Welcome back to another installment of Friday Night Dungeons and Dragons.

The idea for this game came from my writing about Tieflings yesterday. I kind of did a light version of the story with the firefighter backstory that I created, however, I think that can be expanded and changed up into an actual campaign.

In the world, before the PC’s ever showed up, there was a problem with the elemental plane of fire. Mainly, they were trying to take over the world that the PC’s live on. So pretty standard D&D style problem, but in a non-standard solution, after the races of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, etc. had tried to and suffered massive causalities in driving back and holding the line against the fire elementals, someone came up with the idea that, hey, we have a few Tieflings, and they do well against fire, let’s intentionally make more Tieflings.

This idea made enough sense to the others in their moment of loss and need that they agreed to it. They entered into deals with various of the Lords of hell and were able to drive back the fire elementals. But they weren’t able to seal the breach, and as it turned out, it was a bad idea anyways, because the Tieflings who showed up, many of them demanded places of power and authority, because they were keeping the fire elementals at bay. Now it’s several thousand years later.

The players are dealing with a world where there are still a ton of Tieflings around, because whenever any race would try and rise up against the Tieflings, the fire elemental problem would start again, and the Lords of Hell would have something to say about it.

This is going to be a Star Wars style game, I would call it, with some conspiracy thrown in. The players are going to be part of a rebellion against the Tiefling and Lords of Hell rule. But a full frontal rebellion has been shown time and time again to be hard on the race that does it, especially the dwarves which only have small pockets left.

The player characters will be part of the same cell that is doing guerrilla warfare. Strongholds that the Lords and Ladies of Hell have set up are there main target, without them backing the Tieflings, it might be possible to weaken their control. This would be lower level, I think that the Lords and Ladies of Hell would probably be keeping slaves, so players would work on freeing slaves and stopping new ones from coming in, versus a full assault on the keep.

As you move up in levels, the player characters should be getting more and more important missions which should eventually lead them to discovering that Asmodeus himself was the one who pointed the Fire Elementals towards the planet the players live on. Asmodeus should be too powerful a BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) for the players to kill even at level 20, but their goal shouldn’t be killing him, it should be closing down the portal to the elemental plane of fire, because once that’s gone, the need for Tieflings is gone and possibly balance will be able to be restored.

Or at least that should be the original goal. Once that is done, the players are going to see Asmodeus and the Lords and Ladies of the hells starts a concerted effort to take over the world themselves, which was of course Asmodeus’s plan. He just didn’t want to tip his hand that he had put the elemental plane of fire into the world, and he wanted to build up his Tiefling army. Now, the players need to go and destroy the portal to hell that the Lords and Ladies of Hell have built their keeps around.

Players, in this game, are going to need to be on board with a game that isn’t just pure smash and in your face combat. There is going to be sneaking and subtly that go into their missions. The last thing they are going to have happen is getting captured, at least until higher levels when getting captured might be the simplest way into a place, because they have the skills needed to get out of a standard jail.

I like this idea because it does have that different element where it isn’t just about combat. I also like it because it’s a twist on Tieflings, and it’s intrigue within intrigue. This is definitely a game where the players are going to need backstory to be able to roleplay their characters in a non-generic fantasy setting. But don’t info dump though that would be tempting. Just, when someone asks if they would know something about the history of the world, say “yes” and then give them the information without making them roll for anything.

So what do you think of this idea? Would you play in a game like this?

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