One of the curses of D&D is that you'll always have more ideas than you can actually put into practice. If I could I'd be running like five different games and playing ten different characters. But absent that, I have a blog where I can write about what could be.
I got the following idea while reading the description of the Hallow spell. Like a lot of long-term defensive spells, the idea is generally for NPCs to use these and for the party to have to deal with them. However, that needn't always be the case.
Here's the pitch:
The entire campaign is built around defending a particular location. There is something profoundly important there that the villains want to get - maybe it's the last remnant of a dead god, a portal to an outer plane, or a weapon that could be used to unleash terrible devastation on all of creation. It's a McGuffin.
The point is that the party will need to defend it. They're going to be staying in that location and fighting monsters there.
So how do you keep it from getting dull?
Here's the thing: in tier 1, the party will get the funds perhaps to build some palisades, maybe a rough wooded wall, but with every assault, the walls and structures get damaged. The players might sojourn out occasionally to try to secure treasure, but the main use of that treasure is going to have to be securing the position.
As a DM, you'll need to come up with costs for building and maintaining the fortifications, each of which need to be destructible. To make sure that the party isn't just going to save that money for their own purposes, you need to also send bigger hordes of monsters than the party could typically handle. If you're going to do a campaign like this, you'll want to make sure your players are on board and understand how it will work.
What's fun, though, is that the players will essentially be designing the fort. Let them choose where walls, portcullises, moats, and towers stand. You can maintain a map that will evolve and change as the party alters the fort.
Then, you're going to send massive hordes of bad guys. Say the party is well-equipped to fight a single Balgura - send three at them, so they'll have to make use of their fortifications to keep the demons at range or at least bottleneck them so they only face one at a time (it might help here if monsters can't pass through their allies' spaces).
Every piece of fortification will have HP, and you can give it more as they upgrade from, say, wood to stone to enchanted dwarven masonry. Then, you start unleashing more complex hordes upon them with siege monsters sent specifically to destroy the fortifications.
Perhaps getting the more complex defensive features will require difficult challenges away from the fort. I really recommend checking out the special ship equipment in Ghosts of Saltmarsh for some inspiration.
Next, you could have a village that grows up around the fort. Maybe the party needs to help defend that as well. You needn't skimp on RP or NPCs in this type of game - indeed, you might have a great opportunity for recurring NPCs with their own problems. Maybe the stone mason they pay to build their walls is having trouble with her workers, or the woodsmen providing you lumber are being attacked by fey in the forest. Perhaps your powerful magical wards keep getting dispelled because there's a spy in town who has been telling your enemies about what wards you've been putting up.
Spells like Mighty Fortress might trivialize some of the fort-building when you get to later levels, but on the other hand, its 500g cost will add up, and as DM, you'll just need to send some nasty beasts that can chew through its walls with ease.
It might be tempting to make every creature that attacks a Siege Monster, but I think you'll have more interesting encounters if you vary it up. Having siege monsters that focus on the structures while the others attack the players will force the players to make tactical decisions - yes, that Sunder Shaman is dealing double-damage to our wall, but we might need to sacrifice the wall to buy us some time to take down this Death Knight - or alternatively, this Death Knight nasty, but if that wall goes down, a dozen Archers are going to pincushion us, so we need to kill the Sunder Shaman first.
Admittedly, running big siege battles can be very complicated - D&D is built around a party of fewer than 10 people fighting a handful of monsters, and so tracking all the mercenaries and allied cavalry the party might want to hire could get difficult. Using mass combat rules as found in the DMG (page 250) can help smooth this, or you could encourage the party to hire elite mercenaries (as in, a single CR 5ish stat block rather than 20 CR 1/4 ones) and likewise use tougher enemies, but fewer of them.
One key here is that if the party starts magically warding things, make the enemies smart - but not omniscient. Again, using your nearby village as a place for intrigue will let the bad guys make attempts to find out what they'll be facing in the siege. Hell, the party might then be encouraged to switch things up frequently as your big bad starts sending a bunch of mages to dispel magic only for the party to swap to spike traps and the like.
Now, where does the party get the funding to build their fortifications? One option is to basically have them slide backwards into nobility, charging taxes to the village that enjoys their protection. They can certainly take things off the enemies they slay, but you also might have the party have to seek out not only allies but financiers - securing a grant from a local noble or royal by convincing them that the place needs defending.
I have no idea if I'll ever have the time to run such a campaign, but I do have to say that it sounds like a lot of fun.
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