TFT Campaign Ideas

[TippetsTX]

So what is everyone's plans for their kick-off campaign setting? I know some of you have been running TFT for quite awhile but its been a 30+ year hiatus for me. Since the return of TFT was announced, however, I've been thinking a lot about running a metropolitan city-based fantasy campaign because I've never done that before. I've used cities in other games of course, but never as the primary setting.

This got me thinking about Monte Cook's Ptolus setting... I've always wanted to run it, but never did because we were always playing on Faerun (D&D) or Golarian (Pathfinder), occasionally the Lost Lands (Frog God Games). I think it would be easy to adapt since the vast majority of the material is system-agnostic. It also seems like the tone would fit TFT quite well.

[larsdangly]

I'm a month or so into a fresh campaign set in an old TFT setting of mine that I started re-organizing and expanding last summer. The basic idea is a sprawling, complex city of many districts, under which is a complex of sewers and interconnected dungeons of roughly 1000 rooms in size, and a nearby volcanic plateau that entombs a cyclopean ruin of a very ancient city, with a surface decorated by several dozen small dungeons, forts, etc. created by the nasties that now live in the desolate landscape. Plus a few other details. It is basically a massively complicated sandbox. Most of our sessions start without a plan, other than continuing whatever nonsense the players were up to the session before. It's been a glorious few weeks so far; just a lot of fun.

[TippetsTX]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

I'm a month or so into a fresh campaign set in an old TFT setting of mine that I started re-organizing and expanding last summer. The basic idea is a sprawling, complex city of many districts, under which is a complex of sewers and interconnected dungeons of roughly 1000 rooms in size, and a nearby volcanic plateau that entombs a cyclopean ruin of a very ancient city, with a surface decorated by several dozen small dungeons, forts, etc. created by the nasties that now live in the desolate landscape. Plus a few other details. It is basically a massively complicated sandbox. Most of our sessions start without a plan, other than continuing whatever nonsense the players were up to the session before. It's been a glorious few weeks so far; just a lot of fun.

Very cool. Ptolus shares many of those same elements.

[larsdangly]

Thanks! I'm the first to admit that the basic architecture of the place isn't original - the huge adventure land is a pumped up version of Runequest's Big Rubble; the city itself is Lhankmar meets Thieves World meets every city in every Conan book; the dungeon beneath the Raj's castle is a ~200 room version of Death Test. But it feels creative because all the details emerge during play rather than being planned out.

Expert hack: these days it is surprisingly easy to get the bones of such a campaign put together yourself. Over the last several years I've swapped out most of my old hand made maps (which had tons of gaps because I have a job other than writing dungeons!), and replaced them with a massive ensemble of Dyson's Delves maps, which I drop into a graphics program and modify to meet my needs. The result is that a surprisingly large sandbox space is mapped to a surprisingly great depth of detail, so players can literally go anywhere and try anything and I'll have a concrete answer for them. The stocking is trickier because you have to use your brain; there I'm relying on a ton of old NPCs and encounter tables Ive made over years. There are so many of them, many with some history of use in prior games, so it is pretty easy to ad lib. And once you get used to doing that you really don't need to pre stock much.

[the1weasel]

I <3 custom encounter tables. Also <3 them in excel using randbetween and lookups to produce stocking-on-demand. From there, if I use it enough, migrate the logic to the application I’m building (.NET Windows desktop app—nothing super fancy to look at but the back end has some good core elements. )

[The Wyzard]

I'm working on a campaign set in an alternate-universe 1970s UK, focusing on the children of Jen Mnoren.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

So what is everyone's plans for their kick-off campaign setting? I know some of you have been running TFT for quite awhile but its been a 30+ year hiatus for me. Since the return of TFT was announced, however, I've been thinking a lot about running a metropolitan city-based fantasy campaign because I've never done that before. I've used cities in other games of course, but never as the primary setting.

This got me thinking about Monte Cook's Ptolus setting... I've always wanted to run it, but never did because we were always playing on Faerun (D&D) or Golarian (Pathfinder), occasionally the Lost Lands (Frog God Games). I think it would be easy to adapt since the vast majority of the material is system-agnostic. It also seems like the tone would fit TFT quite well.

I've always wanted to run Ptolus, but until you wrote this, I never even thought of it for TFT. I wonder why? Brilliant idea, and now I have to think about that... ;-)

[TippetsTX]

Originally Posted by JLV

I've always wanted to run Ptolus, but until you wrote this, I never even thought of it for TFT. I wonder why? Brilliant idea, and now I have to think about that... ;-)

Right? There are some changes I'll need to make obviously, but reading thru the materials over the last couple weeks, it is much less than I initially thought. I even think many of the setting's meta-plots will mesh nicely with TFT background elements (i.e. the Spire was created by the Mnoren). So far, I'm just making a bunch of mental notes right now, but I plan to share my conversion notes with this group once I start formally writing everything up. I need to finish my revisions to the core rules first though.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

Right? There are some changes I'll need to make obviously, but reading thru the materials over the last couple weeks, it is much less than I initially thought. I even think many of the setting's meta-plots will mesh nicely with TFT background elements (i.e. the Spire was created by the Mnoren). So far, I'm just making a bunch of mental notes right now, but I plan to share my conversion notes with this group once I start formally writing everything up. I need to finish my revisions to the core rules first though.

Well, I for one, will be very much looking forward to seeing your take on it. I need to break out my PDFs and start looking again. (That's probably one of the big reasons why I didn't even think about it; I only have PDFs, and I'm very much an analog guy in a digital world...) Up until now, I was focusing more on places like the Free City of Haven, or City State of the Invincible Overlord as starting urban areas (or at least urban areas within relatively easy reach for those kinds of adventures).

[TippetsTX]

As an interesting aside, I think that Monte Cook and I must've loved a lot of the same things growing up. He created a leonine race (originally for his Unearthed Arcana RPG) called Litorians which are also featured in his Ptolus setting. Back in '85, I created a similar race for my TFT campaign based on the lion-men of Mongo from that cool Flash Gordon cartoon that share many of the same attributes with Monte's creation. There are several elements like this that line up nicely with my own preferences and designs which makes Ptolus that much more attractive to me.