I borrowed from James Bond and Indiana Jones movies. They always start with some situation in progress which the protagonist resolves before beginning a completely unrelated adventure.
To this end, the characters found themselves in a dungeon in pursuit of a thief with a map to a lost city, while being pursued themselves by a host of angry trolls. They got the map, beat a trap, came out high on a hillside, rappelled down a cliff, and stumbled into a gay cyclops couple in a cave. The treasure in the cave was precisely the appropriate amount for starting wealth for characters of their level.
After that they took their loot and headed into town.
Best opening to a campaign was everyone got their own 3-5 hour intro adventure. Then we all arrived at the same tavern in half hour intervals and did a 4 hour session where we just got to know each other as a group, telling each other our backstories and piecing together clues of what we had learned in our individual adventures while having a medieval dinner. We really pulled out all the stops for that one. Talk about epic.
Not an intro as much as a re-intro after the game halted for several months (to the point where everyone, including me as DM, was confused as to where we were, what had been accomplished and what was still to be accomplished etc). Forgotten Realms campaign based in the North.
PCs have no memory of where they are or how they got there. They are dressed in foreign clothes with a mix of their old equipment and new stuff. Their memory is remote and fuzzy (tying with the real-life state of the players), with the impression of missing something big. Several knocked-down yuan-ti as slowly getting back on their feet and to their senses; they seem just as confused. Their sight goes back and forth between the destroyed temple and the PCs. The yuan-ti's confusion turns to wrath...
Synopsis: Where we left the game, the PCs were about to find an artifact that they were meant to destroy. Fast forwarding the game several years, the PCs successfully destroyed the artifact which, as a side-effect, wiped their memories from the moment they had found it.
Now instead of finding a way to destroy the artifact, they must find out why they had to do so in the first place, as it will have many repercussions back in their homeland...
'findel
Hmm, I like that random non-sequitur beginnning.
It was only partially non-sequitur, in that while the situation was out of left field, the map they acquired did lead to an adventure path.
For comic relief, I'll tell you how I started a campaign I run for my three daughters. Their ages are 7, 10, and 12, and this was their introduction to role-playing games. They had already written their character backgrounds, and I had given them some details about how they arrived separately at a village.
After they met each other, they figured it was time to go shopping. They all started talking at once, and they all went shopping for completely unrelated items from different merchants. Pandemonium ensued, and to bring order to the chaos I was forced to declare, "Roll for initiative!"
Initiative. For shopping. Shopping for dresses. To adventure in.
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For comic relief, I'll tell you how I started a campaign I run for my three daughters. Their ages are 7, 10, and 12, and this was their introduction to role-playing games. They had already written their character backgrounds, and I had given them some details about how they arrived separately at a village.
After they met each other, they figured it was time to go shopping. They all started talking at once, and they all went shopping for completely unrelated items from different merchants. Pandemonium ensued, and to bring order to the chaos I was forced to declare, "Roll for initiative!"
Initiative. For shopping. Shopping for dresses. To adventure in.
By the gods, that sounds like Final Fantasy X2.
For comic relief, I'll tell you how I started a campaign I run for my three daughters. Their ages are 7, 10, and 12, and this was their introduction to role-playing games. They had already written their character backgrounds, and I had given them some details about how they arrived separately at a village.
After they met each other, they figured it was time to go shopping. They all started talking at once, and they all went shopping for completely unrelated items from different merchants. Pandemonium ensued, and to bring order to the chaos I was forced to declare, "Roll for initiative!"
Initiative. For shopping. Shopping for dresses. To adventure in.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
It's challenging, is what it is. Sample conversation:
Player: I want some leather armor.
Me: She has some leather armor for--
Player: No Daddy. You have to speak in character.
Me: [with Monty Python-esque female voice] Yes, of course, we have leather armor.
Player: Ok, what do you have?
Me: What do you mean, 'What do you have'? I just told you! I have leather armor.
Player: Like what?
Me: Come again?
Player: What does it come in? What kind do you have?
Me: Kind? I just told you: leather. You mean what color? Brown.
Player: How is it cut? Does it have any designs?
Me: Uh...
Player: How is the fit? What's the style?
Me: ---
Etc.
***
or this:
Them: Is there a candy store?
Me: Sure.
Them: What do they have?
Me: Candy.
Them: Go on...
****
Yeah. We didn't make it to the kobolds that day.
GM: "You are in the city of [name] on the planet [name]. You have 10 seconds to explain why the Imperial Stormtroopers are chasing you. Go. 10, 9, 8..."
Seriously, best start to one of the best games I ever played.
Yeah. We didn't make it to the kobolds that day.
Lol. You did bring it upon yourself. Its a "good dad" thing to do, but seriously you're talking to little girls about shopping. lol.
Years ago, my regular group starting an annual tradition of heading up to a cabin owned by the family of one of the group members that's located in the mountains of Pennsylvania. We like to call it CabinCon, and the main event is what has become a very long running, epic level campaign.
I started out as the DM, and as none of my players had ever really seen anything higher than 12th level and we started at 17th, I tried to go for an intro that set the tone. I wanted that tone to be "You. Are. AWESOME."
Each of them was one of the more prominent generals in each of their respective armies, and the war they'd grown up in had been raging for nearly a millennium. All the armies showed up at the last free city within a week of one another, planning to join together and make one final, desperate march against the Big Bad and his forces.
I had the heroes enter the city together, as part of a formal processional and had Midnight Syndicate's City of Sails playing. When they entered the main hall of the castle and were brought before the last lords of the free world, I switched it to Muir Races to Work from the Spy Game soundtrack.
After their having been introduced in regal fashion and wildly cheered during their entry into the city, I then called for a 2 hour break. While I prepared dinner, I had them split off and each prepare a speech to give to the combined forces during the 6 day march. Fortunately, they each took it seriously and poured a lot of effort into their respective speeches.
I mean, the speeches were so good that I was ready to enlist in the real army after hearing them.
The guys still talk about how epic those speeches made everything - the start of this campaign was (and will likely remain) a high point for all of us.
Are you Will Wheaton or Will Wheaton's nephew? Because I am pretty sure I remember reading an article were he discussed coming up with this exact scenarioIntro: The players come across a small hut and open the door. Inside the see an orc eating a pie.
Where is goes from here: Whatever the players want. This campaign is completely open ended and subject to the player's imagination.
I think he implied that that was a classic scenario.
By the gods, that sounds like Final Fantasy X2.For comic relief, I'll tell you how I started a campaign I run for my three daughters. Their ages are 7, 10, and 12, and this was their introduction to role-playing games. They had already written their character backgrounds, and I had given them some details about how they arrived separately at a village.
After they met each other, they figured it was time to go shopping. They all started talking at once, and they all went shopping for completely unrelated items from different merchants. Pandemonium ensued, and to bring order to the chaos I was forced to declare, "Roll for initiative!"
Initiative. For shopping. Shopping for dresses. To adventure in.
+1
Are you Will Wheaton or Will Wheaton's nephew? Because I am pretty sure I remember reading an article were he discussed coming up with this exact scenarioIntro: The players come across a small hut and open the door. Inside the see an orc eating a pie.
Where is goes from here: Whatever the players want. This campaign is completely open ended and subject to the player's imagination.
I think it was Monte Cooke, actually.
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I think he implied that that was a classic scenario.Are you Will Wheaton or Will Wheaton's nephew? Because I am pretty sure I remember reading an article were he discussed coming up with this exact scenarioIntro: The players come across a small hut and open the door. Inside the see an orc eating a pie.
Where is goes from here: Whatever the players want. This campaign is completely open ended and subject to the player's imagination.
Kobold Cleaver is correct. A friend of mine did this to us once and I've loved it ever since and always try to sneak it into the games I run. The results are always hilarious.
Kobold Cleaver is correct.
Excellent. Now to drop that quote into every argument I get into.
I doubt anyone would believe it though, KC.
I disagree.
Kobold Cleaver is correct.
Let's see how many times I can use this before I get reported for muddying Madclaw's good name....
I have a really bad tendency in doing this...
"You're on a boat..."
I've also spiced it up a bit with...
"You're locked in a cell hanging upside down on a boat."
Boats are my taverns.
Two of the most memorial intro's I ever ran had to be for minor campaigns that were spur of the moment, due to half the group missing and the other half wanting to play anyway.
In one:
Had them make 6th level characters with no gear, then after they made those characters I altered their race, gender, age, gave them a new level in a different class and 1st level appropriate gear for this new class. It started like this:
The two character's both woke up, but cannot open their eyes. There was something cool weighing down on them. They reached up and pulled off two platinum pieces that were covering their eyelids, and found themselves in a lich's lair, in two separate sarcophagus' possessing unfamiliar bodies...
In the other...
Ok, you find yourselves in the basement of one of the players house, (where were were playing) playing video games. When all of a sudden you hear a loud explosion down the street. what do you do? When they went out to investigate, they found a large meteor that had hit a restaurant nearby. They found a hole in it, and when the entered inside they fell into a random D&D world, as themselves. They got to keep any stuff they had on their real life persons, such as cell phones and flashlights, plus anything they specifically said they grabbed before they left the house. It was a wacky adventure...
I ran a one-shot game in a Final Fantasy based system for a bunch of friends back in university. I started off with:
Me: "You're in a tavern..."
PC: "No! We always start in taverns! I want to start somewhere different!"
Me: "Fine. You're in a pet store. Which pets are you looking at?"
The adorable puppies and hamsters and kittens all grew to size of small ponies and went feral on the PCs. The fish also got gigantic, but they just ended up thrashing around after they broke out of their aquariums. I think one PC took bashing damage from a flailing fish. Hilarity ensued and continued. They ended up in a steakhouse and had to fight animated slabs of meat and ended up battling traffic on the roads. A car ran over the Mimic at one point, so the Mimic responded by running over the car.
We were all quite delirious from lack of sleep which definitely made the game more ridiculous. It was a fun departure from the standard tavern > dungeon > town progression.
I've always tried to make the introduction to my homebrew campaigns compelling; in one particularly unique game I had the players take on an open-ended grid maze with something like 100+ rooms. Each room had a simple problem, not even a puzzle. How the player engaged the problem, whether they solved the problem or not, put points into a chart. At the end of the maze, I tallied up the points and told the player what class (or classes) his or her decisions made him most inclined towards. Definitely not something I'd want to do for every campaign, but it worked well a made for some interesting results.
I had a high-level campaign once in Forgotten Realms (started at level 17 and went into epic levels) that began with an innocuous tournament that turned out to be a ploy by the government of Cormyr to find capable adventurers. After the party won, they were taken aside and told that an artifact, the Shield of Cormyr (something I made up) was stolen. In addition to being a powerful shield in its own right, it can summon a massive wall of force around the border of the entire nation, which also blocks teleportation and all forms of non-epic magic. They think it's rather obvious that the shield was stolen so that someone can plan a successful attack on the nation, so the heroes must get it back. They tracked the thieves fairly easily (another party of high-level adventurers), and caught up with them just outside of Cormyr's borders. but once they were defeated, it became clear they no longer had the shield with them. Then, once the big scary heroes are actually outside the nation's borders, a massive wall of force springs up behind them. They stand around there wondering for a few minutes, then they receive a series of frantic Sending spells explaining that the barrier went up and now armies are pouring out of the underdark. Cormyr is being attack from the inside, and with the barrier in place, none of their allies can reach them to offer aid. Because the shield blocks teleportation, the party has to trek through the underdark to reach the action. Eventually, it was revealed that this was only the first step in the theme of an ancient (eons old) aboleth who was trying to return the world to a more primeval state by opening a portal to the elemental plane of water and flooding the material plane.
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I had a high-level campaign once in Forgotten Realms (started at level 17 and went into epic levels) that began with an innocuous tournament that turned out to be a ploy by the government of Cormyr to find capable adventurers. After the party won, they were taken aside and told that an artifact, the Shield of Cormyr (something I made up) was stolen. In addition to being a powerful shield in its own right, it can summon a massive wall of force around the border of the entire nation, which also blocks teleportation and all forms of non-epic magic. They think it's rather obvious that the shield was stolen so that someone can plan a successful attack on the nation, so the heroes must get it back. They tracked the thieves fairly easily (another party of high-level adventurers), and caught up with them just outside of Cormyr's borders. but once they were defeated, it became clear they no longer had the shield with them. Then, once the big scary heroes are actually outside the nation's borders, a massive wall of force springs up behind them. They stand around there wondering for a few minutes, then they receive a series of frantic Sending spells explaining that the barrier went up and now armies are pouring out of the underdark. Cormyr is being attack from the inside, and with the barrier in place, none of their allies can reach them to offer aid. Because the shield blocks teleportation, the party has to trek through the underdark to reach the action. Eventually, it was revealed that this was only the first step in the theme of an ancient (eons old) aboleth who was trying to return the world to a more primeval state by opening a portal to the elemental plane of water and flooding the material plane.
damn
damn
Shoot, man. What Madclaw said!