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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The Inspiration

Right now in Minnesota we’re going through a massive deep freeze, in the southern part of the state, we might not get above 0 Fahrenheit for several days, and the lows have been very low, -14 with -30 wind chill (-25 and -34 centigrade). So how can you create a game around something like that, and that is where The Frosts of Rhime come in.

The Setting

A deep magic, something long forgotten, has awakened throwing the lands of Rhime into an ice age. Frost Giants harrow the lands removing the smaller folks, humans, elves, halflings, and even breaking down into the dwellings of the dwarves deep below. A white dragon of an ancient stature sits on the remains of the largest city in the lands.

Deep deep below the rending claws of the dragon and delving of the Frost Giants, pockets of people huddle, always trying to dig deeper below, get closer to the center of the lands and further away from the ever increasing cold that is seeping down.

The Campaign

The player characters come from one of these pockets of people left down below. Just from that setting and telling them to come from one of the groups of people together is enough for the creation for a lot of good backstories.

Their goal, of course, is to return the lands to the ways that they were or at least stop them all from freezing to death. This means beating back Frost Giants, the ancient White Dragon, and more creatures of the cold before they freeze to death. Freezing is actually going to be one of the timers of the game. Unless they can make it back to one of the under ground settlements in time, which are moving, exhaustion becomes a real thing. This is a deep cold that even a magical resistance can only slow down a little.

There are two ways you can drop the players into this game. Firstly, start at level 1, give them small battles leading up to leveling up where they can start to deal with the bigger threats in the world. Or you drop them in at a higher level and let them start to deal with the bigger things. This is one where I might start at the higher level. I don’t know that survivability of low level characters is going to be that likely, even the most heroic.

When I talk about exhaustion, I’m talking about using those D&D rules where eventually you can die. Players at higher levels are going to have creative ways to deal with it more than characters at lower levels and they might be able to stay out for more prolonged times. It might be too deadly for lower level characters. I do want to tweak, a little how exhaustion hurts the players, instead of making their check for it at the end of the day, this is something from the middle of each day. And you need to spend a full day out of the elements deep below the ground to shake it. So no magical housing is going to get it out of your bones unless, maybe, the players spend a full 24 hours in there.

The players are going to battle their way up until they are eventually facing off against an ancient white dragon. At level 20, them versus the ancient white dragon should be in their advantage, but bring in some of the allies that the white dragon seems to have, like the frost giants.

Before that, they will need to get something, the mcguffin, something that the white dragon has used, somewhere in the lands to bring down this frost. Most likely at the top of a mountain that is treacherous to get up and could cause them to die just from exposure. So at the mid levels/early part of the campaign, make it about figuring out where that item is, what that item is, and how to undo what has already been done. Then as time goes on and they get better and stronger, let them go up there, deal with Frost Giants who are guarding the items for the white dragon.

How does this game sound to you? Do these post apocalyptic style of games where survival is key seem interesting to you or do you prefer more focused on high fantasy?

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“We see that you remember us, even if you don’t search for us anymore.”

A tall lithe woman stands on the top of one of these giant creatures with her fishy lips curled up in a sneer.

Boom, drop the players into that introductory scene. The fish people who are the descendants or maybe just the people who were lost in the neon seas are coming to exact their revenge upon the land and the people who abandoned them, or did they abandon those on land.

The players are going to have to first escape or be captured and taken to the under water city under the Neon seas. I think it should be something that the players do have a choice in, they can do either and both would offer some different challenges. First, if they escape, they are going to have to be on the run as the forces from the water are going to try and take back the land. If they go down into the underwater city, it’s going to be an escape that they have to eventually complete, not from a jail cell, but from the fact that the city is surround by leagues of water and they can’t breath underwater, yet.

From there, the story can go a number of different ways as well, but eventually it’s going to be about the players learning about the Neon Sea and what happened. As the story goes, this group of people traveled to the lands in search of a new continent to start their lives on, and to see what they could make for themselves. But things on the voyage didn’t go as planned. Thorogoth the Brave, whom the players were celebrating might have been more of a tyrant who led the people on ships not through storms and destruction, but through sacrifices and pain as they got rid of those who didn’t follow him in an effort to appease the god of the sea.

But not all who were being thrown over weren’t great as well, in fact, on the way to the new continent, several spies for the old lands were on the ship and were thrown over into the Neon Sea. And these people have been stirring up this return that is happening all to claim back the lands and to finally be able to send word back to the original continent about the lands and about what might be found on the new lands.

I would say depending on what the players do, that’ll determine what they find out about first. If they run, they find out about Thorogoth the Brave first, if they are captured, about the spies and the plan to return to the continent. So the players will need to get both sides to reconcile because eventually those from the original continent will come, and they are considered “bad” for some reason.

Now, there are a few ways you can go with this, they can unite as a group after taking out the spies against those from the original continent. Or they can pick either side to back. I want for this game to have a real sandbox feel and for them to start to understand the depths of the culture that they are in and also probably start to learn more about the continent that they are on as it’s been a few generations but the people have never really left the shore area and moved further into the island. Just kind of give it some funky things about the continent, probably dinosaurs somewhere on there, hidden ruins of ancient civilizations, and probably things that are going to make them question if this continent is the paradise they had hoped, maybe even finding out, and this would be a twist I would enjoy pulling off, that this new continent is actually their old continent, the one that they had before their previous continent and that this whole situation had actually played out before to some extent.

I wouldn’t weave in all of that at once, but start to lay the groundwork for a lot of those things and see what the players latch onto in terms of what you’ll make most important in your story. Normally there is a more defined end goal, but in this, we have people from the previous continent coming, are they really a BBEG, probably not, people from under the Neon Sea, probably not the BBEG either. So see what happens when things are a bit more grey, or in this case neon.

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In Locke & Key, it’s a story about a family who return to their father’s family house and the kids start finding magical keys throughout the house. Right there you have a basis for a game of D&D, so let’s see how I’m going to suggest turning it into one.

To start off with, you are likely not going to have kids nor, in a heavily fantasy setting, do I think that you’ll want to have a particular house or single location where all these keys are stored. Instead, you have Ashiri, a famous wizard from thousands of years ago, who legend has it, created many magical items and drove the fields of magic forward. No one knows what she created, but there are a lot of people who would love to get a hand on her work. Unfortunately there are a lot of con artists out there as well who claim to sell her items.

The game would start around discovering some sort of clue to the location of one of these items. Or the location, maybe, of one of the places that she worked, something where a lower level party is going to be able to do a dungeon crawl through it. Come up with a reason, such as the manuscript with it on having just been found as to why people haven’t gone there to loot it before. And don’t just give the players the information make them buy it, somehow, they can decide if they want to owe a favor later, agree to give away 75% of what they find, or something like that.

Give them a dungeon crawl but when they make it to the place, they find a locked door, not magically locked, from the outside, but something that a rogue would be able to pick, a wizard magic open, or a barbarian bash open. Let them get inside, and then that’s when you start having fun, you close the door behind them, even if the fighter or barbarian bashed through it, the door reconstructs and it’s magical, so immune to all damage, can’t be picked, and while the wizard can cast magic on it, if they have identify, they’ll know that it needs a particular magical item to open it, but what that item is, who knows.

Then give them a dungeon crawl, and hide a couple of keys in there. Don’t make them easy to find, but with two keys in there, and again, if they have identify, they’ll know they are magical and match up with the door. But only one of them should allow them out. The other one should do something else. I like the idea of the mirror prison from Locke & Key, where a player character might end up getting trapped. And maybe even have them find a third key that they think will work on the door but is more like the head key from Locke & Key where it goes into the back of someone’s neck.

I wouldn’t really put a ton of monsters in this dungeons, maybe some skeletons or something undead that Ashiri could have used as guards, but this place is meant to have been sealed up for a long time. Instead give them challenges and puzzles. Maybe there is a trap in a hallway that they can see because there’s a dead skeletal person in armor who has been cut in two. Well, they know there’s a trap there, and with a perception check they can see where blades or something that had cut them in two and also spot some pressure plates or something on the far end of the room that stops it. So give them things to do that focus on the characters abilities.

Once they get through this and have dealt with all the traps and they’ve headed back, I don’t know that you need to double cross them, but maybe have it that the person who got them to do this was blackmailed by someone else to send someone into get this, because the last person they sent in had failed, can even be the dead guy cut in half, so you could start tipping off the players. Or if the players get greedy, have someone come after them and start chasing them down. But while doing this, start hinting that the keys work anywhere, and have given them a clue to more of Ashiri’s locations.

Eventually, I think the campaign ends with them finding a near immortal version of Ashiri who has been twists and corrupted by some sort of magic. There can be some lesser bosses along the way, those who just want the keys for their own nefarious purposes. But make Ashiri someone who isn’t hiding away in one of her former places but is living publicly somehow. That’d make the players questions some of the things, or maybe Ashiri has been cursed to never enter her former places because she was going to bring on the end of the world. But go with an epic climax like that where whom the players thought someone was, it wasn’t the case.

I think that there’d be good buy-in pretty often from groups of players for this, and there’s a lot of room to play with it as the DM. You can create keys that do anything, which is the great part, and you can borrow from Locke & Key. The Head Key, from Locke & Key would work great if someone has gone insane and they have to go and rescue themselves from their own head or something like that or go into someone else’s head to try and pry out some information that they don’t remember. The Echo key to bring back a twisted echo of someone, especially if it’s a fallen player character would be amazing twist on things.

So would you play in a game like this or run one? What sort of character would you want to play?

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