High Seas Example Campaign

I feel this campaign is the best of all I ran, a mashup of D&D, Firefly, Elric, Dracula, King Kong, and Lord of the Rings. Because of all the maritime travel and sea adventures, this was called the High Seas campaign. I learned:

• If you read inspiring stories, play them in video games, or watch them in a movies - steal and remix them. They make great adventure. It is not even bad if your players realize what is going on -- it gives them an edge for meking the connection, and they love it when they realize it.
• It helps to prepare a single page containing a short list of the adventures you plan to run, and key plot elements for the campaign. I made one for each major section. Yeah, that type of scrawly scribbles is all you need. 
• The best way to make a city feel real is to mash together two or three adventures that go on at the same time. It feels much more like a living place. 
• An economic way to create rich texture for a campaign is to make a history timeline of empires, wars, rulers and events that cast their shadows over what is happening in the campaign. 
• Knowing adventures that will happen later allows you to foreshadow what is to come, create meaningful prophecies, and have the players learn hints early on. You can build up the name of key villains, or mystical places. Players will forget most of these hints, but the few times they remember, creates very powerful moments of realization.
• Have site based-adventures for the players to explore if they want, so they do not feel railroaded. Let them run off to do side adventures, if that is what they enjoy. 
• You never worry about hooks. The campaign will tie everything together.
• The published adventure CRs are too easy for experienced players with optimised characters. You can easily run something that is labelled 1-2 levels higher for them.
• It does not hurt at all to run an adventure that is serveral levels below the player CR. Exploration remains, and it feels great for the players to just stomp their opposition into the ground for a change.
• Two unrelated story arcs do not work. If you want a twenty level campaign, design an arc to 20.

In case you are interested, below is the gestalt of the campaign, along with the list of adventures.

You can also read the full campaign story with all the details in German.

The kick-off adventure, Nosferatu, is one I wrote myself many years ago as a teenager. It has the plot and cast of Dracula mixed with King Kong. I patched it up with 3e Stats and a few more detail maps of the village, orc army camps, and the castle. In the campaign, the vampire was spawned by an evil artifact, the campaign gimmick. It is a black iron fly, created by the Chaos God Anarch (i.e., Arioch) and it makes its owner immortal by slowly turning them into a vampire. The players obtain it,  and travel through many dangers to the place where it was forged to destroy it (this obviously is the core plot of Lord of the Rings). A Melniboné-like empire (located in Monmurg on the Darlene map) is were long ago Anarch gave the artifact to the depraved king who craved immortality, and where the characters need to go to learn more about it. The Firefly part comes from the characters winning a sailing boat early on that will be their home for the campaign, and the characters notoriously being short on cash.

Cast: Brother Heiner, pious Paladin of St. Trudbert. Lanfear, sexy female Barbarian. Silverhand, minmaxing Monk and Anton Urbach, beer brewing Bard and entrepreneur. Later on, Dirk Quarzon, ship captain and Fighter/Rogue replaced Anton (as the players changed). This was a peculiar group, as they had no Wizard and after Anton left, no-one knew about Magic. The barbarian in time decided to pick up a few levels of Sorcerer.

Hook: one of the characters dreams of great evil coming to Hillsport, a small port town to the south, and in his dream feels he is chosen to avert it. A paladin made this an easy sell. The others tag along for protection and to conduct business in Hillsport, and then are drawn in by the flow of events.

The rough plan for the campaign and how it developed looks like this (adventure levels in parens, if not mentioned otherwise, all the adventures where adapted from Dungeon magazine): 

• The characters start at level one in the little sleepy province and travel south. 
• Encounter with Bert, the Hill Giant on the road (1, negotiation).
• Wild Boar Inn at an enduring Snowstorm in the Desert (both self-written, 1-3 or higher). Not part of main story; the players opted to not investigate further, as delay could risk bad things happening in the meantime. They were right.
• Palace of the Twisted King  (1-5) On the path, they avoided that too.
• Scourge of Scalabar ("Hillsport" in my game; 1-3, by Chris Perkins); instead of a submarine, I used Sahuagin who control a real giant shark, as I dislike steampunk. With Wreck Ashore (1) thrown in for more investigation and encounters with the pirates. An agent of smith's coster, the nefarious trading company of Monmurg is the brain behind the pirates and briefly seen. There also were Sahuagin raids on seaside villages, with the players and villagers living through the night in a shelter cave, and allies in the lizardfolk in the swamp, as one of the PCs spoke Lizardman and had great diplomacy skills. This was going on at the same time as the next one.
• Nosferatu (1-3, Dracula, with the plague breaking out caused by the vampire and his flies and rats. The adventure had a timeline of what happened unless the PCs interfered. King-Kong Island side story to retrieve a curative pendant that can stop the plague. In gratitude the city gifts a house and the schooner Sea Star as a reward. The combination of these three adventures in Hillsport makes this into one of the richest roleplaying experiences I can remember.
• MAIN PLOT: The players learn about the fly through letters from the young real estate agent  to his love Cecile, the vampire's target. He is still stuck in the vampire's castle, turning into a vampire, and he begs her to learn more about the fly in Chatold before sending help. So she comes to ask her saviours if they can help. This is the root of the evil, so they took this up for sweet Cecile.

The PCs were now about level three.

• Storm and Tammermaut's Fate (6). The players had taken on debt to buy trade goods for their journey, which they had to jettison during the storm; the ship was also badly damaged, and needed costly repairs. (We skipped the harder part at the underwater rift, the tower defense against the undead at night was too much of a close shave.)
• Practical Magic (9; using Cathold for Marsember, this was a side adventure and much too hard for them -- they broke off and negotiated their way out after being badly maimed) 
• MAIN PLOT: The PCs learn the fly's story in a curio shoppe I ripped from Vampire: Bloodlines. The shopkeeper is really an agent of hell and hell wants the fly destroyed. His address was on the box because he sent it to the original count in remote Devil's Pass to get it out of the way until someone shows up who could potentially destroy it.  He does not know how and where to destroy it, and tells them they can find answers for anything from the hags at Scrag Rock. Difficulty is only that the rock shipwrecks ships, and nobody knows where it is. 

This was as far as I had it planned out originally. I knew they had to travel to Monmurg to learn more, as that is where the fly originated. Before the next session, I decided to use Test of the Smoking Eye with Prison of the Firebringer as the final adventure, and that they would get to that other dimension via the jungles of Amedio. I also decided that Kaurophon was a son or grandson of the king who got the fly from Anarch, sired with a succubus, and made the succubus in Eye his mother. He would turn on the PCs or stay true to his hatred towards his father and Anarch, based on how the characters treated him during their joint travels, with good or bad interactions adding boni or mali to the final die roll. 

The PCs were now about level 5.

• Sea Battle encounter with Viking Raiders from Onwal This random encounter I just winged, on board was the lost father the barbarian had been searching for, which let them avoid bloodshed, and got the raiders escort them savely to Eldredd.
• Dead Man's Quest (1) the ghost of pirate captain Ned leads them to Scrag Rock in promise of a return service of freeing his soul.
• Shatterhull Isle (5-7, "Scrag Rock", this was from the Stormwrack supplement). They learn cryptic rhymed answers to three questions (players chose: how to destroy the fly, how to reach Anarch's domain in Limbo, how to find the Mirror of Stars by which it can be reached - they learn that they must find Kaurophon in Monmurg)
• Crypt of the Seventh Lord. (9-13, Homebrew dungeon). This was not part of the plan, the players had found a treasure map to this crpyt in the hills earlier on and wanted to loot to fill their coffers and get out of debt. The wizard was turned to stone early, and they aborted.
• The Setting Sun (5-7) In my game the Wild Coast is overrun by the orc armies with giants and dragons. Eldredd is under siege, elvish griffon riders, high wizards and archers from Celene help defend it. The players get offered transport on griffins across enemy territory, in exchange for help in this side adventure. They also had filled their hold with food, which achieved high prices in the besieged city, and restored their financial position.
• Devil Pass (4-6) second part of the self-written Nosferatu story. The trick is not to kill the vampire, just to impale him, so they do not become the new owners of the fly and will not turn into vampires themselves. They gain the fly, and the players are scared shitless by it. For the rest of the campaign, they will not try to use its powers even once, and only one time open the box to show it to someone. The griffins fly them to Monmurg, then depart, with the Sea Star sailing down separately. (Here the player of Anton left the group for life/time reasons, so Anton was sucked into minimus form in a trapped magical bottle in the adventure). 

The PCs were now about level 7.

• Dead Man Quest. (1-3). Second part, to pay their debt to Captain Ned in the pirate city of Port Jolie. The players have fun flattening the cultists effortlessly.
• Ptolus. As the players enter the city for the first time, the Vallis Moon appears and opens the Banewarrens. The players are hungry for for treasure, and first spend time in the under-city as they have heard there are lots of old dungeons down there, but with little success. Most of the upper reaches are plundered already. They contact Kaurophon who wants them to obtain the Pipes of Madness from the Banewarrens to open the way to the Mirror of the Stars.
• The Banewarrens (6-10). Lots of intrigue from parties in the city, but once they find the flute, they abort and leave this to the dragon riders and the inverted pyramid to sort out.
• The Night of Dissolution (Pythoness House) (4). Easy side adventure to gain the All-Key for opening a door in the Banewarrens. They also learn about the Night of Dissolution, and that they should try and stop it.

Now the story shifted to the Amedio jungle. I made an overall map, to embed and intertwine the adventures. 

• Dragon Hunters (7) This is one of the best modules, highly recommended. Lots of thinking, discussions, choices, possible creative solutions, and action. 
• The Plight of Cirria (8-12) also great. In my version, the cloud fortress was circling above the Solnor Plateau, unless you called it to the Yuan-Ti Temple by playing the Flutes of Madness. I also had Ezhoran be the Archmage of Monmurg, who did not oppose the PCs, in fact he wanted to help them, as he wanted to imprison the essence of Anarch when the fly was destroyed. He gave them access to the Mirror of the Stars. Making it through the mirror with clues from the witches riddle brought them to the next adventure. 

The PCs were now about level 9.

• Test of the Smoking Eye (10) / Prison of the Firebringer (13).  I put a few more factions and sites on the map to have this not just be a linear adventure, and put the castle of the Firebringer on top of the entrance to the peristaltic tunnel, in the heart of the domain of the ancient black dragon Vorkaire. The imprisoned slaad lord was a servant of Anarach, who had led the failed attack. There were lots of political maneuvering with the succubus, Ezhoran, the imprisoned fallen angel, before true to the witches prophecy, the paladin sacrificed himself to carry the fly into the fire, and was reborn with his friends as lord of the plane.

This ended the main campaign. The heroes owned their own plane now, even though it contained some denizens more powerful than they were, and the fly had been destroyed. Closure.  

The PCs were now about level 11.

The use of Ptolus and the Banewarrens/The Night of Dissolution had kicked off of a second campaign arc about the sleeping great old demons of chaos, the Galchutt, and about how this world really was just a prison for them. They were in the process of being woken up, so you had to stop that. We played one more retreat, but it felt somehow tacked on:

• The night of dissolution (Surgeon of the Shadows / Temple of Deep Chaos) (5-9, by Monte Cook). I had to spruce up the encounters to keep some challenge, but that was OK. 

However we were now starting to try online game tables and play-by-skype, and initially thought we would do that only as a side activity, to fill the gaps between our full time retreats, and were not sure it would work, so we made a new group of level one characters. That campaign also started in Ptolus. When time rolled around for the annual retreat, the unanimous vote was to continue with that story, rather than go back to the old one from a year ago. (It did not help that we had switched to D&D 5e, and nobody wanted to convert their Pathfinder level 11 character into a bounded accuracy one). So the rest of the night of dissolution prevention never happened. 

A cool thing of all play being in the same world is that the choices of all the groups matter. What a group does changes the game world for the others. 

• The smoking eye group smuggled the exiled prince and claimant of the throne from Dragon Hunters back into civilisation in Port Jolie. He staged a successful campaign from there, and now is Prince of Monmurg, on of the most powerful and influential positions in the game world.
• With the heroes of the smoking eye not working further to prevent it, the night of dissolution happened and the Galchutt rose and turned Monmurg and the world at large into a horrifying madhouse. The new group in their backwater near Hommlet then had to busy themselves with destroying the elemental chains that had tethered the Vallis Moon, so the Galchutt could not reach it and shatter their prison. This restored the situation where they went to sleep last time, so they might after some time withdraw again.