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I've always really liked the idea of GMing for, or playing in, a campaign where all the PCs were the same class, race, or something similar. A party where the PCs all come from the same Dwarven clan or the same Halfling village, a party where everyone is part of the same thieves guild or wizardry college, or even various types of PCs that are all agents the same church are along the lines of what I'm thinking about.
I've never played in a campaign like this (except for a pirate campaign, but that still allows for a wide range of classes, races, personalities, and motivations). Usually, the idea doesn't appeal to enough people in the group, or I don't want to enforce such restrictions on a group when I'm GM.
So, I'm not looking for advice, or anything. I just want to hear about anyone else's experiences GMing or playing in a group like this. What was your theme? What sort of adventures were involved? Was it fun? What sort of challenges were involved in such a campaign?
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Well I did play game in which we all used nonlethal damage lol. We were part of a religious order lol.
We had:
Serene Paladin
Sword saint saMURAI of the order of the blue rose
A monk of the white lotus(me)
A life Oracle
A heavens Oracle.
Out was actually pretty fun and interesting to try lol.
On a side note, touch of serenity is awesome lol
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Themed groups I have either run, or want to run:
- All-paladin group (but of different deities)
- All-tiefling group (for Council of Thieves)
- Middle-aged townsfolk have to take up the mantle of hero when all of the young and able-bodied pass away mysteriously
- Thieves' guild, starting from the bottom of the guild to the top.
All PCs being a small-sized race is always fun.
All PCs being a small-sized race is always fun.
All goblin party...
WE B GOBLINS!!!
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All of the same race sounds fun.
All the same class sounds like a mistake - you'd end up stepping on each-others toes too much. Different archetypes could help - especially for a class like monk where the archetypes are so different - but I think you'd be better off stretching it out to a class theme.
Ex.
All nature based. (ranger/druid/hunter/cavalier of the green)
All from a church (cleric/inquisitor/warpriest/paladin)
thieves guild (rogue/slayer/illusionist/snakebite striker brawler/ninja)
Etc. (and I probably missed a few potential classes for each theme)
We've done the all small races, that was interesting and fun. And my players are very fond of the thieve's guild adventures, especially if they can move in and start their own guild.
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Hopefully for Curse of the Crimson Throne everyone is going to be a different kind of vigilante (an avenger, a stalker, a warlock, and a zealot). But I've not yet.
In one game, I played one of the all-archeologist bard group. That was a blast.
All Paladin party means no conflict, except when they worship different gods.
Damerrich pally and Sarenrae pally find a remorseful murderer...
Awesome. Those of you who have played the all-from-the-same-monastery/church groups, what are some of the adventures your group(s) had?
Same question for those of you who played in all-from-the-same-race group(s).
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All of the same race sounds fun.
All the same class sounds like a mistake - you'd end up stepping on each-others toes too much. Different archetypes could help - especially for a class like monk where the archetypes are so different - but I think you'd be better off stretching it out to a class theme.
Ex.
All nature based. (ranger/druid/hunter/cavalier of the green)
All from a church (cleric/inquisitor/warpriest/paladin)
thieves guild (rogue/slayer/illusionist/snakebite striker brawler/ninja)
Etc. (and I probably missed a few potential classes for each theme)
Depends on the class...
All inquisitors actuly works (melee aegis build, ranged, caster, anti caster)
All alchemists is just stupid powerful (2 vivi beastmorphs, 1 bomber, 1 utility (cryptbreaker or something)).
Pure druid parties are OP as all hell...
Straight summoners can break the game (1 synthesist, 2 master summoners, 1 first worlder for the unicorn and big beat sticks).
All oracles are quite capable (battle, heavens, life, and dark tapestry)
All bards can actually get humorous (2 dervish or arcane duelists, 1 magician, 1 thundercaller or soundstriker)
All magus can be do able (1 dex dervish magus, 1 str hexcrafter magus, 1 dex kensai magus, 1 defiler build hexcrafter magus)
TECHNICALLY, an all ninja party would be rather nasty. Invisble flanking flurry of shurikken from every direction could fell most things...
Contributor
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Don't know if this counts, but I really want to run Carrion Crown, with all Occult classes. Have the whole party be made up of characters from Occult Adventures, and see how it all works out.
We're currently doing this with Emerald Spire.
-Sylph psychic (formless mind)
-Aasimar (emberkin) occultist (sha'ir)
-Android telekineticist
-Changeling spiritualist (haunted)
Good times. ^_^
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Themed parties I would love to play:
All from the same Barbarian tribes - Barbarians, Witches, Clerics, Bard (Skald), Bloodrager
A detective Agency - Investigators, Detectives, Oracle, characters working towards Spy Prestige, all in some kind of Sherlock Holmes Background.
A buffy Rip-off - A Slayer (Buffy), Brawler (Spike or Angel), A Witch (Willow), Rogue (Xander), Inquisitor (Giles).
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played a game once where all of the party came from a former noble family and servants of.
We have a half elf sorcerer princess and her "left hand and right hand."
the left hand was my character a Rouge and former spymaster of the court and the martial was the right they were ah half elf samurai.
then we have two servants who started as fighter classes.
It was a lot of fun playing the noble side when we had to deal with underworld or lower classes. it actually ended with the two fighters being the most charismatic two of the group.
I've played all Wizard groups, and all Martial (mix of Rogues and Fighters).
The non-casters were more fun, though healing was a bit of an issue.
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We once assembled an all Bard 9th level party to play a module based on the Gamers movies. I can’t recall if we finished the module, but we each had different archetypes, some of which offered different or stacking bonuses. I forget my PC’s archetype at the moment, but it involved pranks and tricks. He also had Intensified Spell and a trait to apply it to Thundering Drums for free, and the results were pretty impressive (at least in a game full of 9th level Bards)
We’ve got an ongoing “Goblin Game” which is currently at 12th level. It included both “We Be Goblins” and “We Be Goblins Too”, but by the time “We Be Goblins Free” came out our PCs had gained too many levels for the DM to feel like ramping the challenge up to our CR range. We’ve been on various homebrew adventures which have included:
- robbing from a gnomish farmstead
- exploring an ancient tomb
- hunting chipmunks for a local goblin innkeeper
- finding a lost pig (again)
- clearing out a haunted mausoleum
- raiding a gnome village
- capturing a human ship
- many acts of arson, murder, and torture
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A few ideas for themed games have been brought up in my group, including:
- a party of Goblins (basically running the We Be Goblins! trilogy)
- a party of traveling Bards, each with a different specialty for Perform and possibly a different archetype (I'd be playing a Skald who specialized in percussion instruments and oration)
- an undead party
- a deathless party (modifying the "deathless" creature type from 3.5's Book of Exalted Deeds)
- a game where the party works in an interdimensional brothel (using the Book of Erotic Fantasy; my group is obsessed with that damn thing....)
- a party of super-rich primadonnas who decide to go adventuring for a lark
- a pirate game (not Skulls & Shackles; our resident DM actually built a pirate campaign from scratch)
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I've always wanted to do this. This one time the group I was in played an all cleric game (everyone worshiped a different deity and was required to be a different alignment from everyone else). Unfortunately, i was out of the country while this adventure played out, so I missed it.
Anyways, the plot of the game was some big scary God was going to come back, so all the other gods sent one of their own to join up (and ordered them not to conflict with the other clerics). So you had a LE cleric alongside a CG cleric and so on. I think there were 7 players at the table at the time. By the time I got back in country, the campaign was over and they had some great stories to tell.
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Themed groups I have either run, or want to run:
- All-paladin group (but of different deities)
- All-tiefling group (for Council of Thieves)
- Middle-aged townsfolk have to take up the mantle of hero when all of the young and able-bodied pass away mysteriously
- Thieves' guild, starting from the bottom of the guild to the top.
Message me if you decide to run any of those please. :-)
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I'm going to make a theme list and put them on cards. Before start of next game I'll draw a card. That'll be the challenge what to play.
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I'm going to make a theme list and put them on cards. Before start of next game I'll draw a card. That'll be the challenge what to play.
Make sure to list all of them here in one concise list! :)
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Kids party--run after parents get replaced by Invasion of the Body snatchers style podlings. Kids are immune....at first.
There's a Harry Turtledove story called "When the last elf is dead." That deals with bbegs winning in a Tolkien based universe. Thought of an all half elf party for this.
Circus or musical group (Blues Brothers Pathfinder edition--we're on a mission from Sheyln).
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The party in my campaign are all fuzzyfolk. An anthropmoorphic wolf, two kitsunes, a catfolk, a suli that resembles an anthropomorphic foodog, and a homebrew race that's essentially a fox crossed with a dolphin.
And no. Such races aren't common in my campaign. They easily got fame and infamy in any community they went into.
I've really wanted to run/play in a church themed campaign where the entire group are all of the same religion, and likely religious themed classes doing some sort of pilgrimage or something. Spreading the influence of their deity one mile at a time or something.
Yeah, this is one of the ideas that I was talking about. I'd love to hear some of the adventures/encounters from someone who actually had a group like this.
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Yeah, this is one of the ideas that I was talking about. I'd love to hear some of the adventures/encounters from someone who actually had a group like this.
Heh. Well, for us, it was Entombed with the Pharaohs, with a little bit of RP-bonus-stuff on top (more or less the meeting before hand and the boat ride over).
We were all archeologist bards, and it worked out really well because, as it turns out, that covers a lot, in terms of adventuring basics - healing, skills, stealth, and so on - all pretty well covered. We weren't great against undead, exactly... but we had a crafter along side, so that didn't bother us too much, as, in addition, we were able to,
... which gave us more time to fill in any inadequacies.
So, all-told, we were able to outmaneuver our foes, craft small things that helped out against the one (major) set of foes we were weak against, and generally cover all of our bases.
Beyond that, most things were run as-written, as far as I can tell (I was a PC).
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Some years ago, I started writing a series of scenarios for an elven group, from the same village. I was discouraged by an industry veteran, and a few people that just wanted to suggest, "But what if I don't wanna play an elf?"
I still have everything I'd written - the first scenario - very much an intro scenario for 1st level elf adventurers, a players' pack, and the beginnings of scenario 2 and 3. I'd sketched out the entire campaign, and still have all of the notes.
Is anybody interested in seeing it?
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I played the Spice Girls in Temple of the Elemental Evil (Video Game) once.
It works well. We never ran out of Bardic Music. I think I had Sporty Spice take a level or in Rogue for trap disabling/evasion.
One was the tank (scary Spice). Sporty was the Rogue. Baby was the healer and secondary face. Ginger focused on archery while everyone else was melee. Posh was the caster/face.
They all had Cha, but only Baby and Posh had above 14.
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I ran a game where the whole group was from a monastery. Every character was a monk or monk like.
Straight Monk
Monk/Paladin
Sacred Fist
Enlightened Fist
Monk/Rogue
I ran them through an edition import of Ravager of Time, an old 1e UK-series. Much fun was had by all, me included.
One i have on my 'To Do' list is to run Iron Gods with a group where everyone is a gun-using archtype, and then i have my fantasy version of The Magnificent Seven.
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Some years ago, I started writing a series of scenarios for an elven group, from the same village. I was discouraged by an industry veteran, and a few people that just wanted to suggest, "But what if I don't wanna play an elf?"
I can see that. It sounds fun - but it's a matter of limiting your audience too much. Even if a group wants to play a theme - they may not want to play THAT theme. (As this thread has shown - there are a lot of potential themes.)
You see that with all forms of media to some degree. The writers try to make it appeal to as large of a demographic as they can without messing up the story/world.
Pathfinder gamers buying an AP is inherently a niche market already - you don't want to trim down your audience much further than that.
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"We're doing an elf theme this campaign. Everyone else is in. Want to join?"
"What if I don't want to play an elf?"
"That's fine. Join in next campaign!"
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Yeah, I rarely make it to a campaign's "end," whenever that's supposed to be. Most campaigns I'm in are just until everyone wants to move on to something else. So, when I envision an all-halfling-from-the-same-village campaign, I'm not assuming it will be a level 1 to 20 thing.
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Some years ago, I started writing a series of scenarios for an elven group, from the same village. I was discouraged by an industry veteran, and a few people that just wanted to suggest, "But what if I don't wanna play an elf?"
I still have everything I'd written - the first scenario - very much an intro scenario for 1st level elf adventurers, a players' pack, and the beginnings of scenario 2 and 3. I'd sketched out the entire campaign, and still have all of the notes.
Is anybody interested in seeing it?
You better believe I want to see it.
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"We're doing an elf theme this campaign. Everyone else is in. Want to join?"
"What if I don't want to play an elf?"
"That's fine. Join in next campaign!"
That's fine & dandy for a home campaign. Few people won't play a game that's being set-up like that just because they hate elves or some such. (You'd probably let someone skate by with a half-elf too.)
I was just talking about from a publishing perspective.
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"We're doing an elf theme this campaign. Everyone else is in. Want to join?"
"What if I don't want to play an elf?"
"That's fine. Join in next campaign!"
That's fine & dandy for a home campaign. Few people won't play a game that's being set-up like that just because they hate elves or some such. (You'd probably let someone skate by with a half-elf too.)
I was just talking about from a publishing perspective.
I totally didn't get that. That makes perfect sense from a publishing perspective.
I was under the impression that this whole thread was about home games, not publishing. Looking back at your post with this new perspective and I see where you were coming from.
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All members of the party inherit part ownership of circus. They have the promise of big pay out but have to keep it running and of course be apart of the act.
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We had a group within a group in a 3.5 game I played in many years ago. We were a group of elves and more elven half-elves and were part of a military division. We had a tallfellow halfling with us as well. The group was made up of
* elven fighter/wizard archer
* half-elven ranger with a cooshee animal companion
* elven rouge/cleric
* elven scout
* tallfellow druid
We were pretty effective to the point where the other group got mad at us and stopped playing.
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One of my most fun groups was an all Sarenite group for Carrion Crown. We had an absolute blast! This was really the first time we'd done something like it and we enjoyed it a lot:
Half-elf Cavalier/Paladin
Tiefling Inquisitor
Human (Osirion) Cleric
We're about to start in a homebrew in Golarion where everyone in the party is part of the same elven family (all different classes). They're all out to find their missing dad... er, partner in mom's case
We've got a middle-aged medium as the mother, channeling her ancestors
A fire elementalist wizard as the son
And a warpriest of (unspecified deity) as the daughter
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We’ve got an ongoing “Goblin Game” which is currently at 12th level. It included both “We Be Goblins” and “We Be Goblins Too”, but by the time “We Be Goblins Free” came out our PCs had gained too many levels for the DM to feel like ramping the challenge up to our CR range. The DM demanded that all PCs must be goblins and banned Good alignments.
The party is basically a bunch of CE psychopaths with my NE character acting as the “voice of reason” though that pretty much just consists of trying to convince them that we’ll be able to cause even more terror and mayhem in the long run if we have a Plan. With 12 Int my goblins thinks he’s an absolute genius, so the more complicated and ridiculous the Plan is the better. One of my favorites involved using severed giant frog feet to make fake “boggard” footprints around a raided gnome village. It also involved giant frog heads on sticks and actually helped instigate a gnome vs boggard war (weakening both sides as a prelude to a goblin takeover).
Soon we’ll be building siege engines such as zombie throwers and maybe some “skele-bombs” with bloody skeleton shrapnel which reforms into undead monsters behind enemy lines. We're pretty skilled at Craft (Alchemy), and thanks to Background Skills my PC is getting good at Knowledge (Engineering) too.
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I have a pfs summoner who the summoner is husband to the wife eidolon and the vanities are the kids (scholar, herald, squire).
You easily do a mom, dad, kids party, with or without the summoner.
I kind of did that once. We rolled randomly for race and class one game, and we ended up with two dwarves, a human, a half-elf, and a half-Orc. So we decided that the human was the father of half-elf and half-Orc, the dwarves were twins, and the twins were close friends with the human and his kids.
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Our last 3.5 campaign backround was "in this world everyone (human) with magic is a member of the nobility, combined with "you are all part of the same minor noble house, members, servants or fostered in". We ended up as three humans : battle sorceror, cleric/rogue and ranger/wizard, and played to 15th level or thereabouts
It worked really well as (1) we all had a reason to get on with each other and (2) there were lots of NPC relationships built into the campaign, that got us into bigger plots as the game went on.
There were also ninja nuns...
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I ran an entire Kobold party once for about a year that was just a blast. Guarding their warrens from nearby goblins, trapping their tunnels and try to scare off adventurers, dealing with a mine collapse. Lots of memorable moments.
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I ran an entire Kobold party once for about a year that was just a blast. Guarding their warrens from nearby goblins, trapping their tunnels and try to scare off adventurers, dealing with a mine collapse. Lots of memorable moments.
Awesome. Did their draconic heritage play any part in any of the adventures?
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There were also ninja nuns...
Of course there were. Why wouldn't there be?
Anyway, the idea of the party (and NPCs!) all being from the same noble house is a twist I hadn't thought of. Nice work! I'm assuming many of the adventures revolved around advancing/protecting their house's interests. Maybe there were some encounters that stemmed from rivalries with other houses?