"You all meet in a tavern..." How to start a campaign

The longest campaign I've been in (almost two years and finally coming to the end) started with the player characters signing up for a mercenary company, which worked just fine for my character, who was an ex-soldier turned bounty hunter, and at that time, pretty apathetic about the morality of his employers as long as the money was good and the jobs weren't directly harming non-combatants.

Not so much for the (good aligned) traveling scholar or the time wizard, and things just got more and more dysfunctional from there.

The current DM's taking a couple weeks off from the main campaign, so another player ran a one-shot dungeon the other night.

We start in front of this crypt, see a character who I guess was a Mary Sue version of the DM'ing player fall down a pit trap, and spend the first twenty minutes of the session lowering the rogue down into it so he can loot the guy's corpse. :|

EDIT: I'm up next; same thing I mentioned last page. You All Meet in an Inn, and then a zombie bear comes in through the wall.

edited 22nd Apr '14 9:59:12 AM by Knowlessman

I got "you all meet in a speakeasy" as a suggestion from a player, and damn it is just the greatest.

One fantasy campaign I ran started with "you were all on the losing side of a Succession Crisis and are being exiled to another dimension." So they started on the other side of a one-way portal in the middle of a wilderness, with limited gear and supplies. Stick together or be eaten by dinosaurs....

Worst result to an opening gathering was in a very short-lived Traveller campaign. Everyone rolled up their characters. One of them was a merchant with a trading ship. So the opening became "You've all mustered out of your previous careers. Oh look, there's a merchant ship that needs crew." What I had not counted on was that other than the merchant, everyone was playing sociopaths. Within an hour, they had mutinied, killed the merchant and taken control of the ship.

At which point I asked for Navigation rolls. Turns out their plans had not included making sure at least one of them knew how to fly the ship they were in.

I plan on having them start out in prison, and get the offer of community service, exchanging 9 quests for one wish a piece.

1. My first GURPS setting featured space station crew onboard the Unity, Earth's first habitable space station. They had one session on board this, and then they went into cryosleep for flash-teaching (to gain one skill after a period of hibernation). When they woke up, they had gained many more skills and then space station was in ruins, with electrical shortages and water flooding the main pods.

The station had made reentry and landfall, and now they were running around Western Africa in the former nation of Gabon, eight hundred years in the future after a global collapse.

2. My current GURPS setting is a Ravenloft (Gothic/dark fantasy horror) campaign, and it features P Cs in the nation of Darkon. Darkon, as those familiar with the setting will know, has a magical feature which causes newcomers to lose their memories. Therefore, all the P Cs were amnesiacs and they were making their way in an unfamiliar cosmopolitan land. One PC actually had memories, being a Darkonian native sent to retrieve the "mind-lost" P Cs, but it's not clear if his memories are complete or whether they've been planted to manipulate him.

My current campaign started when my character, a sorcerer, snuck on board a ship to a newly-discovered island, where he met the other PC, a cleric of the god of adventure and knowledge, who took a shine to my character and promised not to rat him out.

Also, what would be the best place on this forum to post an open-source campaign setting I've just made up?

Well, you're in the right subforum; maybe either find a "Post Your Homebrew Campaigns Here" thread, or make one. I believe it's the Create Conversation button at the bottom of the thread list thing.

I started a pirate game of 13th Age with the PC's chained to the oars in a slaver galley.

Two, I've done

"You all meet in a brothel. ...Yes, you do. You have 30 seconds to decide if you're a client or an employee."

"You're playing in a local poker tournament. The game is high stakes and the pot is quite high. You are all cheating."

A campaign I was in for two sessions before we all just decided "screw it, we all have bad schedules, try again in a month" started with "So you've all just escaped from a mental hospital (the DM gave us a few basics for our characters we had to expand on, one being " you were in a mental hospital because you did xyz") What do?"

it was not a well put together game and the DM was a bit of a railroader, but I think it'd be fun to go back to that character.

the current campaign I'm in had us all get started individually and meet one by one. My Paladin got a Call to go give aid to a halfling community, on her way she met up with a Cleric and together they rescued a kobold from slavery, then all of us met up with a Druid also tasked with helping the community (or rather, their sheep) and we fell in with a spoiled brat gnome something who had cart troubles.

edited 23rd Mar '15 10:52:13 AM by Ellowen

I had two ideas that I liked but have never had the opportunity to suggest to a DM.

1. You are all invited to a tourney of the various classes at a particularly large estate of a high ranking local official. Many people from all over have come to compete and you and your companions meet there. Suddenly the town is attacked. While the big heroes go off to handle the serious threats you and your companions handle the small fry and other stuff that gets past them and discover you work well together and choose to travel and quest together to one day reach the same level as the heroes you watched at the tourney.

2. You and your companions are all apprenticed to high ranking members of your various classes who were also once an adventuring party themselves. Upon your graduation you discover your final test is to go out to a location your mentors all once visited and bring back something to prove your success and ability to work together as a team.

I did a short-lived Vampire The Requiem campaign set in New York during Prohibition. It began with the characters as part of the same crew delivering a shipment of booze into Manhattan and getting ambushed by a rival gang. Fortunately my players were vampires and the attackers weren't.

A Star Wars game I played a while back had the characters as officers on a small Imperial craft who decided after witnessing one too many atrocities that they were going to mutiny and take over. Once we seized the bridge, my character sealed off the internal bulkheads and spaced the Stormtroopers.

The D&D campaign that I'm running right now had the characters start in a city whose water supply had suddenly turned foul. Each character had a personal reason to look into it, and over the course of the adventure they decided to form an adventuring company.

I did one a while back where the characters met in a dungeon. The town then came under attack by Orcs, creating enough of a distraction for the group of ne'er do wells to escape.

One D20 Modern campaign I did a while ago had two characters as a teacher and college students investigating some strange goings-on.

Huh, I thought I had posted here. Anyway, I have run one campaign: a D6 Star Wars game. I'm quite proud of how I began the story, and how I tailored it to each of the characters.

The game was set about a year before the Battle of Yavin. We had six players. One, a friend of mine, was playing an ex-Republic soldier (human, not a clone) named Church that had retired after the Empire formed. His wife and daughter were killed by the empire and it was covered up that they were Rebels (in actuality his daughter was force-sensitive and was abducted and replaced with a body double), and was trying to track down the people responsible. We had a Togruta smuggler indebted to a Hutt and a Jawa engineer that basically hijacked her ship ("We get parts next stop. Promise.") Then, we had a pair of Trandoshan brothers who were bounty hunters for a guild, and their pet droid, a near-homicidal R2 unit painted like a soccer ball (I think people can guess why).

I had them all start on Nar Shaddaa, a junk planet. It was currently occupied by a force of pirates, and all three groups were there for different reasons. Everyone began play fleeing the pirates, being chased into a central area before they teamed up.

All three groups had different reasons: Church had found the Star Destroyer that was in the system when his family was murdered, and had salvaged the ship's datacore, which angered the pirates currently running salvage. Team Smuggler (as I called them) were dropping off a delivery, which was then ambushed by pirates wanting a cut. Team Bounty Hunter, meanwhile, had been dispatched to the planet to capture the pirate leader's son, and were dragging him with them whilst fighting the largest group of pirates. The R2 unit's player couldn't show up, so I had the ship the hunters had chartered leave without them, and the droid. He showed up next session having spaced the crew and been rescued by a spaceport's police.

Only thing I was disappointed by was how the Jawa player hindered my planned escape method for the party; the datacore Church stole had data on it to make a one-use-only distress call, and an Imperial force would arrive in the sector. The jawa withheld this unless he got paid. He didn't. Him withholding things until he got paid became a theme, unfortunately; medpacs, upgrades, the ship's air...

edited 21st Jun '15 5:26:04 PM by Ninjaxenomorph

When I have a group that's conducive too it (e.g. people I've played with before usually) I like to start out with one day of the characters just living their daily lives, then the next day The Call Knows Where You Live. Usually in the form of the brutal murder of a loved one, but one way or another, the heroes' mundane lives get turned upside-down completely.

I would like, someday, to run a campaign where the PC's actually start out as commoners with only an NPC class level and have to scrape their PC l levels together from nothing (upgrading them to the same PC level that they had in commoner and just keeping the higher HD and HP total), but I'm a long way off from being confidant enough to try that and don't really know if it'd work.

Would be interesting to see campaign where characters start as kids before time skip or something, but I'd guess that would be hard thing to do xD

I think my favorites are...

"You're all on a truck/cart. You were drafted not three hours ago into <insert military force here>, they must have been impressed with you because you're graduating boot camp early and going right to the front lines."

and

"You wake up stuck to each other... not with each other... to each other... you have no idea how you got here, but you suspect it has something to do with the empty whiskey bottles right next to the ones labeled Sovereign Glue."

Had another where the players told me what they wanted their characters to be/do and I wrote up their sheets, then I handed the sheets to the wrong people on purpose and told them that they had no idea who they themselves were, but they each recognized one other player. That was fun because I threw in random extra skills and the like for each.

I just ran a short, really low-effort campaign last semester, where I had the party start in an inn. Predictably, for me, the inn and town were attacked by goblins.

I only had two players, so I threw in an NPC Fighter at the same level to help them.
The bard hid under the inn the whole fight while the Fighter and Barbarian, with more help from town guards, cleaned out the goblins (I had words with the bard's player, who was also my roommate, and he dumped the bard for a tiefling Warlock who ended up with 20 Charisma).

I'm starting to feel wary of a potential recurring theme here. Gonna try and not feed it.

Idea I have for a new campaign is that they're all city guards tasked with protecting the king while he makes a public speech. Currently working on that, and debating making them take one level of Fighter (5th edition Fighter is surprisingly well-equipped to be a basic bodyguard) and then multiclass/respec in the second session on.

A short mini-adventure that I'll never run involving....actually, let's not spoil the details.

The plot hooks as follows were class/job dependent, to some extent: A local druid has sent a call for assistance due to strange creatures appearing in the woods (Ranger, Druid, or otherwise nature-focused), the local temple to the sun god is a bit in disrepair and you're sent to help get it back up to snuff (Cleric, Paladin, or otherwise working for the clergy), you're staying at the inn and the local warehouse owner just posted a notice asking for rat exterminators (anybody), a weird standing stone nearby has started emitting weird colors in the moonlight and you're going to investigate/sightsee (magical or researcher/anybody).

Then in the process of investigating, the P Cs would meet up and figure out how those are all related to each other.

Seems like you'd be running a separate campaign for each character until they did meet up. :/

That might be the most elegant way to do it, but the tricky part is that you almost HAVE to run them concurrently, because it's hard to predict where players will be ahead of time so you can join them up smoothly.

Not really my problem though, I'm never going to run the adventure.

Timeskips. Everybody has their prelude, then they stick around the town for a couple days. That gives you enough leeway to get the unifying events rolling.

I'm quite fond of the Darwinian Character Creation from the All Guardsmen Party, damn clever way to start a campaign

edited 29th Jan '16 4:25:06 AM by FieldMarshalFry

^I don't remember name of the game, but I'm pretty sure there is a RPG where that is the standard method of creating character

Some game kinda like classic D&D where each player has multiple characters and after first sessions the survivors become the P Cs.

edited 29th Jan '16 5:32:20 AM by SpookyMask