Creating a campaign

[Diomitus]

Hello FG community,

I recently started a "campaign" (really just a series of dungeon crawls for a group of players.

But they would like to do a long term campaign.

Here's a thought I had;

There is a city which has statues of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. Each statue is missing its head and weapon. The players are tasked with finding the pieces to restore the spell keeping the apocalypse at bay.

The players hack and slash through dungeons collecting the pieces of the statues.

I'm trying to think of an interesting way to introduce the players to the city, the person tasking them with recovering the pieces, and how each piece should be guarded.

Any ideas?

[seycyrus]

I like the idea, but it still sounds like a series of dungeons to me. Won't it be fairly obvious to the players from the onset? To me a campaign is a bit more open ended (at least it should appear to be from the players point of view), and ambiguous.

[Diomitus]

so do you think that should be an over-arching sort of theme and have something else going on at the same time? periodically dipping into the statue recovering?

[Mask_of_winter]

You could add individual character arcs like tv series do. Players love that stuff.

[Diomitus]

ah yes indeed! I'll have them flesh out their characters a bit more and take a shot at that

[Mortar]

How many players do you have? You could link each piece or a couple of pieces to each character in some way. If its multiple pieces, make them pieces from different statues. It sounds epic level type stuff you have in mind so the pieces get progressively more difficult to obtain...and literally make them search the ends of the world for them.

[Diomitus]

7 players

Well it's really what happens after they find then all that is the kicker

[Mortar]

So each of the seven has some link to an individual piece from the statues....they need all of those to find that last one. Like I said before make them literally span the world looking for those seven...then the finding of the last one is the beginning of the epic ending you're thinking of.

The link each piece could be family (the family guarded it, for some reason of the knowledge of the why was lost, then the family lost all knowledge of it completely); mystical (some old witch/hag/seer walks up to the player and announces some dire prophecy -and the whole city/world feels the announcement in some way), divine/demonic...you get the idea.

By the time they have found the last part they definitely will like they are on an epic trip.