Today, my Ravnica-based campaign is going to hit the end of tier 2 - players will be jumping into tier 3, level 11, and officially hitting "high level D&D."
Having only run a couple one-shots at these levels, I'm nervous but also excited. Already, at level 10, the party is nigh-unstoppable, though while I haven't been pulling my punches, exactly, the higher levels introduce foes I can set against them that have some really nasty abilities. Before long, there will be liches, adult and maybe ancient dragons, and other really serious foes for them to contend with.
The way my campaign works is that all characters will turn out to have planeswalker sparks, allowing the campaign to jump around the Magic multiverse, with a final reckoning on New Phyrexia (I doubt this would seem like a spoiler to any of my players if they found this blog.)
But I'll confess that as much as I love Ravnica as a setting, I'm also really feeling a strong "grass is greener" yearning to return to my homebrew setting.
I have a campaign I started years ago that ran pretty consistently from November 5th, 2015 (I made a blog post about it!) up through the fall of 2018, and then started to kind of falter in 2019 (there was, admittedly, some drama, which I think is mostly under the bridge, but it's hard to build up momentum again.) I'd love to return to that, especially given the importance of its plot to the overall story of my setting, but I think doing so will require some reworking and probably a change in the player roster to accommodate schedules and such.
But naturally, as any DM I'm sure experiences, I've got a number of campaigns I've been eager to run that are a little more limited in scope. My initial campaign was very much a sort of "yes, there's a bad guy, but you're going to be going all over the world and doing many different things" type of campaign. While I love that style, and would probably have elements of that in any campaign I run, I've also come up with a few other concepts that are inspired more by the published adventures - more limited in scope and location.
What I think I want to do is come up with a few ideas that I'm particularly excited about (it's important that I expect to have fun running it, of course) and then present a sort of thematic summary of the campaign type, then recruit a group of friends to play in the campaign, and have them decide which they want to do.
So here are the concepts I have in mind:
The Dead of Rhevan Dror:
Up in the frigid land of Cotieras, across the Rimescar Sea from the safety of the Empire, a few tiny villages have formed on the southern coast, hoping to explore this land and seek out relics that might exist from the long-fallen Parthalian Empire. However, a great and terrible sea storm has erupted on the Rimescar Sea, trapping Cotieras' inhabitants. If that wasn't enough, the dead have begun to rise from the icy tundra and march on the port towns while necromancers raise zombies and ghouls from the graveyards. Ancient evils lurk in the frigid darkness.
The Sands of Lost Tenebra:
Lost in the middle of the arid Roshak Desert after their airship is shot down by a horde of orcs, our brave adventurers must struggle to survive in the sun-blasted heat, weathering desert monsters and roving berserkers. But even as they seek to avoid becoming desiccated corpses out on the sands, the adventurers must discover what has driven the orcs to this newfound aggression, and what terrible, mind-shattering secrets lie buried beneath the dunes.
The Shadow of the Dire King:
Transported to the dark and dangerous mirror-world known as the Shadowlands, our adventurers must struggle to survive the delicate and dangerous courtly intrigue of the Dire Kingdom, navigating gothic castles, pyramids of sorcerous power, and a surreal landscape like something out of a 1980s metal album cover. In this sandbox-style campaign, the party defines their own goals and allegiances across this land all while under the watchful eyes of the Dire King.
The Secret of Wisedji Hill:
In this wild-west style campaign, the party comes across a sacred site where a relic of incredible holy power stands vulnerable after its archdruid protector fell. Now, the party must act as its new defenders, constructing a fortress to defend the Celestine Stone and the Ki-Rin spirit within from various threats that would seek to claim the spirit for their own end. The party would have to build and manage their fortress and the nearby town, going on occasional excursions to recruit builders, engineers, and craftsmen to repair and improve their fortifications, while enduring onslaughts by elementals, cultists, and the infernal Red Rattler Gang.
The Burning Depths:
A maritime adventure built using the seafaring rules found in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the Dharam Sea has recently been discovered by explorers from the Empire and the Republic of Nephimala, and both powers are racing to claim the resources found in these new lands. In doing so, one of the colonists, looting a triton temple, broke a seal holding demonic forces at bay, and now demonic madness has spread like an infection across the islands. An open-ended, sandbox campaign, the Burning Depths would focus on the party acting as the officers of their own ship, exploring the islands, fighting demons, and choosing their allegiances in the struggle between natives and colonialists.
So, these are the concepts I've come up with. I think at the moment the Dead of Rhevan Dror is the one that I have the strongest structural concept for, though the Red Scar Plains adventure I ran for my original campaign, which took place in the Shadowlands, was a lot of fun, and I'm tempted to revisit that part of my setting with the Shadow of the Dire King.
The Secret of Wisedji Hill and the Burning Depths both bring in some strong mechanical aspects to the game, which could prove really cool, though I worry both are also a little too narrow in scope.
The ever-present other option, of course, is to simply run another campaign in the "kitchen sink" style, which could use elements of all of these.
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