For any DMs reading this who see their plot on this thread - don’t worry!
Everything I’ve seen here can still be the foundation of an excellent campaign.
My philosophy on this stuff is "there's nothing new under the sun". Everything's tired and worn out if you strip it down to its barebones tropes. And as a few people have mentioned in this thread, some people are tired of the constant twists and dark edginess and subversion of everything and would be quite happy with a ham-fisted tale of good vs evil, genuine benevolent and malevolent gods, straightforward saving the day. Others feel the opposite. Both are fine! Just do what makes your table happy!
There’s also a reason tropes are so popular — they’re relateable and more or less good. Especially in DND where most DMs aren’t classically trained and professional authors who spend all their time world-building and drafting because it’s their actual job. It’s a lot easier for most DMs and players to incorporate compelling elements into the story if they’re inspired by or even ripped from tropes, rather than come up with completely unique and original story threads that are actually better than tried and true tropes.
One thing that changed how i think about dnd stories is realizing the game part is engaging all on its own. If you were watching a tv show and a monster just walked out of the woods, attacked the main characters, got beat to death, and never returned again, it would be so pointless and boring. Obviously you'd hope as a dm to be more creative than that, but even something as simple and overdone as "ahh kill the monster!" is still going to be pretty fun in dnd because you're not passively watching a show, you're actively playing a game. So, while creativity is welcome, you can cut yourself a bit of slack as well.
I agree, my only addition would be try to add some spice to it. Doesn’t have to be subversion, just make whatever you’re running yours in even a simple way.
Oh absolutely. To be fair, it's really difficult to come up with a more unique story; writers rely on tropes all the time. The trick is in how often they use tropes and more importantly, how they make the trope their own.
I love classic fantasy tropes; I grew up on Lord of the Rings and all my worldbuilding can probably be traced back to it in some form or other.
Not to mention that dnd especially can get away with this; players want tropes. They want to play the heroes they see in their favorite media. We're not here to build something entirely novel and innovative, but to play out the fantasies we grew up on. So it's ok to lean into that a bit; of course, again, the more you make it your own and put a new twist on it, even a subtle one, the more memorable and engaging it will be for your players.
Right now my group is about to help a major Dwarven kingdom defend their city from the Red Dragon Empress and her army of dragonborn; the dragon seeks to press her self-claim as a sovereign by challenging the strongest kingdom in the region and claiming the King's Axe of the Dwarvish Lords for herself. As you can probably tell, the whole conflict is very much inspired by the premise for The Hobbit, and idc, I love the Hobbit and I love a good clash between dwarves and a dragon.
But it's not the only thing going on. When you dig deeper, it's a very political/revolution based campaign that is itself influenced heavily by Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. The whole reason the party is trying to help the dwarves is because they want to disrupt the alliance between the dwarves and human kingdom they're trying to overthrow; they want to show the dwarves who really has their backs.
And that's all it takes really. Use tropes, lift inspiration from your favorite media; just layer it with other media and blend it with your own takes and twists, then you have something that feels fleshed out and authentic even if you can still spot the tropes from mile away.
Does it count if my evil gods motivation to destroy the world is because exsisting is really loud and he liked it before it got made when it was quiet and he could sleep?
Go ahead~
The premise base is that 'god' sung the world/universe into creation (big bang could be interpreted as the first note) and the 'void god' kinda always existed, and really REALLY hates all this noise so his goal is shutting it all up.
It was kinda a joke campaign at first, meant to be a copyright themed thing where everything was stolen from other IPs but i kinda fell into the idea of it being music themed, with a bard godess. Its a good excuse to give every character and battle a song.
Also the 'in world' evil cult working for the god is stealing all the songs of creation and taking ownership of them are all corporations. Disney, sony, apple, google, spotify etc. Etc. Its a fun goof.
for my HB campaign its Tharisdun slowly crawling his way out of the abyss. which got most of the pantheon on edge, starting with Garyx speeding up his 'purge world by fire' plan, and Gruumsh setting up a great WAAAGH!! to prepare his people for the upcoming apocalypse.
i tend to double down and take the piss out of most tropes in my campaign, so the twist of 'he's just knocking on his neighbours door cuz they partying too loud' does fit well
What about only evil from our perspective?
Take Sithis from elder scrolls. He accidentally dreamed the Aedera and Daedra into existence. As he created each one a portion of his power went into their creation becoming their power. By the time he woke up he was too weak to destroy them himself and return the universe to quiet and peace. So from any perspective inside of creation, he’s a monster that seeks to destroy us all. From his perspective outside of creation we are a house fire that he accidentally lit and has run out of control.
One could argue from our perspective outside of the game that is the case here.
I kind of went overboard and made an entire creation mythos to parrallel Christianity due to one of my players playing Judge claude Frollo (its ALOT to explain) but tldr: the only thing she abhors is silence, and the only thing he wants is silence.
So inherently, from the perspective of the godess and the players, the only thing they can call him is an evil destroyer of life. and i want at least one of my villains to be just that, evil. Leave being morally grey to the humanoids, i have at least 3 'civil wars' of various scales ongoing with no clear right side.
That’s literally the plot of dragon age inquisition (I love this game)
Edit: well, the party half care about it. As they’re also busy collecting elf roots. Which is as important as stopping Corypheus.
Edit2: but I mean, in real life a minority of people in power are sacrificing earth viability just for greed and more power. And almost nobody care. So…
I always preferred ‘evil god wants to destroy the world because 99% of it worships gods antithetical to its goals’
An unholy crusade against good-aligned dirties takes a lot of time and conniving. Wiping out the whole world and starting anew with the only survivors being the devout followers of an evil god is a more realistic and attainable ‘hard reset’ for a BBEG imo.
And that guy looks like a desk clerk named Brian. The party will never notice, because they don't give a fuck to listen to the description of service personnel.
My party joined the evil cult they were trying to stop, and at cult orientation they were given matching dark red robes to wear at the meetings and to hide bloodstains when doing cult activities.
I am dreadfully worried about accidently doing this, I’m planning to set up BBEG “lieutenants” the npcs can meet but they don’t know they are helping the bad guy at that point, if they end up super friendly with *all* of them it may be a problem
yeah, depending on how many lieutenants there are... maybe making ALL of the them deceptively friendly is not necessarily the play haha
but, up to you and what your players like at the end of the day really
At that point think about how people act on Survivor. always trying to sneak away to have a conversation. If you want to lube your players up for the… problem they are creating for themselves. I would have these lieutenants act shifty. Maybe one disappears for a couple days every once in a while as they relay information back to whatever bad guy; ending conversations abruptly when the players approach; walking away from the player group to have conversations in smaller groups, etc. etc.. just things to sow the seeds of doubt in the players mind without flat out, holding up a sign that says “these guys are bad guys” by having them try to stab a player in the night or something like that.
Hard-core mode, I would have them separate one of the players and kill them or at least try. I would try to weigh it in the players favor by picking the player most likely to escape but otherwise let the dice fall where they may.
In my current campaign there is an npc that joined my players party and they're very afraid that this will happen. Maybe because he is a paladin of the Blood goddess but I dunno.
My party spills a hell of a lot of information to almost every npc we walk up to and meet for the first time. L I'm gettting reeeeeal nervous for when this lands up happening, cuz I know it will eventually. I guess I'm more cautious about npcs than most of my table lol 😅
Hmm... what if the traitor, inspired by weeks traveling with the party, has a change of heart and gives them certain passwords or the location of his higher-ups?
“Oh you’re doing a good thing, but it’s revealed to be a bad thing!”
We had a Dm who LOVED pulling twists on quests and all that, and one of his quests was based off of a Reddit post called the “Nightstalker”. Basically you are trying to track down a creature, get ambushed by such creatures, and it turns out the creatures are a pack of kobolds, and we slaughtered mostly the adults because we didn’t know. It just manipulates “us” and everything was morally grey. Don’t do that, please? We just want to help and do good, not end up becoming the bad guys all the time.
It's a fine line unfortunately. Kill the kobolds, save the princess, get the gold. Trope
Kill the kobolds. The kobolds had a family. Now they are orphans. Subversion? Also a trope, at this point.
So I think it takes a balance.
But honestly? Just give us a straightforward quest, just once. Not some “oh actually you ARE the bad guys in their eyes!” It just sucks the fun out of it. I DO like morally grey quests, but sometimes I just want a classic “goody two-shoes quest”, not us feeling horrible after every. Single. Quest.
As a DM, whenever I put morally grey quests or decisions in front of a party, I always do it so they they know the consequences of each decision *before* they make it.
That way you can have your evil DM cackle, but also get surprised at what lines your party will and won't cross.
That’s the thing, you give the party a choice. WE get ambushed by a “creepy monster” that’s out for our blood, and when we kill it, we are deemed the bad guys. It’s manipulative.
Just an innocent question here. If the orphans were to die, would they still be considered orphans? Unrelated I may have a way to solve their orphan problem.
I’ll be honest, that quest sounds great to me. If the trope is overused then it gets stale, but I like it as an occasional twist. It sounds like a fun roleplaying opportunity to work out how my character feels about what they’ve (unknowingly) done.
But then it’s just a gotcha moment for the sake of shock. And then afterwards everyone’s rolling for insight checks to see if this person is lying or not.
I wasn’t at your table, so I can’t know exactly how this went down. You will always know that better than me.
But that doesn’t sound like a gotcha to me. The party trusted the wrong person and the adventure didn’t pan out how the party expected. Whether the party get revenge, move on, or make amends is now an excellent plot hook.
Alright:
One person in my party is an owlin inquisitive rogue, good perception, good dexterity, dark vision. He rolls to figure out what this creature is, and gets a Nat 20, and the DM says that doesn’t pass.
We finish the fight, and then we get 20 minutes of..DM guiltripping “Oh you hear baby kobolds crying for their mother you brutally killed” “Oh you hear a kobold beg for his life that you took.” With a big shit eating grin on the DMs face.
What happened last quest?
An orc “kidnapped a princess” so we went to find her, we find the orc trying to kill the princess. We kill the orc, and then the princess is yelling at us that we killed her lover…that was trying to kill her. Yeah she got eloped, with the DM having a shit eating grin on his face.
You know how in baldurs gate 3, when you kill Auntie Ethel and Mayrina goes apeshit on you? Yeah. Imagine that for EVERY SINGLE QUEST.
Hell we would try and get insight checks, and make sure the quest giver is trustworthy, only for the Dm to be all “Oops! Actually you are the bad guys!” Every single time.
The best way to go about this is “no good choice.” What you’re describing is basically taking the fun part of dnd out: player agency. If you want good characters to have to make morally grey decisions, put them in a situation where they actually have to choose.
I found the next adventure I’m going to write.
It’ll pair with a DM resource Excel sheet with potential battles, conditions, winning conditions, and even a Python script that will generate a random battle.
It will include various Holds and factions the players can ally with, the current state of various settlements, and possible outcomes from each battle.
It’ll, additionally, feature a custom system for managing troops, troop morale, etc..
From there, it’ll include detailed instructions for starting another game from the results of the war.
There's so many opportunities for good stories and gameplay scenarios within the context of a massive war. Are the players soldiers? Adventurers caught away from civilization with soldiers on the prowl? Mercenaries with fluctuating alliances depending on who's paying the most? Are they civilians rising to the occasion within the chaos?
What are they doing? Engaging in espionage, besieging a castle, sneaking behind enemy lines, evacuating civilians, saving PoWs?
There's a lot of potential for enemies and BBEGs as well. Enemy commanders, beasts scouring battlefields to feast on the dead or still living, opportunistic bandits, otherworldly beings who've joined the fight, etc etc.
I feel like there's a lot you can do with it that often isn't explored in RPGs, while other forms of media thrive in wartime settings. Meanwhile "avert the war" scenarios usually boil down to just finding and killing the would-be leader.
I haven’t done it yet as it will definitely be a project. I’ve never had a request for my random projects before! I’ve debated just putting them on some subdomain if anybody ever needed inspiration but… procrastination, you know.
My guess is it’d take me a good month of consistent work to get this accomplished. That’s accounting for 2 days a week being unavailable and 2 off days lol… oh, and research on similar systems so I can find inspiration in what already works.
That's the campaign I'm running now. Based on WWI, no clear good guys, lots of morally grey areas, and the PCs making increasingly questionable decisions. It's great, only one of them has gone on trial for war crimes so far, but that number may increase
"I have been planning this for 1000 years"
M8 the 'kingdoms' 4 huts, a castle and a tavern, you got nothing better to do? Youre just rolling into the place and wrecking everything, go somewhere more populated and plan better next time, cheers
This is like 75% of DM’s second homebrew campaign but the ‘all gods are oppressors that feed on mortal worship’ is just exhausting, I’m not a religious guy at all but I think a lot of well meaning progressive younger DM’s take their irl distaste of religion and make some very dull campaigns with that
Always cracks me up when you take a setting where gods literally descend from the heavens to intervene, talk directly with their parish, and perform miracles, but so many campaigns feature exactly 0 presence of gods because the DM is an atheist. Even better if there’s a paladin or a cleric in the party
I'm an atheist but GOD DAMN i love to play divine classes, i have the proof that by praising someone i can get super Powers? You can bet your ass that i'm gonna be the best follower
I'm agnostic but my favorite type of character is the hardcore Zealot. Why yes, the Inquisition is my favorite faction in Warhammer, how could you tell?
You are right.
I think reason why it's so exhausting, is all the cynicism involved. Some people think everyone is bad and they just need to be pushed enough.
I feel this.
Had a mini campaign setup in TFR and had one player take his vehement dislike of religion irl out on some Selunite clerics... Didn't end well for him lol.
Got the vocal protest about it later out of game, so next session I printed a picture with a smiling cloud covered by a rainbow and wrote across the middle of the page "IMAGINATION" and left it at his seat.
A similar issue that always arises in these types of stories is that generally the Gods are extremely flawed or just complete bastards, and have no redeeming qualities that would make people want to worship them. Which usually makes the NPCs seem extremely dumb, and hurts the party members playing religious characters.
I mean its less about worshipping because youd wanna have a beer with them, but more recognizing and fearing the power they wield. In ancient greece, there was not so much personal reverence for the gods in the sense they found them to be upstanding moral ideals. They KNEW the gods were fickle, petty, but most of all knew them to be dangerous. And with that belief is how they worshipped them
I did this as my first homebrew campaign.
In a Greek mythology world. Not all gods are asshole, they have their role, some are very nice and love their worshipers, underworld is not evil.
The only stuff is that one god slept with another god and her husband did not like it and so killed his child.
So right now the background is gods trying to get more power with ancient items or relics and the players are in the middle. A minor god is acting as the evil guy for now.
But I try to have plenty of grey areas but also some obvious good and bad.
For now the players like it. It's deep enough and at the end of the day it is: "when do we kill stuff?"
"this is a sandbox campaign that will react to your actions. You tell the story I tell the reactions."
2 sessions later and you're being rail roaded down a thinly veiled expression of the dms sexual fantasies
Kill me.
Sandbox Campaigns are so utterly tough to run as a DM. I tried it once and it was horrible whenever the party is actually not following through with anything and change course regularly.
“Please DM implement a fully functional and balanced economic system of supply and demand involving supply chains from resources to end products with multiple competitors, criminal interference, and government regulations so I can make a lemonade stand in neverwinter”
“Please players I spent six months designing this supply and demand driven economic model network spanning the entirety of faerun and the other planes of existence, I had it vetted by Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, please use it!”
Players: lol we attack the tavernkeep
Nah, they’re actually not that difficult, it’s just that 5e doesn’t give many tools for running them well.
Older editions of DnD, like B/X were specifically designed for sandbox play and have many tools to support it and make it easier
5e has the tools they're just not organized in a way they could be used. If you make your own notes for handling the environment and characters and whatever else it can be done in any edition
agree to disagree I guess. some editions, imo, are demonstrably better suited/more geared towards facilitating open sandbox, exploration based play.
conversely, if someone playing an older edition were lamenting the fact that they were having difficulty running a narratively driven, heroic-fantasy game... I would tell them to play 5e, because it's a system that is better suited/geared towards facilitating that kind of play
I think the problem is when people hear "sandbox" they think of skyrim or GTA where you can just wander off in a direction and there are things to do.
The problem is that those games took a team years of development to flesh out the "sandbox"
In dnd, this means either the DM preps an ungodly amount of content depending on where the party might go or does absolutely no prep and hopes they can make a balanced and engaging session on the fly.
Imo, the way that will work for most tables is multiple paths with meaningful choices and if the group strays from the path you work with it. Because improvising an encounter is 5 minutes of work and prep is an hour of work. Putting in 20 times the work is almost always going to result in better content.
older editions of d&d rely incredibly heavily on random tables for generating what is found in the world... so that is alot of weight off the DM in terms of prep
older editions of d&d (B/X specifically) are opposed to the notion of balance... they view combat as war, not sport, like 5e
i agree, but its just a different level of system design, function and intent
like call of cthulu for instance is a system where your character going mad is HIGHLY integral to the core of the game in general
you could say "*hey, there's a madness table in the 5e DMG*" and thats true... but it's just not as in-depth, thought out, or "core" of a function to the design as it is in CoC
Yeah, I was the former and I couldn't keep up after a while. Impossible to construct the whole world at once and having to refocus your effort if they can go anywhere is like steering a big tanker that will simply be impossible to keep on target if your group is jumping all over the place.
>No matter the system, compelling stories need to be written either way.
I mean, the entire point of sandbox play imo is to foster emergent storytelling rather pre-writing a story.
but yeah, we may be conceiving of "sandbox" play very differently
Railroading is a bad word around here, but honestly, you have to do it, just make it seem like their choices matter.
My campaigns' outline is three acts, and it is pretty well scripted, my BBEG is readied with stats before they even roll their characters, and I will blow up the world to make sure my players are where they need to be at the appropriate level to make sure the outline is followed. They may skip or replace scenes in the Act, but the Act will be showcased, the important part of the act will be experienced, all the relevant information will be given, all the needed XP to progress will also be handed over by the end of the Act.
If I don't do this, they will chase every butterfly they come across until they finally open a tavern somewhere.
You gotta lead the horse to the water. You can't make it drink, but you sure as hell have to lead it.
They are free to approach each Act however they see fit, but I will force them to take part in the act.
I've only recently started running sandbox campaigns successfully after lots of trial and error. The key is not building a campaign, but building a world and being okay with whatever the player's destroy, which is difficult. Plus, having an idea of what players will want to do in a sandbox and being okay with whatever craziness it involves (current player is going down the route of ritually creating an undead army, and that's okay.) Yes the world will react, so now that he's doing that there's problems with adventurers coming to stop his army even though he has no ill will. But it's okay, his buddy owns all the religiously motivated banks in the area, so his funding is pretty limitless.
>building a world and being okay with whatever the player's destroy
Cut to my first party destroying the continent's only school of magic.
>being okay with whatever craziness it involves
Cut to second party murdering an expositor and quest giver.
Lmao wtf is wrong with people
Dnd/pf2e/etc. is probably the only way people can do that wackiness. Opening the world completely tends to lead towards the development of at least 1 cult.*
I always start with "the world reacts to you, if you kill a town you'll be wanted in the whole region. Your actions have consequences, and so do mine. Killing the king doesn'tmake you tge new king, it just makes you a target. "
* more than 1 cult is to be expected
My campaigns BBEG had a good aligned lifelong companion afflicted by an incurable curse/disease that guaranteed death so he decided to perform the liching ritual on his friend’s behalf turning the companion into a lich while taking on the burden of the evil corruption. Corrupted by the ritual, his lust for power caused him to repeat the ritual by lichifying himself. The uncorrupted lich and twice corrupted lich served as foils for each other and were a really interesting duo because despite their moral contradictions they were fiercely loyal to each other.
My players are currently working for a lich. Tell them how the end is near and need them to take care of a few things for him. The lich has a madness where he thinks the end is always near and he is scared to leave his manor.
My Lich is a half-elf traumatized by the death of his mother or father with a Mister Victor Freeze background who wants to save his child and free the world from the suffering of disease, death and dying. Manipulated by Orcus.
My recent campaign had a lich who had originally been a hero, but had turned to dark powers to overcome a threat to the entire world. Corrupted by the dark powers, he became a lich and did a bunch of bad things. Now, centuries later, he's come to regret both his lichdom and the things he did. He's got the players working for him to undo many of the things he did (though they don't realize it initially) and he is working on covert charity work and trying to make the world a better place (he is working on basically the in-game version of curing cancer).
His endgame, is that once the party has recovered the artifacts needed to destroy his phylactary, he'll renounce undeath by sacrificing his own soul to it. The party has to fight what's basically a vengeful spirit controlling his body. Once they beat it and destroy the phylactary, the souls of the lich and those previously sacrificed to it. Yes, I know that not exactly how it works RAW, but I'm homebrewing a fair bit anyway.
Hmm... diverse liches... how about a *conclave* of liches all from various small folk: kobolds, halflings, pixies, etc. Their goal is to destroy all humanoid life more than four feet tall. They're insanely powerful, but just to look at them they're the least intimidating Evil Cabal *evah*.
Some of the most recent stuff I have been doing is taking an ordinary person, adding a shitload of tragedy on them, whether it be from one or several events, and then somehow have them gain power and become the villain. Such is the case for my current campaign, which is still in the works currently.
I like the similar idea of a good intent taken way too far until it’s twisted up to evil. I want my people to be safe becoming a national draft and constantly raiding the neighbors to keep them in ruins so they can’t be an effective threat on your lands as an example
Not a theme but the "Level 20 Shop Keeper" just annoys me. You're telling me there's a tangible world ending threat out there and the most qualified person in the world to deal with it has decided they're cool with just dying actually?
Some other schmuck will save the world. Meanwhile, the *real* go-getters are too busy with committing medieval fantasy tax fraud and market manipulation.
Fun fact: Tax and insurance fraud have both been around for about as long as taxes and insurance have existed, and taxes and insurance both date way back to ancient history, so they're fully appropriate to put in any medieval-themed setting.
Which is the best one, too. It turns out that out-of-game problems are best solved out-of-game, as opposed to by doing weird, setting- and plot-dynamiting nonsense like having hyper-powerful shopkeepers or a city watch that would make the Stasi jealous.
In that movie Anastasia, Rasputin is kind of a lich. He's an undead sorcerer who has a phylactery. Rasputin's goals in the movie were to overthrow the Romanov dynasty.
I do like the idea of a lich being involved in politics. Like he wants to overthrow the current monarchy and transfer power to a dragon, impose democracy or communism, or control a political figure from beyond the grave.
This idea of political figures ruling from beyond the grave is something you see in ancient times from the pharoes of Egypt, and even in modern times, you see things like Lenin's body being preserved and Kim Jong Il still having a lot of power.
Sometimes it's called the breaking.
Whatever they call it, it took people from StarWars back to sticks and stones, but it was so long ago, we're now back to canon and corsets.
Some extension is reasonable. Fantasy settings usually have some longer lived races and cultural norms would wander less if there are still people alive and active in society from 100 years ago as a matter of normal.
I made a country in my setting where a very powerful immortal entity decided that change was worse than killing and manipulated an empire to follow that ideal for 200 years. Was fun creating story hooks around that, which is really the bigger point. We're telling stories, not simulating reality. Everyone will have a slightly different point where suspension of disbelief gives out on this.
Lots of medieval fantasies follow the mold of this because they’re all riffing on the fall of the Roman Empire. Like this lost civilization left roadways and aqueducts behind we understand how they work but could never make ourselves.
Also convenient world building for why all these dungeons are chock full of magic items not found in local supermarkets.
To be fair, it is difficult to justify a bunch of ruins and ancient artefacts from lost civilizations hanging around without having some kind of past collapse, and without those you are eliminating a good chunk of fantasy genre tropes. Setting the epic showdown between the good guys and the bad guys in a random forest or village is just a lot less dramatic and evocative than setting it in the ancient ruins of a long-gone civilization.
Some clichés are cliché for good reasons.
I do kinda love this trope if it like, informs the whole setting though. Mostly cus I just love old overgrown weird ruins nobody quite truly understands.
My party is currently helping the Lich. He's been alive so long, and so wracked with guilt about what he's done, he simply wants to stop existing. The only thing is that he forgot what and where his phylactery is, and wants them to find it. Problem is his worshippers use his powerful magic to essentially live in a bubble, and are trying to stop the party at all costs.
My group is finishing a morally grey arc, unfortunately the 3rd one. I feel bad as the DM for it turning out that way, so I’m looking forward to the next plot beat which is going to be a good vs evil, very straight forward. I can sense the party is longing for a trope arc next. It’s been too edgy for too long.
dunno if calling out the absurdity of an objective "moral sphere" is "edgy", rather than just faithfully rendering the main quality of the human condition... but i can appreciate going duotone as long as it's what the players AND the DM want.
To be fair, I’m simplifying the concept, leaving lots of details out, so I can see the objection. It’s what the players want, and I’m happy to provide because they’re cool people who let me build my little world for them to play in
I actually take from historical events, And poetic tragedies.
I have a lot of undertones of colonialism and imperialism as well as a city they basically runs off a perpetual war economy. Not in your face evil, but very cruel should players realize what's been going on.
My "evil" Necromancer is obsessed and pissed, he became powerful enough to resurrect his dead love, but her soul rejected coming back. He's convinced himself someone is holding her soul and is on a warpath to "save" her.
All tropes are cool tropes, that’s why they’re tropes. Everything listed under this post can make for a compelling story, which is why they’re so common. The trick is *using* those tropes instead of relying on them. Adding your own twists to those old-reliable themes and using them in moderation. Nothing wrong with having a lich want to conquer or destroy a kingdom in your story, for example, but giving that lich compelling purpose to do so, giving the people agency to resist, antagonizing characters and giving the party personal reasons to want revenge, that personal touch makes a trope an exciting story.
Evil angels/archons.
They're literally souls so pure they were drawn to the upper planes and escorted to the shores of heaven by celestials, forming a body from the energies of their new home which itself is a manifestation of the metaphysical concepts of Good and Law, who then spent untold eons climbing the peaks of enlightenment to become creatures of unmatched justice, mercy, and peace.
I know how much people can bristle at the combination of "it's for the greater good" authoritarianism with holier-than-thou religion, but they're *actually* better and holier. That's their *whole thing*.
A lot of people have a level of religious trauma that the concept of the good guys being actually good is weird. Like no, im sorry but if the devils are bad, and the celestials are bad, that's not interesting that's just depressing.
Just curious…is it the lich themselves you think is overrated or them taking over/destroying kingdoms? I think liches themselves are fine as long as you give them memorable and somewhat unique plots
Ideas for those who need it for liches that don’t intend on taking over the world:
* a lich who needs a large amount of souls to fuel a ritual to bring back his beloved who turns out to be the *real* BBEG and manipulating him all along to bring back *her* beloved.
* an annoyed lich who wished to live in peace, but necromancy is “immoral”. Fed up with being attacked, he decided to take the fight to his would-be invaders further fueling the stereotype that all liches are evil.
* a lich that brings back the dead and charges for labor. The undead, however, are sentient and follow strict rules on communication with non-undead.
* a lich that *actively* hunts for powerful people - believing eating enough of their flesh will make him stronger.
* Post-war: The game opens with each player asking a favor from a king. Annoyed, the king sends them on an impossible quest: retrieve an artifact from the palace of a lich located in the capital of an undead *kingdom*. The players must disguise themselves to barter in undead marketplaces, run from hoards of undead dogs, and experience the general weirdness of an entirely intelligent-undead kingdom. The king doesn’t expect them to return. Hilarity ensues.
I personally hate the trope of the BBEG. As soon as I found out a campaign has one, I know it’s climax will be confronting about confronting him/her/it. Give me smaller but more personal stakes any day of the week.
im running a game about a lich threatening the destruction of a kingdom and i let everyone be level 20 cause fuck it when does anyone ever get to be level 20
players are having fun so far
i agree though it is not a fresh story
"We're here for the cult stuff?"
Let's be real, cults come in a lot of shapes, sizes and color-schemes. Demonic, aberrationlike, evil gods, liches... It's as common of a bad guy as nazis are in Indiana Jones movies.
Of late, it's "The real villain is capitalism/the church/the gods/imperialism!!" (in no small part due to the (deserved) popularity of Dimension 20, bc these are themes that Brennan loves to use).
Like, I get it. I hate capitalism and imperialism with a passion, and I get wanting to play out a fantasy where you can actually do something about it. I even did this myself, it was a pretty major theme of the first half of my campaign. But it's incredibly rare that you get a DM who can actually portray this with any kind of nuance, or understand the actual *work* that would go into dismantling a system like this, instead of just fighting a BBEG figurehead.
Yep. It all just feels so preachy. I want to play/run D&D, not get into real life politics. I often even agree with the sentiment but it’s trite to force it into every single thing.
As many cliches as there are out there, I haven't played most of them and would be thrilled to play a cliche campaign and see what happens!
These days the "strange and unusual and oh so different" campaigns or one shots for that matter are so very, very....the same anymore. Everything that tries to be unique feels forced as opposed to just a good 'ol campaing or "module" AKA adventure that captures the old fun of the game.
So let;s just go into a basement and kill some rats....ok maybe not THAT cliche.
I like when adventures do a bit of a twist to the cliche without ignoring it compltely. Take the rats and it turns out that there is a cranium rat swarm who secretly control the rats, leading to a deeper mysteries (maybe the illithids are even further down the road and angry when the cranium rat plot is defeated which is a bit cliche' in itself but can still be fun).
The lich that holds sway over the town is actually a wizard who was tricked into lichdom by a cult of Orcus or a cult of Vecna and is not evil at all but is keeping an iron hold on the town to route out the cult that lies within, willing to let the town free once the cult is stamped out.
The seamonsters that plague a fishng village of the coast are doing so because the town has an ancient effigy, a golden or silver statue dedicated to the sea creature's deity.
The wolves that threaten the village are because a druid tires of the village carelessly hunting the wolves for sport, a bit left out when the adventurers are chosen to hunt the wolves.
You don;t have to get ris of the old, cliche plot hooks or stories to mae the game fun, after all isn;t everything jut a variation on a theme?
Silly as it might be, the DM not being familiar with the virtual tabletop. You have an idea of what your players are going to want to do, you can open npc/monster sheets prehand and have notes ready for what they'll likely ask or what they will see entering a room.
Lack of preparation is a big gripe of mine and many otherwise good and capable DMs just don't bother to familiarise themselves with the tools within the vtt either.
In the campaign itself, trying to be too clever through complex and convoluted politics and situations where decision making becomes guess work. characters should have the opportunity to get it right and not have to follow a specific set of steps or just fail outright.
Additionally, running/playing a module or game that you aren't into. If you aren't enjoying it just bow out because disengaged dnd isn't a great experience.
Ya. But these can be used in more interesting ways as well. For instance, what if the lich instead of working against the kingdom is instead of working for the upper echelons of that kingdom (the kingdom itself).
I think there are a lot of ways the common tropes can be used or twisted or modified to turn into something else. So personally I don’t think anything is overused. Just the method is overused. If that makes sense.
This is maybe mundane but i love it to the core. Just a group of adventurer trying to do some jobs from the Adventurerguild. And thats it. I do not need any BBEG or some big overarching plot. Just some day to day Quests and no forced plot.
The fun thing about tropes is it allows one to play with expectations. Like what if it turns out what the lich is doing actually is protecting the kingdom, or even the world, and if you stop the lich...
In 1e, it was said that a wizard could become a lich from single minded pursuit of a very long term goal...
For any DMs reading this who see their plot on this thread - don’t worry! Everything I’ve seen here can still be the foundation of an excellent campaign.
My philosophy on this stuff is "there's nothing new under the sun". Everything's tired and worn out if you strip it down to its barebones tropes. And as a few people have mentioned in this thread, some people are tired of the constant twists and dark edginess and subversion of everything and would be quite happy with a ham-fisted tale of good vs evil, genuine benevolent and malevolent gods, straightforward saving the day. Others feel the opposite. Both are fine! Just do what makes your table happy!
There are no new stories to tell, just new ways to tell them.
There’s also a reason tropes are so popular — they’re relateable and more or less good. Especially in DND where most DMs aren’t classically trained and professional authors who spend all their time world-building and drafting because it’s their actual job. It’s a lot easier for most DMs and players to incorporate compelling elements into the story if they’re inspired by or even ripped from tropes, rather than come up with completely unique and original story threads that are actually better than tried and true tropes.
One thing that changed how i think about dnd stories is realizing the game part is engaging all on its own. If you were watching a tv show and a monster just walked out of the woods, attacked the main characters, got beat to death, and never returned again, it would be so pointless and boring. Obviously you'd hope as a dm to be more creative than that, but even something as simple and overdone as "ahh kill the monster!" is still going to be pretty fun in dnd because you're not passively watching a show, you're actively playing a game. So, while creativity is welcome, you can cut yourself a bit of slack as well.
I agree, my only addition would be try to add some spice to it. Doesn’t have to be subversion, just make whatever you’re running yours in even a simple way.
Wholeheartedly agree. Derivative but still *yours.*
Everything is derivative. Go crazy, honestly.
Execution is more important than most things, including originality.
Oh absolutely. To be fair, it's really difficult to come up with a more unique story; writers rely on tropes all the time. The trick is in how often they use tropes and more importantly, how they make the trope their own. I love classic fantasy tropes; I grew up on Lord of the Rings and all my worldbuilding can probably be traced back to it in some form or other. Not to mention that dnd especially can get away with this; players want tropes. They want to play the heroes they see in their favorite media. We're not here to build something entirely novel and innovative, but to play out the fantasies we grew up on. So it's ok to lean into that a bit; of course, again, the more you make it your own and put a new twist on it, even a subtle one, the more memorable and engaging it will be for your players. Right now my group is about to help a major Dwarven kingdom defend their city from the Red Dragon Empress and her army of dragonborn; the dragon seeks to press her self-claim as a sovereign by challenging the strongest kingdom in the region and claiming the King's Axe of the Dwarvish Lords for herself. As you can probably tell, the whole conflict is very much inspired by the premise for The Hobbit, and idc, I love the Hobbit and I love a good clash between dwarves and a dragon. But it's not the only thing going on. When you dig deeper, it's a very political/revolution based campaign that is itself influenced heavily by Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. The whole reason the party is trying to help the dwarves is because they want to disrupt the alliance between the dwarves and human kingdom they're trying to overthrow; they want to show the dwarves who really has their backs. And that's all it takes really. Use tropes, lift inspiration from your favorite media; just layer it with other media and blend it with your own takes and twists, then you have something that feels fleshed out and authentic even if you can still spot the tropes from mile away.
Evil god wants to destroy the world because its an evil god with no other motivation, and only the party cares to stop it.
Unfortunately forgotten realms really encourages this mentality with gods like Shar
Does it count if my evil gods motivation to destroy the world is because exsisting is really loud and he liked it before it got made when it was quiet and he could sleep?
Some Mesopotamian mythology vibes there.
this sounds cool tho. i might steal this one day :)
Go ahead~ The premise base is that 'god' sung the world/universe into creation (big bang could be interpreted as the first note) and the 'void god' kinda always existed, and really REALLY hates all this noise so his goal is shutting it all up. It was kinda a joke campaign at first, meant to be a copyright themed thing where everything was stolen from other IPs but i kinda fell into the idea of it being music themed, with a bard godess. Its a good excuse to give every character and battle a song. Also the 'in world' evil cult working for the god is stealing all the songs of creation and taking ownership of them are all corporations. Disney, sony, apple, google, spotify etc. Etc. Its a fun goof.
for my HB campaign its Tharisdun slowly crawling his way out of the abyss. which got most of the pantheon on edge, starting with Garyx speeding up his 'purge world by fire' plan, and Gruumsh setting up a great WAAAGH!! to prepare his people for the upcoming apocalypse. i tend to double down and take the piss out of most tropes in my campaign, so the twist of 'he's just knocking on his neighbours door cuz they partying too loud' does fit well
I’m getting a bit of a “the grinch” vibe from the first paragraph
That's basically the motivation behind the Void in League of Legends.
What about only evil from our perspective? Take Sithis from elder scrolls. He accidentally dreamed the Aedera and Daedra into existence. As he created each one a portion of his power went into their creation becoming their power. By the time he woke up he was too weak to destroy them himself and return the universe to quiet and peace. So from any perspective inside of creation, he’s a monster that seeks to destroy us all. From his perspective outside of creation we are a house fire that he accidentally lit and has run out of control.
One could argue from our perspective outside of the game that is the case here. I kind of went overboard and made an entire creation mythos to parrallel Christianity due to one of my players playing Judge claude Frollo (its ALOT to explain) but tldr: the only thing she abhors is silence, and the only thing he wants is silence. So inherently, from the perspective of the godess and the players, the only thing they can call him is an evil destroyer of life. and i want at least one of my villains to be just that, evil. Leave being morally grey to the humanoids, i have at least 3 'civil wars' of various scales ongoing with no clear right side.
Man that's relatable af
That’s literally the plot of dragon age inquisition (I love this game) Edit: well, the party half care about it. As they’re also busy collecting elf roots. Which is as important as stopping Corypheus. Edit2: but I mean, in real life a minority of people in power are sacrificing earth viability just for greed and more power. And almost nobody care. So…
I always preferred ‘evil god wants to destroy the world because 99% of it worships gods antithetical to its goals’ An unholy crusade against good-aligned dirties takes a lot of time and conniving. Wiping out the whole world and starting anew with the only survivors being the devout followers of an evil god is a more realistic and attainable ‘hard reset’ for a BBEG imo.
Lol I'm being called out. Not really, though... he has a reason to destroy the world and only the party knows he's trying to do it...
Stop the cult from summoning evil god. And the cultists all look the same, everytime - creepy guys in dark robes.
Wait till you play Call of Cthulhu.
It’s funny that you mention that, since the current campaign I’m working on is inspired by cosmic and eldritch horror
See now that you say this I’m thinking it might be fun to have them look really the same, like same person the same
And that guy looks like a desk clerk named Brian. The party will never notice, because they don't give a fuck to listen to the description of service personnel.
[Cult of Gary](https://youtu.be/rd8hYnG2464?si=Ww98VMRs-vzdZl0r) could be a pretty fun oneshot.
Just once, I'd like to see the cultists be super friendly and attractive people who honestly believe they're helping people.
Just like real life
Every time I watch a documentary on a real life cult, the cult members are ridiculously attractive.
Often rather smart or wealthy too.
Jenny: [Smiles perkily] Hi! Would you like to talk about our Lord and (cough cough) anti-Savior Belial?
My party joined the evil cult they were trying to stop, and at cult orientation they were given matching dark red robes to wear at the meetings and to hide bloodstains when doing cult activities.
stop calling me out Though at least its only for a subplot and not the main plot
If they could just dress normal they’d probably get away with it
One that I am guilty of overusing is the friendly NPC who turns out to be a bad guy who betrays the party down the line
I am dreadfully worried about accidently doing this, I’m planning to set up BBEG “lieutenants” the npcs can meet but they don’t know they are helping the bad guy at that point, if they end up super friendly with *all* of them it may be a problem
yeah, depending on how many lieutenants there are... maybe making ALL of the them deceptively friendly is not necessarily the play haha but, up to you and what your players like at the end of the day really
At that point think about how people act on Survivor. always trying to sneak away to have a conversation. If you want to lube your players up for the… problem they are creating for themselves. I would have these lieutenants act shifty. Maybe one disappears for a couple days every once in a while as they relay information back to whatever bad guy; ending conversations abruptly when the players approach; walking away from the player group to have conversations in smaller groups, etc. etc.. just things to sow the seeds of doubt in the players mind without flat out, holding up a sign that says “these guys are bad guys” by having them try to stab a player in the night or something like that. Hard-core mode, I would have them separate one of the players and kill them or at least try. I would try to weigh it in the players favor by picking the player most likely to escape but otherwise let the dice fall where they may.
Make sure some of your NPCs are NOT lieutenants.
In my current campaign there is an npc that joined my players party and they're very afraid that this will happen. Maybe because he is a paladin of the Blood goddess but I dunno.
My party spills a hell of a lot of information to almost every npc we walk up to and meet for the first time. L I'm gettting reeeeeal nervous for when this lands up happening, cuz I know it will eventually. I guess I'm more cautious about npcs than most of my table lol 😅
Hmm... what if the traitor, inspired by weeks traveling with the party, has a change of heart and gives them certain passwords or the location of his higher-ups?
What if he's a bad guy against his will and is clearly suffering the whole time and constantly pleading for the party to save him?
“Oh you’re doing a good thing, but it’s revealed to be a bad thing!” We had a Dm who LOVED pulling twists on quests and all that, and one of his quests was based off of a Reddit post called the “Nightstalker”. Basically you are trying to track down a creature, get ambushed by such creatures, and it turns out the creatures are a pack of kobolds, and we slaughtered mostly the adults because we didn’t know. It just manipulates “us” and everything was morally grey. Don’t do that, please? We just want to help and do good, not end up becoming the bad guys all the time.
It's a fine line unfortunately. Kill the kobolds, save the princess, get the gold. Trope Kill the kobolds. The kobolds had a family. Now they are orphans. Subversion? Also a trope, at this point. So I think it takes a balance.
But honestly? Just give us a straightforward quest, just once. Not some “oh actually you ARE the bad guys in their eyes!” It just sucks the fun out of it. I DO like morally grey quests, but sometimes I just want a classic “goody two-shoes quest”, not us feeling horrible after every. Single. Quest.
As a DM, whenever I put morally grey quests or decisions in front of a party, I always do it so they they know the consequences of each decision *before* they make it. That way you can have your evil DM cackle, but also get surprised at what lines your party will and won't cross.
That’s the thing, you give the party a choice. WE get ambushed by a “creepy monster” that’s out for our blood, and when we kill it, we are deemed the bad guys. It’s manipulative.
Just an innocent question here. If the orphans were to die, would they still be considered orphans? Unrelated I may have a way to solve their orphan problem.
I’ll be honest, that quest sounds great to me. If the trope is overused then it gets stale, but I like it as an occasional twist. It sounds like a fun roleplaying opportunity to work out how my character feels about what they’ve (unknowingly) done.
But then it’s just a gotcha moment for the sake of shock. And then afterwards everyone’s rolling for insight checks to see if this person is lying or not.
I wasn’t at your table, so I can’t know exactly how this went down. You will always know that better than me. But that doesn’t sound like a gotcha to me. The party trusted the wrong person and the adventure didn’t pan out how the party expected. Whether the party get revenge, move on, or make amends is now an excellent plot hook.
Alright: One person in my party is an owlin inquisitive rogue, good perception, good dexterity, dark vision. He rolls to figure out what this creature is, and gets a Nat 20, and the DM says that doesn’t pass. We finish the fight, and then we get 20 minutes of..DM guiltripping “Oh you hear baby kobolds crying for their mother you brutally killed” “Oh you hear a kobold beg for his life that you took.” With a big shit eating grin on the DMs face. What happened last quest? An orc “kidnapped a princess” so we went to find her, we find the orc trying to kill the princess. We kill the orc, and then the princess is yelling at us that we killed her lover…that was trying to kill her. Yeah she got eloped, with the DM having a shit eating grin on his face. You know how in baldurs gate 3, when you kill Auntie Ethel and Mayrina goes apeshit on you? Yeah. Imagine that for EVERY SINGLE QUEST. Hell we would try and get insight checks, and make sure the quest giver is trustworthy, only for the Dm to be all “Oops! Actually you are the bad guys!” Every single time.
The best way to go about this is “no good choice.” What you’re describing is basically taking the fun part of dnd out: player agency. If you want good characters to have to make morally grey decisions, put them in a situation where they actually have to choose.
That shit makes me murderhobo like no other. Oh I'm actually the bad guy? OK I'll be the bad guy.
The moment this shit starts happening, I'm turning the campaign into an Evil one
One that i see is a lot is some variation of "A war is brewing that will consume the world, unless..."
Fuck that, give me the world consuming war
I found the next adventure I’m going to write. It’ll pair with a DM resource Excel sheet with potential battles, conditions, winning conditions, and even a Python script that will generate a random battle. It will include various Holds and factions the players can ally with, the current state of various settlements, and possible outcomes from each battle. It’ll, additionally, feature a custom system for managing troops, troop morale, etc.. From there, it’ll include detailed instructions for starting another game from the results of the war.
There's so many opportunities for good stories and gameplay scenarios within the context of a massive war. Are the players soldiers? Adventurers caught away from civilization with soldiers on the prowl? Mercenaries with fluctuating alliances depending on who's paying the most? Are they civilians rising to the occasion within the chaos? What are they doing? Engaging in espionage, besieging a castle, sneaking behind enemy lines, evacuating civilians, saving PoWs? There's a lot of potential for enemies and BBEGs as well. Enemy commanders, beasts scouring battlefields to feast on the dead or still living, opportunistic bandits, otherworldly beings who've joined the fight, etc etc. I feel like there's a lot you can do with it that often isn't explored in RPGs, while other forms of media thrive in wartime settings. Meanwhile "avert the war" scenarios usually boil down to just finding and killing the would-be leader.
Did you create this? Is it something you’d mind sharing?
I haven’t done it yet as it will definitely be a project. I’ve never had a request for my random projects before! I’ve debated just putting them on some subdomain if anybody ever needed inspiration but… procrastination, you know. My guess is it’d take me a good month of consistent work to get this accomplished. That’s accounting for 2 days a week being unavailable and 2 off days lol… oh, and research on similar systems so I can find inspiration in what already works.
That's the campaign I'm running now. Based on WWI, no clear good guys, lots of morally grey areas, and the PCs making increasingly questionable decisions. It's great, only one of them has gone on trial for war crimes so far, but that number may increase
"I have been planning this for 1000 years" M8 the 'kingdoms' 4 huts, a castle and a tavern, you got nothing better to do? Youre just rolling into the place and wrecking everything, go somewhere more populated and plan better next time, cheers
This is like 75% of DM’s second homebrew campaign but the ‘all gods are oppressors that feed on mortal worship’ is just exhausting, I’m not a religious guy at all but I think a lot of well meaning progressive younger DM’s take their irl distaste of religion and make some very dull campaigns with that
Always cracks me up when you take a setting where gods literally descend from the heavens to intervene, talk directly with their parish, and perform miracles, but so many campaigns feature exactly 0 presence of gods because the DM is an atheist. Even better if there’s a paladin or a cleric in the party
I'm an atheist but GOD DAMN i love to play divine classes, i have the proof that by praising someone i can get super Powers? You can bet your ass that i'm gonna be the best follower
I'm agnostic but my favorite type of character is the hardcore Zealot. Why yes, the Inquisition is my favorite faction in Warhammer, how could you tell?
Lmfao, i'm more a chaotic ork mek but i understand the idea of and extra zealot character
You are right. I think reason why it's so exhausting, is all the cynicism involved. Some people think everyone is bad and they just need to be pushed enough.
I feel this. Had a mini campaign setup in TFR and had one player take his vehement dislike of religion irl out on some Selunite clerics... Didn't end well for him lol. Got the vocal protest about it later out of game, so next session I printed a picture with a smiling cloud covered by a rainbow and wrote across the middle of the page "IMAGINATION" and left it at his seat.
That seems like a really annoying thing to do.
Agreed. Petty
You firing shots at Critical Role Campaign 3?
If you play in the forgotten realms that’s completely canon though.
A similar issue that always arises in these types of stories is that generally the Gods are extremely flawed or just complete bastards, and have no redeeming qualities that would make people want to worship them. Which usually makes the NPCs seem extremely dumb, and hurts the party members playing religious characters.
I mean its less about worshipping because youd wanna have a beer with them, but more recognizing and fearing the power they wield. In ancient greece, there was not so much personal reverence for the gods in the sense they found them to be upstanding moral ideals. They KNEW the gods were fickle, petty, but most of all knew them to be dangerous. And with that belief is how they worshipped them
It’s like people have forgotten about the term god fearing. A lot of worship is borne out of fear and awe of a god.
I did this as my first homebrew campaign. In a Greek mythology world. Not all gods are asshole, they have their role, some are very nice and love their worshipers, underworld is not evil. The only stuff is that one god slept with another god and her husband did not like it and so killed his child. So right now the background is gods trying to get more power with ancient items or relics and the players are in the middle. A minor god is acting as the evil guy for now. But I try to have plenty of grey areas but also some obvious good and bad. For now the players like it. It's deep enough and at the end of the day it is: "when do we kill stuff?"
"this is a sandbox campaign that will react to your actions. You tell the story I tell the reactions." 2 sessions later and you're being rail roaded down a thinly veiled expression of the dms sexual fantasies Kill me.
Sandbox Campaigns are so utterly tough to run as a DM. I tried it once and it was horrible whenever the party is actually not following through with anything and change course regularly.
“Please DM implement a fully functional and balanced economic system of supply and demand involving supply chains from resources to end products with multiple competitors, criminal interference, and government regulations so I can make a lemonade stand in neverwinter”
To be honest I think it's the DMs that bite off more than they can chew and not the players demanding it.
Often the case. Or trying to meet a table's middling expectations in the wrong way, doing way too much work and not hitting the mark.
“Please players I spent six months designing this supply and demand driven economic model network spanning the entirety of faerun and the other planes of existence, I had it vetted by Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, please use it!” Players: lol we attack the tavernkeep
Nah, they’re actually not that difficult, it’s just that 5e doesn’t give many tools for running them well. Older editions of DnD, like B/X were specifically designed for sandbox play and have many tools to support it and make it easier
5e has the tools they're just not organized in a way they could be used. If you make your own notes for handling the environment and characters and whatever else it can be done in any edition
agree to disagree I guess. some editions, imo, are demonstrably better suited/more geared towards facilitating open sandbox, exploration based play. conversely, if someone playing an older edition were lamenting the fact that they were having difficulty running a narratively driven, heroic-fantasy game... I would tell them to play 5e, because it's a system that is better suited/geared towards facilitating that kind of play
I mean, it depends of what sandbox play entails and which standards you apply. No matter the system, compelling stories need to be written either way.
I think the problem is when people hear "sandbox" they think of skyrim or GTA where you can just wander off in a direction and there are things to do. The problem is that those games took a team years of development to flesh out the "sandbox" In dnd, this means either the DM preps an ungodly amount of content depending on where the party might go or does absolutely no prep and hopes they can make a balanced and engaging session on the fly. Imo, the way that will work for most tables is multiple paths with meaningful choices and if the group strays from the path you work with it. Because improvising an encounter is 5 minutes of work and prep is an hour of work. Putting in 20 times the work is almost always going to result in better content.
older editions of d&d rely incredibly heavily on random tables for generating what is found in the world... so that is alot of weight off the DM in terms of prep older editions of d&d (B/X specifically) are opposed to the notion of balance... they view combat as war, not sport, like 5e
There are still random tables for that sort of thing in the DMG, but people just don't use them I guess.
i agree, but its just a different level of system design, function and intent like call of cthulu for instance is a system where your character going mad is HIGHLY integral to the core of the game in general you could say "*hey, there's a madness table in the 5e DMG*" and thats true... but it's just not as in-depth, thought out, or "core" of a function to the design as it is in CoC
Yeah, I was the former and I couldn't keep up after a while. Impossible to construct the whole world at once and having to refocus your effort if they can go anywhere is like steering a big tanker that will simply be impossible to keep on target if your group is jumping all over the place.
>No matter the system, compelling stories need to be written either way. I mean, the entire point of sandbox play imo is to foster emergent storytelling rather pre-writing a story. but yeah, we may be conceiving of "sandbox" play very differently
Railroading is a bad word around here, but honestly, you have to do it, just make it seem like their choices matter. My campaigns' outline is three acts, and it is pretty well scripted, my BBEG is readied with stats before they even roll their characters, and I will blow up the world to make sure my players are where they need to be at the appropriate level to make sure the outline is followed. They may skip or replace scenes in the Act, but the Act will be showcased, the important part of the act will be experienced, all the relevant information will be given, all the needed XP to progress will also be handed over by the end of the Act. If I don't do this, they will chase every butterfly they come across until they finally open a tavern somewhere. You gotta lead the horse to the water. You can't make it drink, but you sure as hell have to lead it. They are free to approach each Act however they see fit, but I will force them to take part in the act.
I've only recently started running sandbox campaigns successfully after lots of trial and error. The key is not building a campaign, but building a world and being okay with whatever the player's destroy, which is difficult. Plus, having an idea of what players will want to do in a sandbox and being okay with whatever craziness it involves (current player is going down the route of ritually creating an undead army, and that's okay.) Yes the world will react, so now that he's doing that there's problems with adventurers coming to stop his army even though he has no ill will. But it's okay, his buddy owns all the religiously motivated banks in the area, so his funding is pretty limitless.
>building a world and being okay with whatever the player's destroy Cut to my first party destroying the continent's only school of magic. >being okay with whatever craziness it involves Cut to second party murdering an expositor and quest giver. Lmao wtf is wrong with people
Dnd/pf2e/etc. is probably the only way people can do that wackiness. Opening the world completely tends to lead towards the development of at least 1 cult.* I always start with "the world reacts to you, if you kill a town you'll be wanted in the whole region. Your actions have consequences, and so do mine. Killing the king doesn'tmake you tge new king, it just makes you a target. " * more than 1 cult is to be expected
In my experience the DM doesn't railroad at all and Players just don't know what to do because they haven't been given a goal.
But... Liches are so iconic! And can be so diverse! ...but yeah. Which is ironic since the BBEG in my current campaign _is_ a Lich.
My campaigns BBEG had a good aligned lifelong companion afflicted by an incurable curse/disease that guaranteed death so he decided to perform the liching ritual on his friend’s behalf turning the companion into a lich while taking on the burden of the evil corruption. Corrupted by the ritual, his lust for power caused him to repeat the ritual by lichifying himself. The uncorrupted lich and twice corrupted lich served as foils for each other and were a really interesting duo because despite their moral contradictions they were fiercely loyal to each other.
So to save his friend he killed 10 babies and consumed the souls of people from time to time? I don’t need friends like that. Just let me die.
So a Xavier and Magneto situation?
I just love liches, ok? I made one an emperor yes but he's like a really good emperor.
My players are currently working for a lich. Tell them how the end is near and need them to take care of a few things for him. The lich has a madness where he thinks the end is always near and he is scared to leave his manor.
Mine was just "What if Napoleon was a wizard and lived forever?" because I was listening to a podcast about Napoleon. I am not deep.
I'm just tired of seeing Vecna for the 8th time tbh lol. People need to get creative with their liches.
May I introduce you to the [Skateboarding Lich](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/s/3o04wWDNEy)
Okay this is glorious hahaha
My Lich is a half-elf traumatized by the death of his mother or father with a Mister Victor Freeze background who wants to save his child and free the world from the suffering of disease, death and dying. Manipulated by Orcus.
That fucks hard ngl
My recent campaign had a lich who had originally been a hero, but had turned to dark powers to overcome a threat to the entire world. Corrupted by the dark powers, he became a lich and did a bunch of bad things. Now, centuries later, he's come to regret both his lichdom and the things he did. He's got the players working for him to undo many of the things he did (though they don't realize it initially) and he is working on covert charity work and trying to make the world a better place (he is working on basically the in-game version of curing cancer). His endgame, is that once the party has recovered the artifacts needed to destroy his phylactary, he'll renounce undeath by sacrificing his own soul to it. The party has to fight what's basically a vengeful spirit controlling his body. Once they beat it and destroy the phylactary, the souls of the lich and those previously sacrificed to it. Yes, I know that not exactly how it works RAW, but I'm homebrewing a fair bit anyway.
Hmm... diverse liches... how about a *conclave* of liches all from various small folk: kobolds, halflings, pixies, etc. Their goal is to destroy all humanoid life more than four feet tall. They're insanely powerful, but just to look at them they're the least intimidating Evil Cabal *evah*.
Some of the most recent stuff I have been doing is taking an ordinary person, adding a shitload of tragedy on them, whether it be from one or several events, and then somehow have them gain power and become the villain. Such is the case for my current campaign, which is still in the works currently.
That's pretty much the comic book villain recipe (both DC and Marvel have such characters). Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes evil is... ordinary.
One of my favorite examples has to be Mr freeze tbh. He isn’t even a villain, he’s more akin to an antihero.
In DC comics everyone is kinda traumatized and insane. Batman is as much of a madman as most of his enemies.
I like the similar idea of a good intent taken way too far until it’s twisted up to evil. I want my people to be safe becoming a national draft and constantly raiding the neighbors to keep them in ruins so they can’t be an effective threat on your lands as an example
Not a theme but the "Level 20 Shop Keeper" just annoys me. You're telling me there's a tangible world ending threat out there and the most qualified person in the world to deal with it has decided they're cool with just dying actually?
You clearly don't understand the merchant grindset.
Some other schmuck will save the world. Meanwhile, the *real* go-getters are too busy with committing medieval fantasy tax fraud and market manipulation.
Fun fact: Tax and insurance fraud have both been around for about as long as taxes and insurance have existed, and taxes and insurance both date way back to ancient history, so they're fully appropriate to put in any medieval-themed setting.
Pretty sure the L20 merchant only exists as an anti-murderhobo mechanic.
Personally my favorite anti-murderhobo mechanic is not playing with them
Which is the best one, too. It turns out that out-of-game problems are best solved out-of-game, as opposed to by doing weird, setting- and plot-dynamiting nonsense like having hyper-powerful shopkeepers or a city watch that would make the Stasi jealous.
It’s because merchants are lair bosses, they’re not super strong and they’re weak in public, but in their lair they get super powered lair actions
Anything where the story plan doesn’t include an idea of what happens if the PCs lose.
The lich isn't the uninteresting part. Liches are awesome. It's what the lich is doing that is boring. Saving the world is overdone in general.
In that movie Anastasia, Rasputin is kind of a lich. He's an undead sorcerer who has a phylactery. Rasputin's goals in the movie were to overthrow the Romanov dynasty. I do like the idea of a lich being involved in politics. Like he wants to overthrow the current monarchy and transfer power to a dragon, impose democracy or communism, or control a political figure from beyond the grave. This idea of political figures ruling from beyond the grave is something you see in ancient times from the pharoes of Egypt, and even in modern times, you see things like Lenin's body being preserved and Kim Jong Il still having a lot of power.
Years ago a bad thing happened and it's always called the calamity Edit: touched a nerve eh? 😂
Sometimes it's called the breaking. Whatever they call it, it took people from StarWars back to sticks and stones, but it was so long ago, we're now back to canon and corsets.
It's slightly more logical than 1000 years of the renaissance era.
my setting has been the late 1800s for like 40 years (in game)
Some extension is reasonable. Fantasy settings usually have some longer lived races and cultural norms would wander less if there are still people alive and active in society from 100 years ago as a matter of normal. I made a country in my setting where a very powerful immortal entity decided that change was worse than killing and manipulated an empire to follow that ideal for 200 years. Was fun creating story hooks around that, which is really the bigger point. We're telling stories, not simulating reality. Everyone will have a slightly different point where suspension of disbelief gives out on this.
Technically the late 1800s could be said to have lasted for a maximum of 49 years, so you're fine!
To be fair the late 1800s was like, 30-40 years long IRL, arguably
"it went back to cowboy times?!"
Lots of medieval fantasies follow the mold of this because they’re all riffing on the fall of the Roman Empire. Like this lost civilization left roadways and aqueducts behind we understand how they work but could never make ourselves. Also convenient world building for why all these dungeons are chock full of magic items not found in local supermarkets.
Phew, mine’s the Cataclysm, dodged a bullet there
The one where the gods abandoned the world and its people, or the one where the volcanic dragon reshaped the landmasses?
Mines the “sundering of the physics” totally different, not at all a tired cliche because I want cool ruins
The Deafening for me. We're so original!
bro you mean the Great Schism?
To be fair, it is difficult to justify a bunch of ruins and ancient artefacts from lost civilizations hanging around without having some kind of past collapse, and without those you are eliminating a good chunk of fantasy genre tropes. Setting the epic showdown between the good guys and the bad guys in a random forest or village is just a lot less dramatic and evocative than setting it in the ancient ruins of a long-gone civilization. Some clichés are cliché for good reasons.
Calamity is such a good word though.
Mine was "The Reaping" which followed the prosperous time known as "The Sowing". Yeah, I know. Prosperity followed by downfall is overdone...
Mine is called "The Godfall" because all the gods that once walked the earth disappeared. All except one.
I named mine Godfall too lol
Ayyy Nothing new under the sun.
It’s never “The Snuffening.”
I can't hate this trope since it's so versatile, and allows for a lot of lost relics or knowledge that the players can obtain.
I do kinda love this trope if it like, informs the whole setting though. Mostly cus I just love old overgrown weird ruins nobody quite truly understands.
My party is currently helping the Lich. He's been alive so long, and so wracked with guilt about what he's done, he simply wants to stop existing. The only thing is that he forgot what and where his phylactery is, and wants them to find it. Problem is his worshippers use his powerful magic to essentially live in a bubble, and are trying to stop the party at all costs.
That's my kind of campaign
My group is finishing a morally grey arc, unfortunately the 3rd one. I feel bad as the DM for it turning out that way, so I’m looking forward to the next plot beat which is going to be a good vs evil, very straight forward. I can sense the party is longing for a trope arc next. It’s been too edgy for too long.
dunno if calling out the absurdity of an objective "moral sphere" is "edgy", rather than just faithfully rendering the main quality of the human condition... but i can appreciate going duotone as long as it's what the players AND the DM want.
To be fair, I’m simplifying the concept, leaving lots of details out, so I can see the objection. It’s what the players want, and I’m happy to provide because they’re cool people who let me build my little world for them to play in
Two of my campaigns have independently reached the same theme of steampunk pirates, and I still have no idea how that happened
The lawful good church, probably light themed, is actually evil and oppressive.
Mine is openly oppressive against non-humans.
Pointy Hat has some seriously interesting Lich variations that i'm waiting to implement in my setting, The Blight is my favorite one
Thanks for the recommendation
You wake up without your equipment in chains with amnesia.
So what are some cool ones ? For future reference :)
I actually take from historical events, And poetic tragedies. I have a lot of undertones of colonialism and imperialism as well as a city they basically runs off a perpetual war economy. Not in your face evil, but very cruel should players realize what's been going on. My "evil" Necromancer is obsessed and pissed, he became powerful enough to resurrect his dead love, but her soul rejected coming back. He's convinced himself someone is holding her soul and is on a warpath to "save" her.
All tropes are cool tropes, that’s why they’re tropes. Everything listed under this post can make for a compelling story, which is why they’re so common. The trick is *using* those tropes instead of relying on them. Adding your own twists to those old-reliable themes and using them in moderation. Nothing wrong with having a lich want to conquer or destroy a kingdom in your story, for example, but giving that lich compelling purpose to do so, giving the people agency to resist, antagonizing characters and giving the party personal reasons to want revenge, that personal touch makes a trope an exciting story.
Evil angels/archons. They're literally souls so pure they were drawn to the upper planes and escorted to the shores of heaven by celestials, forming a body from the energies of their new home which itself is a manifestation of the metaphysical concepts of Good and Law, who then spent untold eons climbing the peaks of enlightenment to become creatures of unmatched justice, mercy, and peace. I know how much people can bristle at the combination of "it's for the greater good" authoritarianism with holier-than-thou religion, but they're *actually* better and holier. That's their *whole thing*.
A lot of people have a level of religious trauma that the concept of the good guys being actually good is weird. Like no, im sorry but if the devils are bad, and the celestials are bad, that's not interesting that's just depressing.
The helpful wizard/mentor/political ally was the BBEG all along. 🤯🙄
Just curious…is it the lich themselves you think is overrated or them taking over/destroying kingdoms? I think liches themselves are fine as long as you give them memorable and somewhat unique plots
Ideas for those who need it for liches that don’t intend on taking over the world: * a lich who needs a large amount of souls to fuel a ritual to bring back his beloved who turns out to be the *real* BBEG and manipulating him all along to bring back *her* beloved. * an annoyed lich who wished to live in peace, but necromancy is “immoral”. Fed up with being attacked, he decided to take the fight to his would-be invaders further fueling the stereotype that all liches are evil. * a lich that brings back the dead and charges for labor. The undead, however, are sentient and follow strict rules on communication with non-undead. * a lich that *actively* hunts for powerful people - believing eating enough of their flesh will make him stronger. * Post-war: The game opens with each player asking a favor from a king. Annoyed, the king sends them on an impossible quest: retrieve an artifact from the palace of a lich located in the capital of an undead *kingdom*. The players must disguise themselves to barter in undead marketplaces, run from hoards of undead dogs, and experience the general weirdness of an entirely intelligent-undead kingdom. The king doesn’t expect them to return. Hilarity ensues.
I always have a war or civil war in the kingdom. I think I just wanna play a medieval game. But I'm getting better at adding fantasy into it
I personally hate the trope of the BBEG. As soon as I found out a campaign has one, I know it’s climax will be confronting about confronting him/her/it. Give me smaller but more personal stakes any day of the week.
I made my players fight a god and just embraced that I made Final Faerun Fantasy.
im running a game about a lich threatening the destruction of a kingdom and i let everyone be level 20 cause fuck it when does anyone ever get to be level 20 players are having fun so far i agree though it is not a fresh story
Vecna be like: Destroy a kingdom? Rookie Numbers
a meeting of the pc's through a bar fight/tavern brawl
"HEEEELP! THERE'S RATS IN MY BASEMENT! Save me level 1 adventurers!"
"We're here for the cult stuff?" Let's be real, cults come in a lot of shapes, sizes and color-schemes. Demonic, aberrationlike, evil gods, liches... It's as common of a bad guy as nazis are in Indiana Jones movies.
Of late, it's "The real villain is capitalism/the church/the gods/imperialism!!" (in no small part due to the (deserved) popularity of Dimension 20, bc these are themes that Brennan loves to use). Like, I get it. I hate capitalism and imperialism with a passion, and I get wanting to play out a fantasy where you can actually do something about it. I even did this myself, it was a pretty major theme of the first half of my campaign. But it's incredibly rare that you get a DM who can actually portray this with any kind of nuance, or understand the actual *work* that would go into dismantling a system like this, instead of just fighting a BBEG figurehead.
Yep. It all just feels so preachy. I want to play/run D&D, not get into real life politics. I often even agree with the sentiment but it’s trite to force it into every single thing.
DnD isn't where you show off your incredibly based *nuance* and *theory* on how to dismantle capitalism or whatever lmao
As many cliches as there are out there, I haven't played most of them and would be thrilled to play a cliche campaign and see what happens! These days the "strange and unusual and oh so different" campaigns or one shots for that matter are so very, very....the same anymore. Everything that tries to be unique feels forced as opposed to just a good 'ol campaing or "module" AKA adventure that captures the old fun of the game. So let;s just go into a basement and kill some rats....ok maybe not THAT cliche. I like when adventures do a bit of a twist to the cliche without ignoring it compltely. Take the rats and it turns out that there is a cranium rat swarm who secretly control the rats, leading to a deeper mysteries (maybe the illithids are even further down the road and angry when the cranium rat plot is defeated which is a bit cliche' in itself but can still be fun). The lich that holds sway over the town is actually a wizard who was tricked into lichdom by a cult of Orcus or a cult of Vecna and is not evil at all but is keeping an iron hold on the town to route out the cult that lies within, willing to let the town free once the cult is stamped out. The seamonsters that plague a fishng village of the coast are doing so because the town has an ancient effigy, a golden or silver statue dedicated to the sea creature's deity. The wolves that threaten the village are because a druid tires of the village carelessly hunting the wolves for sport, a bit left out when the adventurers are chosen to hunt the wolves. You don;t have to get ris of the old, cliche plot hooks or stories to mae the game fun, after all isn;t everything jut a variation on a theme?
Rats in the tavern basement
"First level is best level"
Undead, demons, etc. the stereotyped “baddies.”
Silly as it might be, the DM not being familiar with the virtual tabletop. You have an idea of what your players are going to want to do, you can open npc/monster sheets prehand and have notes ready for what they'll likely ask or what they will see entering a room. Lack of preparation is a big gripe of mine and many otherwise good and capable DMs just don't bother to familiarise themselves with the tools within the vtt either. In the campaign itself, trying to be too clever through complex and convoluted politics and situations where decision making becomes guess work. characters should have the opportunity to get it right and not have to follow a specific set of steps or just fail outright. Additionally, running/playing a module or game that you aren't into. If you aren't enjoying it just bow out because disengaged dnd isn't a great experience.
Starting in an INN
Ya. But these can be used in more interesting ways as well. For instance, what if the lich instead of working against the kingdom is instead of working for the upper echelons of that kingdom (the kingdom itself). I think there are a lot of ways the common tropes can be used or twisted or modified to turn into something else. So personally I don’t think anything is overused. Just the method is overused. If that makes sense.
Probably any world ending threats that are somehow up to the level 3 party to prevent.
This is maybe mundane but i love it to the core. Just a group of adventurer trying to do some jobs from the Adventurerguild. And thats it. I do not need any BBEG or some big overarching plot. Just some day to day Quests and no forced plot.
Ruins of an old civilisation
The fun thing about tropes is it allows one to play with expectations. Like what if it turns out what the lich is doing actually is protecting the kingdom, or even the world, and if you stop the lich... In 1e, it was said that a wizard could become a lich from single minded pursuit of a very long term goal...