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[hugseverycat]

D&D campaign idea that popped into my head this evening after watching a bunch of DMing videos on YouTube

• There is a high-magic, walled city on a mountain that is ruled by a totalitarian wizard king
• It is a place of great wealth and learning, but entry and exit is strictly controlled (see “totalitarian wizard king”)
• crime and public dissent are rare, as criminals and dissidents are quickly disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again, and their very existence is no longer recognized publicly
• the players start the game in prison, they have been arrested for something. each player can choose what they did, or they can even decide they’ve been falsely accused for political reasons or no reason at all
• the players are brought before the wizard king and are sentenced: they will be banished!
• they and any other “criminals” in their group are then magically shifted to THE SHADOWFELL (or something like it)
• this is the dark reflection of the city, where the sun never rises and despair prevails
• it has a similar layout to the “real” city but everything is taller, sharper, twisted
• it is populated by evil things, the undead, other creatures of darkness. and of course, other banished “criminals” from the city
• the players will have to survive, find what allies there are to be had, uncover why people are sent here instead of executed or whatever
• i haven’t decided why yet. maybe the wizard king has a deal with a power in the Shadowfell to gain something in exchange for sending living creatures?
• anyway i’m thinking that this realm can’t be exited by typical planar magic, so even if they were to find someone who could cast plane shift or whatever, it doesn’t work
• i’m also thinking that whatever method they do discover to exit, it is highly destructive to the shadowfell, so maybe they will have to choose to either leave and destroy the local shadowfell area, killing everyone they left behind (so including whatever allies they made), or they can merge the shadowfell with the normal plane, which would mean all the creatures that populate the shadowfell version (friendly and otherwise) would appear in the real city
• so the players would have to make a TERRIBLE CHOICE
• anyway they’ll have to deal with the consequences of that and idk defeat the wizard tyrant or whatever, i haven’t thought this through

What I really want to do though is DM a game in-person with 3-4 players. I really hate DMing online, it sucks. And I want to try with a smaller group of players as I have a theory that it will be easier for me to practice making the game more immersive. Previously I have DMed for a group of 5 players while using a pre-written campaign in person, and for 7 players in a home brew campaign online. The pre-written adventure I bought didn’t feel good to run because I didn’t feel like I knew it inside and out. So that was stressful. The home brew campaign I knew better, but doing it online with so many players was just bad. Not being in the same room as the players made me feel really anxious, like I couldn’t read the room. And having so many players made everything go so slowly and it was hard to try to make everyone feel a part of the story. Anyway, it sucked.

But DMing is really fun when it is going well, and the most fun I had in the pre-written adventure was when we did a side encounter that wasn’t from the book at all, I wrote all of it myself and I feel like the players were really engaged. It was a courtroom scene where they had to be their own defense lawyers and come up with possible witnesses for their side, and question prosecution witnesses, and otherwise be creative in figuring out how to get away with a crime they definitely committed.

Anyway, now I’m trying to figure out how to actually put this together into a game. Which is the hard part. Ideas are easy.

And I’m trying not to think about which players to invite, as I have wayyy more D&D friends than the 3-4 player maximum I want to have.

Comments

[kolleh]

I love the idea of having to decide whether to destroy the Shadowfell (dangerous, violent, but familiar and filled with friends) or merge the two worlds together into something in between the two. It's always fantastic when a campaign presents a real moral dilemma like that.

[hugseverycat]

yes! i love it when players have to make terrible choices, it is my most favorite thing in fiction and i want to bring it into my games too. the previous campaign i ran also had a planned Terrible Choice point, but unfortunately we didn’t get to it because it was the online campaign with like 7 players that i burnt out on. in that one, the players were hired to seal portals to other dimensions, but at some point the plan was for them to discover that most of the diversity in their world (e.g. all the non-elf races, most of the player’s gods) came to their world from these portals so they were going to have to decide whether to turn against their employer (a very fundamental institution, e.g. catholic church in medieval europe). in hindsight i don’t think it would have been a very dramatic choice. but uh, i was trying :P i also stole that plot from a novel i liked.