Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Foxface Aug 12, 2014 19:07:26	One that you ran!  One that you played in!  One that you always wanted to try but never did!   What made it a favorite?  Special rules, special setting, special people?   Would you do it again?  Why or why not?   I'll let y'all share yours before I share mine.
#2 malisteen Aug 12, 2014 19:33:09	Rotating DM team evil campaign played one summer break.  Every night the next DM would run an adventure for the rest of the party while their character was off taking care of 'personal business', and at the end of each night the party would level up.  Went from level 1 to level 17 in a little over two weeks.  Played a true necromancer (yeah, yeah, mechanical garbage, I know) with early entry shenanigans & the necropolitan template.  Highlights included permanently deafening an NPC bard for daring to try to give us an adventure hook.  Later that same bard was nailed alive to the inside of a skeletal frost giant's rib cage as part of an undead 'delegation' sent to subdue his home town.  Towards the end of the campaign, he was fed to a devourer made from the corpse and tortured soul of his sister.   Other highlights include helping the party dwarf build an underdark city for his newly founded clan, a city which eventually served as the home base for our little organization.  My necromancer offered him tireless undead workers in exchange for allowing a temple to Nerull to be errected within his city.  There were also useful undead buddies and combat aids and magic items and undead grafts provided to each of my fellow party members, except for one - the party assassin, who refused all my generous gifts.  You see, he feared my necromancer's growing power and influence, and was constantly plotting ways to murder her, when he wasn't trying to convince the other party members that she was out to kill them.   He was only half right, of course, Yes, she was plotting to kill them, but she would also have raised them from the dead as mighty undead champions of Nerull.  That she hadn't already tried to do so was purely out of respect and admiration for her companions - they deserved to live until she was powerful enough to transform them into the most worthy of undead forms.  They would have been even more powerful than they were in life!  Sadly, the campaign ended before I was able to activate the colossal magic circle that had been built beneath the foundations of the city in a great necromantic ritual that would have converted its entire population to the living dead, channeling hundreds of lesser souls into Nerul's tender care in exchange for the power to give my companions the rewards they most truely deserved - whether they wanted them or not.  If the campaign had continued, I wonder if the assassin would have found a way to kill me, or to convince the others of what I was plotting, before that happened?   Sadly, I'll never know.  Summer ended, and with it all my dark ambitions.  Anyways, yeah. Good times.
#3 Rhenny Aug 12, 2014 20:13:54	Wow...so many I've played and DMd...which to write about?   Here's one...   I played one 3rd Edition campaign - The First World - on OpenRPG (online gametable) 12 years ago.  The catch was that it was the first time I joined a game of people I didn't even know.   I played a wise, zen-like cleric named Alaster, who was from the desert seeking salvation in a new land.   The DM gave each of the players an item that was bound to him, a piece of a scroll in a magical case.   We didn't know that each of us had one, but as we played, we found out that we each had a piece of the scroll, and our lives were inextribably linked.  We were the "Scroll Bearers."   Meanwhile, we were typing our interactions to the DM, the NPCs and each other, and we typed completely in character unless we put actions or questions to DM in parentheses.   As our games developed, my cleric became more and more sanctimounous and wise sounding.   The interaction between my PC and one of the other PCs in the group, who we all thought was an evil person that we had to put up with because we were bound together as "Scroll Bearers", became really intense.   To this day, I remember how in-character I felt whenever we played that campaign.   I even saved the chat logs and all of the bulletins that the DM posted.   I don't remember his name; maybe he's out there.  He went by DM (Dan) on OpenRPG.    DM (Dan), if you are out there, you created an amazing world and a great campaign.   I wish I were able to play longer.   I was able to keep it up for about 6 months..then work and family got in the way so I had to drop out, unfortunately.   That was a cool experience.
#4 malisteen Aug 12, 2014 20:00:32	Another campaign, another necromancer.  A more traditional 3e game, this one starting at 4th level, and intended to run through 12th or so.  My character was an illumian necropolitan dread necromancer, but not an open one.  To the rest of the party he was just some sort of battle sorcerer, using a hat of disguise, high cha, and heavy social skills from a high int to hide the fact that he was undead.  He never animated or summoned undead, less he give away his secret, and his imp familiar, when it showed up, stayed in raven form at all times, and was given a magic trinket to hide its alignment.  My dread necro himself was not evil, but not good, and always eager to hunt down any bit of forbidden lore no matter how dangerous.  He fit in well to the rough & tumble tomb raiding party he found himself in, even with the party paladin.   but, as time went on, the paladin started growing suspicious.  My character never ate much.  More than once he caught my character up late reading when they should have been asleep.  My character never seemed to get sick, and didn't suffer any adverse effect when stung by scorpions or accidently caught in a poison dart trap.  And, as my character leveled, their spell selection kept getting darker, ray of enfeeblement giving way to enervation, false life to magic jar.  But it wasn't until a battle with an enemy big bad ended with my character getting pushed into a pit trap, a pit trap with an anti-magic field at the bottom of it, nullifying my magical disguise - that his suspicians wer finally confirmed, and he stood at the lip of the pit staring down at me, my dessicated form exposed for the blasphemy it was, the beetle swarm within the pit gnawing futily at my tattered robe (their con damage and sickness effect wasted on undead prey).   And in that moment, as the temple began to collapse (load bearing bosses, sigh), trapped in that antimagic field, my undead necromancer, exposed for what he was, had to appeal to the mercy of a paladin of pelor for aid.  "Am I evil?  You can tell, you can see, even if I hid it before, I cannot do so now!  Have we not travelled together this past year?  Did I not save your life countless times, and you mine?  Nothing has changed, I am who I have always been.  Help me!  Save me!"   "You are a liar and a fiend and a walking blasphemy, but you are my friend and I owe you much, I will save you", he tells me, and drops a rope down, and drags my boney rear end out of the pit, and drives a freaking greatsword through my chest.  And that was how my dread necromancer died, and after that I played a beguiler for the rest of the campaign.  But the paladin did carry my necro's corpse around in a coffin everywhere from that point on, saved up gold, and at the end of the campaign payed for a true resurrection to restore my original character to actual life.
#5 Rastapopoulos Aug 12, 2014 20:25:24	It's hard to pick a favourite, but we played one with a very creative DM who mixed Steampunk elements, Atlantida myth, and martial arts in a very interesting way (even if that doesn't seem to make much sense describing it like that).    It was a home-brewed world and it ran for some 6 or 7 years straight, using a house-ruled version of 2e. T'was very very cool.
#6 Kiraya_TiDrekan Aug 12, 2014 21:09:52	Let's see here...   2nd Edition - DMed a Forgotten Realms campaign set in Calimshan, borrowing a bit from the R.A. Salvatore novel Servant of the Shard.  The PCs were all multi-classed rogues and members of a new thieves guild.  A couple of PCs were drow spies for House Oblodra.  Highlight of the campaign was meeting their own time traveling offspring who had come back in time to stop the PCs from doing something awful.   2nd Edition - DMed a group of Dragonlance PCs who were caught up in the mists and sent to Ravenloft.  A kender in Ravenloft is quite an interesting thing.  The BBEG of the campaign was the black dragon that was inadvertently drawn into Ravenloft with them and on the verge of becoming a domain lord.   3rd Edition - DMed the first proto-adventure path (The Sunless Citadel through Bastion of Broken Souls), though we skipped Deep Horizon.  This was in the Navy and the players were a rowdy bunch.  Still, some epic roleplaying was had and its one of the few campaigns that I've DMed to completion.   3.5 - DMed a duet campaign (one player, one DM) for my wife in a homebrew campaign.  Lots of drama, intrigue, and political scheming in that one.  BBEGs were a group of rakshasa posing as various legendary beings of each race.   D&D Next Playtest - DMed an adaptation of the Wrath of the Immortals campaign from BECMI.  Massive natural disasters, time travel, killing gods, all kinds of fun.
#7 philipnicholls Aug 12, 2014 21:51:17	it would almost certainly be the first 4th edition campaign I played (we started only a day after the books were released)  we had a  Human Inspiring Warlord, a Half-elf Paladin of Kord and a Halfling Star Warlock, we initially kept running into Death Aspected cults, then worshippers of Orcus, and finally at Epic level we discovered that the plot involving Orcus replacing the Raven Queen and we had to travel to the abyss and bind him. the sense of achievement was palatable when we finally succeeded.
#8 Caliburn101. Aug 13, 2014 5:26:51	I ran a game which was based on a world flooded like Waterworld but with many island chains and a once-plateau subcontinent left above the waves.   Some highlights;   The Valta Veri ('Brinebloods') - catamaran living sea nomads - they had a Monk class tradition called Riptide Warriors - who could change their unarmed damage to slashing as they manifested sharks teeth Wolverine-style between their knuckles The Vargyri - demon possessed Gnolls The Harrowkin - Githyanki adaptation serving a Devil Lord trapped in the world by the flood The Inheritors - civilised folk occupying the last large city that remains and trying to reclaim lost glories 'Dark Water' - negative-energy suffused shallow seas above flooded cities where swarms of brine-zombies can float up silently under your boat and grapple everything down into a watery grave The Drah Neshin - Fremen-style barbarians living in a desert filled with beligerent giant-scorpid hives with intelligent queen Order of the Dying Light - Paladins who draw their power from the reliquary-style corpse of a slain Demigod of Light The Lodge of the Warghost - a martial lodge on a far island where Fighters coould go and be possessed by ancient soldiers and gladiators to 'learn' rare Feats etc. Lots of other stuff in it - and much I am re-using in my new Homebrew.   Essentially it was thematically like 'Dark Sun' in a flooded world instead of a parched one.
#9 Orzel Aug 13, 2014 6:40:53	One of my faves had a DM that put a 1920s prohibition theme to his game. We smuggled the booze and the monsters kept trying to steal the booze. The wand of magic missile looked like a Thompson submachine gun, the dragons ran the crime families, and adventurers raided opposing alcohol warehouses in dungeons. Fireballing a moonshine distillery? Good times.
#10 iserith Aug 13, 2014 6:57:25	At the end of 2009 through early 2010, I ran a really fun 4e Eberron campaign I called Serial Hero. The PCs were pulp action heroes and the adventures were weekly, episodic, and self-contained. Each one took place in a new location in Eberron. One week you'd be in the steaming jungles of Xen'drik, the next you'd be fleeing from halfling dinosaur-riders in the Talenta Plains. Every session would start with action and end on a cliffhanger. At the end of each session, you'd level up. I implemented a rewards system to encourage pulp behaviors, offering rerolls if players did things like demonstrate "Dry Cool Wit" or if they "Stole the Show." I asked the players to come up with the fiction that bridged one episode to the next which connected all the dots in very interesting and complex ways. They were always doing battle with over-the-top villains in fantastical locations at a break-neck pace. It was a lot of fun.