Adventure!

This is the first post of a blogging contest I am having with TheDustyWahl! His blog is at http://thedustywahl.blogspot.com/. The contest is nothing intense, but it is incentive for us to write more and get content out. Thank you for reading.


Today, I have an Campaign idea that I have wanted to run for a long time. I would be using the Dungeons & Dragons 5e rules, but any setting would probably work. I will be talking mostly about the world, but I will also throw in a bit about the player characters and their interaction with the world. Enjoy! and let me know if you have any comments.


Setting
 I like running high fantasy games simply because I want my PCs to feel like they are larger than life heroes who can do anything. It also means I can throw higher combat encounters at them. Now if I was using a grittier/darker system, I would try to be more realistic, but for this setting, I want magic and monsters coming out the wazoo. I also believe that high fantasy makes it easier to use cliches and tropes, which are awful in most movies, but in TTRPGs, I find them fun and necessary. (there is a reason they are used so much.)

Anyways, getting to my actual point... I want magic to be accessible to my party, but also their foes. I want refrigerators to be a common thing because all it would be is a stone or metal box with an everlasting cold spell cast on it. I want bicycles and communications and magic wagons and everything in between. Essentially I want magic to be what technology is for us today: convenience. Now this doesn't mean I want to hand out free wish spells at 1st level, but simple items that make everyday life easy would be a staple. Things like magic rope, speaking stones, darkvision goggles and magic ammunition would all be common adventuring gear, but it still wouldn't be cheap. Enough about the magic of the world, I would like to talk about the government of this world.

The world is more of a parliamentary system. You have a cabinet of people who all expertise in things like land ownership, taxes, bureaucracy, boring crap, etc., but the figure heads of the nation are adventurers. A small group of 3 to 5 adventurers travel the land diplomatically. They go from town to town fixing quarrels and disputes that politicians normally can't and won't have a say in. Say some giants are traveling through a town looking to trade, but the townsfolk are afraid and treat the giants with hostility. This is where the round table of adventurers would come in to settle the dispute however they see fit. Now they can kill the giants, which would quickly solve the problem but create mortal enemies, or they can try to show the people that the giants are just looking for useful goods. Now, I would throw in spiteful saboteurs who would try to convince the people that the giants are malicious, but it is up to the party to investigate. Ultimately, the party has the final say on any matter, but if they make enough people dislike them, there will be an uprising and war. This system has worked for so long that the party is treated like diplomats or friends of the town. Some towns might even despise them simply because of the legacy their predecessors left behind. I would now like to clear up a few clerical things such as how the adventurers get chosen and a how long they last.

The way the PCs get chosen actually plays along with the twists. (whats an adventure without twists) The adventurers choose their predecessors while adventuring. Once they find someone "worthy", they give them a letter and a memento that signifies that they are next in line. Now where the twist comes in, is the fact that the choosing process seems random. A cleric of Bahamut might choose a godless rogue as his predecessor or an orderly wizard may choose an insane warlock. Sometimes things will fall in line. sometimes there is a resemblance of order, but not always. How I want this to work is, once the PCs have been chosen, they would get a set of clues that magically appears when they are alone. These sets of clues would lead them to their predecessors and if they tried to give their memento to anybody but the person it is meant for the person, they might turn into a horrific beast, or die and begin spreading a plague. Essentially, if they got it wrong, bad things would happen. I also want to get into how long the heroes last "in office."

I am going to leave this short and probably keep it to a cliche. I do want to explain that the predecessors do not start until the hero either dies, leaves or disappears. I don't know how to explain what happens if they die before they find their predecessors, but I will eventually come up with something. The cliche is that every time a group of heroes survive for a certain number of years, they just disappear and their predecessors take place. This disappearance only takes place if all heroes found their next-in-line and the land is at peace. Now I just want to leave the rest a mystery for certain reasons. The largest being that I don't know the rest.


Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, let me know. Also let me know if you want me to talk about anything. I enjoy some research and i need something to write about every week, so let me know!

Thanks Again,
BottleofGreen