The first session of D&D I ran, at the beginning of what would be a multi-year campaign that sadly fell apart (as seems to be so often the case,) I had my players meet one another at a party being thrown by the Sand Prince of Camrada, a drug-addled, manic playboy who served as a figurehead for the crime lords of the city of Camrada. The party was going to his palace to get him as a patron to create an "Excavation Company" that would explore the ruins of the super-advanced, long-lost Parthalian civilization.
It was my first time DM'ing, but not my first time weaving a story, and I wanted to start big. So, I had the character who was intended to be (and in theory still could be if I ever pick that campaign up again) the final boss (though arguably not the main villain) of the campaign show up at the party, ostensibly as some form of entertainment or at least an interesting "mystic" to add to the mix of interesting people the Sand Prince would invite to make his party noteworthy and prestigious.
Instead, this "mystic," offering prophecies to the Sand Prince, responded to the question "how long will this grand palace stand" with "no more than two hours," and then began some sort of incantation that caused a nearby hill to erupt, revealing that beneath it was the dreaded Tarrasque, the massive, kaiju-like monster that is basically designed to destroy cities.
The party, thus, was forced to flee the city while chaos descended, having their first actual combat against just a couple of kobolds (it would take me a long time to figure out encounter balance, but I can tell you that two kobolds versus even a level 1 fighter, paladin, and wizard was not enough).
Now, I'd already done a lot of work world-building for this setting. So I eventually clarified that while the Tarrasque destroyed a big swath of Camrada, the city itself survived, and the party would later meet the Sand Prince (whose full - and pretty obviously embellished - name was Feyd Yanek al Dastran di Macchi Keotopoles von Shunt) staying with the NPC who actually became their patron, dispossessed of his title and going through rehab supervised by the benevolent Baron Siegfried von Angir IV.
I still think it was a pretty cool way to start a campaign, even though I think there are elements of the execution I could have gotten a bit better. Probably the biggest thing is that I had to kind of just handwave that the Tarrasque disappeared mysteriously after destroying a fifth of the city, because I wanted the players to feel like they could go on unrelated adventures and not have the entire world panicking that the Tarrasque was out there, squashing cities.
And, frankly, the motivation for the villain summoning the Tarrasque was pretty vague - mostly it was to keep a major war going as a distraction, though I think the way I portrayed the villain and his minions made it seem more likely that making no announcement of their presence at all would have been a better way to pull it off.
What I wanted was the big set piece to kick off the campaign.
There is a balance to be struck.
Here's the advantage I see in having something huge happen as a campaign begins:
So often, the stakes of a story, and I think particularly of a D&D campaign, feel really small at first. Campaigns seem to always start with you fighting bandits (either of the broad range of humanoid races or of the kind of "low level bandit" monster types like goblins and kobolds.)
And sure, there's something to be said for a story that starts with seemingly innocuous things happening that turn out to be tied to much bigger things - this is kind of the mystery narrative, where some smaller thread like a single person's murder turns out to be part of a much large tapestry of plot and conspiracy - maybe that person was murdered because they found out about some magical material that was being stolen, and that material was being stolen because it could be used to open a gateway to the Abyss, which some evil wizard wants so that they can learn how to become a lich from Orcus, but Orcus is actually just using the wizard to invade the mortal realm. You can trace a direct line from the small-scale crime to a massive, epic fantasy plot (and in only a couple steps,) but you won't really know that big things are happening until there's a major plot reveal likely very far down the road.
The "big kickoff" presents different challenges, but I think it's something DMs should consider using more often.
Really, this is about modulating the stakes. With the aforementioned plot two paragraphs up, you have ever-raising stakes. First you're looking for a murderer, and then you've uncovered some kind of organized crime plot. So, now the party isn't just looking for one killer, but a whole mob with which they've gone to war. But then, when they realize that the mob is just doing a job for this other individual, and they realize they've got this powerful necromancer they're fighting, the stakes go up again. And then, when they realize that the wizard is working with Orcus, you've got one of the most epic and iconic villains in D&D to deal with. The ramping up of stakes works pretty well with the way that D&D sees players grow in power as they level up. A party of level 3 players taking on a city's thieves' guild? Sure, that tracks. They're at the right level for street-level fights. And as they level up, they're now fighting more powerful, more inhuman threats.
But let's also consider a classic example:
In Lord of the Rings, the first monster the party faces is a Ringwraith. There's a lot of exposition that starts things off, with Bilbo planning his birthday and then Gandalf coming and convincing him to leave Frodo the ring, and then Bilbo pulls his cheeky little disappearing act (which is pretty obviously the ring trying to influence him not to relinquish it - let's just take a moment to remember that only Bilbo and Samwise ever actually give up the ring voluntarily, which I think makes them the most virtuous people in the story) and there's a pretty big time jump (I think in the books it's actually several years) before Gandalf shows up and tells Frodo he's got to get the hell out of there before the Nazgul come and slaughter him for the ring.
Frodo and Sam set out, and they come across Merry and Pippin, but the most dangerous thing they face (at least in the movies) as they make their way through the Shire is a farmer who is pissed off that the latter pair stole some vegetables... and then, suddenly, they have what is basically a Death Knight sniffing at them, inches away from finding them and utterly eviscerating them.
The Nazgul/Ringwraiths are the top-level henchmen of the story - indeed, given that Sauron is only ever this disembodied presence (literally a big flaming eye in the movie, though I think the books treat that more as a metaphor for his lingering, incorporeal and invisible presence,) the Nazgul represent the biggest physical threat of anything that even shows up in the story (ok, maybe the Balrog.)
After they escape the Nazgul and get to Rivendell, their subsequent adventures are far more "level-appropriate," but that beginning sequence - in which actually fighting the Ringwraiths is not really an option until they get the much-higher-level Aragorn in the party, and even then, he's only able to scare them off - pushes the narrative forward from the tranquil innocence of the Shire.
It's also some great foreshadowing for the kind of dark and terrible powers that the party is going to face down the line.
One of the big things that took me a while to internalize when I started off as a DM is that, just because a monster has a stat block with hit points and attacks, it doesn't have to act strictly as a fight for the party to overcome.
Powerful monsters can show up as NPCs. But they can also show up as monsters that are there to kill things - but not necessarily the party.
Consider the opening of Skyrim. You're carted off to a small fortress where you're going to be executed as a spy for crossing into the country in the middle of a civil war. But right as you're about to have your head chopped off, Alduin - the final boss of the main story campaign - shows up and begins to tear the place up. In point of fact, he's there to kill you (so he'd have been better off just waiting) but you don't know that, and maybe he doesn't know which of these puny humanoids is you yet (you can forgive me for not remembering all the details - the game turned a decade old yesterday).
You're not expected to fight Alduin during this opening sequence. Instead, it just establishes the kind of powerful threat that this world-eating dragon represents, and gives you a hint as to what you might find yourself concerned with moving forward.
So, I think if you want to do a big kickoff for a campaign, one thing to consider is getting a very large monster - ancient dragons (or greatwyrms!) or the Tarrasque or a Kraken are all great possibilities, because these are the sorts of monsters that can threaten entire cities - and that means you always have the excuse not to kill the party, because the monster is going to be focused on other parts of the city. But in the meantime, you've got this massive thing that is flying overhead or shaking the ground with its steps, or the party can see flailing tentacles tossing broken ships around the docks.
I am a big fan of starting level 1 characters off against zombies. Zombies are relatively durable for such a low-CR monster, but they're slow and almost impossible to miss, so your players, who are likely trying out a new character for the first time, are going to get the satisfaction of landing hits or seeing the zombie fail its dexterity saving throws, and if they're smart, they can always move far enough to keep the zombies at bay.
So, while it's not a scenario I've personally used (I did send my party up against zombies in the first official setting of my Ravnica game, but it wasn't quite the same) I think another huge set-piece you can pull off is a massive zombie plague. The party is only going to be fighting balanced encounters with an appropriate number of zombies, but the scene you describe will show that the dead are rising all over the city or town where they start.
I guess one common thread here is that this tends to work best when things start off in an urban location.
One streaming show that I think did this very well was The Unsleeping City. The conceptualization of basically all the Dimension 20 shows is incredible, but the first big fight in The Unsleeping City saw the party fighting a bunch of mutant Santa clones in the middle of Times Square, with a kind of horrifying "hive queen" Santa clone in the center.
It was huge and utterly ridiculous. And actually, unlike the examples I've been talking about, it is actually balanced for their level (which was like 2 or 3).
Thinking about published adventures, it occurs to me that I think Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus missed an opportunity. That adventure begins with the city of Elturel getting abruptly dragged into the Nine Hells, leaving only a massive crater behind in the continent of Faerun, and the party is motivated to eventually travel to the Hells in an effort to restore the city and save its people from being forever claimed by the Hells.
Or, rather, the adventure begins after this has happened, and the party arrives at Baldur's Gate among a throng of refugees seeking shelter in the neighboring city. How cool would it have been if the first session of the adventure has the party facing off against some Zariel cultists on the outskirts of the city, only for their initial victory to suddenly turn to defeat as they witness the city vanish.
I think that most of us get into games like D&D because we want to take part in those huge, epic moments. And I certainly understand the need to start things a little slow and build up to the heightened stuff. But I also think it's worth it to give the party something really exciting off the bat to whet their appetite and start things off with a bang.
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