Four Game Ideas
Over the years I have had a few campaign or one-shot ideas I may never use, and I thought I'd give them to you as an early Christmas gift. Some are serious enough and some are silly.
Base the Campaign Setting on a Game of Small World
Days of Wonder's board game Small World already has a number of standard high fantasy staples: halflings, elves, orcs, dragons, giants, and fortresses. If I planned to begin a new campaign anytime soon, I'd like to start by playing (and recording) a game of Small World with the group as Session -1; I'd then interpret the game as the history of the campaign's immediate environs. I think this would be a fun exercise for me, but I also think that it would give the players a sense of investment in the setting. Also, although Small World isn't really a world history emulator, I find that the mechanics do often create compelling situations and dynamics that could make an interesting basis for a campaign setting. The random matching of races with modifiers also results, sometimes, in unconventional combinations: swamp elves, sea-faring dwarves, merchant ratmen.
Now, I'd tell the players that we're making the game's setting together, and also that I wouldn't tell them what scale the Small World game represents in the campaign setting. I would want them not to be sure exactly how I'd use the game, first so they'd just play the game rather than think too hard about making the board state turn out a certain way, and second so they'd still have a sense of discovery in the role-playing game.
I'll tell you, though. The setting would be a region between larger empires. Each section of the board would, on average, take five days' march to cross. I'd also want the overall game to represent a span of about one millenium; I'd do a bit of math to work out how many years each turn would have to represent in order to make the game a thousand years of history. The role-playing game would start during the final turn, with any invasions instigating the campaign. If a player used the Troll race or the Fortified modifier, I'd use those fortifications as mouldering ruins still dotting the landscape. The Lost Tribes would be standard player races kinships that didn't otherwise appear over the course of the game.
Of course, I'm sure there are other board games or video games that could work instead: an RTS or 4X for the campaign setting (though you might run into issues of scale), or Labyrinth for a dungeon.
A Sidekick Class One-Shot
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition has a mechanic called sidekick classes: three stripped-down classes that can be added to NPC stat blocks in order to let the party's retainers and adopted monsters grow with the players, without upstaging them or taxing the DM's attention with too many options.
I think it would be fun to get players together for two sessions. In the first session, they'd each pick a CR 1 stat block, give it a level or two of a sidekick class, and decide what their characters are doing together. (For a weird game like this, with so many strange character options, I'd want to let the players decide what the adventure is in broad strokes.) In the second session, you'd play the one-shot.
It doesn't have to be CR 1. I can imagine that CR ½ or CR 2 could work well, too. I like CR 1, though, because there are a variety of CR 1 humanoids and beasts who have a cool ability or two. That's the appeal, of course (besides playing as a dinosaur): being able to use the abilities that the monsters usually get.
I would probably set a few limits on the stat blocks they can choose from: Tiny to Large size and only humanoid, beast, or (maybe) monstrosity creature types, with some hand-picked creatures with other types that I think could still work.
If you were going to do this as a campaign, I'd say that at some point the players could multiclass into proper character classes.
Suitors Saving The Prince
The prince has been kidnapped and his suitors must work together to save him!
This is probably a silly idea; I think it would be a short run of maybe three or four sessions, and it would only work with the right group of players. It doesn't have to be a prince, of course. It could be the wealthy heir to the Vander Bukx fortune if you want a more contemporary setting. The point is that the players are rivals for the kidnapped person's hand in marriage, but they have to work together to save their intended. If you wanted this to be a campaign, you'd have to keep deferring the rescue somehow, which would be doable but difficult.
Of course this idea could be done in any system, but if I were running it in Dungeons & Dragons 5e I might combine it with the idea above: the players begin with NPC stat blocks and sidekick classes, to capture the sense of regular people taking up arms in a desperate situation.
(I am drawing strongly on Rene Girard here, as I often do.)
Hunters Turned Deviants
Someday I'd like to run a Deviant the Renegades game. (I explain the system a little in my last post, if you aren't familiar.) Like most Chronicles of Darkness games, it's designed to be picked up some time after the player characters are transformed into hybrids, mutants, or the like. That makes sense, of course, but I'd be interested in something which takes the players from regular mortals, who start poking around the Conspiracies, up to and through the moment of their Divergence; I think seeing the contrast between their lives before and their lives after they changed would make the game more poignant. I could run the first half as a basic Chronicles of Darkness game, but I think Hunter the Vigil would be mechanically and narratively more interesting, as you could then bring in the Hunter Compacts.
Of course, you'd want to be clear about your plan with your players at the outset, in part because you could really use their cooperation in getting to the point of Divergence.
(For the basic idea for this post I am indebted to Nick Hendriks's similar blog post.)