ITT: ways to start a campaign that aren't involving meeting in a tavern

This is my next character.

Everyone is part of x company and are out on a job, or they already know each other from some bullshit they make up themselves and are looking to for/on a job.

>the ol' "you're trapped in a virtual reality video game and if you die in-game you die IRL" cliche
or
>half the party has been either imprisoned or taken hostage by the other half, but they're forced to work together to against some external threat
or
>players are all on an expedition to colonize/explore a hostile foreign land, game starts with all of them arriving by boat, or maybe there's a shipwreck and the players are the only survivors

My next game (Belkzen), everyone is either going to be escaped orc slaves, or escaped duergar slaves who got above ground and then captured by the orcs.
Everyone gets a occasional chance to escape. If they fail, the party ages one year. If someone plays an orc character, they can instead be a slaver who has a "change of heart" (or gets bribed or otherwise persuaded to ally with the party), and can add their roll to one of the prisoners.

The players are all attending a wedding.
Then someone murders the bride and/or groom.

Party runs the tavern.

Regulars are adventurers.

What could possibly go wrong?

It boggles my mind that someone received this message and thought to himself to “I must screenshot this for posterity”.

Like nigga, a fucking nuke is coming.

What are we talking about again?

You think that's bad?

I'd imagine its more a thing you can quickly send to your loved ones once you've gotten somewhere vaguely safe. Though with recent happenings, I wouldn't be too surprised if somebody was going to try to make a meme with their last few minutes of existence. We wound up in the strangest timeline lads.

>ww2 soldiers fighting on different battlefields at the same time
>ice-cream truck roadkills and isekais them into the fantasy world
>they find themselves racechanged and with new powers
>now they have to work together to prevent the death of the multiverse

>isekai
Shit taste detected

>he gets his champions from a single world
Pleb

>I wouldn't be too surprised if somebody was going to try to make a meme with their last few minutes of existence. We wound up in the strangest timeline lads.

You're all on a ship, not even nec going to the same port.

A sea monster that shouldn't exist attacks your ship. Party is free to try doing whatever they want, the ship's going down but they may possibly kill the creature in their flailing.
All wash up ashore an island, and have to warn the population that ancient horrors are coming back.

That's an intro I have for a game with dinosaurs from the Happy hunting grounds. They're talking celestial spellcasting dinosaurs that worship a primordial.

>be local blacksmith
>town's children go missing
>get called for militia duties to form search parties
>another party brings in and hangs a local bandit leader because we believe he was responsible
>go out to find the children
>discover it was actually an ancient dryad who had abducted all the children to keep them safe as she had seen a vision of our village being destroyed in a disaster
>she ensures us this disaster was simply unavoidable
>stay in her lair over the night as we were bruised and bloodied from our journey and would very likely not have a home to return to if her vision was true
>leave the morning with all the village children in tow
>over night the town has been burned to the ground, the corpse of the bandit leader missing from the gallows with the body of the local nobleman left in his place
>our search party, and the village's children are the sole survivors

>party are all friends/acquaintances/enemies of some person
>he dies
>all go to the funeral
>they're the only people in a hidden section of his will, and they're being requested/blackmailed/pressganged into helping him with some unfinished business or finding his killer etc

This has to be fake, no one would want to sleep with thier sister outside memes

One approach I'm going to try is to have everyone already know each other and already be members of an organization.

My next campaign is going to more or less be a ripoff of Final Fantasy IV, so starting out, everyone is going to serve a kingdom in some capacity or another: royal archivist, war mage, elite scout, knight, commander, airship captain, things like that. It gives everyone a reason to know each other and a reason to work together, and I think it will be a refreshing change from the ragtag band of unrelated murderhobos who just met.

Thankfully, I don't have anyone in my group who would complain that I'm stifling their creativity by setting something like that up, because my players are reasonable people.

You're all on a ship. It will arrive to the destination without incident. Get ready to start a new life in the newest colony.

>party has been captured by the BBEG and is in some kind of slow-moving deathtrap
>first 95% of the campaign is a flashback to how they got there
>last 5% is escaping and defeating the BBEG

>The party are all just childhood friends living in a small town/village until this one faithful their adventure began.

There's also the weirder starts from older editions.
>you all are playing famous wizards, at high level, investigating a powerfully sealed chamber.
(ten minutes later)
You're all dead. Give me your sheets, THESE are your actual characters.
>So you're all going about your normal days when...

lmao.
i like this, but how do you get them there without maximum extreme railroading or "rocks fall everybody is knocked unconscious" shenaniganz?

predeterminedoutcomesinmyrpg?

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>BBEG attempts to capture PCs
>if he succeeds, goto slow-moving deathtrap
>if he doesn't try again later
>repeat until party is captured

In our current campaign all characters have been hired/freed from jail by the party leader during a raid to a village overrun by cultists

What part of that is fun for the pcs. they literally havve no control, you're literally creating a fated encounter. Fuck that. Fuck you. ree.

>incest fetish doesn't exist
How new are you?

If things get really out of hand, you could contrive some stupid twist. It would depend on the overall seriousness of the game, though.

>The slow moving death trap situation is actually an illusion sent by proxy by the BBEG to see what the party would do if they were in such a situation

I dunno, being able to do manual labor for longer than the average Joe seems pretty marketable to me.

i recognize wojak, but why is he gaping like a retard and playing mario

The capital city is under siege. Your party are all local lowlifes and criminals caught out on the streets as the two armies clash inside the city walls.

Will you flee like cowards, fight for your country, or try to grab whatever riches and power you can as the place burns?

>four and a half inches
>average

and here I thought I had a small dick at 5.6 inches. Feels good man

you all wake up in a wizard's laboratory, he's done something to you and now you need to do what he says to get him to reverse it

It's the new meme. The numale smile/soyboy grin. Semi-popular on /pol/. I guess Nintendo is for cucks now or something? I honestly can't keep up with what's forbidden by the meme hive these days

I have an incest fetish but I don't want to fuck my actual sister who exists, I want to fuck a fantasy sister like the one in that made-up story.

im fucking glad I dont go anywhere on this shit site but here

Even here's not safe. Just less infested than the rest, usually. For now.

honestly if a /pol/tard shows up and goes "wait WAIT WAIT WHY WOULD YOU LET A -NIGGER- PLAY DND WITH YOU" everyone in the thread erupts into immediate laughter and they spend the rest of the thread sperging out about it. I once saw a poltard get btfo so bad in one thread from the mockery he started replying to himself and saying nice things to him. he then screenshotted them into a collage, and didnt even fucking edit out the (yous), while going "wow that guy thats not me fucking rekt you guys so hard"

and you could tell he was replying to himself because all of a sudden there were 8 posts in a row that were suddenly "I AGREE FELLOW ANONNYMOOZE I HATE BLACK PEOPLE TOO AND YOU ARE JUSTIFIED IN YOUR BELIEFS AND SHIT"

i think his name was virtualoptim

My party started out as prisoners wrongfully arrested then our prison ship crash landed on an island and we had to work together to find our way off

The players wake up in an abandoned tavern. Their memories of the last few weeks/months/years and of each other are gone. There is a note for them on the table.

PCs all wake up from cryostorage in a seemingly-deserted spaceship. None of them have any idea why they were in cryostorage or how long they were frozen.

I ran a game where each party member was individually hunting a rogue mage for their own motivations (money, justice, friendship, whatever). The game started with them all breaching into the same house in pursuit of the guy, followed by a bit of farcical "Oh, you guys are after him too?"

Then they had to band together to defend themselves from the trap the mage had lured them all into. Worked like a charm, to be honest. Easily one of my favourite campaign openings I've done.

>The lichnomancer is throwing a huge party at his spooky haunted castle, and all the nobles are invited!
>party gets pulled in by some nobleman who really fucking loves to party, but is a bit worried about the whole "the host is the lichnomancer" thing

I ran a campaign that started with the players as the only survivors of an assault on their village by a neighboring kingdom. They were farmers, blacksmiths, town drunk as a bard, etc. In their quest for revenge they developed guerrilla warfare tactics, assembled allies, and slowly brought that kingdom to its knees. The sense of character progression in that campaign was the best

>The party were virgin sacrifices thrown into a dormant volcano to appease some old heathen god. They don't die though, far from it: waking up in a village in the center of the earth, they journey to explore their hollow world and maybe seek revenge on their home village.

>The party are the only survivors of a ferry ship eaten by an utterly, incomprehensibly massive sea creature. They must work together to escape, lest they die alone and forgotten inside a stomach.

>The party are a group of prisoners who've been thrown into a massive, underground, mega dungeon for their various crimes by an apathetic and lazy empire.

>The party are the surviving crew of a space craft that had to make an emergency landing on a 'fantasy' themed planet due to their ship being totaled by a stray meteor. They must work together to not only survive, but adapt, and re-engineer what they can in order to get off this generic theme-park planet.

They kind of have the same premise, but that's all I got at the moment.

Why is this a thing. Everyone i know tries to run something like this? Is it the just tge apex of power gameing? Do they want to be gods? Is it the ultimate huberious of atheists to think of themselfs as their own god?

I'm starting my players on the tail end of getting their job to clear out some bandits. What they don't know is the guy who hired them (noble of that province, through the town they're in's mayor) hired the bandits in the first place to make a quick buck, then hired them to clear it out so he'd get credit for dealing with issues like that quickly.

As an atheist, yeah, sure, why not.

>>Is it the just tge apex of power gameing?
>You all got your shit kicked in by some nobodies
>Aw yeah, I feel so powerful now!

I once had a campaign where my only directions to the players for their backstories was that they needed to reason to be on a boat, heading to the new world. Every single one of them independently decided that their character had gotten blackout drunk, fallen asleep in the gutter, and woken up on a ship in the middle of the ocean.

Thats okay, Jesus brings his own buzz.

Well, no good reason why not too. After all, it's not like such thing as a god exists outside of philosophic concept or the primitive writings of cavemen to explain what they don't know to sleep better at night.
I mean, in one school of thought, you are your own god, so...

No one actually likes rusty dagger shanktown. High-powered games are fun.

Fuck that. I prefer Uncle Stabby's infection alley to any high powered game. They're always an unfun clusterfuck that ends the same.

I've started a game in a few ways

>Stranded in a desert for weeks and finally discover people again for the first time as monsters go out to attack them all.

>Walking into town and someone is looking to hire anyone interested in helping herd some animals, paying well for cheap work because her labors were bought out from under her and no one is willing to work helping there other than her and her husband. Generally put some little combat in to spice it up as protecting the cattle and a night drinking and sleeping at her home while being left off while told they seem to work well together.

>Party shows up in town seeing the town split on a disagreement and a murder and the individuals being seen as the only people without a bias. Afterwords again, celebration and people saying how well they worked together.

>Captured by Drow/Cultists ready to be sacrificed before someone lets them out and they are forced to work together to escape.

>Town attacked and people kidnapped and any able body asks for help finding them. And the only people not in a group is the PCs.

Just generally, hook them once and most characters don't question too much about being together unless someone acts out.

you're actually within the standard deviation of average cock size

I really do hope that tavern has insurance.

I wouldn't bang my sister, but I have cousins I'd definitely go to town on.

And people think larping only happens on Veeky Forums

I've always really wanted to make a contrived plot for a game that is played backwards a la Memento. Like session 1, you defeat bad guy. Then you're making your way through the dungeon, then you're back at the town about to head out to kill BBEG, etc. Maybe some reason that you all need to mind-wipe yourselves each session is that you know something important that the BBEG wants to know, and you must keep it from him.
Obviously, the standard "you were working for the bad guy all along and just killed the good guy"

What is the reason for the PCs to stick together and not split up?

i started an ironclaw one-shot with a high-speed carriage chase as assassins tried to catch up and either fire pistols or leap across
after that it was determining where the assassins came from and how to stop them. if i were going to adapt that into a campaign it'd be pretty easy to turn into either a pure hack 'n' slash or a deep intrigue game based on the tastes of the players.
you can easily extend this to other settings, concepts, or modes of transport, uniting the players through sudden catastrophe

other than that, starting them already as a group investigating a dungeon or whatever in media res can be a good way to kick things off.
it immediately establishes a goal, and you can prompt them for ideas on what they expect to gain from the venture.
you could also establish some form of benefactor in the process, such as a wealthy noble paying them to investigate ruins to either add artifacts to his collection or help with research on something.

no, nintendo is for giant manchild bugmen, or so the meme goes

Maybe they liked the experience of working together.
Maybe it worked really well and they begrudgingly accept that.
Maybe they have nothing better to do.
Maybe they continue to find themselves in similar situations with the same people and can't get out of it.
Maybe they need each other for some reason.

Or maybe, and this is the most important reason of all, the players all want to play a tabletop game together and shouldn't try to make it difficult for that to happen.

There is nothing worse than someone in the group going "oh my character wouldn't do that, he is an aloof loner... why would he do X Y Z, I'm not doing that".
You're playing a game with other people.

>princess bublegum anything but lawful evil

>Semi-popular on /pol/
Probably because all gaming systems as well as 95% of forms of fun are degenerate. /v/ is where youll find people arguing about individual platforms. Because its a /v/ meme. From /v/.

Group of mercs that got slapped together by someone above them. Have part of the first campaign be all of them being let go for whatever reason. Mercing is all they know so they keep going at it because of a hook included in their firing

I'm trying to do that with a friend of mine. For now what we have is :

>Party starts with [MacGuffin1] in hand, without memories.
>Proceeds through the "end" section of the campaign.
>At the very end, find [MacGuffinFinal].
>By touching it, gain back their memories of (==play out) section "end-1".
>Their goal is to find [MacGuffin1] to go back to "end-2", and so on until they get to the beginning.

Thoughts?

>/pol/
It's a /v/ meme, but really, what's the difference once you get down to it?

>the party is a group of high-school students who get hit by a truck and are reincarnated into another world

A massive sinkhole opens up beneath a populous area, and the survivors that crawl out from the rubble have to band together to defend themselves from the monsters lurking in the dark.

>What is the reason for the PCs to stick together and not split up?
In the case of the deserted spaceship, they're free to split up, but unless they can hold their breath for a million years, they're not going anywhere.

I wanted my own and another PC to have met before in a game.
As they were a duelist and a doctor the obvious Idea was that they met when the duelist was in need for medical attention. The GM set the house on fire and had the other PCs gathered in the gawking crowd.
As all the PCs were traveling folk anyway, they decided to travel together.
An orchestrated meeting by chance.

...

That looks like a screencap from a shitty board.

The mind can operate unusually under threat of death. From what I understand a lot of people had sex because they thought they were going to die, it wouldn't be surprising to assume some of them were related.

the shittiest

>You all meet in a car crash. Roll for damage
>You all work at the same business when the store next door explodes

/pol/ are shit at coming up with OC, even cuck is from /tv/

> You all arrive at the same port by the same ship.
> You are all hired as mercenaries to protect a caravan. Now the caravan is under attack.
> You all wake up in an abandoned warehouse with no memories of what happened yesterday
> You all grew up in the same village and left it together in a search of a better lot.
> You all are members of the same order/ team/ guild/ army

So, do you assume that everyone you know is atheist, and this is the reason they want to powergame or play as gods? Are you unironically baiting with this, or are you just stupid?

Honest if i had received this i would think i got hacked/pranked somehow. Maybe you in USA are taught that that message could arrive, but here in euro i never heard of something like that and would never think it's true.

/v/, /pol/, basically the same thing. Lots of weird tribal posturing and loyalty to groups that would be disgusted by the people proclaiming it

>Honest if i had received this i would think i got hacked/pranked somehow. Maybe you in USA are taught that that message could arrive, but here in euro i never heard of something like that and would never think it's true.

Consider that North Korea has been threatening to launch nuclear missiles at the US for some time, and Hawaii is much closer to North Korea than the mainland United States.

Now consider how you would react if you received an official phone alert from a government agency stating that a terrorist attack was planned on your city's subway and advised you to stay home. Would you say "LOL this is obviously a prank!" and rush to the subway, or would you think that it was legitimate?

>Now consider how you would react if you received an official phone alert from a government agency
that's my point, how do people know it's from governemnt? That's the part i would doubt and be very surpised about. Even knowing it was not a prank it still seems like a weird fact that gov messages everyone about it. Though it does make sense. (probably after thinking it is a prank i would still paranoia it up and treat it like the real deal like everyone else)

To play the fucking game, unless you're that one asshole that always goes out of his way to not go on an adventure.

We use the same Emergency Alerts system for other stuff. Weather alerts, natural disasters, industrial accidents that can affect areas or regions, AMBER Alerts (kidnapped kids), etc. There are just different tiers of alert, and all can be disabled except for the Presidential Alert which has never been used.

Ah i see, thank you.

Do you realize it's an OOG reason, and the asshole here is you, because this person asked about IG reasons?

OOG reasons come first, it's the GM's job to work around them.