Battle-wagon race – The Adventure Zone
In the Petals to the Metal arc, the characters enter a battle-wagon race – small airships equipped with distinctive weapons and abilities. I used that idea for my Eberron campaign. Each of the major nations of the continent entered an airship with distinctive abilities. The dryad pilots, for example, charmed the PC at the helm of their own ship. I pre-rolled the finishing order of the other entrants, which provided the DCs the players would have to beat with piloting skill checks to catch them. It ended up being a little clunky, but was a lively and memorable encounter.
Handsome Jack – Borderlands
For my very first campaign, I envisioned an XCOM-style devil invasion of the Sword Coast. And flipping through the Monster Manual, I came across the perfect creature to mastermind it – a Cambion. Cambions are the offspring of a devil overlord (usually Grazzt) and a human, and I thought this particular cambion might seek revenge for his father abandoning his mother, and harnessing Hell to overthrow him. And the character of Handsome Jack provided the perfect personality: arrogant and vain, but also charismatic and occasionally reasonable. (The players ended up striking a deal with Handsome Jack to let him take a warforged colossus to invade Hell as long as he left the Material Plane alone. That party was wonderfully Chaotic Neutral.)
Earth vs. Mars – The Expanse
The backdrop to the Handsome Jack campaign was two powers on the Sword Coast stuck in a cold war. Neverwinter was a rich but stagnant city-state with a large but outdated navy. Baldur’s Gate was a budding empire on the rise, with a militaristic culture and a small but advanced military. This was directly inspired by the conflict between Earth and Mars at the beginning of The Expanse book and TV series. I even adapted the early plot line from the books, where the PCs, who were scouting an island, watched their ship and crewmates get blown to pieces by an invisible super-weapon stolen from Baldur’s Gate. (The weapon was being used by the Cult of Grazzt in anticipation of a fight against Handsome Jack.) As it turned out, the PCs didn’t really get involved in the city-state conflict, but it still served as an interesting context for the campaign.
The Protomolecule – The Expanse
A father comes to the PCs and asks them to find his daughter, Mei, who was last seen under the care of a pediatrician for an illness. As it turns out, the evil Dr. Strickland has been experimenting on his patients with a mysterious blue substance that turns them into powerful zombies. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s another plot line from the second book of The Expanse series. For the PCs, saving the girl meant not only defeating Strickland but taking her to another plane of existence to find a holy spring, and then winning a fiddle contest against the demon overlord who was controlling Strickland. (Dungeons & Dragons is such a good game sometimes.)
Time Loop – Majora’s Mask
The PCs are summoned to enter the Mournland – a former kingdom shrouded in a magical force field from which no one ever returns. Of all the ideas I’ve tried, this was the one that I want to try again. The idea was that they would face a series of insurmountable challenges and either die or be reset to the entrance after their first long rest, and would have to learn the correct series of decisions to end the curse. Except … the challenges ended up not being insurmountable. I think I set the DCs too low, and erred in allowing a save point at a sacred cathedral part way through. Still, the mission ended with them siding with robots against zombies, commandeering a zombie airship and Indiana Jones-ing a bunch of zombies, and barely surviving a massive explosion in a warforged foundry. So not a total loss by any means.
Into the Fray 