Planning Season 2
It's more than session prep... it's campaign planning!
Planning a D&D Campaign is hard, so I decided to try an use the website as a way to plan it and show you how it works. I will be posting polls and much of this content early on Patreon, so if you want to get early access, access to longer form notes, more magic items, character sheets and lots more, consider supporting me on there.
Background
I anticipate a large number of players from our previous campaign to be joining the new campaign. This is a Season 2 of the story started in the previous campaign, some of which is chronicled here on the website. Players in the previous group range in age from 13 to 20 now and they are itching for a slightly less silly, more gritty game.
The TLDR of the previous campaign goes like this… The players worked for 5 real-world years to overthrow an oppressive Elven empire spreading over several solar systems before joining the crew of the World Ship destined for a distant nebula in the galaxy. A journey that was so long that it required a 300-year hibernation, made possible by hand full of extremely powerful wizards, clerics and a hand full of heavenly avatars. Now those PC’s are heroes in a new pantheon.
The new PC’s are the decedents of the original crew and they will be exploring and colonizing new star systems. The original colonists are spread pretty thin across a dozen worlds. As they have expanded, dungeons and ruins have been discovered on otherwise uninhabited worlds hinting at previous civilizations that have disappeared.
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Campaign Concept
In the previous campaign, there were numerous unexplored plot threads. One of the most intriguing was the Illithid (mind flayer) story arc. In this campaign, jokingly referred to as Season 2 of DMingDad, the players will be forced to deal with the Illithids as they are the dominant species in this nebula consisting of thousands of stars and habitable worlds.
I am going to rely heavily on the Stargate franchise for this campaign. The Illithids will take on the role of the Goa’uld. These two species share a lot in common and the Stargate franchise is a great serialized adventure with an overarching plotline.
The player characters will encounter multiple slave worlds under the control of different elder brains, sometime multiple elder brains on a single planet. Each of the colony will have slightly different goals, strategies, and obstacles. The party will be drawn into a web of manipulation only the mind of an Illithid elder brain could devise 🙂
Illithids a.k.a. Big Bad Evil Guys
There are several forms of Illithids and in this campaign we will modify them slightly to keep things interesting. We have a couple of players that have evolved into major meta gamers and there are a couple of young DM’s in the group now too. So we will need to keep this interesting.
The Illithids have several forms:
- Elder Brain
- Ulithard
- Vampiric illithids
- Mind flayer
- Alhoon
- Implanted Tadpole
- Tadpole
Illithid minions, pets and allies include:
- Intellect Devourer
- Cultists
- Drow
- Aboliths (adversarial allies)
- Beholders
- Dragons
- Giants
- Wizard’s Shackle
Illithid Enemies and Related Creatures
- Neolithids
- Aboliths
- Beholders
- Dragons
- Giants
- Wizard’s Shackle
Illithid enslaved races included grimlocks, ogres, quaggoths, and troglodytes, who manage to survive as slaves because the are generally considered inedible but easily manipulated by the Illithids.
Illithid choose to feed on player character species, mostly humans.
Illitid Videos
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Stargate Plots & Inspiration
IMPORTANT: Season 1 of Stargate as it was seen on cable TV contained nudity, which was not appropriate for younger viewers. Parental preview and guidance is recommended if you are going to allow younger viewers to watch the first season episodes.
None of the young players in our group have every watched any of the Stargate movies or TV series, so I can mine the show for some great inspiration.
In the previous campaign, we had a network of permanent teleportation circles that provided fast travel between many of the frequent game destinations. So, the idea of a network of “stargates” is well established. In the new campaign, some of the missions will be to establish permanent teleportation circles on “new worlds.”
After the PC’s successfully complete a few escort, fetch and dungeon exploration quests, they will discover a list of teleportation sigils, and unlock travel to the Illithid controlled worlds.
Stargate Preivew Videos
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Spelljammer Star Maps
In every Spelljammer campaign, you are going to need a star map at some point. With all the free NASA and astronomy websites out there, you really don’t need to spend a lot of time creating a map. Just download one at various resolutions and start labeling it! If you want to get fancy, there are lots of map editing software platforms and icon libraries. Here are a couple of helpful links.