I had been floating an idea around in my head for weeks upon weeks (inspiration coming from watching one particular streamer and their friend group colloquially known as the chaos crew, in their D&D campaign with its myriad of characters), but today I actually brainstormed the details behind it.
Basically, one thing which I thought would be neat is to have a D&D campaign where there were nine different characters, of nine different classes, of nine different alignments, too, covering the whole spectrum of alignments. Narrative-wise, this would be something of a challenge: what could bring them together and keep them together when they are normally people who would never work together? How could the group realistically be brought together and be justified in having done so, on a long-term, massive-scale campaign sense?
Well, with PCs controlling it and them separately creating characters it's probably possible to do, but unwieldly. Plus, I'm never going to have a group where I could run it and even if I could I wouldn't have a group that would so neatly slot into making the needed nine characters fitting the spec and keeping that knowledge of it out of their characters, and even if I did, I'm not able to realistically DM. Even if I could, all nine characters would need to live to the end and D&D being what it is, that's not easy especially with PCs that, in their narrative, should know they're not inclined to work as a coherent team.
However, while I could never have it work as an actual D&D campaign, it works incredibly well as a D&D-inspired narrative, telling a story which uses D&D concepts like alignments and classes and overall worldbuilding, but which is more loose and open to flexibility, such as not requiring the characters to have a strict 'level' system where they need to be of a certain level to use a skill, where they can lack skills that should be universally available at level 1 but have a skill that's normally level 18. (That said, for this narrative, I explicitly wanted it to be a bunch of fairly seasoned adventurers, including giving each of the nine one mythic 'weapon', more accurately stated 'item', which gives them powers spanning beyond those of their class.)
I made a notepad file with all nine with their basic facts, but I don't feel like reopening it and organizing it more coherently to translate into blog form tonight, but I might do that soon so that I can elaborate on the basic foundations that I gave today.
The long story short of it is, the protagonist and deutagonist, lawful good/evil (respectively), were actually fighting it out, but in their clash with each other, they ended up discovering an ancient ruin, and the lawful evil character, the deutagonist, was able to read the ruins and from it, learn of a world-ending threat, one which neither of them individually would be able to deal with but that by combining forces they would stand a chance.
Further research into the world-ending threat revealed that to counter it would require nine different champions of nine different classes, with nine different absolute defining traits, and--(the research is incomplete on details further but the outside meta continuation is nine different alignments); only by these nine epic champions of their values would they be able to win against the upcoming threat, which research suggests is coming soon, very very soon, as the protagonist and deutagonist could not have discovered the ancient ruin otherwise.
I have the nine characters fleshed out pretty well.
The fundamental threat and how the group combats it, less so.
Still, it's a promising start.
Basically, one thing which I thought would be neat is to have a D&D campaign where there were nine different characters, of nine different classes, of nine different alignments, too, covering the whole spectrum of alignments. Narrative-wise, this would be something of a challenge: what could bring them together and keep them together when they are normally people who would never work together? How could the group realistically be brought together and be justified in having done so, on a long-term, massive-scale campaign sense?
Well, with PCs controlling it and them separately creating characters it's probably possible to do, but unwieldly. Plus, I'm never going to have a group where I could run it and even if I could I wouldn't have a group that would so neatly slot into making the needed nine characters fitting the spec and keeping that knowledge of it out of their characters, and even if I did, I'm not able to realistically DM. Even if I could, all nine characters would need to live to the end and D&D being what it is, that's not easy especially with PCs that, in their narrative, should know they're not inclined to work as a coherent team.
However, while I could never have it work as an actual D&D campaign, it works incredibly well as a D&D-inspired narrative, telling a story which uses D&D concepts like alignments and classes and overall worldbuilding, but which is more loose and open to flexibility, such as not requiring the characters to have a strict 'level' system where they need to be of a certain level to use a skill, where they can lack skills that should be universally available at level 1 but have a skill that's normally level 18. (That said, for this narrative, I explicitly wanted it to be a bunch of fairly seasoned adventurers, including giving each of the nine one mythic 'weapon', more accurately stated 'item', which gives them powers spanning beyond those of their class.)
I made a notepad file with all nine with their basic facts, but I don't feel like reopening it and organizing it more coherently to translate into blog form tonight, but I might do that soon so that I can elaborate on the basic foundations that I gave today.
The long story short of it is, the protagonist and deutagonist, lawful good/evil (respectively), were actually fighting it out, but in their clash with each other, they ended up discovering an ancient ruin, and the lawful evil character, the deutagonist, was able to read the ruins and from it, learn of a world-ending threat, one which neither of them individually would be able to deal with but that by combining forces they would stand a chance.
Further research into the world-ending threat revealed that to counter it would require nine different champions of nine different classes, with nine different absolute defining traits, and--(the research is incomplete on details further but the outside meta continuation is nine different alignments); only by these nine epic champions of their values would they be able to win against the upcoming threat, which research suggests is coming soon, very very soon, as the protagonist and deutagonist could not have discovered the ancient ruin otherwise.
I have the nine characters fleshed out pretty well.
The fundamental threat and how the group combats it, less so.
Still, it's a promising start.
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