So for the first time in almost 20-years (since I came to Dallas from LA), I get to be a player. I'm loving it. I didn't step down from the chair because of burnout or anything, I did it because I need my group to "grow" and I want them to have some perspective from another GM, while I take some time out to work on some writing projects looming ahead of me.

That said, I've had lots of interesting ideas for new campaigns. So I just jot them down as I go, some might not be more than a few sentences to form a seed, others have become pages of notes/images/ideas, others have become full blown campaign primers that are ready to fire up on a moment's notice. So I've got a stockpile.

Do any of you stockpile campaign ideas? What are they? Do you share them? Even if they're silly ideas you haven't fully formed yet into a coherent campaign structure. Or if you don't wanna talk about the specifics - what's the general gist? Which one is burning in your head today?

Theme: Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror/Supers etc.
System:
Gist:

Theme: Supers
System: FASERIP
Gist: Marvel Universe. The PC's are either talented military personnel, newly powered heroes or criminals conscripted/bribed/blackmailed/offered to work for Operation: Eclipse under the auspices of SHIELD. The goal is like a Dirty-Dozen scenario of characters that will be working undercover as villains to infiltrate various high-powered criminal organizations in order to bring down the really bad bad-guys like Red Skull, Doom, Zemo etc.

They'll start out as recruits in the Taskmaster School where they'll earn their bonafides and become low-end criminals. They'll have to be villains that are deep undercover so it will pit them against both heroes and other villains while given some umbrella cover by SHIELD. As they work their way up the ranks, the natural conflict will be pitting the players against literally *everyone* in the Marvel U in a big chess-game of Doom and Fury. The goal of them getting their freedom will inevitably lead to more issues as well as the bad-juju they rack up as villains trying to be heroes. And the inevitable question will come up - are they actually heroes?

Sure! I have piles of ideas for campaign and games, many of them even developed somewhat.

Some of them I share (especially the ones I don't intend to run myself, and/or that I'd like others to run or borrow ideas from). Some are just ideas that I think are neat or could in theory be fun, or amusing to my friends. Some are even jokes.

Like when GURPS RIverworld came out, and it was a great example of a setting that no one I know would ever probably ever want to run, but we browsed it and looked at their character sheets for real-world famous people, which all seemed pretty amusing to us, because we could hardly imagine ourselves actually being into playing a fantasy world full of afterlife celebrities. It was either me or a particular friend, or both, who came up with an idea we thought was hilarious, which was to start a campaign where everyone seemed to be Mark Twain. The goal of the campaign, we speculated, could be to prove that you were the REAL Mark Twain, and that all the others were impostors, but of course it would tricky to tell who was delusional or even what this strange world was about, etc. We cracked up thinking of strategies and arguments about how to assert that you were the real Mark Twain, and how to argue that others were inferior, etc. We told our friends, but the whole idea was ended when one of them put an end to it with the assertion that he would win, "because I AM Mark Twain".

When I read books or watch films of TV, or even consider a computer game or RPG, my GM/campaign-creation brain section activates and I start considering how I'd like to play or GM it. So every time there is a forced plot or fake-o combat, I think about how it could play out in an actual dynamic game with more appropriate/logical/realistic game mechanics. Many of my throw-away ideas end up being things like, "what if you gamed out these action situations in GURPS tactical combat - wow it would never go like it did in the film", etc. Or "Hmm, what would it be like to play as Ned Stark at various points in his role as Hand of the King in Game of Thrones - what _were_ his options, and how could you game his limited options given players may know the story ... or even knowing the story with perfect hindsight, how could he survive from certain points in the plot?"

But I rarely if ever go through with such ideas, because I can get most of the point of them just by thinking them through or talking to friends about them, so no need for the pile of work that it'd take to prepare and run them. The campaigns I end up running are almost always home-brew universes. And I tend to prefer to pile most work into already developed home-brew worlds, rather than running one-offs where the work put in isn't relevant afterwards.

I have tons of ideas for game exercises or scenarios or campaigns that I would enjoy running if I had enough time or resources, but I generally don't. These days, most of my game energy goes into computer game design & development, so I don't have much bandwidth for pen & paper RPG playing or GM'ing, so those ideas don't tend to get much play and yeah they pile up ad infinitum.

I have tons of ideas. I tend to collect them and generate them primarily for whatever game I am currently running and put them in an adventure or scenario ideas folder or folders. Sometimes I'll get an idea for something I'm not running and those go in the ideas folder for that game system or genre. Even though its been years since I have run Call of Cthulhu or Star Wars I still add to the idea (as well as the location, pics, ships, and various other) folders for those games. I don't typically share them since I might use them one day. I've shared a few ideas for H+I on my blog - either for adventures I've already run or ones I probably will never run.

What gets saved will vary from a single image or a one or two line adventure seed to a complete location, minor setting, or adventure write up.

@Bren

Yeah I've got about two-dozen folders of odds and ends. A few are just images of ideas I wanna develop. Do you not share them because your players come here? or are they your Preeeeecious? (I have my Precious snowflake campaigns for sure.)

Quote from: tenbones;922115@Bren

Yeah I've got about two-dozen folders of odds and ends. A few are just images of ideas I wanna develop. Do you not share them because your players come here? or are they your Preeeeecious? (I have my Precious snowflake campaigns for sure.)

In order of importance.

• Just too lazy to go to the effort of posting it.
• I have a blog for stuff that I am currently working on so why post stuff here instead.
• I'm overly concerned with the statistically unlikely but theoretical possibility that my players might come here or that some of you might become players.
• We wants to keep these ideasies for ourselves. Yes we do. Gollum. Gollum.

One of the many reasons everything lives in the wiki.

I haven't gotten to play or run for a while, but I have been reading quite a bit. So yeah, I've been stockpiling ideas.

Here's one in particular that I've been thinking about a lot lately:

A sci-fi fantasy OD&D campaign inspired primarily by the Night Lands by William Hope Hodgson (frozen death world, last bastion of humanity is a glowing arcology.) The setting also borrows elements from:
A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin (the Wall, the Night's Watch, player characters may be tasked with guarding their Citadel from external threats of the frozen wastes)
Attack on Titan, by Hajime Isayama (their concentric walls, the structure of their community, the Survey Corps tasked with reclaiming the land, and the giants that eat them)
Storm of the Century, by Stephen King
Blindsight, and the Rifters trilogy, by Peter Watts (humanity has a tenuous alliance with transhuman vampires. Sci-fi elements of the setting have more of a hard sci-fi bent. Fantasy elements, like psionics, are much more subdued.)
Green Antarctica, by Den Valdron (an alternate history of a populated Antarctica, itself inspired by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe, it's sequel The Sphinx of the Ice Fields by Jules Verne, and At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft)
John Carpenter's The Thing, and The Things by Peter Watts (there's some really weird and terrifying stuff out there in the frozen wastes...)
Stand Still. Stay Silent, by Minna Sundberg (further elaborating on the weird and terrifying stuff, and on the people that fight them)
A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay (inspiration for various abhumans)
After Man, by Dougal Dixon (more inspiration for abhumans and for other creatures)
Last and First Men: A Story of Near and Far Future, by Olaf Stapledon (yet more inspiration for various abhumans)
Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon-ho (itself based on Le Transperceneige by Jaques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette. For atmosphere and some dystopian ideas.)
Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa (a D&D supplement, and a controversial one at that, but a favorite nevertheless)

I already wrote an unpublished adventure module featuring a clock tower in a fantasy version of Antarctica, but everybody I showed it to kept wanting me to elaborate on the fantasy Antarctica and I got stuck. I'm in the process of fleshing it out into a more complete setting.

It would be a hexcrawl campaign on a frozen death world where the sun is cold, red, and dead. The one source of light and hope for the last remnants of humanity is a massive pyramid-shaped arcology capped with a pillar of mysterious light. The arcology is surrounded by a massive citadel; three great walls with cities enclosed within the bastions, forests, farms, and villages between them sustained by the pillar of light, and only frozen death beyond the outer walls.
Player characters are scouts stationed at the walls or at vanguard fortresses beyond them to protect the citadel from abhumans, giants, and other threats form the frozen wastes beyond.

I would like to thank Daztur for pointing me towards a lot of these great sources of inspiration.

I have tons of campaign ideas, maps, drawings, characters, monsters, treasures -you name it. About half are in binders and the rest is written on index cards and filed away in plastic coupon boxes. NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY! That half-finished castle I was drawing? The 2nd level cleric with a donkey and gallon jug of holy water? The hoard of a dragon in detail? A brigand camp? A diagram for a ship? Stats for the ship's crew? I have all of these things and more stockpiled, often with several copies -Kinko's became my home away from home before I got my own copier/printer. So when my players need say, some hired men-at-arms, I don't have to stop to roll them up, I can just flip them a card or cards like a blackjack dealer and we're ready to roll.

The binders are full of larger maps, home made charts, completed adventures (including ones I cannibalized from published modules and magazines) and some I never completed -including some I barely started. For example, I had a page of notes and ideas about an ancient haunted battlefield where the land was laid waste and the undead prowl the site after sundown. My notes included the monsters and treasure ideas I had, plus a few ominous-sounding names and that was about it. I pushed it to the back burner and finally abandoned it because I didn't have time for it. A friend of mine (also a DM) asked if I had anything he could use and I gave him a copy of my ideas and he did the rest, running his players through it when he had filled in the blanks.

I've always shared my stuff with other DMs and players, so long as they make a copy so I can keep the original.

Always happy to share what voices in my head are saying!!

Theme: SciFi Fantasy
System: RIFTS / Mechanoids
Gist: Vikings in Spaaaace! In a far flung arm of a forgotten galaxy, a cluster of worlds under the watchful eye of the Norse gods has developed futuristic technology while keeping to the Old Ways of the Vikings, until a Mechanoid mother ship discovered them. Now, the gods look down upon their children as they are challenged to save themselves against the mammal-hating psionic cyborgs.

I ran this as a one-shot many years ago, but I've been repeatedly asked to revisit it and I've enjoyed it tremendously. It's cartoon laughable, but its got the whole 40k Space Wolves vs. Terminator Necrons going on and the players just keep loving the whole Ragnar Bloodfist with a plasma gun. So over the years, I've dibbled and dabbled, expanding the original Mechanoids RPG rules to include more Rifts bits.

Quote from: Cave Bear;922168It would be a hexcrawl campaign on a frozen death world where the sun is cold, red, and dead. The one source of light and hope for the last remnants of humanity is a massive pyramid-shaped arcology capped with a pillar of mysterious light. The arcology is surrounded by a massive arcology; three great walls with cities enclosed within the bastions, forests, farms, and villages between them sustained by the pillar of light, and only frozen death beyond the outer walls.

If that was on Kickstarter, I'd throw money at you.

Please rock this idea. I've been toying with a frozen setting for a long time, but never did it. I've recently been introduced to the Frostgrave minis game and I love your concept. The arcology idea is extremely interesting.

After reading a "4-page campaign manifesto" and various discussions it spawned elsewhere on the net, throwing them together has been one of my hobbies. Here's an extract of the doc I shared with my players last time we were talking about spinning up a D&D game. All of them are pretty stock fantasy, since that's what I expected would appeal to them, and there are three  or four modules + one computer game clearly showing through:



Things are wilder up here in the borderlands, where the chance find of an old map has brought you questing after a lost king’s tomb. The dwarves left the area a century ago, declaring it too dangerous - but that’s long before the Picts invaded from the west, and it’s not clear what other danger they meant. Meanwhile the elves refuse even to admit there is anything north of the Empire, ostracizing those who dare suggest otherwise. But there are people living here, in a pair of walled towns and scattered castles and villages, and other, less human sorts in their own communities: bullywugs, ratkin, the Pure Ones.

The last Imperial Inquisitor and his staff disappeared into the jungle two years ago, vainly searching for a saint’s lost relic. It’s been longer than that since a fleet or legion visited the East Marches, which has left the separate provinces squabbling even more than ever. The Church of Urizen has factioned into even more sects than were known in the Empire, or so it seems. In the lands around Anagaiak Bay both farmers and fishers have been disappearing; surely Vidame Artemisia would appreciate it if you found out what was going on.

The guards took you seriously, if that’s any salve to your pride - keeping you chained and closely watched, not just roped together like all the other captives in the coffle. Days of trudging along the riverside trail had taken you through the wilderness and up into the mountains. Now they’ve separated you from the rest of the slaves-to-be and herded you into the captain’s office of a small rundown fort in a stinking swamp. One of the crueler guards shoves at you, growling that you should hurry up so the caravan doesn’t have to spend the night in the miasma. You’ll remember her face.

The mountain villages around Lago Agala are a bit of a backwater, but perhaps that’s all the better for a bunch of would-be adventurers like yourselves who have learned of a recently-abandoned bandit hideout and hope to loot it before the Amalric the Golden’s greedy guardsmen can get there from the town of Hillside.

30 years ago the Witch-King was defeated, but since that triumph things have only gotten worse. The Northmarchers raid for slaves, the Immerians focus on fighting with the barbarians who closed the East Road and stamping out any hint of heresy near their borders, the western petty kingdoms harbor any number of collaborators and sympathizers. The lizard-men in the swamps are unruly, as well. One of the forest princelings is away patrolling the border with most of his men; his lady has hired you to investigate why the taxes from a small village are late.

In the deep desert is the town of Arikshanye, perched below the mist-shrouded goddess-haunted mountain Beyaz Dag on the shore of a shallow lake. Long secure in its isolation, the town is threatened by the ongoing war in the west, but also by unsolved murders, rumors of cults, a haunting in the quarry, a mad prophet…

Travelers’ tales say that musket-wielding armies of sun-worshipping Lusitanians and Vettones have stormed the old capital at Tulaytula, but that’s far away, and it’s been many years since the Padeshah there actually held any authority over the southern principalities: Gharnata, Malaka, Mariyya. Here in Capileira, in the steep valleys between the snow-covered mountains and the southern sea, those stories are far less of a concern than the damage wrought by the floods and lightning from the storms two weeks ago…

I do: A couple I have rolling around in mah brain.

Theme: Samurai, Politics, and a smattering of Stephen King horror
System: L5R
Gist: One of the characters is a newly promoted daimyo and the others are various hangers on to the new noble court being taken over at Sekiguchiyama, The Barrier Opening Mountain. Little do the PCs know that in addition to the bullshit politics that come from being between the lands of [CLAN] and [OTHER CLAN THAT HATES FIRST CLAN] and owning a somewhat profitable silver mine, dark forces lurk both in Kuroi Jukai, The Black Sea of Trees and in the Mountain Itself.

Basically start with bandits and small political overtures, then as the political pressure starts to ramp up have the supernatural shit from Kuroi Jukai (almost a mini-Shadowlands unto itself) and the corrupted spirit of the mountain (Which takes a Pennywise style "This is my hunting ground, let me play and you'll be...sort of successful".).

Theme: Power and Its Uses
System: Godbound
Gist: I have a lot of these and the concept of Night Roads really lets you make any setting have Godbound in them. My first thoughts are Azeroth around about the time of Burning Crusade or slightly before, Westeros (just to see what they smash and what they don't), and Forgotten Realms. I think upturning setting worlds (with some changes so the PCs are challenged) is fun. Also, I think making the PCs react to power vacuums created by punching everything in the face has a lot more potential than punching monsters over and over.

Yeah you guys got some interesting stuff in your secret stashes.

Quote from: tenbones;922083So for the first time in almost 20-years (since I came to Dallas from LA), I get to be a player. I'm loving it. I didn't step down from the chair because of burnout or anything, I did it because I need my group to "grow" and I want them to have some perspective from another GM, while I take some time out to work on some writing projects looming ahead of me.

That said, I've had lots of interesting ideas for new campaigns. So I just jot them down as I go, some might not be more than a few sentences to form a seed, others have become pages of notes/images/ideas, others have become full blown campaign primers that are ready to fire up on a moment's notice. So I've got a stockpile.

Do any of you stockpile campaign ideas? What are they? Do you share them? Even if they're silly ideas you haven't fully formed yet into a coherent campaign structure. Or if you don't wanna talk about the specifics - what's the general gist? Which one is burning in your head today?

Theme: Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror/Supers etc.
System:
Gist:

I only really stockpile game ideas in my head.

Right now, none of my campaigns look like they'll be ending anytime soon, but I have a few broad ideas of what campaigns I might want to run next.

Quote from: Spinachcat;922228Always happy to share what voices in my head are saying!!

Theme: SciFi Fantasy
System: RIFTS / Mechanoids
Gist: Vikings in Spaaaace! In a far flung arm of a forgotten galaxy, a cluster of worlds under the watchful eye of the Norse gods has developed futuristic technology while keeping to the Old Ways of the Vikings, until a Mechanoid mother ship discovered them. Now, the gods look down upon their children as they are challenged to save themselves against the mammal-hating psionic cyborgs.

I ran this as a one-shot many years ago, but I've been repeatedly asked to revisit it and I've enjoyed it tremendously. It's cartoon laughable, but its got the whole 40k Space Wolves vs. Terminator Necrons going on and the players just keep loving the whole Ragnar Bloodfist with a plasma gun. So over the years, I've dibbled and dabbled, expanding the original Mechanoids RPG rules to include more Rifts bits.

Please tell me you had planets named 'Innangard' and 'Utangard'.

QuoteIf that was on Kickstarter, I'd throw money at you.

Please rock this idea. I've been toying with a frozen setting for a long time, but never did it. I've recently been introduced to the Frostgrave minis game and I love your concept. The arcology idea is extremely interesting.

Back when I was working on that adventure module I had people telling me to expand it out into a setting book.
I might pick it up again and do so. I'm a big fan of radium-age scifi/fantasy (1900-1930). Maybe I'll stat out a LotFP compatible 'Nyctalope' class, who knows?