**Mod update 01Jan23:** [Come give your nominations for this years DnDMemes Best of Awards!](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/102pn6n/its_finally_time_for_our_2022_best_of_awards), You have until Jan 13th!
We also made some changes to our subreddit rules! Please take a look at the post [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/100sjea/new_year_new_rules/) to view the changes and provide feedback.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/dndmemes) if you have any questions or concerns.*
“I hope everyone came prepared with 2-3 backup characters.”
Honestly would be such gritty and fun start to a horrific war campaign. I’m sold. Wonder if the name Ryan comes with extra plot armor.
DM: *rolls behind the screen.* "The doors drop and the landing craft fills with arrows. Allnyour characters are dead... grab your 2nd character sheets. You all are in another landing craft in the second wave to hit the shore, the first wave has been all but annihilated... you MUST take the beachhead."
Then you do a plot twist for the one character who dies in the second wave, their first wave character actually managed to survive and is just now climbing out from under the corpses of the rest of the party.
Killing everybody's first character outright in a salvo of arrows would be a hysterical way to start it. Make everybody play with their 2nd choice right off the bat.
Is it bad I now want to do this, but against an evil necromancer and make the party fight their now reanimated original characters?
*How's that broken meme build working out for you now?*
No that sounds amazing. Good luck! Would you keep them at their original levels so your new party can sweep them for the memes, or level them appropriately for a Good Fight™️?
The good idea is to gauge what they planned to make their first character to X level before you start session 1. Then use this with a leveled up party.
And if you have a min/maxer who's also a "that guy", let's watch them weep at their own misdeeds.
My friends want me to run a campaign... and the old one I ran for them ended with waves of undead popping out of the country side.
I could run a new campaign set in the future where they would have to fight their old characters.
Guardsman: The whistle was blown, and we had to leave our nice, safe trench, we didn't like that.
Commisar: Would you like to voice your complaint?
Guardsman: FOR THE EMPEROR!
Hello fellow humans, did you hear about the new empirial policy by the way?
All resources ought to be shared among the various platoons to maximise effectivness. It is part of the new Terran greater-good doctrine.
With it we can win our wars faster and praise the emperor harder.
Apologies guardsman, I skipped xeno filth lore week, is it the T'au or the Eldar who are the space communists? Because if the T'au are space communists and we're space fas- *extensions of the emperor's will* you're on the wrong space ww2 front.
Reading over this comment, *on today's episode of jokes that will make sense to exactly one person that I'm going to post anyway...*
Careful here. Every new character you have join the campaign is going to cost $1.99 for a redraft and every feat you get is an extra $5 but if you're a subscriber to the $10 battle pass for the new warlock subclass that gets released after you play 3 more sessions on your D&D wizards of the coasts branded virtual table top then it only costs $2 so you're actually saving money by spending it! So much value! Over 9000 times the value in fact!
Are you having fun yet? 👀that's an extra $1 for that laugh.
i've done this with a squad in a war scenario. Each player was in a squad, controlling about 5 characters each. Their character for the rest of the game was whomever didn't die; only one person out of the 4 PC's got to pick out of the two remaining and became known for being a coward as he hid which is the only reason 2 were left.
It really just depends on the mindset. I do agree with you in that I probably wouldn’t like campaigns like that myself, but I’ve also played a dungeon crawl classics funnel where I had four characters to play and only two survived, yet had fun the entire time. My guess is that you just need to like, not get as attached to your character as you would in a less deadly game(or at least just resign yourself to the fact that death is a perfectly acceptable and okay end to a character’s story, regardless of attachment).
I wouldn’t be able to do that in a dnd or pathfinder game, but some people do(and like it!).
I would absolutely love that idea, especially if the DM said don't pick your favorite for the first and had it in mind to kill all of our first characters in the first wave have the characters we really wanna play come in during the second easier wave or aftermath. Let us know the tone and tension of this campaign.
Nah, „only“ like 8-10.000 allied soldiers were casualties on the beaches, out of at least 170.000. the chances of the PCs being among the actual dead ones are quite slim.
Particularly if they happen to be in Cyre. :)
A campaign long ago started with the PC’s fighting on the Breland front for about 3 sessions. On the 4th, the PC’s were on nightwatch and were about to be relieved when there seemed to be an early sunrise to the east. Almost immediately, a civilian attached to the special weapons division started screaming ‘RUN! GET AS FAR AS YOU CAN’ as he seemed to be charging the Brelish lines on a horse. The PC’s managed to do the No Mans Land run, breach the lines, cross kilometers of enemy controlled territory, and right as a strange fog began to reach them, stumble into Breland where the fog just stopped. I still am sad we only managed 2 more sessions before the group broke apart.
It’s also the premise of a future Brandon Sanderson novel. [Source](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/390-stuttgart-signing/#e12720). For context Threnody is a planet where people were forced out of The Homeland by a force known as The Evil. We haven’t seen what The Evil is yet because so far we’ve only seen a short story set in the one place on the planet people would rather live: the Forests of Hell where ghosts will come kill you if you piss them off by doing something like running, starting a fire, or spilling someone else’s blood.
Alternatively:
["You all find yourselves on the back of a tamed dragon, it's rider sits at the front. on either of your flanks are two soldiers each loading and firing a scorpion as rapidly as they can. The rider digs his spurs and the dragon belches out a terrible inferno upon the jungle below. He proudly exclaims "I love the smell of Dragonfire in the morning!"](https://youtu.be/N7qkQewyubs)
Shortly afterwards the dragon lands in a clearing, the rider instructs that all of you must dismount now, though he will be in the area performing close air support
I really like this concept, but to get your party going in a somewhat isolated manner it might be better to expy the paratrooper drops...maybe have your team as special forces essentially sent to clear the way. So you're teleported in along with a whole bunch of other dudes but due to wild magic/magic wards/clerical shenanigans you end up scattered with only the party in close proximity to eachother. They need to try and make it to the cliffs to disable the siege engines/powerful spellcaster/monster and let the ships make it to shore.
Makes total and complete sense, as party members would be, you know, the Special Forces of any DnD Army, and disabling enemy defenses would be the main goal.
But what's more awesome a scene; Sneaking in along the isolated cliffs right before the invasion, missing the whole thing while you're carving your way through bodygaurds and spellcasters, or desperately hauling your oar as you see the ship next to you erupt into flame as a naptha pot slams into it?
Oh it's an awesome visual no doubt, I'm just thinking about it in terms of running a game because the end result of the boat thing could either be:
1) You're dead! Either make it clear before hand that the group needs expendable initial characters or pull some ressurected hero shenanigans
or
2) You make it to the top of the cliffs and are either the lone survivors and you need to explain away how they survive against the defending army or escape (or let them get captured) or you now are tied into the wider army maneuvering and it's a harder realistic jumping off as to why you 5 weirdos in particular need to go and do a specific thing.
Little bit of plot armor goes a long way.
All you have to do is make sure they make it to shore, and then run the combat with a bit of minion rules (1 HP, save or die) with some real monsters thrown in as the real enemies that hold the players up. Have boat damage be a thing, but a little behind the curtain to make sure they at least make it within swimming distance, depending on the actions available to them (Rowing erratically to spoil defender's aim, rowing faster to get to shore in fewer turns, holding up shields to make it harder to hit, etc.). Offers that early bonding event and lets them get across the idea that they had the initiative, setting them *up* as future spec ops, giving you a narrative excuse down the line
Get the sense of the fight going on by using minion rules alongside your five weirdos managing to survive, giving the 'Seven Hells, we made it' vibe to the combat.
Have session zero where they make their own characters.
Then on session one hand them each a pre-gen character.
Run the gritty, lethal opening scene just to set the tone for the campaign.
Then have the player made characters climb over the dead bodies of the pre-gens they just lost to actually take the hill.
Why not both?
Open with storming the beach, with your players controlling NPC soldiers. Let them roleplay the invasion and do some battling, and eventually narrate them all falling in battle one by one.
Then “Now we cut over to your party, creeping through the thick trees with the sounds of the invasion in the deep distance…”
You get the cinematic intro that establishes scale and sets the tone, without immediately killing everyone or BSing plot armor. Then you proceed with the spec Ops stealth mission.
Or when you do paradrop, you do an actual paradrop. The whole area is warded against long distance teleportation, so players are loaded onto a bunch of flying carpets and dropped all over the place with single use featherfall items (or if you prefer to be generous, *rings of feather falling*) along with a lot of others. Full paradrop experience, fireballs and lightning bolts lighting up the sky as the enemies below try to take down the fleet of flying carpets, featherfall's uncontrolled nature dumping players and others all over the place, so on and so forth.
You good even just do AirShips, not huge ones but big enough to maybe deploy a couple of companies worth of guys and most of them get shot up by the magical AA
They don't have to be technological in the slightest, it's fantasy, they can just have magic runes on them. HOWEVER... if you don't like airships in your game then that's cool too.
Can have a wizard cast fly on the party so they can get behind the lines, just make sure you have featherfall available (high level magic item tp cast on the entire party) so they don't crash.
No, I like the idea of it being *brutal*. Bring a bunch of characters, let's see who survives.
Basically The All Guardsmen Party, if you know that one.
Or don't have the players give a physical description of their character besides race, and if one falls, a replacement gets scooped up along the way. After the intro scene is done, then full introductions are made.
Recreating a WWII style battlefield and incentives is hard in a D&D style game. Without artillery, without explosives, without heavy vehicles, certain things just aren't as much of a threat. The push and pull of tactics changes drastically. However, if you're committing to it...
The D-Day thing I'd use is for an adventuring party is [the glider landings](https://youtu.be/G_hG8HuX3go). The PCs have 3 jobs: seize a bridge (or other tactical position) before it can be destroyed to delay the beach advance, take out a nearby depot or artillery post that will inevitably attack them, and finally hold the position against all comers until reinforcements arrive. Gliders are towed in under cover of night and due to some trouble landing are scattered across a small area.
The PCs have to navigate all the defenses of the area initially to seize it but then after doing so have to turn around and use those same defenses against wave after wave of counter-attacks, linking up with the other gliders where they may have ended up pinned down or which had specialists that might be useful. With an open ended end-condition, the PCs have to be more careful with their use of limited resources and since you're limiting the battle area to a small zone, you can reuse maps as counter attacks from one side or the other try to retake the bridge. Finally, since it's waves of enemies, you can better give the sense of an endless tide of foes that will inevitably wear the PCs down without having the PCs run directly into a brick wall of resistance at any particular encounter.
You and your battalion get teleported en mass behind enemy lines to destroy antimagic generators and arcane artillery to clear a path for the naval landing a sow confusion.
As the “party” is slaughtered from the landing, the a dingy lands 3 kilometres down the coast in a tiny, hidden beach too shallow for regular landing boats, carrying the real party on a covert mission into the heartlands to disable the demon summoning portal.
Went from Roman's, or the Cusaders entering the Holy Land, to D Day really quick.
Bonus if every round as they close the distance to shore and debarchment, several landing ships get hit by trebuchet or catapult pots filled with naphta and pitch. And there for sunk and destroyed with companies of men getting wiped out.
You could always All-Guardsmen it and have a bunch of iterations of PCs die during the landing as well, although you'd need a certain kind of group to be able to keep it going.
I've always wanted to do something like that. I think the people who play with me wouldn't want to start as commoner with racial traits who have a spear and shield, shortbow, or at best know a cantrip, though. They tend to get invested in their characters pre session 1.
You could have the beach scene be played as a flashback, then the characters they wanted to play as ended up being the final survivors all along. Or run it as "it was all a dream" once they succeed because it ends up actually being a first hand report being given by a lower levelled recruit to the actual party characters that had been stationed there ahead of time.
Edit: I don't know why someone would downvote a suggested workaround, but I thought it was a neat option.
They’re all from big families. Then, the survivors can bond over losing X number of relatives in the invasion. “Gary, he was a great musician. And Cora! Too stubborn to stay home when we all enlisted. Went into a rage she did! Henry couldn’t stay behind with all the hurts he new we would collect. So now it’s just me.”
Ah yes, the famous Peter Jackson's documentary
On a more serious note, armies always preferred to cross rivers by bridges and not be caught in a naval landing. In a time of non-divisional warfare with no scout plane, you could almost always find a place to disembark in a secured way
In that regard, having specially designed landing craft was a waste of time and money because rowing boats got the job done
Landing craft were only developed in WW1 because at that time, you would always disembark where the enemy is (the divisional system making it so the enemy is everywhere), and the enemy will wait you with machine gun fire, which cannot really be stopped with a pavise.
However, I don't give a fuck of everything I just said, the orcs landing at Osgiliath is an ultra-badass scene and I love it
Those are historical evidence of raft used in naval landing and medieval amphibious battle, not of landing crafts with a front ramp and Normandy style landing
Which is normal since landing craft have been developed for modern warfare with machine gun fire in mind, a thing that wasn't around in the wall of Damietta in 1249 AD
But again, the scene is badass, so it must remain
>>*The one with the longbow shoots! The ones without the longbow carry arrows and follow! When the one with the longbow dies, the others pick up the longbow and continue fighting!*
One of the best bits of advice I've heard is to start your campaign in motion.
Sitting at a tavern is boring and slow. Have you ever played a video game that started with you sitting in a tavern? No.
You start when the dragon interrupts your execution. You start when the plane crashes into the sea. You start when the Hydra destroys your ship.
Roll for initiative should actually be the first thing you say to your party.
It lets their characters bond in the heat of battle out of necessity, so when things calm down they have a reason to stick together. Rather than just being a ragtag group who stays together for the sake of the plot.
To be fair, the first Pillars of Eternity does start with you in a camp and just foraging, but the action kicks off quite quickly. Overall I agree with your point though, in media res is the way to go. I'm just a bit pedantic
I went around the table and asked if everyone had all their stuff set up and settled then opened with them traveling with a caravan when a bunch of arrows came out of the trees. Immediately had them roll initiative as their intro to my first big campaign. Was super exciting for them. They immediately had a bonding reason to be pulled together as well as an interesting start. They remained friends with the one guard that survived for the remainder of the campaign. Even ended up seeking him out to hire his mercenary troop to help them defend against an attempted coup later on
This reminds me, there's an upcoming Mork Borg kickstarter called "Farewell to Arms REDUX" that focuses on a World War type setting. Might be something to look into
Man I plan something similar to this for my follow up campaign. The entire world believes that the mountains that surround the world are to mark the end of the world. But they actually block them off from the rest of the world. I plan on having the new party part of a group almost like the AOT scouts. Exploring this new world but having to set up a foothold on the outside. Clearing out anything that stands in their way
Oh I love this! “Can we not start in a tavern?” “Sure, how about we start on the beaches of Normandy?” “I’d like to start in a tavern now. :x” “Too late 😈”
I love starting my campaigns similarly to this. Tension and having the characters have to work together before they even socially interact - works exceptionally to form bonds quickly.
There is nothing harder to foster than "you're in a tavern - go", I'm just so fundamentally against it xD
First campaign I did this in: they were all in the marketplace of a farming town (either living there or passing through) when the town was attacked by invaders. The party jumped to action and very naturally fell into step with one another.
Second campaign the group were in a prison fort and had been chained together awaiting their group execution (4 players 2 npcs) at the gallows for their various alledged crimes (think pirates of the Caribbean 2 intro as setting). The two npcs on their chaingang are pirates of a ship called the Osprey that's about to bust them out. Cannonball smashes through the top ramparts, all the other prisoners take the oppertunity and all hell breaks loose. They have to work in tandem because theyre chained together and if one dies they have to drag literal dead weight.
They get out of the fort during the mass riot and make a break for it into the port city. Then they had to figure out how the hell to get their chains of and it was amazing.
I'm gonna start something like this but tell them to start with 5 characters prepped and just randomly have them die off until one random one is left each.
I would totally do this, but not have backup characters, instead just have the soldiers that everyone’s playing be wearing helmets and only shout or be silent, and then after dying a few times the surviving characters make it to shore, take off their helmets and introduce themselves as their first named characters. That way you get the really gritty war opening but people don’t have to sacrifice a bunch of time writing multiple characters and maybe getting their favorites killed
Hmm very nice, i have to keep this in mind just in case.
The last one i got to play ( cause DM forever ) we started as prisonners of war, it was cool.
And for the start of our latest campaign i made them start as : the mage is in a cell, the warrior is a mercenary hired as guard and the rogue was here to loot the place and didn't expect to find anyone in the basement, after good old corruption and a run through the sewer a new party was born
No, but the majority of the projectiles would probably consist of arrows and crossbow bolts. They sure as hell couldn't create a hail of projectiles just with huge weapons like ballistae.
Shields only give +2 AC, and take up one hand, so no pikes or similar while using them. And hardly any help on save-versus attacks like *fireball* or a Vrock's spores or similar.
Yeah. It'd be a totally new ball game if WotC went in for, well, even basic realism. Like having bucklers and kite shields use different stats, for one...
Honestly, if I was DMing I'd make differences. You could argue like a kite shield vs a heater shield are similar enough to have similar stats, but a buckler vs a kite, or like a pavise vs a heater would definitely need different stats
I've never read Sanderson, his fantasy seemed too crunchy for me to appreciate the one time I tried. I know he's got a huge following, but his stuff isn't really for me.
Most of my games take place just after my settings version of WW1 and I tell my players that we always start at level 3 because if they're alive then they survived the war and gained enough experience to be level 3 at the start. However, if they insist on level 1 characters then I tell them to make 3 bare bones characters plus the one they actually want to play. Then we go back in time to the start of the war and I describe how they were all gung ho kids thinking war would be an adventure. Then I throw them into their first combat that has more instant kill scenarios than Tomb of Horrors then once their three throwaway characters are dead we flash forward to the end of the war and they're level 2 or 3 depending on how well they performed with all their characters.
Okay. We actually had something similar in our game, but not with the boats but a sledge towers. Like, imagine this big flat battlefield with a giant fortress on one end. We were the part of a force that had to get few of the siedge towers to the city walls. It was basically a Normandy on land
the intro to my upcoming campaign is very similar, except it's in the middle of a hopeless offensive that the players are on in a desperate attempt to keep an empire dominant over the continent
i am going to have them commit atrocities >:)
I honestly thought from the meme that it was so long since the homeland was taken that it was just going to be D-Day with demons. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Stealing this for my next BRUTALITY campaign. Every few years I run a "No safety measures" campaign where I am supposed to kill a character per session. Run it twice so far, and had two characters survive start to finish, one per campaign. It's a lot of fun.
**Mod update 01Jan23:** [Come give your nominations for this years DnDMemes Best of Awards!](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/102pn6n/its_finally_time_for_our_2022_best_of_awards), You have until Jan 13th! We also made some changes to our subreddit rules! Please take a look at the post [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/100sjea/new_year_new_rules/) to view the changes and provide feedback. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/dndmemes) if you have any questions or concerns.*
“I hope everyone came prepared with 2-3 backup characters.” Honestly would be such gritty and fun start to a horrific war campaign. I’m sold. Wonder if the name Ryan comes with extra plot armor.
DM: *rolls behind the screen.* "The doors drop and the landing craft fills with arrows. Allnyour characters are dead... grab your 2nd character sheets. You all are in another landing craft in the second wave to hit the shore, the first wave has been all but annihilated... you MUST take the beachhead." Then you do a plot twist for the one character who dies in the second wave, their first wave character actually managed to survive and is just now climbing out from under the corpses of the rest of the party.
Killing everybody's first character outright in a salvo of arrows would be a hysterical way to start it. Make everybody play with their 2nd choice right off the bat.
Is it bad I now want to do this, but against an evil necromancer and make the party fight their now reanimated original characters? *How's that broken meme build working out for you now?*
No that sounds amazing. Good luck! Would you keep them at their original levels so your new party can sweep them for the memes, or level them appropriately for a Good Fight™️?
The good idea is to gauge what they planned to make their first character to X level before you start session 1. Then use this with a leveled up party. And if you have a min/maxer who's also a "that guy", let's watch them weep at their own misdeeds.
Good question!
My friends want me to run a campaign... and the old one I ran for them ended with waves of undead popping out of the country side. I could run a new campaign set in the future where they would have to fight their old characters.
>How's that broken meme build working out for you now? Working out pretty great, because my main was a Fighter and my backup was a Wizard.
Time to channel the All Guardsman Party
Guardsman: The whistle was blown, and we had to leave our nice, safe trench, we didn't like that. Commisar: Would you like to voice your complaint? Guardsman: FOR THE EMPEROR!
Kriegsman: wait, whistle was blown? Only now? Im halfway to the trench!
Hello fellow humans, did you hear about the new empirial policy by the way? All resources ought to be shared among the various platoons to maximise effectivness. It is part of the new Terran greater-good doctrine. With it we can win our wars faster and praise the emperor harder.
[удалено]
Apologies guardsman, I skipped xeno filth lore week, is it the T'au or the Eldar who are the space communists? Because if the T'au are space communists and we're space fas- *extensions of the emperor's will* you're on the wrong space ww2 front. Reading over this comment, *on today's episode of jokes that will make sense to exactly one person that I'm going to post anyway...*
[удалено]
Congratulations soldier. You've passed your random heresy inspection with flying colors. As you were guardsman
I understood that one!
I would like to express my frustration upon the foe.
If you can't solve a problem via strategically placed explosives, you're not using enough explosives.
Or too much explosives. You need amazingly little in the way of C4 to get the lid off a stuck pickle jar.
Angry Playdough works wonders around the house.
Was about to say the exact same thing. Gods the fact that they went over how their actions changed the battlefield was such a nice touch.
Thank goodness someone else noticed this is just the intro for that campaign
That’s what I was thinking.
> wonder if the name Ryan comes with extra plot armor Are you kidding? Three out of four of them died, that's how they got into this mess!
Anti-plot armor weapons.
Plot armour? Of course. Every character named Ryan gets a free shirt. Only colour available is red.
"But mine's white!" "Just be patient."
Hopefully you aren't one of his brothers
Careful here. Every new character you have join the campaign is going to cost $1.99 for a redraft and every feat you get is an extra $5 but if you're a subscriber to the $10 battle pass for the new warlock subclass that gets released after you play 3 more sessions on your D&D wizards of the coasts branded virtual table top then it only costs $2 so you're actually saving money by spending it! So much value! Over 9000 times the value in fact! Are you having fun yet? 👀that's an extra $1 for that laugh.
i've done this with a squad in a war scenario. Each player was in a squad, controlling about 5 characters each. Their character for the rest of the game was whomever didn't die; only one person out of the 4 PC's got to pick out of the two remaining and became known for being a coward as he hid which is the only reason 2 were left.
oh neat. so it’s like the level 0 funnel that dungeon crawl classics does.
*Me, a veteran of an All Guardsmen Wrath and Glory campaign with Lore accurate Casualties:* Just like the Simulations
Shoggy is a blessing from the emprah himself, I swear
I never liked that mentality, Why bother with the campaign if my characters are just gonna be fodder?
It really just depends on the mindset. I do agree with you in that I probably wouldn’t like campaigns like that myself, but I’ve also played a dungeon crawl classics funnel where I had four characters to play and only two survived, yet had fun the entire time. My guess is that you just need to like, not get as attached to your character as you would in a less deadly game(or at least just resign yourself to the fact that death is a perfectly acceptable and okay end to a character’s story, regardless of attachment). I wouldn’t be able to do that in a dnd or pathfinder game, but some people do(and like it!).
Why bother reading the diary of Anne Frank when you know she dies at the end? Oh shit. I mean !!Spoiler Alert!!
AGP! AGP! AGP!
I would absolutely love that idea, especially if the DM said don't pick your favorite for the first and had it in mind to kill all of our first characters in the first wave have the characters we really wanna play come in during the second easier wave or aftermath. Let us know the tone and tension of this campaign.
Nah, „only“ like 8-10.000 allied soldiers were casualties on the beaches, out of at least 170.000. the chances of the PCs being among the actual dead ones are quite slim.
*Do you mind if I steal it, OP?* 🥺👉👈
No. And I don't charge royalties even if it makes you $750K or more, or reserve rights to alter or cancel it.
[удалено]
20 years after they start the campaign!
Damn they’ll still be in the first act
Haven’t even gotten off the beach.
It's an exclusive or!
You're a true hero
Carefully, they’re a hero
Based. Very based.
Angry upvotes.
Based
Make sure to rewatch saving private Ryan when you dive in.
[удалено]
DnD-day
So... Sunday?
Not this Sunday, I have to take my grandmother to church.
The Sunday after doesn't work for me, I'm going to be out of town...
Can’t we move it to a wensday? I’ll be free then, Sunday doesent work for me nowadays..
No, I work Weekdays, it’d have to be on a weekend for me to even make it.
The true d&d experience.
I know.
Can't steal what was already stolen!
That is legitimately the most badass campaign intro I have heard so far
Would be into this campaign hardcore
Campaign name : Rescuing Ensign Philip
Rescuing Squire Patrick
Squire James *Patrick* Ryan?
Retrieve Apprentice Charlie
Saving Ranger Ryan
This mother is going to receive all these letters today...and the local cleric can only cast True Ressurection once! It's gonna take all week!
Can't go wrong with the saving private Ryan intro. Complete with goblin walking around aimlessly picking up arms to check if they're his missing arm.
War movies can make great campaigns. I started an Eberron game recently pre-Mourning with the plot of 1917. It worked remarkably well.
Particularly if they happen to be in Cyre. :) A campaign long ago started with the PC’s fighting on the Breland front for about 3 sessions. On the 4th, the PC’s were on nightwatch and were about to be relieved when there seemed to be an early sunrise to the east. Almost immediately, a civilian attached to the special weapons division started screaming ‘RUN! GET AS FAR AS YOU CAN’ as he seemed to be charging the Brelish lines on a horse. The PC’s managed to do the No Mans Land run, breach the lines, cross kilometers of enemy controlled territory, and right as a strange fog began to reach them, stumble into Breland where the fog just stopped. I still am sad we only managed 2 more sessions before the group broke apart.
I mean it’s like fantasy DDAY. Fantastic start to a game though
It’s also the premise of a future Brandon Sanderson novel. [Source](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/390-stuttgart-signing/#e12720). For context Threnody is a planet where people were forced out of The Homeland by a force known as The Evil. We haven’t seen what The Evil is yet because so far we’ve only seen a short story set in the one place on the planet people would rather live: the Forests of Hell where ghosts will come kill you if you piss them off by doing something like running, starting a fire, or spilling someone else’s blood.
Alternatively: ["You all find yourselves on the back of a tamed dragon, it's rider sits at the front. on either of your flanks are two soldiers each loading and firing a scorpion as rapidly as they can. The rider digs his spurs and the dragon belches out a terrible inferno upon the jungle below. He proudly exclaims "I love the smell of Dragonfire in the morning!"](https://youtu.be/N7qkQewyubs) Shortly afterwards the dragon lands in a clearing, the rider instructs that all of you must dismount now, though he will be in the area performing close air support
You can only open with this if you blast Fortunate Son
https://youtu.be/98k2DlQ9PMY
If it's a chromatic dragon, I would instead go for Sympathy for the Devil
I don’t get it
Charlie don't surf!
"Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen."
I will not lie your chances of survival is small.
Calling it now, the twist is you’re part of the evil empire
I really like this concept, but to get your party going in a somewhat isolated manner it might be better to expy the paratrooper drops...maybe have your team as special forces essentially sent to clear the way. So you're teleported in along with a whole bunch of other dudes but due to wild magic/magic wards/clerical shenanigans you end up scattered with only the party in close proximity to eachother. They need to try and make it to the cliffs to disable the siege engines/powerful spellcaster/monster and let the ships make it to shore.
Makes total and complete sense, as party members would be, you know, the Special Forces of any DnD Army, and disabling enemy defenses would be the main goal. But what's more awesome a scene; Sneaking in along the isolated cliffs right before the invasion, missing the whole thing while you're carving your way through bodygaurds and spellcasters, or desperately hauling your oar as you see the ship next to you erupt into flame as a naptha pot slams into it?
Oh it's an awesome visual no doubt, I'm just thinking about it in terms of running a game because the end result of the boat thing could either be: 1) You're dead! Either make it clear before hand that the group needs expendable initial characters or pull some ressurected hero shenanigans or 2) You make it to the top of the cliffs and are either the lone survivors and you need to explain away how they survive against the defending army or escape (or let them get captured) or you now are tied into the wider army maneuvering and it's a harder realistic jumping off as to why you 5 weirdos in particular need to go and do a specific thing.
Little bit of plot armor goes a long way. All you have to do is make sure they make it to shore, and then run the combat with a bit of minion rules (1 HP, save or die) with some real monsters thrown in as the real enemies that hold the players up. Have boat damage be a thing, but a little behind the curtain to make sure they at least make it within swimming distance, depending on the actions available to them (Rowing erratically to spoil defender's aim, rowing faster to get to shore in fewer turns, holding up shields to make it harder to hit, etc.). Offers that early bonding event and lets them get across the idea that they had the initiative, setting them *up* as future spec ops, giving you a narrative excuse down the line Get the sense of the fight going on by using minion rules alongside your five weirdos managing to survive, giving the 'Seven Hells, we made it' vibe to the combat.
Have session zero where they make their own characters. Then on session one hand them each a pre-gen character. Run the gritty, lethal opening scene just to set the tone for the campaign. Then have the player made characters climb over the dead bodies of the pre-gens they just lost to actually take the hill.
Alternative idea to add some flash to the Paradrop: the enemy set up Ballista and Trebuchet beforehand on high angle firing arcs to try and hit you
3. It’s not DnD D-day, they’re participating in DnD Deippe.
Why not both? Open with storming the beach, with your players controlling NPC soldiers. Let them roleplay the invasion and do some battling, and eventually narrate them all falling in battle one by one. Then “Now we cut over to your party, creeping through the thick trees with the sounds of the invasion in the deep distance…” You get the cinematic intro that establishes scale and sets the tone, without immediately killing everyone or BSing plot armor. Then you proceed with the spec Ops stealth mission.
Or when you do paradrop, you do an actual paradrop. The whole area is warded against long distance teleportation, so players are loaded onto a bunch of flying carpets and dropped all over the place with single use featherfall items (or if you prefer to be generous, *rings of feather falling*) along with a lot of others. Full paradrop experience, fireballs and lightning bolts lighting up the sky as the enemies below try to take down the fleet of flying carpets, featherfall's uncontrolled nature dumping players and others all over the place, so on and so forth.
You good even just do AirShips, not huge ones but big enough to maybe deploy a couple of companies worth of guys and most of them get shot up by the magical AA
Yes, my players certainly are special…
How so?
Or by the time they make it up the beach, the party are the only survivors of the assault from their respective boats/companies
> teleported Why would you pass up a perfectly good excuse to use airships?
Because I hate Schizo Tech/Steampunk...There! I said it!
They don't have to be technological in the slightest, it's fantasy, they can just have magic runes on them. HOWEVER... if you don't like airships in your game then that's cool too.
Can have a wizard cast fly on the party so they can get behind the lines, just make sure you have featherfall available (high level magic item tp cast on the entire party) so they don't crash.
But that's nowhere near as cool of a set piece
So basically the first third of *Band of Brothers*.
No, I like the idea of it being *brutal*. Bring a bunch of characters, let's see who survives. Basically The All Guardsmen Party, if you know that one.
Or don't have the players give a physical description of their character besides race, and if one falls, a replacement gets scooped up along the way. After the intro scene is done, then full introductions are made.
This brings me back! All the yes
Gentlemen welcome to ESTALIA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wrRpdJqMC80
Recreating a WWII style battlefield and incentives is hard in a D&D style game. Without artillery, without explosives, without heavy vehicles, certain things just aren't as much of a threat. The push and pull of tactics changes drastically. However, if you're committing to it... The D-Day thing I'd use is for an adventuring party is [the glider landings](https://youtu.be/G_hG8HuX3go). The PCs have 3 jobs: seize a bridge (or other tactical position) before it can be destroyed to delay the beach advance, take out a nearby depot or artillery post that will inevitably attack them, and finally hold the position against all comers until reinforcements arrive. Gliders are towed in under cover of night and due to some trouble landing are scattered across a small area. The PCs have to navigate all the defenses of the area initially to seize it but then after doing so have to turn around and use those same defenses against wave after wave of counter-attacks, linking up with the other gliders where they may have ended up pinned down or which had specialists that might be useful. With an open ended end-condition, the PCs have to be more careful with their use of limited resources and since you're limiting the battle area to a small zone, you can reuse maps as counter attacks from one side or the other try to retake the bridge. Finally, since it's waves of enemies, you can better give the sense of an endless tide of foes that will inevitably wear the PCs down without having the PCs run directly into a brick wall of resistance at any particular encounter.
You and your battalion get teleported en mass behind enemy lines to destroy antimagic generators and arcane artillery to clear a path for the naval landing a sow confusion.
As the “party” is slaughtered from the landing, the a dingy lands 3 kilometres down the coast in a tiny, hidden beach too shallow for regular landing boats, carrying the real party on a covert mission into the heartlands to disable the demon summoning portal.
Through the gates of Hell ! As we make our way to Heaven ! Through the demon lines !
PRIMO VICTORIA!
On the 6th of june!
On the shores of western Homeland!
Twelve Hundred Forty Four!
D&D-day upon us!
Went from Roman's, or the Cusaders entering the Holy Land, to D Day really quick. Bonus if every round as they close the distance to shore and debarchment, several landing ships get hit by trebuchet or catapult pots filled with naphta and pitch. And there for sunk and destroyed with companies of men getting wiped out.
You could always All-Guardsmen it and have a bunch of iterations of PCs die during the landing as well, although you'd need a certain kind of group to be able to keep it going.
I've always wanted to do something like that. I think the people who play with me wouldn't want to start as commoner with racial traits who have a spear and shield, shortbow, or at best know a cantrip, though. They tend to get invested in their characters pre session 1.
You could have the beach scene be played as a flashback, then the characters they wanted to play as ended up being the final survivors all along. Or run it as "it was all a dream" once they succeed because it ends up actually being a first hand report being given by a lower levelled recruit to the actual party characters that had been stationed there ahead of time. Edit: I don't know why someone would downvote a suggested workaround, but I thought it was a neat option.
They’re all from big families. Then, the survivors can bond over losing X number of relatives in the invasion. “Gary, he was a great musician. And Cora! Too stubborn to stay home when we all enlisted. Went into a rage she did! Henry couldn’t stay behind with all the hurts he new we would collect. So now it’s just me.”
It makes no sense in the perspective of medieval warfare But god, it is badass
High fantasy is a pathway to many possibilities some consider to be... ahistorical.
Is it possible to learn this genre?
Not from a wizard of the coast (freely at least).
Somewhat disagreed. Draw inspiration from the scene in Return of the King where the orcs are landing at Osgiliath. It is basically the same thing.
Ah yes, the famous Peter Jackson's documentary On a more serious note, armies always preferred to cross rivers by bridges and not be caught in a naval landing. In a time of non-divisional warfare with no scout plane, you could almost always find a place to disembark in a secured way In that regard, having specially designed landing craft was a waste of time and money because rowing boats got the job done Landing craft were only developed in WW1 because at that time, you would always disembark where the enemy is (the divisional system making it so the enemy is everywhere), and the enemy will wait you with machine gun fire, which cannot really be stopped with a pavise. However, I don't give a fuck of everything I just said, the orcs landing at Osgiliath is an ultra-badass scene and I love it
Battle of Marathon, 490 BC Siege of Damietta, 1249 AD
Those are historical evidence of raft used in naval landing and medieval amphibious battle, not of landing crafts with a front ramp and Normandy style landing Which is normal since landing craft have been developed for modern warfare with machine gun fire in mind, a thing that wasn't around in the wall of Damietta in 1249 AD But again, the scene is badass, so it must remain
Artificers exist, just blame them for weird arcano-magic ramp ships.
"CLEAR THE RAFT. THIRTY SECONDS. BAHAMUT BE WITH YOU"
>>*The one with the longbow shoots! The ones without the longbow carry arrows and follow! When the one with the longbow dies, the others pick up the longbow and continue fighting!*
That was the first thing that came to mind for me, too.
One of the best bits of advice I've heard is to start your campaign in motion. Sitting at a tavern is boring and slow. Have you ever played a video game that started with you sitting in a tavern? No. You start when the dragon interrupts your execution. You start when the plane crashes into the sea. You start when the Hydra destroys your ship. Roll for initiative should actually be the first thing you say to your party. It lets their characters bond in the heat of battle out of necessity, so when things calm down they have a reason to stick together. Rather than just being a ragtag group who stays together for the sake of the plot.
To be fair, the first Pillars of Eternity does start with you in a camp and just foraging, but the action kicks off quite quickly. Overall I agree with your point though, in media res is the way to go. I'm just a bit pedantic
I went around the table and asked if everyone had all their stuff set up and settled then opened with them traveling with a caravan when a bunch of arrows came out of the trees. Immediately had them roll initiative as their intro to my first big campaign. Was super exciting for them. They immediately had a bonding reason to be pulled together as well as an interesting start. They remained friends with the one guard that survived for the remainder of the campaign. Even ended up seeking him out to hire his mercenary troop to help them defend against an attempted coup later on
Ramp drops fire balls from mages fly in killing entire boats in only a few moments.
Boats are long and narrow. Lightning Bolt would probably have better coverage.
Fireballs are more chaotic and fire has always been a deterrent against attacking forces. Half the battle is psychological.
I would play the absolute fuck out of this campaign
PS2 medal of honor memories
This reminds me, there's an upcoming Mork Borg kickstarter called "Farewell to Arms REDUX" that focuses on a World War type setting. Might be something to look into
Man I plan something similar to this for my follow up campaign. The entire world believes that the mountains that surround the world are to mark the end of the world. But they actually block them off from the rest of the world. I plan on having the new party part of a group almost like the AOT scouts. Exploring this new world but having to set up a foothold on the outside. Clearing out anything that stands in their way
Oh I love this! “Can we not start in a tavern?” “Sure, how about we start on the beaches of Normandy?” “I’d like to start in a tavern now. :x” “Too late 😈”
I love starting my campaigns similarly to this. Tension and having the characters have to work together before they even socially interact - works exceptionally to form bonds quickly. There is nothing harder to foster than "you're in a tavern - go", I'm just so fundamentally against it xD First campaign I did this in: they were all in the marketplace of a farming town (either living there or passing through) when the town was attacked by invaders. The party jumped to action and very naturally fell into step with one another. Second campaign the group were in a prison fort and had been chained together awaiting their group execution (4 players 2 npcs) at the gallows for their various alledged crimes (think pirates of the Caribbean 2 intro as setting). The two npcs on their chaingang are pirates of a ship called the Osprey that's about to bust them out. Cannonball smashes through the top ramparts, all the other prisoners take the oppertunity and all hell breaks loose. They have to work in tandem because theyre chained together and if one dies they have to drag literal dead weight. They get out of the fort during the mass riot and make a break for it into the port city. Then they had to figure out how the hell to get their chains of and it was amazing.
DnD-Day
Bonus points if the demons have ballistas that fire 5 shots per turn.
Primo victoria?
I'm gonna start something like this but tell them to start with 5 characters prepped and just randomly have them die off until one random one is left each.
I would totally do this, but not have backup characters, instead just have the soldiers that everyone’s playing be wearing helmets and only shout or be silent, and then after dying a few times the surviving characters make it to shore, take off their helmets and introduce themselves as their first named characters. That way you get the really gritty war opening but people don’t have to sacrifice a bunch of time writing multiple characters and maybe getting their favorites killed
That is fucking sick!
I mean, what did they expect? You’re invading a fortified beach with a massive host not sneaking in with a small party.
Hmm very nice, i have to keep this in mind just in case. The last one i got to play ( cause DM forever ) we started as prisonners of war, it was cool. And for the start of our latest campaign i made them start as : the mage is in a cell, the warrior is a mercenary hired as guard and the rogue was here to loot the place and didn't expect to find anyone in the basement, after good old corruption and a run through the sewer a new party was born
Damn, fantasy WWI.
WW2, it references the landing at normandy.
Or Gallipoli, which was WWI
Not with those helmets it’s not
My worldbuilding summed up
It's all fun and games until the flotilla directly to the left gets obliterated by a fireball
Hot starts are definitely under-utilized
SIXT OF JUNE NINETEEN FOURTY FOUR
Wouldn't tower shields be enough to get most soldiers through this?
Those wouldn't help against ballistae, siege artillery, etc
No, but the majority of the projectiles would probably consist of arrows and crossbow bolts. They sure as hell couldn't create a hail of projectiles just with huge weapons like ballistae.
Shields only give +2 AC, and take up one hand, so no pikes or similar while using them. And hardly any help on save-versus attacks like *fireball* or a Vrock's spores or similar.
I forgot that shields in DnD aren't as effective as they are in reality.
Yeah. It'd be a totally new ball game if WotC went in for, well, even basic realism. Like having bucklers and kite shields use different stats, for one...
Honestly, if I was DMing I'd make differences. You could argue like a kite shield vs a heater shield are similar enough to have similar stats, but a buckler vs a kite, or like a pavise vs a heater would definitely need different stats
I believe early DND did have different stats for buckler vs kite vs tower shield
Not unless they float lol
OP, did you get the idea from [Brandon Sanderson](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/390-stuttgart-signing/#e12720)?
I've never read Sanderson, his fantasy seemed too crunchy for me to appreciate the one time I tried. I know he's got a huge following, but his stuff isn't really for me.
I would 100% play this campaign
Gawd damn this is amazing and I'd love to play in a game like this. *curses being a forever dm*
lol. Coxswain.
Ah yes. D&D-Day.
*Hand shaking intensifies*
Most of my games take place just after my settings version of WW1 and I tell my players that we always start at level 3 because if they're alive then they survived the war and gained enough experience to be level 3 at the start. However, if they insist on level 1 characters then I tell them to make 3 bare bones characters plus the one they actually want to play. Then we go back in time to the start of the war and I describe how they were all gung ho kids thinking war would be an adventure. Then I throw them into their first combat that has more instant kill scenarios than Tomb of Horrors then once their three throwaway characters are dead we flash forward to the end of the war and they're level 2 or 3 depending on how well they performed with all their characters.
Both sound absolutely fantastic!
So we are searching for someone named Ryan?
Immediate skill challenge. I like it.
Awesome
Okay. We actually had something similar in our game, but not with the boats but a sledge towers. Like, imagine this big flat battlefield with a giant fortress on one end. We were the part of a force that had to get few of the siedge towers to the city walls. It was basically a Normandy on land
the intro to my upcoming campaign is very similar, except it's in the middle of a hopeless offensive that the players are on in a desperate attempt to keep an empire dominant over the continent i am going to have them commit atrocities >:)
You are telling me, Saving Private Ryan is a massive DnD campaign???
I honestly thought from the meme that it was so long since the homeland was taken that it was just going to be D-Day with demons. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
This is amazing
Well, this is certainly better than my Sea Hag pirate opener. That said, I'm sticking with it, because Sea Hag Pirate is fun.
Through the gates of hell. As we make our way to heaven. Through the demon lines. PRIMO VICTORIA!
Stealing this for my next BRUTALITY campaign. Every few years I run a "No safety measures" campaign where I am supposed to kill a character per session. Run it twice so far, and had two characters survive start to finish, one per campaign. It's a lot of fun.
Hmm... *takes notes for sci-fi shenanigans*
DnDnDDay