Been reading Eberron books. Eberron is a setting for Dungeons and Dragons. Most everybody I know who DMs wants to set up that one "epic" campaign going from level one to max with all the stuff they love in it, just once. A lot of them give up from the workload or cuz such a thing takes years to play out and shit happens. This is my attempt to set up my own. Might as well, I got time with quarantine and my friends and I need a game to socialize.
Game is using the latest edition rules, but since the setting hasn't had its timeline ever change, all info ever published for the setting is still current. Got a) Rise of the Last War as the main book for fifth edition, b) Eberronicon as a bit of a reference encyclopedia, c) Morgrave Miscellany is an "unofficial" supplement (meaning it's published under the open games license for the game, and is not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, the D&D owner) written by the setting's creator with a lot of supplementary details on how the classes fit into the setting, among other things, d) Five Nations, Dragonmarked, and Sharn: City of Towers as older setting supplements for background lore, plot ideas, and maps, and e) Encounters in Sharn or something like that, which has a collection of small scale battles or adventures that take place in the city the game will start in, and which I can shamelessly steal stuff from so that the work I'm doing is sustainable in the long run (way easier to edit something to fit than to make it from scratch).
I'm in a brainstorming stage where I'n reading through the books and jotting down any ideas that happen to hit me as I go, and forming them into 5 overarching plotlines framed as conspiracies, which will update with the state of the world according to the players' actions, and serve as inspirations for the adventures I'll be coming up with. For example, if I feel like the Criminal conspiracy is at a tipping point, maybe that means its time for a gang war for the players to be involved in. And maybe the results of that gang war have an effect on the Politics conspiracy, so the next adventure will evolve organically from the previous while taking the players in a fresh direction. Eberron has 3 big selling points as a setting: magiteck, pulp adventure, and noir thriller. Noir thriller is the favorite for me, so the campaign will be geared towards that primarily, with the players getting ensnared in the gambits and betrayals of a continent-wide Cold War.
So far, the Demon conspiracy/plotline has gotten the furthest (it'll probably be the epic conclusion of the game, and I tend to have the easiest time coming up with endings than anything else), with Criminal close behind, vague ideas for Dragonmarked Houses (basically industrial barons) and Dreamers (sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except telepathically?), and not really anything at all for Politics. I'm going through Five Nations now, as its the background info for the major continental powers, to try to help that last one. Dragonmarked should help with the Houses plot, and Sharn with the Criminal one. I'm not sure if I will want to keep the Dreamers one. It's cool, but so far it's feeling divorced from the other plots. I'm thinking of reframing it as a subplot for each of the major plots; each plot would have a Dreamer infiltration, which can take over the whole plot if the infiltration goes unimpeded long enough. I have to think it through more.
