In my very first session of D&D I ever played (and ran) I had the campaign's main villain appear at the party of a debauched local ruler and summon the Tarrasque to attack the city.
The Tarrasque was chosen purely because it was the scariest, highest-CR monster in the Monster Manual (even Volo's had not come out at that point, though the Tarrasque has only had three CR equals - two of which are versions of Tiamat). One of my players, the only D&D veteran of the group, remarked "we're far too low level to fight that," and I realized only later that he might have feared that he had agreed to play with a DM who was just going to pound his players with unbeatable fights.
The Tarrasque never got within a mile of the player characters - by the time it came to destroy the palace in which the campaign had begun, they and most of the guests of the Sand Prince had fled, leaving the already chaotic and anarchic city of Camrada to descend into utter chaos.
I was a brand-new DM, and I was also following the advice of the 2014 DMG, which profoundly under-tuned combat encounters (though I think that the "adventuring day" XP totals compared to the tuning of even a "deadly" combat encounter in that tells you that there were very different assumptions about adventure pacing being made).
Thus, when the three level 1 party members fought two Kobolds (an ostensibly balanced low-difficulty encounter) and then a single Thug (likewise,) they plowed through them - in fact, by winning initiative, they actually didn't even give any of their foes a chance to act.
There are a lot of ways that I'd run the beginning of that campaign differently now with a decade of experience under my belt. But I do really like the idea of throwing the party into a major crisis.
One of the challenges I have running a campaign that has honestly spent most of its time in tier 3 and now a significant amount of time in tier 4 is that enormous catastrophes are the kind of crisis that the party is equipped to stop. The party literally just defeated the Tarrasque, and while I made one suboptimal choice in the combat (I didn't use its legendary action to knock out the Sorcerer's Tenser's Transformation spell, gained via Wish) the party beat the monster fair and square. (Half of them were unconscious at the end of the fight, but that just means I didn't think it was too easy).
Anyway, the point is that I would caution that it's difficult to make this work at higher levels. Earlier in the campaign, back when they were level 16, I believe (it was the start of my Orzhov arc, and the Lich who served as the boss of that arc also saw them hit level 17 - fun fact, the second and probably final time they fight him will be what gets them to 20, though now backed by a ton of very powerful minions), I had spirits of the dead flood the streets of Ravnica after the magical artifact that the Orzhov use to regulate the connection between Ravnica and Agryem, or the "Ghost Quarter" was damaged by the main villain. This happened while some characters were off in separate parts of the city, and so the plan was to have little vignettes where they each had to fend off an attack in pairs before the party could group up. One of these encounters was just skipped - the Gruul Sorcerer used Conjure Animals (the 5.0 version) to get a giant vulture or something and fly over all the undead creatures that emerged.
Truthfully, I think that a catastrophic set-piece is a great way to start a campaign in tier 1.
I've been giving a lot of thought to how to achieve survival horror in D&D, and I think that honestly would probably work best starting at level 1 and throwing several trivial combat encounters (like a single zombie against a party of four) before the party gets to rest.
This is different, genre-wise. Here, we want spectacle and bigness while still making things surmountable. I think you can sustain this pretty well at somewhat higher levels. Even going as far as level 5, your Wizard might be able to cast Fly, but only on a single target.
Generally, I think that the next campaign I start running (whenever that happens) will probably skip ahead to level 3 - I think level 1, and to an extent 2, are more like tutorial levels, and unless I have a lot of different players who haven't played D&D before, they'll probably be champing at the bit to at least have a subclass. But that's fine - it just opens up options for what kind of monsters I can use and how flexible they are to endure more encounters over time.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves: what do we mean by a catastrophe?
Something really bad is happening - it's a major event and something that will probably be remembered historically. Urban locales work well for this because there's a concentration of people that raises the stakes: perhaps our party will have the opportunity to save some helpless civilians in the process. They might only be one small corner of the fight.
Draw Steel has a published adventure called the Fall of Blackbottom that I think really does this kind of adventure: the party begins in a multi-story inn in a major town. Enemy soldiers drop an enormous metal sphere on the inn, which plummets through the roof and all the way down to the ground floor, and the sphere contains a portal to the Abyssal Wastes that summons in a bunch of demons. That's really just a single big encounter.
Another catastrophe could be an outbreak of an undead plague (though take careful consideration on how infectious it is - Romero-style zombies don't really work in D&D because they're essentially one-hit-killers).
While having some hints and clues sprinkled in here, the moment of a catastrophe is one of confusion - our most salient evidence of what is going on is just what is plainly happening in the moment. If it's elementals you're throwing at the party, they can put a pin in that and try to figure out who has the means to summon them. If it's an invading army, maybe the party can recognize the banners and uniforms of the invading soldiers, or maybe the insignia they bear is intentionally unknown, a mystery to be uncovered once the crisis of just surviving has died down.
Depending on how comfortable you are as a DM, the players might have some choices in how they want to escape the chaos, but I think that giving them a very clear goal could be helpful: maybe they have a friend with a ship at the docks, or they know about a tunnel built for such a moment. The goal is to reach that escape route, and the challenges and encounters you put in their way become the obstacles to that goal.
Now, what kind of encounters do we use?
Combat encounters are a key staple here, and especially if this is the beginning of your campaign, giving your players an opportunity to try out their new character's abilities is something you don't want to hold off for too long, especially in an action-heavy introduction like this.
An invading force naturally lends itself to combat encounters - enemy soldiers, demons, undead, what-have-you, are easy enough to just throw at your players.
To ensure that there's a certain breathlessness to the escape, you'll want there to be multiple encounters (not all combat) before they can escape, and thus, this first fight (especially if starting at level 1) should be pretty easy. A low-difficulty encounter using the 2024 DMG's guidance will probably suit you fine.
Now, I have a tendency as a DM to rarely re-use monsters in the same campaign, but I you're not bound to that. Especially if this is some unified force invading a city, it would make sense to have the rank-and-file invaders use the same low-CR stat block. Say it's a demonic invasion: it would make sense for Manes to be the front-line fodder.
Later, to keep the stakes clear, a second combat encounter might still be more of the low-ranking monsters the party has seen before, but adding in something scarier - a Manes Vaporspawn, for example, jumps from CR 1/8 (two per player at level 1 for a low-difficulty encounter) to CR 1 (one per four players at level 1/low difficulty). Maybe the party fought off eight Manes in their first fight, then had some non-combat encounter after that, and then this scarier monster makes its debut in the second encounter, with just a pair of Manes to make it clear that these are all part of the same invasion.
We want to give the players a tougher enemy that's certainly reasonable for them to fight and defeat (again, we'll be using tougher things if they're starting at level 3,) but the key is that we want to make sure that the tougher monster feels tougher, and actually starts to make them fear defeat, even if they can still handle it.
The reason for this, is that we want to get them to a point where it's clear they need to flee: ideally, they defeat the Vaporspawn, but maybe they're really rough after that - maybe one PC goes unconscious.
We can be generous with healing items - maybe in the non-combat encounters we make sure they can find a healing potion or two. Getting healed up just means they can keep running.
Now, I think perhaps we have a combat encounter with a different objective: perhaps we need to save some civilians, reinforcing our party's identity as heroes even as they are also fighting to survive (or giving them the opportunity to show that they're self-centered antiheroes who leave others to a dreadful fate). Here, we stick to those easily-slain, low-CR monsters to make the party feel powerful again.
And lastly, the final combat, in the final stretch to their escape route, is where we force them to flee: An overtuned encounter where it's clear that the fate of the city is not something that they can currently change. What we do is we use several of the tougher monsters. Where once the party was fighting like eight Manes at a time, and a single Manes Vaporspawn was a bit more of a challenge, now the party sees, at a distance, like four of them. The Vaporspawn are not blocking their escape route - instead, they are there to chase the party to their escape.
As a DM, you might feel pressured, especially at low levels, to protect your players' new characters. But I do think that here, you'll have given them the information they need to say that these creatures are going to be too much for them.
A couple other notes:
First off, you want to vary things up - have non-combat encounters between the fights. Massive destruction can block off expected routes: maybe a tower falls down, blocking the street the party was going to take. This could force them down into the sewers (where they might have the encounter with that tougher monster) to get around the rubble. A burning building gives the party an opportunity to save some civilians at the risk of taking damage from smoke inhalation or even a level of exhaustion. Meeting heroic NPCs might give the party allies who show up later to cover their eventual escape.
Treating each of these vignettes as discrete encounters rather than amorphous roleplay opportunities might make you feel like you're railroading your players, but I think it'll help keep up the pace. Linearity in a moment like this helps sell the urgency of it, and once the party escapes the chaos, you can move to a more open campaign design.
The other thing I'd strongly encourage is ensuring that it feels like a lot of things are going on in the city. Imagine a big skybox where other, maybe larger, dramas are playing out. The party might just be fighting Manes, but perhaps we see the city's gryphon-mounted skyguard getting shredding out of the air by Vrocks.
Remember, we want to sell this catastrophe as a reason to become more powerful, and thus more capable of stopping something like this. Depending on your tastes, the carnage might be more visceral or more implied. Will your players feel thrilled by seeing others (maybe the city guard) getting eviscerated by the monsters as our protagonists flee, or will they feel that this is a failure that starts the story off on a sour note? If you feel it's going to be the latter (and here I think session zeroes and talks about tone are important outside of gameplay) consider instead showing more structural carnage - a famed wizard tower collapses, maybe blocking off a more obvious route of escape, or some temple or coliseum. Landmarks that once oriented the players will sell the importance of this event in their destruction.
Finally: while we want to kick things off intensely, even an explosive opening requires some build-up. If we're going to see a great city fall, you want to give the players some time to get to know it. In a four-hour play session, you probably want to start off introducing your characters in the city - a great time to lay out some of the locations where your encounters will take place. If we see a Wizard tower fall, maybe it belongs to an NPC that the party, or at least one member of the party, knows. We don't have to kill off that NPC, but we can at least raise the possibility that they've fallen along with their tower.
The thing is, without establishing the stakes, the carnage won't land as hard. A lot of stories set in the real world get to take a shortcut here: threatening New York lands because it's a city that most people are very familiar with. Threatening some fantasy city requires build-up because we need to know about it to care about it. Indeed, using an established setting like the Forgotten Realms can help here - if the players are familiar with Waterdeep, you could start the campaign off with chaos and people would feel invested. But if we assume that it's a homebrew setting or even just a more obscure one, we need a little time, at least, to get to know it.
All that being said, that doesn't mean we can't bring the chaos right at the start of a campaign. A connection to the city could happen in the backstories of the characters, or just how you describe it - making it clear that this is a place where people live, where there's a daily bustle of life that gets interrupted by our opening.
We might not know this city, but if you as the DM make some effort to remind people about what people living in a city are like, how a city lives and breathes, with all the humanity in it (even if it's not a human city,) we can feel that panic that makes an opening like this feel powerful.
Later on, the party will discover why this catastrophe took place, will find out who was responsible for it, and will confront the evil that kicked it all off. But for now, survival is the name of the game.
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