic. The owlbears and other night fauna are beginning to go mad, the plants begin to wilt, and everyone is sure that the world's about to end.

Are you man enough to find Sungod's dead beat demigod son and whip him up in shape to take over the duty of ferrying the Sun?

And expanding on this: since your players will see a raging shitstorm, they will expect a villain even though there isn't one. But you know what? Give them one, somewhere later in the campaign have an imposter claim he has brought on the plague. For gold or whatever he offers to mercifully spare kingdoms from being infected. He can either be bluffing or maybe he's secretly a talented alchemist and managed to develop a formula that halts the infection spread and has his underlings spread it when the kingdoms heed his demands.

Presumably you don't want 'villain wants to take over the world' plots either right?

Some ideas
>hate group wants to kill everyone of a certain race/religion/magical tradition
>religious organisation wishes to end the practice of resurrection, believing the resurrected to be merely copies. The party or the party's loved ones have been resurrected
>a war between two great nations fast approaches, one that threatens to throw the world into chaos, the party must find an ancient super-weapon to ensure their nation survives/wins the war relatively unscathed (doesn't have to be particularly political, keep things simple)
>the party are part of a recently arrived group of settlers/colonists in a new land. They need to survive the winter, explore the new land with its mysterious ruins, and deal with the natives. Eventually, other nations may want to get in on the colonising action. Or the home nation might start throwing its weight around and asserting undue control.
>the party are a group of adventurers who wish to reclaim their lost lands from the ancient druidic lich that destroyed them in order to stem the tide of civilisation
>the party are nihilistic villains that wish to destroy the universe and end suffering

The party need to go to the lost land of whocaresistan, an advanced and ancient kingdom that collapsed and is now full of monsters (and/or robots, depends how advanced you want to make them) to find the cure for a plague or something

Literally the best advice in this thread. Let your players plot the story for you.

This especially has the advantage in that the players are most likely automatically invested in the adventure.

Well, you'll need to have a mission that would drive all the PCs to work together for a long time, and it sounds like you want a far-reaching plot of epic scale. If you want to avoid saving the world (or the PCs' section of the world) from destruction, then you'll want something personal enough to compel all the characters to work together.

Here's an idea. All the characters have a mysterious power of some sort, and they don't know what it is or why they have it. They journey across the world and explore ancient ruins to discover the true nature and secret history of their powers.

Given my usual players, I'd make it about some sort of wish-granting artifact.
Lots of people want it for various reasons - most aren't particularly nefarious even, they're just rich traders and merchants who want more money.
Maybe you could throw in some more 'evil' villains who are after it - or perhaps just simply limit the power of the artifact so those people care less about it.

Whole thing has violence in it obviously, since there are criminals after it for a way to bolster their crime empire, there are the aforementioned traders, a few wronged parties seeking it to fix their issue - and more importantly, I'm sure the party can come up with a wish between them.
Or each having their own, resolving to share it if everyone is playing lawful/chaotic good decent chaps

The party are colonists/explorers on a ship/skybarge to a new land. Cue conflicts with locals, other nations' expeditionary forces, finding an artifact or important place.

>defending "big bad evil guy"

*cringe cringe*

you could do a war between city states, of the likes of the italian renaissance wars.

Something along the lines of:

>PCs are a bunch of mercenaries and sellswords that set out to profit from a trade war between city states.

The world is dying. Its not anyones fault, as far as you know. Its been happening for a long time.

Everyone claims they know the reason. Some say its because the gods have abandoned our world, or are dead. Some say its because he tapped into powers we were not meant to know. Others say that it is as simple as this: all things eventually come to an end.

What matters is that the sun is going out, the seas are drying up, and there is no one the party can simply kill to make it stop. Maybe they can find a way to save the world anyway. Maybe they can find a way out, to someplace safe. Maybe all they can do is make one last act of defiance against the coming dark.

Whatever they choose, this is the Last Grand Adventure.

>self-awaredly continuing with this shitty meme

*le cringe*

here's a plot I wrote up and am currently running

world was a low/ no magic place.
magic wasn't originally part of the world some cataclysmic event lead to turning the material plane into magical Chernobyl. as things began to settle down this saturation of magic gave rise to magical beasts and many monsters in the world as well as a new breed of humanoids.
these supremely powerful magical humanoids realized their potential and went full tyrant on the world way back in the when. small movement of them felt it was wrong and tried to sap the magic back out of the material plane but was only "mostly" successful. this caused a second cataclysmic event that brought the downfall of these super mages. many of them had contingencies in case everything went tits up and as a result several of the gods are actually these beings that achieved powers rivaling actual deities or formed one of any number of plans to avoid destruction.

cue world as we know it. while magic isn't gone it is far less potent than before the super mages went extinct. one such mage has reemerged and discovered the power some of his peers had achieved.

this dude doesn't want to destroy the world. doesn't even want to rule it. he designed a way to "consume" the gods and their power, but before he could test it out they thwarted him and the gods and this BBEG have been secretly slugging it out for centuries.

the party inadvertently stumbles over a small part of this plot and gets roped into stopping this BBEG from wiping out the gods as this would lead to all divine power would be snuffed out. with mortals and the divine being codependent for so long the complete disappearance of one would have devastating effects. like spirits running rampant on the material plane, paladins cease to exist, primary method of healing is gone overnight. and the only god left is the biggest asshole in creation.

tldr; supermage wants to eat gods to become supreme being. it's a dick move so some shmucks go to stop him

cont'd.

there is more detail but that is the core of it you can work with.

>BBEG

Ugh.

>That's probably the lamest premise for the campaign I've ever heard.
climate change that is caused by illegal fire elemental immigrants who does not work and steal all the jobs

Help guy make a perfect sandwitch by going after the ingredients, which are monsters

>"What do you mean the sauce is ruined and we have to collect fresh portions of all 48 types of demonic ichor because one of the previous specimens came from the wrong gender?"

>Leddit
>Using the word cringe at all

Assuming that this is D&D, you need to get into the head space of pulp writers of the 1930s. Have your characters adventure to far off and exotic locales, matching wit and blade with bizarre adversaries. Have them adventure for the lost treasures and cursed artifacts of fallen empires.

The villians, on the other hand, need smaller scale ambitions than 'world conquest'.
Maybe a sorcerer needs to commit some horrible atrocity to summon the spirit of a long dead priest-king, just to learn how to a cast a new spell.

Maybe the Neaderthal warlord just wants to capture a single city. He doesn't have the means to become SUPREME RULER OF THE WORLD (tm), but he's fine with commiting genocide on the Homo Sapiens and tearing down their edifices so his people have tons of lebensraum.

Oh, and that Thief-king? He's not doing anything wrong (against the players at least), he just happens to have a legendary hoard of treasure that the party really wants.

A conventional medieval war

>cringe
Ugh.

>climate change that is caused by illegal fire elemental immigrants who does not work and steal all the jobs