coming up with campaign ideas is hard so here are 11 that you can steal for your next D and D campaign number one the demons have gone missing the devils are appearing all over the land the Angels clash with them from the heavens the material plane is in shambles and it's all because of one thing the demons have gone missing the abyss and all the demons within have disappeared overnight the shock waves continue to Ripple across the Realms the party must exist in this new reality as they slowly try to reveal what has happened to the demons this is a campaign that can take your players from Level 1 to level 20 it's also very easy to run from a combat perspective because there's so many Devils demons and angels in the monster manual I think this is also a great example of a technique I use all the time to create campaigns if you're stuck and you have no ideas take something away from The Campaign World and explore that like what if all the demons disappeared or like what if the players didn't play characters second campaign idea this camp campaign is called lional bodies the core conceit of the campaign is that each player is playing this sentient item it can be a magical sword or a valuable ancient amulet whatever the case the spirit of the weapon takes over the host body as the new creature picks it up the items were created by an ancient artificer trying to accomplish an impossible goal and now these items no matter how many lives it takes will accomplish their task I Envision this campaign working well if you have players that want to try many different classes and some classes if a player character dies no problem just throw that item back out into the world and wait until the next schmuck comes walking back to Camp Maybe This Time Around the sentient ring is on a cleric but last time they were a part of a fighter I think the design space for a campaign like this is immense what happens when you encounter someone who knows the body you took over how will the items feel about possessing people what happens if there's a dungeon that forces one of the items to sacrifice their body I don't know but I think it would be great fun for you and your group finding out but in this next campaign we're going to move from from being magical items to sacrificing them in this Third campaign for an unknown reason the land is gripped in an endless winter the player characters are stuck in a settlement that has a magical furnace created by an arch Mage the problem is that this magical furnace is powered by magic items so now the party must manage the social politics of the settlement and also go off to find magical items to just Chuck into the furnace all the while they are trying to find a way to cease this endless winter this was a campaign idea obviously inspired by Frost Punk but I think you could also change the core idea to reflect any number of different weather environmental effects perhaps you're not dealing with the cold but this overwhelming scorching heat within a desert or perhaps the machine keeps back this deadly fog of poison and if the machine fails the poison is going to sweep through the settlement and kill everyone within go wild with what the threat is but the core idea is that there is a magic engine in the center of the town that the players need to feed however what if the players were working on an engine with an unknown purpose this is partially the idea behind campaign 4 the project did you watch Oppenheimer I did it's a fantastic movie and that's where this idea began to percolate you see what if the player characters are all recruited by a secret task force that is doing something the players don't know what that something is and they were promised an assortment of things maybe somewh promised gold a pardon for a past crime the answer to a question they seek or maybe a powerful magical artifact whatever the case is they are all working on this mysterious project the campaign revolves around them going on missions to complete the project maybe they need to raid dungeons for rare loot or they need to journey to a far off Kingdom to meet with a shady Professor who has some formula that they need and if you need an answer to what this project is well maybe the government is trying to revive a dead God it could be a good god it could be a bad God maybe even the thing they're trying to revive is an elder evil that the government is trying to turn into a weapon I always thought that an entity like Hadar or k the worm that walks would be perfect for a campaign like this yeah they're dangerous but I also 100% believe a government official would try to resurrect them and turn them into a weapon and if you like shady government campaigns well the next one is right up your alley campaign five is called the Monarch's Forest the party are playing the role of Park Rangers guarding a protected Forest near an important city however once they all get the job they realize that the turnover rate is pretty high very quickly they realize that this is not a normal forest and it houses many Secrets if you're a fan of creepy pastas the SCP Foundation or even the Magnus Archives this is the campaign for you this forest and the denisons therein seem to bend the laws of nature all types of strange Cryptids and weird magic reside Within These Woods then to top it all off the superiors of the party are either no help at all or acting very strange why did the monarch of the land protect this Forest who knows but it is the Monarch's Forest they can't just go burning it down or can they who knows that's up for you and your players to decide a part of me though always wanted the potential bbeg to be some sort of like butterfly eldrich creature that was slowly hatching its presence within the forest is the thing bringing monsters to this place and warping reality also this way the name means one thing at the start of the campaign and something completely different by the end think of the devilish smile you can give to your players when you say yeah I told you from the start it's the Monarch's Forest but I get it I get it some of you want the giant monsters to be your campaign from the very beginning that's why campaign 6 is titled the food chain giant monsters are on the lose throughout the campaign World a dozen or more gigantic Kaiju s creatures showed up one night the capital city is already destroyed beneath their feet now the player characters have to survive in a world reeling from these creatures appearance Adventures can include helping settlements that the monsters have gone through warning cities about the approach of one of these creatures or revealing the wizard cabal who summoned these monsters and their true intentions whatever they are I call this campaign the food chain because now all the races of the world are roped back into the food chain even dragons are not safe from these things you are literally introducing new apex predators into this campaign and maybe just maybe if the players are lucky by the end of the campaign they can have some truly epic Kaiju battles I mean just imagine the opening moments of the fight you describe a creature that stands 50 ft tall at its shoulder covered in spiked armor plating that turns aside spells and other magical weapons with ease possessed of the desire to devour all within its path and endowed with a primal strength equal to that of the mightiest Titan do you like that description because I got it from the exact same place where I got the music for today's video our sponsor describe. comom describe is your One-Stop shop for everything you need to run in a mive d and game they have thousands of descriptions for everything from Monsters to magic items and even spellcasting descriptions they're also releasing their new software Opus which is a film quality audio library containing a growing number of over 3,000 ambiences sound effects and musical pieces for your games they even have highquality interactive maps for your next game if you click the link in the description and sign up using the code enter the dungeon you'll get a whole 4 weeks free on any tier you sign up for with describe if you want to level up your home game check out my friends at describe but now we're going to switch gears from the monster that you can obviously see to the monsters you can't see which is strange because you have more than enough light campaign s is titled the never Setting Sun because one day the sun rose and never set all the people of the world wonder what this means and what it does actually mean is up to you I've always had it in the back of my mind though that a God or another powerful Mage is keeping the Sun up because as soon as night falls an army of vampires or other Undead are ready to invade from the underd dark while the sun being up up in the sky seems ominous it's actually keeping everyone safe or rather some people safe because if your campaign map takes place on say a globe well then half of your campaign map is going to be kept in darkness and the vampires might be running a muck there but in any case it's the party's mission to navigate the world and slowly unravel The Mystery of the never Setting Sun but so far a lot of these are very high stakes campaigns what if we cool the tone off a little bit because campaign 8 is titled running the shop this Campa revolves around players running a magical item shop they're setting prices interacting with customers and going into dungeons to get new items for their shop this setting is a chill low-level fantasy town where occasionally you might need to fight a bbeg of the week however running the shop is designed to be an RP heavy campaign that's Chicken Soup for the Soul well maybe aside from the start though because I always envisioned session one being a high level party walking in and robbing the players blind the stereotypical murder hobos murder hoboing and being potential antagonist in the campaign maybe the party is waiting until they're high enough level to go after these murder hobos and show them not to mess with shopkeepers otherwise though you can focus on NPCs player backstories and getting awesome loot now one big question is what do the players do with their money and I have a few ideas for that the first is you can have the players buy their level UPS by getting trained from people in town the more money they're making the faster they can level up or a second option spend it to make the town a better place/ getting permanent buff for their characters I think this is the harder option if you're a dungeon master but I think I'd prefer it and then you have the third option which is that they have to pay off a massive debt they accured maybe at the start of the campaign if they got robbed maybe they have to spend a bunch of money to fix up their shop and get new magic items so now they're indebted to the Mob and if they don't keep paying well they're going to get smoked or you could go with the most fun option do all three at once let's switch gears though to a more sandbox focused campaign idea campaign 9 titled the villains world is a Sandbox where the heroes failed to defeat the villains now the players have to survive in a world that is directly impacted by the villain's Victory everything is apocalyptic there are threats everywhere and people have problems that they need you to solve this is not a campaign about the party who's going to defeat the villain it's about a group of people trying to survive here a group of player characters trying to do the best that they can and carve out a niche in this new world you see this is a great campaign for even the most chaotic of parties what are they going to do make things worse perhaps though you sprinkle in a few ways to defeat the villain somewhere in your campaign world but that's not necessary this is a campaign about settling into the villains world not necessarily being the heroes when I ran a campaign like this I ran it as a hex crawl where each hex had a new fire to put out the player characters went around the map solving problems at their Leisure there was a new flavor of Adventure every single week and it was a great time but shifting gears to campaign 10 we we asked the question what if the Druid was the BBE I titled campaign 10 the druid's Wrath because what if a druid got really angry that Civilization kept on chopping down their forests they became so angry in fact they decided to wipe civilization out completely and start from scratch the Crux of this campaign is simple it's nature against the Civilized world all the beasts and the plants of the world are on the hunt cities in the region are safe but everything else down to the smallest flower the cutest squirrel is trying to kill you the party needs to defeat this Druid hellbent on returning everything to Nature via forced natural selection if you ever wanted a campaign where you can finally run all those beasts and plants that you've never touched try this one out for size and the final campaign we're talking about today I'm titling the perished the players in this campaign wake up in a strange house owned by a God or maybe just a powerful Angel they've been resurrected but not by this person and now they all have so many questions who is this God what do they want how did each one of them die this is a campaign that revolves around a Sinister plot woven around all the player characters and the god in this D and D Story the players are trying to get Vengeance on those who killed them and also try and figure out why they're alive in the first place but now you might be saying to yourself well okay these campaign ideas are great but I don't even know how to run a D and D campaign well you can check out this video right here to get started it will teach you how to structure The Narrative of your campaign or you could head over to my patreon and sign up for some one-on one dm coaching this will allow me to help you build your campaign from scratch also thank you for entering the dungeon