1920s campaign. Gumshoe detectives, patrolmen, and maybe a sgt. investigate alcohol or heroin smuggling in the area. Basic police procedural, with added era appropriate flair. Prison campaign Players play random criminals recently incarcerated long term in a federal prison facility. All housed on the same wing they interact and deal with common threats perhaps ending up calling the shots. Stranded campaign Players survive plane crash in the wild and must survive harsh elements and wildlife in order to make it back to civilization.

Crusader Campaign. Players are knights embarked to the holy land during one of the crusades. Along the way they must balance piety vs. practicality and may finally arrive at the holy lands far twisted beyond recognition as nothing more than brigands. But still they must fight the muslim hordes for Christendom. History calls them doomed from the start. Can the players defy fate? Alternatively this can be done with players as mercenaries in the Rhodesian bush war or Vietnam.

>>799 >Stranded campaign I like that one, In fact I was thinking of making a campaign like that but instead they're shipwrecked.

>>803 Yeah that could be fun. Theres ideas out there that are unique and can lead to very memorable campaigns. Some are risky, but the possibilities are there. Like gilligans island but serious. Maybe mid pacific so you can get komodo dragons and gators and sharks. but the plane angle gives you additional options such as arctic, jungle, mountainous, and desert. But regardless of location chosen each one has unique challenges to be modeled in advance so as to ensure a more enjoyably challenging simulation.

Destroy All Monsters style of campaign Make everyone huge and let them fuck shit up The enemies? Also huge Beat that giant with half a building, throw the monsterpede into a lake, stomp through the dumb enemies barrier, just go wild

Here's an idea: Try being original instead of copying copies of dungeons and dragons.

I've been kicking around one. Basically it's a tabletop version of Invader Zim, Destroy All Humans, and X-COM where you specifically play as alien invaders. The alien threat should most likely be a confederation of different alien races so the players have a lot of options for what to play, but some species would be naturally prone to animosity or better suited to all the same race. This would depend very heavily on session 0 play style to familiarize players with their options and the mechanics. Obviously something more like a xenomorph would be a lot harder to pull off and should have more specialized dice rolls for their character to succumb to instinct. Others could be grays, whose objectives would focus heavily on abductions and study. You really could mine quite a lot of pop scifi for player types and objectives. I would draw the line at lovecraftian entities simply because they're too powerful. I would however save that for NPC alien threats. Because I would also have modules structured around rival alien factions with different invasion methods and even more hostile attitudes, possibly even ones with active human collaborators. The emphasis should be on stealth, and the gameplay very objective-based. Humanity is very much a Humanity Fuck Yeah caliber of enemy mixed with some comic stupidity. The players should be an outlying force relative to their alien affiliation, possibly they crashed by accident, maybe they're the seed invaders meant to gather intelligence, but they shouldn't be the armada or mothership. Effectively blending in or hiding out would be critical to achieving their objectives. Players might get lucky on not being discovered but rest assured once it happens they will not hesitate to escalate the conflict from rednecks all the way up to MIBs if players get careless. This would also be some of the fun, I think some PARANOIA-flavor could be added in where the players are to some degree being set up to fail or get caught, and have to do damage control while attempting to bail on their mission. Actually, it would make a lot of sense for the setup to be that the players crashed their vessel and have to work towards being evacuated from earth undiscovered. Honestly the more I think about it the more scenarios and angles I see possible. There could be peaceable aliens the players could be, and the campaign would focus on establishing contact with the CORRECT type of humans, and dealing with the politics of that, or even having to fight off an invasion from another collection of aliens.

Basically like a giant winged lizard and it can breathe fire sometimes

I've been wanting to do a Grey Goo apocalypse themed game for a while. What are some interesting ideas I could do with it, mechanically and narratively?

>>2014 Realistically? you couldn't, Grey goo would just be instant death. I guess you could have a whole campaign centered around stopping the grey goo event. Could be pretty fun, corporate spies infiltrating some rival HQ and finding out about the grey goo.

>>2014 >>2030 Or even better, have campaign centered around escaping planet. Collecting technology, resources and know-how to build seed-ship, while creating trying to slow down grey goo progress through world.

>>2030 >>2034 My current idea is that the world is being slowly transformed intro grey goo by an antagonist that is controling it, and has several urderlings overseeing the gooification of several zones, and the party has to chose where to act first to cut those zones from the bbeg and stop the spread (and maybe use it for their own ends), while the others progress (and get harder to justify level scaling) without their intervention.

In a medieval-fantasy campaign, news have arrived of some mysterious creature who appeared in some random village, and the local priest is asking the adventurers to escort that thing to the city's big temple where the priests and local wizard's guild can try to determine if it's a demon or an angel or a messenger of the gods, and what to do with it, or if it's possible to send it back, unsummon it, whatever It's an isekai'ed 20something year old improbably-gendered social studies major with clown hairs and nails in zem's face neo-nu-gamer whose only skills in life are pro-trans twatter and modding political correctness on mobile-fortnite, and xir's smartphone is completely out of signal and batteries it would be a bad idea to let it be captured by goblins, they would be in awe of its piercings

>>1924 Anonymous you need to copyright this

>>793 (OP) I am considering creating a series of homebrew subclasses for the underperforming (combat-wise or otherwise) classes in order to encourage further homebrew for the next campaign and so everyone plays a custom subclass. The catch is that I would not allow multiclassing (maaaaybe up to 1 to 3 level dips depending on the specific class, but ideally none). What do you think of this one for starters?

>>2030 You can do it but you need to put limits on the swarm. Nanomachines also come with a host of disadvantages and vulnerabilities on their own. The square cube law and the law of thermodynamics make nano machines extremely sensitive to heat. Prey by Michael Crichton provides a good example of a workable swarm of berserk nano machines.

>>2225 Forgot my pic.

>>2225 >>2226 I'll check that one out, let's see if it gives me some ideas.

If I had the players to do a long campaign, I want to really run a mushroom themed BBEG. Thallids, Myconids, etc. I feel like they're the more sensible than Mind Flayers in terms of mind control and decay. I like the idea of the Rotweb, a commune of Myconids that are trying to seize control of the surface. I want to give NPCs minor symptoms of being parasitized, and the only way to diagnose them is the fact they stop bleeding normally, the fungus puppeting their bodies around just barely keeping their blood from hardening. I would love to allude to the MGS:V virus that drove the soldiers to go somewhere high and have them sporulate to kill towns as fruiting bodies erupt from their hands and fingers, like the ants that get infected with Cordyceps fungus. Maybe some Psilocybin etc.

>>2226 Listened to this on audiobook years ago, not Crichton's best work but still good stuff.

>>2030 >>2225 Funny enough, I was thinking of throwing a Von-Neumann Universal Constructor Swarm at my PCs in the Traveler campaign I'm working on. I know that's probably not the correct name since a VNUC is more for digital cellular automata but I think it's appropriate since if you think about it, there is not much difference between it and a Von-Neumann probe. https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Industrial_Nanorobotics_(SMAC) https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nano_Factory_(SMAC) Basically the idea behind it is that since they're all supposed to be asteroid miners, they should encounter some piece of high technology that fill the niche they do at their current tech level. Or rather a piece of technology that fills the entire supply chain that they are a part of. From ore extraction, to processing, refining, and then manufacturing into a final product.

>>2225 Here's a idea, the nanomachines are hard countered by high levels of pollution. Oil and trash clogged waterways are just death swamps for these things, greasy smog clouds mess up their sensors killing them, trash mountains are a trap that they keep going into and getting stuck inside due to small traces of biomaterial in the trash. Let the overused idea of "pollution bad" be turned on its head where now for once it's temporarily good. >>1214 I love this

>>799 >Prison campaign >Players play random criminals recently incarcerated long term in a federal prison facility. All housed on the same wing they interact and deal with common threats perhaps ending up calling the shots. Probably not your intention but the premise reminds me of The Suffering, just in co-op mode this time.