Campaigns in a nutshell. Adventures in a sentence.

Bohandas said:

It's actually inspired by the last segment of the song "Paradise By the Dashboard Lights" by Meatloaf

"...Started swearing to my god and on my mother's grave
That I would love you to the end of time
I swore I would love you to the end of time!
So now I'm praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
'Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don't think that I can really survive...
...I'm praying for the end of time
It's all that I can do
Praying for the end of time
So I can end my time with you!"

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Love that!

I've always thought it would be a fun exercise to think of campaigns based on popular song lyrics.

Stairway to Heaven is one that comes to mind - perhaps the Lady of Pain starts trying to collect as much gold as possible and it gets revealed that she's trying to build a stairway to Mount Celestia for some reason...

This may require a different thread

Eyes of Nine said:

Love that!

I've always thought it would be a fun exercise to think of campaigns based on popular song lyrics.

Stairway to Heaven is one that comes to mind - perhaps the Lady of Pain starts trying to collect as much gold as possible and it gets revealed that she's trying to build a stairway to Mount Celestia for some reason...

This may require a different thread

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I've always imagined Stairway to Heaven as the elevator music that plays on an orbital lift

Eyes of Nine said:

I've always thought it would be a fun exercise to think of campaigns based on popular song lyrics.

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A couple years ago I had a secret society in my game based on the song The True Wheel by Brian Eno. It's something I've wanted to do since high school.

Missing God - In a setting wherein the gods actually do something (rather than being redundant figureheads as in most D&D settings) one of the gods has gone missing and the thing that they rule over has simply ceased to be (or alternately, has gone haywire). This coule be either a seriousand potentially apocalyptic event* or more of a quality of life type thing**. In either case the PCs need to retrieve the missing deity or mitigate the effects of their absence. Alternately maybe it's the god of something bad that has gone missing and the PCs need to make sure that they don't come back

*(such as the plants ceasing to grow in the myth where Demeter abandoned her duties to search for Persephone or the sun ceasing to shine when Amaterasu got fed up with Susanoo's nonsense)
**(such as the disappearance of sexual desire during Ishtar's descent to the underworld)

I like that first version. Very classic.

I’ll note that DC Comics did a comic series about Lucifer abandoning his duties in Hell for a while, which was adapted into the TV series Lucifer.

Also, I seem to remember one story where Death itself stopped doing its job for a while, with horrifying consequences.

A twist on the idea would be if the missing divinity didn’t want to “return to duty” after being found.

Dannyalcatraz said:

I like that first version. Very classic.

I’ll note that DC Comics did a comic series about Lucifer abandoning his duties in Hell for a while, which was adapted into the TV series Lucifer.

Also, I seem to remember one story where Death itself stopped doing its job for a while, with horrifying consequences.

A twist on the idea would be if the missing divinity didn’t want to “return to duty” after being found.

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And one of the PCs had to take on the mantle of the divinity? And then the PCs understand all the bureaucratic headache of being a god. Sounds more like a Nobilis campaign than D&D tbh

Eyes of Nine said:

And one of the PCs had to take on the mantle of the divinity? And then the PCs understand all the bureaucratic headache of being a god. Sounds more like a Nobilis campaign than D&D tbh

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There’s more than one solution. They could convince the divinity to return. One of them could assume the mantle.

Or maybe they could work out something like a power-sharing agreement or even a council to take up the abandoned post.

And leaving the post unfilled could lead to a VERY interesting setting, depending on what role has been abdicated.

Another possible out of the box solution would be to remove another god to cancel the situation out. Like the goddess of crops goes missing so now they have a limited timeframe to eliminate either the god of hunger or the god of death

Firefighters- The city is on fire and the player characters must put it out in the only sensible way - by fighting dozens and dozens of fire elementals

Foreign Factions- Some kind of adventure revooving around one of the Plaenescape sigilian factions but set in a relatively mundane world on the material plane, where the factions are unknown and exotic. Kind of a Clive Barker vibe; mysterious and powerful in the manner of the Cenobites of the Order of the Gash (who, btw, have basically the same tenets - although not methods - as the Society of Sensation anyway) or any of the otherworldly groups from Imajica

Yah-Sabaoth - Call of Cthulhu game set during bible times

Voyager From Another World- More of a possible setting background element and possible inciting incident than a specific adventure here. Sometime in the mid to late 20th century the space program recovers an alien artifact that's kind of like the Voyager Golden record but with much more information packed much more densely; basically on a series of HD-Rosettas. Most of them are eventually translated as a series of vector equations, and these form a small LLM AI (think gpt-2 sized). On 20th century tech it takes a dedicated skyscraper sized building to run it. ANYWAY the knock-on effects are that a bunch of scientific advances happen early and a bunch of weird philosophical and cultural ideas make their way into the government and of course all of it is highly distorted because of the limitations of the small model and the people running the program not being fully aware of the limitations.

Eyes of Nine said:

And one of the PCs had to take on the mantle of the divinity? And then the PCs understand all the bureaucratic headache of being a god. Sounds more like a Nobilis campaign than D&D tbh

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They still sell all the Primal Order capsystem books WotC used to make before Magic came out. Perfectly workable system for PCs drifting into godhood. Readily adaptable to a wide variety of game systems, since it was designed from the ground up to be an addition to an existing set of rules rather than its own thing.