I don’t think that matters if they already have. Dungeons and Dragons is a great spot to borrow, steal, and ask the players to help create your story with you. I talk about this often, Dungeons and Dragons is a cooperative story telling game, and that means that you can tell whatever story you want. Even if you are ripping off something else, go for it.

But You Want It To Be Original?

I get that, I really do. When I say rip something off, I don’t mean fully do that. Stealing a whole story is not going to be nearly as interesting as stealing pieces that you like. But using pieces that you like, that makes it easier on you. You don’t need to come up with everything yourself. I use stuff that I’ve read all the time, because it is cool. If there is a giant set piece in a story that I like, I will use that to create a combat or encounter in my game.

Tower of the Gods is a great example of this, you can find what is happening in that in the Friday Night D&D Posts. What is stolen in there? Well, first off, the whole idea of the tower, that is 100% stolen from the LitRPG series Arcane Ascension and Towers of Heaven. Heck, I named my campaign Towers of the Gods, it’s a bit on the nose. But I didn’t steal the whole plot of either of them.

How Do You Keep the Balance?

That is the trickier part, keeping a balance so that you don’t rip off everything. I think it’d be easy to just try and create the beats from either of those stories and see what happens. However, if someone already knows the story, that isn’t going to be interesting to them. It would be like playing through the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Frodo still needs to throw the ring into Mount Doom, that’s boring. And never give your players the One Ring, they will abuse the power.

Instead, pick and choose a few things. In Tower of the Gods, I took the leveling up or getting the class power from the tower from Arcane Ascension. In that book, you go into the power and you get a power of some sort and that is where it starts for the main character. But, I also took the idea of potentially fighting over the tower, but that was from Towers to Heaven. Two separate story ideas that I wove together.

Borrow Lightly

So, with that example, borrow lightly. From Arcane Ascension, I took the leveling and the school idea. The plot that I run is very different. On the flip side, Towers to Heaven, I introduced the idea of fighting over the tower. But how I run that is exceedingly different than how the author of that book wrote it.

Like I was saying, grab nuggets of things. A concept or a image that you really like from a story. Weave that into your game and it saves brain power for you. But just borrow a little bit, even if people don’t know what. Because I want to tell my own story, and most DM’s are going to want to tell something that is fairly well their own.

Steal Moments

This is basically the same thing as borrowing lightly. Don’t steal everything. But it is totally okay to steal things that stuck out to you. If there is an important moment in the story, such as the luck of the draw when getting your class in Arcane Ascension, steal that. I 100% just took that and put it into my story. They drink from a cup when they are about to exit the tower. My players picked a cup to drink from and that determined what class they got.

So that imagery, I really liked. It made sense to me for how you’d end up getting a class. Now, it totally went against how Dungeons and Dragons normally does it, but it was a fun way change things up for people who know D&D pretty well. I made it work different than it did in the book, though, giving the players more agency in potentially picking what class they ended up with.

Beg For Help

Now, this sounds silly, but asking the players to help will cause your story to verve at times towards story and tropes that have already been done. Most people who play Dungeons and Dragons know fantasy. You and I know all sorts of books, movies, and television shows that are fantasy. Whether we actively think about them all the time or not, that doesn’t matter, we know them. So when you ask for help in creating a location or character, you will find that tropes start to show up or ideas from books show up.

This is a good thing. Grounding your fantasy world and story into what people know is important. It means that you and the players are more connected to the world and can more easily understand what is going on. I get the idea to do something extremely out there and unique, but that isn’t always great. Sometimes it can take people out of the story, instead of keep them in.

Putting It All Together

So how much should you or shouldn’t you beg, borrow, and steal? That is a great question. For some stories, it might be a fair amount that is pulled in from other places. Or there might be chunks of the story that are and other chunks that aren’t.

In Tower of the Gods, the whole Dorin subplot, trust me, there is no way that is any published book. Or if it is, there is no way that I’d have made it to that part of a book, because it is just so weird. So while I borrow from Arcane Ascension and Towers to Heaven, there are other parts that you can blame the players for, or myself as the DM for letting it get there.

So don’t steal everything, people will know when you have the novel on the table with you. But borrowing a little bit, all of that is good. Stealing a memorable moment, that is amazing. And asking for help means that players will be even more engaged. Don’t be shy about it because what you do will never be exactly like that book, movie or television show.

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The Session

Things don’t go like they hope during the night. After dealing with two parties of goblins they were hoping that it would be an uneventful rest, but they still had Fukuro Kuma, the owlbear that the goblins had previously used and who Bokken had since adopted. And the goblins wanted it back. Using the distraction of a siren the goblin boss and two goblins sneak up on the camp and try and take down Bokken. It doesn’t work, but they do manage to get Fukuo Kuma knocked out again.

The battle doesn’t go well for the goblins. Barrai, near death yet again, thunderwaves the three goblins who were creating the ruckus sending them flying through the air and to their deaths as they wonder why they had done this in the first place. Thrain casts darkness on the Goblin Boss’s armor and with only Thrain really able to see through that darkness, he just slowly Eldritch Blasts him while Bokken and the Goblin Boss swing wildly at each other in the dark and generally missing.

Once that battle is over, the rest of the night is quite restful. At the morning they continue to the ford. On the way they cross paths with a group of four gnomes who said they had camped at the ford that past night. They had seen a trunk go floating by and one of them who had been quite drunk that night and was suffering for it this morning, claimed to have heard the trunk singing something about a “pirates life”. It had continued to float down the river towards the waterfall they said.

The group rushes to the waterfall and they see the trunk, battered and broken, but still floating, not too far down the river. They surmise that it had gotten stuck on some rocks for a little bit and was now drifting further. Since there was a cliff to climb down, Bokken uses a rope to let Barrai and Thrain down while he watches Fukuro Kuma, the donkey, and the wagon.

Sure enough, they find Dorin in the trunk. He has thrown up in a corner of it from his bumpy ride, and now firmly believes that he is a feared pirate captain. But his old ship no longer meets his needs or sanitary requirements. So he gives the trunk a proper sendoff pushing it into the river, borrowing Barrai’s crossbow, and shooting a flaming rag into the side and watching it burn as it floats down the river.

They head back up the cliff with Barrai grabbing Dorin as he starts to fall while climbing the cliff. At the top Dorin knights Barrai his first mate and claims the cart as his new ship in his quest to become the terror of the seven seas. They had over to the ford and it isn’t too bad, they are making a plan when Dorin, still standing in the cart like a captain of a ship decides to send it ahead into the water with the donkey still attached to it. Bokken is able to stop it as the donkey isn’t too keen on swimming while attached to a cart. At that point in time they decide to go to the ferry. There is also a mutiny as Dorin is slapped in the manacles that Barrai has.

They make it to the ferry with no problem and get passage around 5 in the evening. It is an uneventful trip, through Dorin tries to get Barrai to do another mutiny so that he can get the ferry as his new ship to sale the seas in. Barrai instead uses words of terror and causes Dorin to become deathly afraid of krakens that might be living in the water. So much so that he’s afraid to drink his own water. That helps them get across safely. Dorin also decides that the sea has too many pirates, so he’s going to become a land pirate.

The group pushes on further until they find a spot on the road that they think is a camping spot, it turns out to be a scenic overlook. But it doesn’t have many entrances and they decide it’s probably a pretty solid spot to camp anyways. They settle in for the night and Bokken sends Fukuro Kuma off to hunt for their dinner. They bring back a deer which Dorin wants to eat the heart of because he thinks it’ll give him powers if he eats the heart of a deer that he killed, which he didn’t. Then they settle in for a peaceful night.

Behind the DM’s Screen

We were down Kip again this week. The whole siren thing at the end of last session was actually a way for me to bring Kip back in if the player could have made it. Kip previously has made the siren be attached to Bokken. So the thought had been that the players would recognize it. Instead, it worked nicely as a goblin distraction. Since I didn’t ever say it was Kip, I had the possibility to change it up.

The goblin battle was interesting. Thrain used darkness to very good affect and definitely changed the dynamic of what happened. I like a good use of a spell like that.

And a lot of the Dorin stuff was made up on the fly. I decided that I wanted to make it obvious that Dorin was in the trunk. I think had he been looking out of the trunk, those who saw him would be likely to try and rescue him. But having a drunk gnome claim to hear singing, that worked. The pirate song made sense and then I just decided to run with it. It turned out to be really goofy and now Dorin is scared of dragons, dragonborn, and kraken.

What is something weird in a campaign you’ve played in that you have just run with?

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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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In the lands of Demythsteria there were rumors of an ancient evil. But they’d been always just that, rumors. An ancient ruler, Empress Esmeralda De’Valiran, who ruled with an iron fist and took everything and anything that she wanted without concern who is stepped on. But that was all just a fairytale, right? Something made up to keep kids in their bed or out of trouble.

Then, one day, there was a change, Mount Kalav, where Esmeralda De’Valiran was said to have to made her throne erupted raining down fire on the land. They say that you could hear the voice across all the lands, a seductive voice, a powerful voice, a voice that brought terror and desire to everyone’s hearts. It simply said, “My children, return.”

It’s been 100 years to the day since that fateful day, and while no one knows precisely what happened that day, the lands have fallen into chaos. Peace that had been kept for centuries between nations is now an all out war. People are searching for new gods, for any form of hope that they can find. But times are bad, and lava still flows, poisoning the lands from Mount Kalav.

So, in this game, obviously, Esmeralda De’Valiran is back and the players are going to end up facing off against her. But I’d have them start smaller than that, give them a false lead or something else to focus on. I think that cults are generally a solid way to start. Cultists aren’t that strong in D&D, at least out of the Monster Manual, and you can always beef them up over time. Make it so that your high priest or priestess is much stronger and have that be a mid point of the campaign showdown, something that lets slip that the cultists while definitely bringing on another end to the world are doing this to stop what they consider even a larger threat to humanity. Put the players on the path of Esmeralda De’Valiran.

I like the idea that Esmeralda De’Valiran is an Ancient Red Dragon, the Crimson Scales, but also that the Crimson Scale was something that she used in her past life. She’d been banished away somewhere, somehow, and now the players either have to defeat her, but that is going to be difficult because the lava. The fact that she’s going to be sitting at the top of extremely dangerous terrain that will be full of little and big monsters that love fire is going to be tough enough. Add in facing and Ancient Red Dragon, that is going to be almost impossible, except, the Crimson Scale is going to be something that they can use to their advantage.

For me, there are two things you could do with the Crimson Scale. Firstly, it could be something that they could tempt her off of the mountain with if they find it. Make it a massive scale the the players are going to be able to destroy, but something immensely important to to her, create lore around it and how it works. Now the players will be fighting an Ancient Red Dragon outside of it’s lair. Or you can make it something the players can take with them to her. If they can take it to her, now it’s something that they can use in battle. It’s a powerful artifact of some sort. Something that was her downfall the first time and could be it again. If she can somehow be judged by her own scale, it means that her powers wain and fade to some extent, but it is something that needs to be kept up. So the fight will be easier, but the players will be down one PC. And make it interesting for the PC, make it a mind battle where that’s where some of Esmeralda’s power is being pulled away to, and make it her polymorphed human form that they are battling in there and a form that the player recognizes. Make it someone who they worked with to stop the cultists.

Overall, more of a standard game, but I feel like it would have some bigger and more epic moments in it. I like the idea of the final battle coming after a slog, not something that takes too long, but maybe a couple of sessions fighting up the mountain, creating cinematic moments and bleeding the players of their resources to face off against Esmeralda De’Valiran. And if you do the mind battle, really build it up, I’d pull from the mirror world stuff in Doctor Strange so that it feels real and feels physical, but make it mental.

So, as I wrap up, would you want to play in a game like this? What things interest you, what don’t? Would you run a game like this?

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A portal from the abyss has opened up a few generations ago in terms of humans, and probably pushing it for some elves if they were around when it happened. Obviously, crap hit the proverbial fan and the nations banded together.

Now, there is a no way known to close to the Devil’s Maw as it’s known, but it’s turned the civilization into something that more closely resembles a steampunk world, but while there is some steam, it’s also based off of runic magic where they can harness different aspects of the Devil’s Maw to power the vehicles and contraptions.

The demons are also being held kind of at bay, but that’s still a fulltime job that the heartiest are recruited for. It’s a glamorous position, but not a long lasting one with the heat from the maw and the constant fighting. Meanwhile, the cities around the maw are the opulent places where the rich live and like to brush elbows with heroes who have survived fighting the demons.

I’m thinking that this is going to be a pretty rich world. With the world, I think there are a number of ways that you can do a story. The obvious choice would be that the demons somehow are slipping out and now the players have to deal with those rogue demons that are attacking from another direction or unexpected direction, and then try and plug that whole where they are slipping through.

However, I personally think it would be more interesting to run a conspiracy sort of game. The players catch wind of some dealings that seem shady, but they don’t know how shady. Eventually, it would lead to something big where the players are finding out that the Devil’s Maw could actually be closed, but it would cause all the runic magic to stop working. So, is it worth, whatever the cost is to keep it open, besides keeping back the demon hordes? That would be the big question for the players before the last mission, probably some sort of infiltration mission.

This setting does have one interesting thing. With the runic magic, I personally think that you could create another wizard subclass or it’s own class where they use “magic”, but that magic is mainly done by creating runes. It would be an interesting playable character since that is going to be something that maybe you are known for it. I had at one point in time started developing my own class for it, but there’s still a ton of work to do with that, I should probably go back to it at some point in time and then release it somewhere. I’m also seeing what’s already available on the Dungeons Masters Guild to see if there are options or things that I can tweak for my game.

Anyways, what do you think of the game ideas and the setting? Is it something you’d be interested in building a game in?

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The basic idea is that you are all players tied into a thieves guild. Or several thieves guilds in their cities. So it’s a bit of a twist from the standard heroic game. However, I don’t think that this is a straight up evil game. The thieves guilds are going to be more neutral groups, sure they do criminal activity, but they aren’t too brazen about it, and really, they are a sub economy in the world and worried more about their economic status on the black market, versus killing everything that moves.

This again, might be something you have to pull your players back from, and since it’s going to be a big part of the game, it’s going to be something that you’d want to bring up in session 0. And I’d even lay out the consequences for what getting caught for some of the crimes are. Murder will be a beheading, stuff like that, and possibly even introduce an infamy track or something that tracks where they are in thieves guild hierarchy, and how much they are on the city watch/guards radars.

In this game, I’d have the story focus around a couple big points that are going to be tied together. One should be in the city proper and one should be among the thieves guild. They should be both introduced at the beginning of the game, to at least some level to get the ball rolling. Eventually you’ll tie them together so that the one of the two paths the players have been ignoring now becomes important.

I also wouldn’t do the “B-Team” thing, where the second story line is being tracked by a “B-Team” that, when they intersect with the players, fills them in on what they missed out from that path. I’d keep the two paths separate, and put some specific information on one path only that the players now don’t have. Just don’t make it something critical to the story that they’d need to know to put it all together in the end.

Start with small goings on in both the city proper and in the undercity where the thieves guilds reside. Let the players deal with some sort of summoned creature that is causing issues. Maybe have the big bad as an elemental mage who decided to use their powers to get a hold of one of the thieves guilds or blackmail them, while on the surface they are starting to take out the other noble families in order to get the throne at some point in time. You can start with some small elemental creatures showing up in places and trace is back to the one guild. If he’s taken over the guild, by magic or persuasion, you could even start a war between guilds.

Have the players raid hideouts to find information, have them have to track down drop locations and fight off members of the other guild as well as elementals. Have an attack on the thieves guild that the players are part of. Escalate it to the point where it becomes an issue that’s getting really big and impossible for the players to ignore and just do their own thing. But at the same time, have the players also still have to be pulling a heist here or there and deal with their own contacts and drops.

Or they if they are more focused on the surface, those other things are still happening, but they are having to break into the mages guild, sneak into noble houses to investigate what is going on. Tracking down assassins or having to protect a noble who has ties to your guild.

I think that either of those things can work well, and the other things should be going on in the background. At some point serious fighting will break out on the surface or in the undercity, and that’s when you should start tying things together. This is kind of what kicks off the climax of the game where now the stories are brought together. Eventually the players have to deal with whomever is causing the issues.

Finally, I will say, this doesn’t have to be a game of all rogues. A thieves guild is going to need a wide variety of things. Even a paladin or cleric are needed, because when other members come back injured, or even are brought back dead, you want someone able to heal them or bring them back to life. So let your players play whatever they want.

What are your thoughts on this game? Does it seem like an interesting game to play in? Do you like the idea of two different paths the players could take or bounce between?

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