Campaign Toybox
The Story: One morning – perhaps after a strange magical occurrence, or a short journey into a magically-touched area – the PCs wake up to find themselves alone. As in completely. Not a single human or demi-human soul is to be found, no matter how wide they travel. Beds lie empty. Bars are untended. Cows go unmilked in the fields and the thrones of every lord and king are unoccupied. It is a terrifyingly lonely existence, but more terrifying are the shadowy creatures that walk at night…
It seems that in one night, a great evil ritual was enacted, and an evil force has won its victory over the land. Thousands were killed instantly, even more were turned into soulless undead. Now there are no more heroes except the PCs, and nobody left to save – except themselves. Will evil be triumphant, or will the last few survivors find a way to turn things back?
Style and Structure: Evil winning has been done elsewhere (in Midnight, notably), but never quite so completely. And although it seems like an enormously dramatic change to a setting, one of the interesting things about doing this in fantasy is how little it actually changes. You don’t, after all, need humans to explore dungeons, find treasure, kill goblins, undead and dragons and unlock ancient rituals and magic. What changes completely, however, is downtime.
There are no more taverns in which to enjoy a beer and gain some rumours. There are no blacksmiths to make or sharpen weapons, no cooks to provide food, no teachers to teach skills or magic, nor any other such things which players tend to take for granted. We all know the classic story of combat-loaded PCs stuck in the wilderness and starving to death for want of survival skills: this becomes the entire reality of this campaign. The PC who just happened to take a survival skill is now the only thing stopping the rest of the group from starving to death. XP may now be flushed into mundane skills as a player tries desperately to learn how to fashion armour. True, money no longer matters, as everything is suddenly a lot easier to steal, but not everything can be stolen. Mages in particular may suffer if they normally need teachers to learn – but on the other hand, they can now simply waltz into the libraries that were previously barred to them.
Also key is the issues of motivation. There are no longer any princesses to save, any kings to ask heroes to rescue them from dark lords, and no wizards to provide quests. PCs can be like kids in a candy shop and do whatever they want – but may also fall prey to apathy. GMs will need to take care to provide some home of a resolution (even if it won’t bring everyone back) and clues to how to get there, clues that can’t simply be handed from an NPC.
Plots and Villains: The danger and horror levels of the campaign can be determined by just how many people died and how many were turned into undead, or shadows or whatever else. If almost everyone became a monster, then the world will be terrifyingly unsafe and even the simplest thing like stopping for the night becomes an exercise in survival. This can be extremely exciting, but can also be too oppressive. Likewise it can become depressing to constantly have to kill your fellow species, even if they have become monsters. Consider having minions of the evil overlord wandering around as well, in large numbers – PCs can then get revenge, which they will want from the beginning.
Revenge is the key factor here because the PCs have been greatly wronged from the start, so it is important the GM make revenge possible, somehow. While it is important not to forget that countless other evils will make use of the empty world, PCs will not want to be too distracted from the quest against the big bad. Likewise don’t bog them down too much in solving just what happened, when, why and to whom – when something this big goes down, PCs will be angry and they won’t want to wait too long to find out who they need to hate. And note well: an accident just won’t cut it for an RPG – it’s just not satisfying enough.
This doesn’t mean that solving the problem should be easy, of course. But for the actual method, you can steal any other fantasy campaign out there and remove the helpers – it makes for an awesome last battle, too, if the PCs know that nobody can come after them to fix their mistake. Which is why it is vital that there should not be a reset button, too. Although you might want to have something up your sleeve that goes a little way towards that – a lost colony of a few surviving humans, a couple with a young family – because otherwise a group of PCs might feel uncomfortable with the burden of “repopulation”.
Sources: Everyone should read I Am Legend, and all of the films (The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man and Will Smith’s latest) have their virtues. Other movies like 28 Days Later and Day of the Triffids focus on the same empty or devastated world, and absolutely thousands of films and novels deal with the idea of there being no safe place with an outpost or community – take a look and then apply it to the whole world. Stephen King’s The Stand spends a lot of time dealing with the outcome of an emptied America – the fantasy equivalent would in many ways be much worse.
RPGs: Naturally, FFG’s Midnight springs to mind, and while it doesn’t go quite as far as this, it is an excellent starting point, with several necessary conditions already in place, an evil god well-suited to the task and a way of stopping him. Many RPGs for pre-established fantasy settings, from Lord of the Rings to a Song of Ice and Fire, also have suitable gods for such an apocalypse – as indeed to many, many horror, suspense and action games. Grab something off your shelf, and then simply turn the nob up to apocalypse.
