Letting My Players Choose the Next Campaign

I recently resumed work on my Deep Vaults adventure, but a complication arose this week. Our Tuesday night campaign is currently run by my friend Jeff, who I've known since college and with whom I swap off DM duties so we both have opportunities to play. He's been running a simple megadungeon concept, sort of an urban Caves of Chaos, to experiment with using some of the OSR principles I've shared with him.

We've been using the Into the Unknown (O5R) rule-set with some house mods for his campaign, and I think everyone is enjoying the simpler, more-grounded approach. Our players have grown a little jaded and lazy from computer games, though—and the isolation of Roll20 doesn't help in terms of player engagement—so Jeff and I both like 5e's core game engine to provide a framework for player actions (even though we loathe the setting and current direction of the game). 

Jeff's done a great job adapting to the OSR methodology but now wants to experience it as a player, so the plan was for me to run one area of his megadungeon. He still wants to do that, but has also indicated that he wants to wrap this experiment up soon and take a break from running while he applies what he's learned to a "real" campaign. As a result, my concept for the Deep Vaults is too ambitious for the near-future. I adapted the adventure from another concept that exists in my own campaign, so I don't want to waste it on something that will soon end and make it all irrelevant.

Thus, I'm forced to switch creative gears again. I'm still developing the Deep Vaults (which I will continue to post here along with the other adventures I'm working on), but for Jeff's campaign I've decided to run an older, unused dungeon I've had in my folder for awhile. It's an as-yet unnamed cavern crawl, sort of along the lines of Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, for levels 4-6. It's mostly done, I just need to finish up a few places in the key and create the Roll20 assets.

As for the future...

Like many DMs, I'm certain, I have a folder full of campaign concepts—half-baked ideas and scraps of worlds I'll likely never visit. As I discussed in an earlier post, I'm already working on multiple long-form dungeons, but I haven't committed to any single one. Those adventures represent old projects I'd like to finish, as opposed to starting new ones. 

I feel like if I can at least get those finalized and shared online, then I'm okay if I never actually use them in my own campaign. I've released that creative energy into the world and they can live or wither on their own. I have no illusions of fame or glory by sharing them, nor am I interested in how I can make a living writing game material...I think the barriers are high, and the effort-to-reward ratio is too low. It's fun to feed the creative beast, though, and if I can inspire even one other person with an idea, then it's worth it.

In any case, I have all these campaign concepts but I can't decide which one to pour new creative energy into. I have a few months...maybe a year to prepare. To combat the decision paralysis, I've decided to let the players choose. I've compiled a list of ten campaign ideas, some of which would be based on an old-school 5e rule-set and others on different rule systems altogether.

I've asked the players to rank the campaigns in order of interest level, from 1 (lowest) to highest (10). Unless one concept just blows everything else out of the water, we'll then take the top 3 scores and re-vote. The winner will be the campaign I develop over the next 4-6 months.

The survey list I sent them follows the break...

A) Golden Voyages
You're a party of bronze age sailors/pirates, plying the warm seas surrounding your homeland in search of adventure. Visit exotic ports of call and remote islands with often-hostile societies, plunder the ruins of a golden age now littered with danger, and defeat horrible monsters to retrieve wondrous items from the gods.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Travel, explore, trade, conduct diplomacy
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Sinbad and Hercules movies, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans

B) Keep on the Badlands
You're all mercenaries who've come to a remote border outpost to blaze trails through a forbidding landscape, eliminate dangerous threats to settlers, and uncover remnants of the great evil that once flourished in this region.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Defeat evil, grow stronger, establish a stronghold
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Bog-standard D&D

C) Last Days
You are the last wretched souls left in a fantasy world forsaken by the gods and overrun by the infernal forces of hell. This is your final chance to redeem past sins and earn an escape from the end of everything.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Survive in a constantly-lethal environment, find holy relics and return them to the last remaining temple, earn enough redemption before the final prophecy manifests.
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e + MÖRK BORG trappings
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Revelations, The Divine Comedy, Hieronymous Bosch, Heavy Metal-D&D

D) Machines and Mutants
You are survivors of a cataclysmic war, living in the radiation-blasted ruins of the old world. In addition to the difficult task of finding food and water, you're under constant threat of attack by mutants, roving gangs of marauders, and battle-droids with orders to "kill all humans" (not to mention clouds of poisonous miasma and glowing craters that kill anything approaching them).

• PRIMARY GOALS: Survive, find ancient technology, rebuild civilization
• SYSTEM: Possibly Mutant Crawl Classics or possibly even original GW rules (might even squeeze ASE in there as well).
  
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Mad Max (and a million knock-off movies), Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha, Thundaar the Barbarian

E) Midgaard
Set in the frozen north, you are all village jarls—vassals of a local barbarian king—tasked with managing a geographic portion of his domain. In addition to the high-level management of a territory (including its population, settlements, and resource production), you are also responsible for raising an army and recruiting heroes to fight external threats to the kingdom on the ground. Many book-keeping elements of this campaign would occur offline, with game sessions being used to resolve hero "missions" using stripped-down, NPC-style characters (you are the jarl, however, not the hero...heroes are expendable). Players are competing to curry the favors of the king, but also must contribute to the kingdom's prosperity and cooperate in its collective defense.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Manage and grow your fief, serve the king's interests, achieve superiority over your peers, attempt to become king (?).
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e (micro-level) combined with a homebrew domain simulation (macro-level)
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Vikings, 13th Warrior, Warcraft (the RTS game not the MMO)

F) Moormist Manor
Each of you has come into possession of a deed granting you ownership of a mysterious mansion once owned by a powerful wizard, but which has stood vacant over a quarter-century for...reasons. In light of your competing deeds, which all seem legitimate, the local lord has ruled that each of you owns an equal share of the house, and may do with it what you will. Now, you simply have to make your way there and see what all the fuss is about. This is a crazy funhouse megadungeon full of valuable treasures and weird danger.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Explore and clear the manor, claim what is yours, move in (?).
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Tegel Manor, any haunted house movie

G) Shipwreck Island
Your vessel was sunk by unknown forces and you've all washed up on the beach of a mysterious tropical island. With meager supplies in hand, you set off into the jungle to find food, shelter, and some way to survive the island's many perils, including cannibals, volcanoes, giant reptiles, and a lost civilization.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Explore, survive, manage resources, find a way off the island (?)
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Lost, King Kong, Land of the Lost, The Land that Time Forgot

H) Streets of Remedios
You are a company of sell-swords in the city of Remedios whose main occupation is exploration of the megadungeon catacombs that descend deep beneath the city, to plunder the vast riches therein. Your characters can include those from previous Catacombs excursions, as well as the other characters you rolled up for the Slave Pits of the Undercity adventure and Bergummo's Tower. Or you can roll up brand-new ones if you want to.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Explore, get loot and experience, uncover the secret of the catacombs*
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Again, pretty standard D&D — straight-up megadungeon-crawl with a city backdrop for downtime and faction play.

            *The players won't know this, but this is where the Deep Vaults material comes into play.

I) Traveller
You are a company of hard-boiled space jockeys earning a living among the planets of a distant star system. In addition to finding and accepting regular jobs for cash to keep your ship operational, you'll navigate the many hazards of space travel, including hostile pirates looking to take your stuff, corrupt starport officials demanding bribes, and mysterious craft of unknown origin that shadow your every move.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Explore, earn money, keep moving
• SYSTEM: Traveller
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Firefly, The Expanse, Alien/Aliens, Heavy Metal (the movie and the music)

J) Weird West
You're newly-arrived settlers in a strange frontier that mashes fantasy tropes + classic Westerns = Guns n' Goblins. Stake a mine claim, start a ranch, make your name as a gunslinger, defend the town against outlaws and banditos, negotiate with natives hostile to your presence, etc.

• PRIMARY GOALS: Make a living, build a name for yourself
• SYSTEM: Old-school 5e + elements from Boot Hill and Aces & Eights
• MEDIA REFERENCES: Wild, Wild West, Deadwood, Boot Hill, Silverado, Big Trouble in Little China