Normally in a game of Dungeons and Dragons the world sucks. Everything is breaking down, there is some evil king, mad wizard, or power hungry dragon that is going to kill everything. It could be that there’s a vengeful god who is going to smite the world. Or a demon comes up the pits of hell to rain fire and brimstone down upon the lands.

But this idea, it isn’t that type of game. The world is peaceful and the characters lead normal lives. No one goes out adventuring to stop anything, there are no wars that need to be broken up. Goblins are nice, Chromatic Dragons are peaceful, deomons aren’t even a thing that cross people’s minds.

This, however, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And it kind of needs to be that way, because otherwise it’s a boring game. If there is no danger, what is going to push the players out adventuring? What is going to keep them going out instead of just starting a nice little school for adventurers? Where do you get even the skills for adventuring?

The Perfect World

The lands of Calagathra are beautiful. The crops grow and there is always enough food. While people get old and pass away, no one has died of an accident or illness. There are no wars between the neighboring rulers. Everything is amazing.

The players start out in the capitol city of one of the lands, and everything is amazing. They are part of a school which is focused on teaching about the history of the lands. But the lands of Calagathra only seem to go back about 1000 years. Before that, besides the creation story, there is no information. But there are rumors of ruins, at the edges of the Silver Mountains, in the middle of the Swamps of Carthak, and deep below the blue waves of the Estidial Sea.

That is the jumping off point for the campaign. The players, either because they are required to or because they want to, will pick one to go investigate. What they find is going to be a world that doesn’t match the rest of Calagathra. Going to the place is not a sanctioned activity, but a Professor can ask them to assist or investigate something if they need motivation. But the ruins are banned for people to go to, for some reason. But everything else is so perfect that no one cares. Most people who study are doing so because technology, magic, and knowledge of the natural worlds is growing at an amazing rate.

The Ruins

The ruins should tell the players that something isn’t what it seems. Which ever one they pick, it is going to be the first spot they encounter danger. The further they go into the ruins, the more danger there is. We are talking skeletons in some areas, traps in other areas, but also just injury, checks they need to make to avoid accidents. If you make a trap, maybe make it a poison or a disease.

With that, though, the player characters learn about the world as well. They find out that the perfect lands of Calagathra might not have been so perfect before. The ruins contain signs of battles, they find remains, unanimated, of people, they see ghosts and specters who either attack or beg for help. And the characters should be unprepared for this. I would let the characters buy weapons, but when they start, roll for gold instead of letting them pick equipment. Weapons outside of something like an axe or knife don’t exist in this world or are just toys.

The further the go into the ruins, the more weird that they find, like I have said. But what’s in the middle? I think there needs to be something that captures their attention. The adventure is kicked off by whatever they find. Bind a spirit of something powerful and hide it away deep in the ruins.

Break The World

That spirit, that is a good spirit. Or it was a good spirit anyways. The spirit tells a lie about why it was trapped and some of the truth when pressed. It was trapped along with three of it’s kin to create almost a protective field around the lands of Calagathra. Nothing bad is allowed to come through, no murders, no robberies, no diseases, no accidents, nothing of the sort. The players, by stepping foot into this area, are now free of the compulsion to be good, however. In fact, anyone who steps into the ruins, any of them will lose that compulsion.

The spirit asks to be freed. Basically talking about all the pain, suffering and agony that it is taking on, the stuff that could be happening to the people. Not that will, but that could happen, all the possibilities, and how it is slowly tearing it apart. The spirit promises to help them, promises to try and keep as much calamity at bay as it can, in exchange to being freed. It should only promise twice though.

Now, there are a few things that can happen. The players can free the spirit. If they don’t, someone else can free another spirit. Maybe have the professor leading one team and the players going on another. Either way, when one spirit is freed, you can either have the other two freed or all the pain and everything can crash into those two causing them to explode or something along those lines.

Either way, when the players come back to town, or come back to the world of Calagathra, things are going poorly. People are getting sick and something like a common cold is now a big deal because no immune system has had to deal with anything for years. People break a leg and that does them in because no one knows how to heal. The weather starts to become unpredictable versus a light shower most mornings and then sunny in the afternoon with a mid 70’s high. Basically the world is breaking up.

Where To Go From There?

There are so many ways you can go with this. Villains arise, dragons start to horde again and attack, demons could even show up. And of course, the players will be blamed at least in the capitol and at their school for what happened. So put the players on the run. Also, the good spirit, make it fey, and it didn’t promise three times, and it said it’d help as much as it can. However, the other two spirits did not. So even the helpful spirit, which should bounce between our realm and the fey realm needing to recharge, shouldn’t be that helpful.

The decision or the players asks if they should capture, basically torturing the spirits again, or if there is another answer. As well as they should be on the run, and they need to try and stop some power hungry people who happen to be ahead of the curve when it comes to being the ones in control.

At the end of the campaign, I think the players will face a decision that can go a few ways. They can capture spirits again and learn to trap them. Or they can do a never ending job of stopping power hungry wizards or dragons, but there will be a big bad who is going to try and destroy the world. That can be the one they focus on at the end of campaign and need to stop.

Heck, even make it their Professor who is stepping in wherever they create a power vacuum by stopping someone else, pretending to be good. Make it their scheme that set this all in motion. The Professor can monologue about how they had gone to the ruins before and been enlightened. They knew that they need a fall person to free the spirits, someone who everyone would blame. They could then be the good person coming in after, but really, they wanted to destroy it in a way where they ruled everything.

And that is the Perfect World campaign. Is this one that you’d be interested in running? As a player would you want to play in a game like this? Now, it hits some traditional things later on, how would you role play in the perfect world?

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