Campaign Concepts Pt. 1: The Colonists

I’ve been thinking about new campaign concepts recently, how to break the mold from the traditional fantasy game, and have come up with a series of different concepts I think could make for some pretty great roleplaying in your next D&D campaign. We’ll begin the series with what I like to call: The Colonists.

Humanity’s history stretches back into antiquity. The iron cities have always existed, as far as history traces; tall towers of self-contained cities, their smooth sides without windows, and impervious to any weapon, magical or not. Some rooms of the mile-high cities are sealed off, and always have been. Each race has a different variation of the cities: The humans have their tall towers, the elves their wide, round iron cities hidden within the foliage of the forests, the dwarves cities embedded in the mountainsides. Orc iron cities look patchwork and rusting.

One day, a sealed-off room in the human tower of Pelam opened unexpectedly. Venturing in, the explorers discovered a complex labyrinth of hallways and tunnels, with strange synthetic ropes, tables made of glass with glowing images dancing across them, and strange magical items. One of the explorers accidentally flipped a lever, and a voice rang out throughout the tower: “Emergency launch sequence activated. Initiating lock-down of all airlocks.” Some escaped, including a few of the explorers to tell the tale of the tower lifting out of the ground and soaring into the air, disappearing into the stars. If the other iron cities are the same, it raises many questions as to where the races came from…

This campaign concept allows you to focus on bringing technology-as-magic into the game, making magic weapons just super-advanced technology. I know it’s been done in the past, but it’s a concept I’ve always loved.

Keep an eye out tomorrow for the next in this series!