My Granny's Parrot

I always love planning a new campaign. It's like starting with a blank character sheet - endless possibilities, dreams of what it could become... and without input from those pesky players ruining it all. I've therefore been enjoying giving a lot of thought to the topic of the new campaign over the last couple of days, and I've now firmed something up.

I've decided that the new campaign will be a homebrew job. Frankly, I've not been impressed with WotC's output ("Lost Mine..." aside), and converting a Pathfinder campaign isn't going to be less effort that doing the whole thing whole-cloth. I've also decided to give the players a choice of three campaigns at the outset:

The Quest for Memory: The most classic of the three, this is standard dungeon-crawling and treasure finding, with not a huge amount else going on. It will have a somewhat Hobbit-y vibe, and will be centered around an ancient, abandoned dwarven citadel. This one will have some interaction, quite a bit of exploration, and a number of hidden treasure caches - PCs will gain extra XP for finding those caches (in addition to the money itself, of course).

The Mists of Lamordia: Ravenloft, but not in Strahd's domain. The PCs were once smugglers plying the trade in the Realms, but one moonless night they find themselves enveloped in a thick mist. When the mist clears, they find the terrain around them changed, and a silent dock beckons. This one will be a horror/adventure campaign, similar in tone to "The Evil Dead" or "Van Helsing". This one will be balanced between interaction and exploration, and the focus on discovering secrets - PCs will gain extra XP for discovering secrets. Further, each PC will have a secret, and will gain XP from revealing it at an opportune time.

Blades in the Desert: Swashbuckling adventure in Calimport, with the PCs working for one of the five factions in the region. The emphasis here will be on fast-moving adventure, with quests against villainous sorcerers, feral gnolls, and rogue elementals. This campaign will feature some exploration, but will focus more on interaction. The PCs will gain extra XP for advancing the agenda of their faction, and also for rising within the faction.

Obviously, preparing three different-sounding campaigns is a lot of work, and work I just don't have time to do. Which brings me to my own dirty little secret: these are actually fundamentally the same campaign just skinned differently - I'll be using a mostly common map, be reusing the same structure of adventures, and will be placing the key obstacles in the way of the PCs with the same cadence. There are some differences, of course, but those are actually detail work that I can flesh out once I know which way they've jumped.

(Added bonus: whichever way they go, I'll then have the skeleton of two more campaigns to use later. Robust recycling facilities are a must for any busy DM!)

FWIW, the title of this post is from a probably-apocryphal story told me by an old English teacher, about a pupil who wrote one amazing essay, "My Granny's Parrot". Thereafter, he found a way to shoehorn this same essay into being the answer to any and all questions.