The Most Ambitious Adventure?

Two orcs

Officially better than you, according to PoN
From the top of your head, what would the most ambitious adventure that you'd like to play, run or author be? I'm not talking about a campaign setting or adventure path but a single (if big) adventure either in scope, complexity or length.

I had a passing thought: The Trojan War. A high level adventure, destroy a city defended by Gods and Heroes and countless soldiers. But perhaps it could be written up simply, a list of characters, a roster of units, a pretext for the war, a map of the city (based on the historic ruins).
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
Published or unpublished?

I've wanted to try Dragon Mountain for decades. It's just sitting on my shelf taunting me.

I've also got 'Castle Whiterock' and 'The Rod of Seven Parts', but they're less compelling to me.

This thread may go south fast since a lot of these things could be classified as mini-campaigns or adventure paths. I had a buddy run The Odyssey as a campaign. He'd planned the Iliad as a campaign as well, but failed to get it off the ground.

Would you consider 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors' an epic adventure? Because I do, even though it sprawls like a mini-campaign.
 

Commodore

*eyeroll*
I have a combo West Marches/Megadungeon campaign I've sunk a fair amount of time into; it's got 184 10-mile hexes keyed over a couple dozen islands (with about ten minor dungeons) and the first level of the megadungeon linked to the region with some sixty rooms is complete. As my PCs start venturing deeper I'll key the following four levels of the dungeon, I've gotten the second well mapped but after that it's fuzzier, in part because of the verticality of the miles-deep complex. I'm running it in my own Five-Torches-esque OSR Pathfinder hack and I've got a pair of helper GMs with a player pool of 19 so far.

It's...reasonably ambitious I think? I'd love to publish it, but that a ton of formatting work.
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
I have had in my head a module that had the following elements:

1. Ruler of city is about to go to war, leaving weak lieutenant in charge.

2. Attempt to assassinate ruler, which PCs may or may not be present for and may or may not be able to prevent. Should the PCs choose to do so, there is a mystery that can be solved as to who is behind the assassination plot. That is faction 1, an external faction.

3. In any event, there ruler is out of the picture and lieutenant is in charge in the short term. Factions start squabbling:

(a) Faction 2 is lieutenant/city guard: disrespected by monks, shake down merchants, think the missionaries are rabble rousers.
(b) Faction 3 is radical faction of assassin/monks who operate openly in the city and want to go back to the old ways: disrespect the guards, religiously opposed to the missionaries, thinks mercantilism is a betrayal of the old ways.
(c) Faction 4 is missionaries who oppose (legal but frowned upon) slavery in the city, and who have the favour of the ruler: critical of the guards (especially treatment of merchants), religiously opposed to monks, enemies of the slavers.
(d) Faction 5 is merchant's guild, which is low status because this is a warrior culture. They include the slavers' guild, who are not liked but are influential. They are shaken down by the guards, harassed and intimidated by the monks, and the missionaries' protests against the slavers are bad for business.

EDIT: I should mention, a lot of the factions suspect each other in the assassination attempt.

If the PCs gain any notoriety the various factions will try to recruit them.

4. There are rumors of a dungeon in the sewers.

5. Tensions between the factions escalate over time, which will eventually end up in the city being carves up into armed camps. Escalation includes:

(a) Missionaries sponsoring a raid on slaver's compound. Part of it, including slave pens, is built into the sewers a la A1.
(b) General strike in solidarity with merchants (trust me, this makes sense within the mini setting). Sewer workers stop cleaning sewers.

6. It starts to rain. Sewers back up, dungeons and slave pens eventually flood (with consequential drowning of slaves).

7. Overlord will eventually come to the city and restore order.

I call it "Six days in Rhuukan Draal." There are several potential adventures on a timer, including the assassination investigation, supporting/opposing/peacekeeping with respect to the factions, the sewer dungeon, and the slaver raid, and no time to do them all because they are on a timer. It was inportant to me that the players not merely have a choice of adventures, but a choice of types of adventures.

I made a slavers' compound heavily influenced by A1, and had about half the sewer dungeon written (not really a "sewer dungeon" per se, but sewers until you get to the entrance of the dungeon), but was stuck on mechanics to regulate the escalation of factions. I has a list of ever-escalating things they would do to each other, but no good way of regulating what would occur when, or how quickly the various factions should escalate; I eventually decided it needed to be left to DM discretion. Then I sort of ended up drifting off into a different campaign with the players, so it got shelved.

If I ever was to publish, this would be a contender.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
but was stuck on mechanics to regulate the escalation of factions.
Sounds like the faction timelines you'd get in the old Planescape adventures. I've been looking for a good timeline tracker for a while now. I know they exist. I think there's one for that fancy D&D campaign planner, World Anvil I think? But, I'd prefer something for free with fewer bells and whistles.

I think if you could see everything horizontally on a timeline and move things around easily, you'd be able to do what you're talking about.

Sounds fun!
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
Sounds like the faction timelines you'd get in the old Planescape adventures. I've been looking for a good timeline tracker for a while now. I know they exist. I think there's one for that fancy D&D campaign planner, World Anvil I think? But, I'd prefer something for free with fewer bells and whistles.

I think if you could see everything horizontally on a timeline and move things around easily, you'd be able to do what you're talking about.

Sounds fun!
Each faction was going to take some sort of action against one of the other factions each day. I had each faction with its own escalation score, which depended on how often they had been hit, and influenced the kinds of raids they would make and how fortified they had become; eventually the whole city would be affected by checkpoints. So even if the PCs tried to stay out of it, eventually it would affect them because activities in the city would be hampered (not to mention the dungeons slowly filling up with water). I was also swapping out items on the rumor table as things escalated, with rumors getting wilder and wilder, and the true ones relating to new activities.

I wanted it to be semi-random in terms of who was hitting whom, influenced in part by who they had been hit by; the problem was, that kept ending up with them squaring off in pairs and it didn't feel chaotic enough. And there ended up being an unmanageable amount of variation in when certain events would happen. There just ended up being so many variables that I didn't think it would be possible to reduce it to a mechanic.

I had started to map out different hostility levels, so the raids would be more radical depending on how often they had been raided. Looking at it now, I think if I was to pursue it I would give each faction its own hostility level, which would indicate how aggressive they were being; but have a group paranoia level, so everyone was increasing their defensive activity at the same time. And then link various events to the defensive activity level, so it would be on a more predictable timer.

Here is my original chart for the Monks' potential actions against the missionaries. For context, the dominant culture (that of the guards and monks) was hobgoblin; the merchants are goblins; the missionaries are from mostly human lands (demi-humans are the "common races"). You can see how complicated it was getting.

HostilityAction and Consequences
1Words: The Monks will attempt one of the following (or more, if multiple actions against the Expatriates are indicated):

(a) The Monks actively and loudly spread rumor 8-1. They will try to intimidate and provoke members of the common races (other than elves), religious figures associated with anyone other than the Dark Six, and “sympathisers”, but will not initiate combat. Unless the PCs successfully shut this down, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Monks to 2, and adjust rumor 5 accordingly.

(b) Posing as a merchant in the Bloody Market, a Monk will spread rumors of being cheated by a Dragonmarked House or priest of one of the gods of the Sovereign Host. If successful, increase the Traders’ hostility towards the Expatriates to 2, and adjust rumor 11 accordingly. If exposed, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Monks to 2, and adjust rumor 5.

(c) Posing as a concerned citizen, a Monk will complain to the guard that a priest of Dol Dorn has been trying to lure hobgoblin women into prostitution. If successful, increase the Guards’ hostility towards the Expatriates to 2, and adjust rumor 1. If exposed, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Monks to 2, and adjust rumor 5.
2Skirmishes: The Monks will attempt one of the following (or more, if multiple actions against the Expatriates are indicated):

(a) Posing as guards, the Monks will stage a raid on _____________. If they pull off the subterfuge, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Guards by 1, to a maximum of 3; and adjust rumor 4. If exposed, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Monks to 3, and adjust rumor 5.

(b) Posing as slavers, the Monks will drive a bedraggled group of slaves made up of the common races through the middle of the expatriate district, abusing them all the way. They will then “auction” them in the Bloody Market to the most unsavoury possible “customers” (more Monks in disguise), making as much as a spectacle as possible. If they succeed in the subterfuge, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Traders by 1, to a maximum of 3; and adjust rumor 6. If exposed, increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Monks to 3, and adjust rumor 5.
3.Standoff: The Monks will attempt one of the following (or more, if multiple actions against the Expatriates are indicated):

(a) Monks will be stationed near the entrances to the expatriate district as well as the ____ district (where the Monastery is) and the Bloody Market, and attempt to prevent movement of any Expatriates through the city. Increase the Expatriates’ hostility towards the Monks to 4, and adjust rumor 5.
4.War: Bands of Monks roam the streets attacking Expatriates and leaving them for dead. The ____ district (where the Monastery is) will be barricaded, and they will attempt to barricade the exits from the expatriate district.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
that is indeed a tangled web you're weaving there!

Maybe you're good at juggling information in your head. In my case, I'd be getting this all down with a mind mapper like VUE so I could see all the moving parts and start to organize and categorize them. I've tried to use it for timelines as well, but it's not doing everything I would wish.

Once you've got it all down, maybe simplify. Consider pruning down the number of factions and/or affiliating factions so that two or three factions always fall under one umbrella, giving you the illusion of lots of wheels in motion while only three or four groups truly matter.

It looks like you've already sort of gamified the action. Could you create a simple faction character sheet that would allow you to quickly resolve conflicts between them? Do like the d20 system and make the stats easily translatable in D&D terms rather than a whole new game unto itself.

After that, I guess the big problem that I've encountered in the past is constructing a timeline that flexes nimbly when characters interact with it, so that their actions matter.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
Here's my campaign world synopsis (yeah...you knew it was coming). IT'S FREAKIN' E_P_I_C DUDZES! (not)

  • Party met up with a dwarven noble/henchman who is trying to find the lost tribe of his father's clan (2012). Promised great rewards.
  • Travel through a human kingdom in major decline. Enemies have infiltrated. The King is no good. No one has seen the dwarves for decades.
  • Find clues as to where the secret dungeon entrance is in the mountain valley.
  • Go through underground tunnels to sneak past the wicked witch's tower (complete with flying monkeys!) to get into the valley. Discover she's amassing an army and is being supplied from somewhere up river.
  • Poke around a half-dozen valley ruins to find clues about the dungeon entrance, and eventually enter the tent-pole dungeon.
  • Fight with goblins & such in the upper levels to find the secret entrance to the lower regions.
  • Discover the abandoned Wizard's Sanctuary and remnant of the dwarf colony under siege. Convince the dwarves you are not yet-another set of spies by performing a small side quest.
  • Help defend the dwarf colony against an army of half-orcs (half-plants), tech-weilding kobolds, and undead sent by the Big Bad, who issues an ultimatum that the party must be turned over as prisoners by the dwarves.
  • Learn that:
    • the dwarf city was over-run by a dragon that still dwells there---and the demon-beast is sitting on a Doomsday Device the chief dwarven engineer/savant brought up from the underworld to study before the city fell. It's going to go off sometime in the next century and blow everything to hell. Only he's smart enough to disarm/delay it, but he's a cripple, close to the end of his life, and hangs on by slowing down time (for him) while events speed past...so he's not much help.
    • all the elderly, female, and children dwarves are held hostage in a Prison camp by the Big Bad, which has tied the dwarves hands---also, they are short on natural resources and can't equip themselves for war (need your help!) :p
    • the only (known) way to kill the mythic dragon is with a sword that went missing when the dungeon stronghold fell
      • it's in the hand of an Iron Colossus, that can only be commanded by the king---but his crown is missing (fortunately the party saw it in another dungeon all the way back near the beginning of their quest! i.e. The Earth Temple.)
      • Use divination to discover the Colossus retreated to an Underwater Temple with the sword.
      • A mad dwarf is arming the tech-kobolds---and their section of the dungeon lays between the dwarf colony and the Old City/Sunken Temple...unless the party take a barrel ride along an underground river through the Big-Bad Wraith-Priest's territory.
  • Hook the dwarves up with the caretakers in the Wizard's Sanctuary so they (together) can defend against the Big-Bad while the party uses a flying carpet to escape the mega-dungeon via the mountain-top exit (complete with Great Glass Elevator).
  • Get past the Witch again and back to the city. Learn what's up with the King. Discover there's are double-agents working for another conspiracy that is plotting to weaken and destroy the Capital City and wipe out the kingdom. The Frost Giants, who lost the last war against the human, are suppose to be trapped up north on a "reservation", but have secretly been put into play.
  • Go deeper into the Earth Temple to retrieve the Iron Crown
  • Retrieve the Kingdom's Lost Holy relics (giant deterrents) and use them to masquerade as a corrupted heir to the throne who was pretending to be questing after them (that the party killed)
  • Overthrow the King and put the "good Prince" into power (while masquerading as his corrupted older brother who stole the relics to begin with)
  • Head back south, leading half the Kingdom's army to stop a suspiciously timed invasion that would cut the Kingdom off from all its allies and trade partners.
  • Fight the battle to rescue the besieged Keep on the Borderlands (where it all started 6-7 years earlier)
  • Take a side trip into Giant territory via the Ogre Fens to rescue a scout and find out who is riling them up (clue G1)
  • Agree to give the Hill Giants King's head to a political refugee/rival who's slumming it with the ogres.
Which brings us up to date (minus a dozen side-trips). We started at first level (B2+T1), they now are about 8th-level (Ogre Fens).

The next big thing is when the party return to find the capital under attack by the Witch's forces, who took advantage of the fact they split the army. The Frost Giants will probably use that time to attack the stronghold northern vassels aided by displaced-and-pissed barbarians. So a bunch of mass combat, is ahead...which my players don't much enjoy (tedious) so I am writing an AD&D mass combat video game for them to play it out. Fortunately, I have until next winter break to get it functional.

Then it's (if they so choose):
  • defeat the witch
  • reconnect with the dwarves. Bring in some raw materials/allies.
  • get past the kobolds (there are multiple routes)
  • find the Colossus in the underwater temple and win the sword
  • oust the dragon & disarm the Doomsday machine
  • lead the dwarves against the Wraith-Priest
  • stop the giants & uncover the kingdom's other major enemy (y'all know who) by traveling the deep underworld
Other options
  • take a side-trip into the planes to fight a demon and recuse an ancient elven wizard who is in purgatory
  • head to the coast to travel the sea
  • use the underwater astral gate they just found to a pirate island in the underground sea, grab a ship there and circling back to the dwarf city while avoiding all mass combat!
  • find the MIA dungeon-wizard via an astral trip to Barsoom/Mars
  • seek the real Dark Lord way down south who's been pulling the strings
  • use the Iron Crown to travel to the Moon
  • fight a time-war against some ancient AIs
I'll probably have to wait until my kids have some kids of their own before we finish all of that. (450 double-column pages and counting). I cannot dream of anything bigger (or less vanilla/cliche)...this is my best attempt.

Adventure Caveats: only the four core-classes allowed for PCs, and against the backdrop of boring old faux-medieval, low-level, low-magic, human civ where elves and magic-users were banned by the rotten King and it takes forever to level-up. :p

Probably not what @Two orcs was asking.
 
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Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
Die Vecna Die or Silent Titans comes to mind!

Or Talons of Night? The Lvl 25 Jaquyas adventure

I think its worth bringing in Masks of Nylar and Pendragon Campaign too

The Traveller Adventure?
 

Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
I always thought about doing a mixture of "Touring the planes" and "Moby Dick".
Basically the PCs somehow get swept up in a revenge plot in which a crazy NPC and his planehopping ship (think spelljammer) search the elemental and even stranger planes to finally kill the eldritch abomination that killed the captains family... or something like that.

Never got further than wistful dreams on that one :p
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
an army of half-orcs (half-plants), tech-weilding kobolds
I would like to hear more about this.
that is indeed a tangled web you're weaving there!

Maybe you're good at juggling information in your head. In my case, I'd be getting this all down with a mind mapper like VUE so I could see all the moving parts and start to organize and categorize them. I've tried to use it for timelines as well, but it's not doing everything I would wish.

Once you've got it all down, maybe simplify. Consider pruning down the number of factions and/or affiliating factions so that two or three factions always fall under one umbrella, giving you the illusion of lots of wheels in motion while only three or four groups truly matter.

It looks like you've already sort of gamified the action. Could you create a simple faction character sheet that would allow you to quickly resolve conflicts between them? Do like the d20 system and make the stats easily translatable in D&D terms rather than a whole new game unto itself.

After that, I guess the big problem that I've encountered in the past is constructing a timeline that flexes nimbly when characters interact with it, so that their actions matter.
Looking at the time stamp, this was 7 years ago. Now, I would probably take a page from Eberron and be careful to make the language describing the factions "sticky" so the DM can improvise their actions without referring to notes. I would still list sample activities at the various hostility levels, but have fewer of them and make it clear that the DM can improvise; I would also make the beats of the module explicit so the DM would know exactly what improv would fit in the structure and what would not.

I don't want to gameify the results of interactions between factions too much, because I want the PCs to be able to meddle in them. That means if the players take an interest in them they need to be playable. If the players don't interfere then the results can be predetermined, so no system is necessary. So each raid/activity is a single encounter which can be discovered in advance as a rumor and interfered in (or not) as the players see fit, with all the rules of encounter writing applying to them.

I do like the idea of having rumors change over time to reflect the suggested activities, but I would probably have them in the section for the activities instead of modifying a rumor table all the time. I would try to simplify rumor delivery, perhaps by setting up a few informants that can be relied upon for the information, so if the DM knows which informant they are speaking to they know what rumors to deliver (that might mean it makes more sense to include the rumors with the informant writeups, I dunno).

I would then look at what I had and if it was still unwieldy, and I couldn't fix with with better organization/presentation, I would start cutting. Of course, it was that process that led me to the conclusion that I should just set up the whole situation in good evocative language, tell the DM the objectives, and trust the DM to figure it out. But maybe I could do better now.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
I always thought about doing a mixture of "Touring the planes" and "Moby Dick".
Basically the PCs somehow get swept up in a revenge plot in which a crazy NPC and his planehopping ship (think spelljammer) search the elemental and even stranger planes to finally kill the eldritch abomination that killed the captains family... or something like that.

Never got further than wistful dreams on that one :p
I wanted to do something similar, but I wanted to make it a plane-hopping cruise ship! It was going to be an inter-planar murder mystery in this huge pleasure-boat with stops in between at various weird places. I spent half a Planescape campaign setting up the building of this ship in the Sigil shipyards all happening in the background of other adventures. I set up half the cast of eccentric wealthy NPC's. It was going to be LEGENDARY.

and then the campaign went off the rails as I tried to weave in their godlike PC's from a previous campaign as a sort of high-level guest cameo adventure. Overambitious #DMHoistedbyhisownpetard etc.

I think this was half the reason I got so excited about Gus' HMCS Apollyon. I would've liked to have seen that floating megadungeon, heart-breaker reach the light of day...
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
Before I launch into a TL;DR exposition which part interests you? The half-orcs, the kobolds, or the siege warfare inside the dungeon?
I was thinking about the half-orcs and kobolds, but feel free to elaborate on the siege warfare as well.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
@Beoric : Your scenario sound very much like gang warfare, but possibly mixed with a murder mystery? The faction time-table is a difficult thing to pre-plan IMO. I think it's the difference between "I want to publish this, so I need to communicate all the branches" vs. a home brewed campaign in which you (as DM) have time between sessions to react or are fleet-footed enough to do on the fly. It's good to have a nominal mental map of how things might play out, but after each event I think it's more exciting to have random outcomes (possibly via PC actions, possibly not) that forces you-as-NPCs to re-evaluate and plot the next move.

Am I making any sense? There's no possibility of a railroad then, just factions with motives on the way to the next station. Also, it way easier to sketch out the static (current) situation than it is to construct a hypothetical timeline. Use the DM's brain and creativity to keep things dynamic (as oppose to trying to pre-programming it (if-then-else-if...).

---

So, because you asked for it...

I can relate this to my home campaign. There is a "big picture" of how things in the world would most likely unfold if the players never get involved. I like the general idea of humanity (the good) generally being on the defensive, fighting that Tolkien-esque slow retreat from evil. Hopefully, through the parties heroics, they can change things for the better --- or run away to fight another day on a different part of the continent! But even for the big events, my mental timeline is very crude and expected to need constant readjustment. Asimov's "Future History" and I (as DM) am the Foundation.

That's well and good for a big, vast, quasi-nebulous world, but what about a dungeon or keyed site?

In my mega-dungeon, there are the factions I already mentioned:

1) the dwarves who drove off the local fauna and established a colony on a small island in an underground (and wickedly deadly) subterranean sea. They built a mine & bunker/fortress into near-by cliff sides, and eventually tunneled up to the surface. There a whole bunch of "sketchy" actions in their collective history, and are a mild Jim Jones/Elon Musk cult in reverence towards their (dead) founder---who can do no wrong in there eyes, but actually did a lot of wrongs (and a lot of rights).

2) the evil priest who attacked the city a hundred years ago but was killed --- now returned as a wraith to extract his revenge and torture those who ended his natural existence. He's what we used to call "the local dark lord"---think dark Numenorean turned Nazgul. A very traditional scary bad guy modeled off of "Mr. Dark" from Something Wicked This Way Comes. His section of the dungeon is very Lovecraftian and his tendrils reach far and wide (include the surface).

3) the kobolds who were emancipated from slavery and genetic experimentation in the Body Banks of the (mainly off-camera) Nazi-like Mind Slavers (Illithid). I've developed a caste-system for the kobolds (the traditional 1d4 prols, female-breeder-priestesses, stealthy warrior-males, and finally the genetically altered and god-head empress). These are the "clever little hands" used by the warring Powers of Evil. They make military-grade weapons, big and small. Not slaves per se, but "business partners" to the highest bidder. They have there own agenda and spies throughout the world. Very hive-collective. They are the Commies! The "high tech" parts comes in a few ways: the dwarves before the city fell were plundering deep ruins in the underworld for ancient tech (cities run by world-spanning AIs and their slaves that were destroyed in a 16-hour flash-war that ended the Last Age) and a stereo-typical Mad Genius (traitor dwarf who betrayed the titular Lost City and caused it's collapse) who invents gonzo things like a series of rickety proto-type war-machines that resemble Apparatus of K'walish (Mark I, Mark II, etc.) that the PCs can try to commandeer for some mass-combat smash-ups (or to use as a submarine).

4) the dragon who now sits in the city --- mythic, inscrutable, a faction of one. A Titan that desires treasure and worship. Waits for the End of Days to fulfill it's ordained role in killing the Gods and destroying the world. Originally recruited to take the city, it settled in and refused to leave---demanding tribute.

There also a bunch of other bit-players, a few I'll get to.

So there's all this recent history, roughly in 1-2 dwarven lifetimes. Mainly it's a tale of the founding and fall of the titular city. The PC can discover some of it SLOWLY -- some is utilitarian (e.g. the Doomsday Clock, lost Dragonslayer sword, missing Iron Crown, etc.), a lot is not.

I think the hardest part though, and the only thing I've saying that even approaches a shinning "ADVENTURE DESIGN PRINCIPLE" is that I struggled mightly to invent a dungeon scenario with factions that was quasi-stable. It permitted the dungeon to be keyed in a static-state. The PC then have an opportunity to tip the balance and de-stabilize things that sets big events in motion.

This actually back-fired. The party arrived and was locked-in. They were too reluctant to break the dead-lock. As a result, they actually left the dungeon to gather some more muscle/power before an eventually return.

Ironically, their adventures in the dungeon had sufficiently altered them so that they returned to the surface world as big-shots compared to the low-profile nobodies they had been went they left. Rinse and repeat!

The human civ on the surface has it's own history over roughly the same period, but it only occasionally intersects the dwarven one. In general the humans were weak when the dwarves were strongest, become strong after the dwarves fell, and are now in the slow process of being whittled away by some common enemies. That's the theme. Evil slowly creeps in and rots out the foundations, until one day an overt attack is launched and all is lost. This is the default trajectory because Good always fails to stay vigilant.

---

Ok. I think that about covers it except for the half-orcs. Orcs (in my world) are a combination of fey goblins (beings of pure chaos that grow up from the ground) mating with some other living creature in the world (e.g. an ape, wild boar, bull, etc.) They are all mules, ergo no orc babies, no females. Goblins are hermaphrodites and can combine with anything---the Jokers to the World's Batmen. Moral dilemmas avoided.

These particular "half-orcs" are notable because they are goblin/men/plants. The Local Dark Lord has a Shroom that works for him (Matt Finch creation that appears in Monsters of Myth, Pod Caverns & Demonspore). The Shroom grows orc "podmen" in organic chambers---cloning an army for the Wraith-Priest. This a a bit of the "ticking time bomb" element. When the army gets big enough, the Tower Witch will use it to attack the human vassal-outposts and eventually the Capital city. This came be short-curcuited in a number of was by the party's actions:
  • The Shroom has his own section of the dungeon (plant themed, naturally) that the party can go into and wreck.
  • Similarly, the party can go and wreck the kobold forges. Then the half-orc army gets no weapons.
  • Finally, the party can re-united and arm the dwarves and attack the Local Dark Lord's (underground) Stronghold with a small tech-enhanced army...but first the Neymer Dragon must be dealt with or else they will get squeezed from both sides.

Or not...

The party can always zig instead of zag. There's plent of places to wander around picking up cool magic items, fight some native underground denizens, explore ancient subterranean ruins and underwater temples, astral travel to Mars, or sail the dark waters of the Sea of Shadows to lands never before glimpsed by mortal men. Totally orthogonal, genre-shifting side-treks are essential to allow the party to catch it's breath and prevent a world from seeming one-note or contrived.

So far my players have been very willing to play protagonist in the local drama. It's partially driven by the recognition it gives them from a wealth of NPCs whom they have encountered over the years. Good-but-average folks who need their help...and now some big movers-and-shakers who (when they were lower level) would never have even granted them an audience.

See how starting out as utter and totally nobodies has a utilitarian purpose in the larger campaign game? It fuels desire for recognition. Don't hand-waive the local NPCs, and especially don't ever let your players talk you into letting them start out with awesome abilities or elaborate backgrounds---it kills the future. You have a chance to BECOME a hero through play (and many, many, many more times must first play the FOOL). If you cheat that process, you'll find that in the end, what you tried to snatch has absolute no value. Forget about all your lordly Paladin-Princes at roll-up...play a lowly peasant fighter and start acting like a one! That's the only way it will ever feel legit.

I'll get to warfare set-pieces and in-dungeon sanctuaries in some later post.

Yeah, I know...TL;DR. :)
 
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The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
I think it's more exciting to have random outcomes
This is obviously ideal, but I'm enjoying the exercise of imagining a way to fit that sort of thing in a published product. I'd love to see some more people take a stab at it...
 
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