So we started a new campaign this past weekend, and I already have the feeling that it will be the best campaign I've ever been involved in. Got me to thinking, what others are out there? So here I am asking, what are some of your favorite campaigns? Or campaign ideas? Or maybe just your best story?
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Got me to thinking, what others are out there? So here I am asking, what are some of your favorite campaigns? Or campaign ideas? Or maybe just your best story?
I've been DMing a lot over the past 6 years. My favourite campaign to run will always be Age of Worms. It was challenging, fun, full of surprises. I've ran it twice (TPKs each time) and people in my group STILL talk about it fondly and how much they want another crack at it. I'm going to update it to 3.P and either my friend is going to run it or I'm going to see if the third time's the charm.
Runners up:
Rise of the Runelords - I love the storyline, but my players made this the best for me. They roleplayed a group of PCs who acted like workmates. It's the first time that dynamic ever happened in our groups (10+ years) and it was amazing. Almost like the Coyote and the Sheep Dog in old Warner Brothers cartoons.
Curse of the Crimson Throne - Currently running this. The amount of amazing, fun moments in the group has been amazing.
As for my own campaign ideas:
I'm waiting to run an odd Hybrid of 3.P/d20 modern/World of Darkness/Mage/Cthulu/Hellbringer/Werewolf that's been bouncing in my head. Granted, that's a few years away.
I ran one game that was based on a gigantic world (100 times the size of Earth). Each player created an entire civilization knowing the only caveat was that due to the size and the technology, no exploration beyond their own civilization had been made. I then transported their characters to a floating city that spans the world each year for "champions". Culture shock/Technology shock/True origin shock all around. Used the FFRPG system, and for the 3 games we were able to play before the group broke up, it was awesome.
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The best campaign I ever played in wasn't because of an overarching plot, or any particular novelty in the setting. The setting was a sandbox, a large chunk of Amazonian-type rain forest (with obligatory ruined temples in the jungle). The main city (with obligatory dungeon underneath) was on an island in a large lake at the confluence of a couple of rivers. What made this the best was the DM. He was intensely creative and very good at seamlessly (and unobviously) improvising on the fly. Over and above that, though, was his ability to make the game respond to PC actions. He'd also on occasion run solo adventures with his NPCs, which could also have ongoing effects on the campaign. In combination, the campaign felt like it existed independently of the PCs--that it was more than a static backdrop for us to play in front of. I've not played in a campaign with that sense of depth and solidity since.
My favorite campaign is probably the Shackled City AP (the Hardcover version). A partial TPK finished us in the beginning of the Demonskar chapter iirc. I still regret to this day not fudging a roll or two that fateful sunday.
My players were still semi-free from RL issues (and still in this state), they made characters that brought Cauldron to life so completely that I couldnt wait for each session.
We lost 2 or 3 of the characters to the oversized Fire Elementals rampaging through the city and they were the characters most entrenched with the NPCs of cauldron. We all kind of couldnt see bringing in new PCs halfway into the movie (so to speak) and trying to establish new contacts with the same NPCs after being so close to them the first time around. So we gave the campaign a heroes burial.
In the old days, my fave campaign was the classic T1-4, G1-3, D1-3, Q1 series of the AD&D era.
I run two campaigns at the moment. My players would say their favorite is my Star Wars Saga Edition game. I've set it in an Infinities Universe, so things are always new and unexpected for them. I'm actually about to wrap up the third part of this campaign, and there will be a fourth to end the saga.
I started them in the Rise of the Empire era, where they were a group of Antarian Rangers (for those of you who aren't Fanatical Followers of the Flannel One's mythos, the Antarian Rangers are a paramilitary organization who assist the Jedi). At the conclusion of that campaign,
I moved the timeline forward to the events of A New Hope, where the party was a Rebel cell, specifically working for their old characters.
We're currently wrapping up the Empire Strikes Back arc, where the party is playing a group of Imperial soldiers. They have crossed paths with their old characters, though in tangential ways.
They're now looking towards the Return of the Jedi era with great anticipation, the entire party consisting of Force-users. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to run a saga of this type, and will be sad (and satisfied) when it's done. It's been a four year run thus far.
My favorite is the Cortex System (a generic RPG system ala GURPS, but far better in my opinion) campaign I run based on Crimson Skies. I'm a huge fan of Dieselpunk, and the setting appeals to me. Plus, I sandbox that campaign; while I have story arcs planned for each character, the party is free to do what they like, where they like. The campaign is very player driven, and requires very little prep work on my part.
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My favorite campaign by far was a Mutants and Masterminds campaign my buddy ran a few years back where we were a party of three super-villains. It was also the only campaign we ever finished. I specifically left my character's backstory mysterious so that the gm could use it for whatever he wanted, and it turned out that my human-hating shapeshifter was actually an avatar of the unspeakable one (a la Lovecraft). After a lot of adventures and roleplaying we ended up summoning his "father" to Earth. He wiped it clean of life and then opened a portal to another dimension so the party could go to the next world and start the process over. We ended it there since it was just too epic to continue the campaign after that. The roleplaying was great and all the characters were brilliant. We love the game so much we are currently planning on writing up a comic using the characters, though the events will be different.
Many happy memories - especially as this is my gaming 'birthday' - on 5 October 1977, I played my first-ever RPG!
Happy birthday!!!
My real birthday wasn't until a year or so later... ;-D
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The most successful campaign I ever ran was in 2001 with a group I had only recently put together and introduced D&D to. I had run a handful of smaller adventures for them as an Orc N Pie kinda intro to D&D and then finished our first "real" adventure, a homebrew based in Waterdeep and Undermountain.
Then I started a modified "Kingdom of the Ghouls" by Wolfgang Baur. The best. campaign. ever.
I did what Dungeon was unable to do for that adventure, flesh it out into a proper campaign -- I still argue that if Baur's masterpiece had the word count of "Umbra," "The Harrowing" or "The Ice Tyrant" it would be unanimously considered the best adventure Dungeon ever published, instead of top 10. Kingdom just screamed for more development.
"Kingdom of the Ghouls":
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Most fun campaign to play in has got to be the Heroes of Ribhus local society game.
Clerics had all kinds of crazy extra powers, it was all 3.5ed with lots of local deities, feats, etc. The history and general state of affairs was laid out in 3.5" 3 ring binders, the presentation quite nice.
For 4 years, every Connecticon, any other local cons i could get to, and a few weekend events at Omni Comics, I played a Chaotic Pretty crazy-Charisma Halfling Sorcerer. The DM's were all fantastic, capable of running 12 person super combats against demons, humanoids, and a Huge dragon, or "winging it" when the "dream sequence" convention-game write up says "Joe, you're gonna have to wing this here..."
That character always shows up in most of the games i DM now, and i still use tons of tricks and tips from those DM's. I was extremely sad when they switched from 3.5 to 4e.
Highlights included:
A massive city-wide mystery "easter egg" hunt. With actual, magic-artifact Easter Eggs. And almost every group failed the mission, triggering a flood and wiping out 3/4 of a major urban center.
Several massive fight sequences, with a dozen or more PC's against 2 or 3 DM's and hordes of monsters. Sometimes, just one or 2 really ridiculous monsters.
And some of the funniest, most inappropriate "Monster Voice" DM'ing i've been party to.
My current Savage Tide campaign. It is a great campaign to begin with. Add to that a group of 6 players with an enormous amount of enthousiasm and creativity. I enjoy every session of it.
Favorite campaign is the one I'm in right now. My fellow adventurers have distinct personalities and backgrounds full of stuff our GM has used to make things interesting, including the sorcerer having a succubus give (and remove) a profane gift, the shadowdancer's mercantile empire, and other insanity.
Favorite campaign I've run was Dragon Mountain in college. Modified the kobolds with the Humanoid's handbook, the group did crazy things like use kobold corpses for trap detection and drain the swamp out the side of the mountain to try and find a magic blade (sorry, long-gone guys!).
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Best Campaign Ever? Hard to say ...
There was a crazy campaign I played with my old high school group – there really wasn’t that much of a coherent, on-going storyline, but we all had a lot of fun with our crazy characters (I played a wild-mage in that one).
There was a 2nd edition Planescape campaign with a fair amount of 1st edition stuff thrown in for good measure (with another cast of even crazier characters) with a great GM who was really good at ad-libbing, lots of planes-spanning plots with intricate sub plots and big group with interesting character ideas, from the ‘normal’ to the sort you would only find in Planescape – from memory we had (at different times)a male half-elven bard, a female wild-elf bandit, a male dwarven sharpshooter, a female aasimar psionicist, a male cambion monk, a male urda mage, a male half-elf ranger/cleric, a female drow assassin/mage, a female tiefling fighter/mage, a male satyr cleric of Thor and a male crossdressing human Zorro type psionicist / thief.
I have run several campaigns in my homebrew game world (called, unimaginatively, ‘Dark Ages’) that have all been characterised by great roleplaying by various players. Began as second edition, updated to 3.5 and recently to Pathfinder for one of my pbp groups.
The Pathfinder campaign I am currently playing in, a heavily modified Curse of the Crimson Throne is also very good. I have never played with a bunch of players who are so dedicated to developing their characters, in-game and out, and really taking the setting and making it their own.