My Life As A Gamer: The Celestial Isle Campaign (Premise)

(Carrying on from last week.)

An Existential Crisis

Your people are in danger.

Your enemies press upon you. Slowly, steadily, they push you back. For hatred's sake, they throw themselves upon your spears and charge into your volleys, uncaring of the ruin wrought upon them by your warriors or the devastation by your wizards and mocking the power of your gods brought upon them. There is no shortage of valor, no question of commitment, and no end of the songs of glory sung in home and hall- but there is a limit of time, of life, and your enemies know it.

Many years ago, when this grinding war began, your people sent one party out to seek aid. Most of them failed.

One succeeded.

Through uncanny means, your people learned of his success- and with it, the promise of deliverance, for he showed proof of a place long lost to legend and within it the power to deliver your people from certain doom. You learned of The Tower at the center of The Celestial Isle- a place some called "Atlantis", others "Lemuria", "Mu", "Lodoos", "Fairie" or any number of legendary labels for a land long lost.

Though the effort was difficult, and much was sacrified to make it so, you marshalled your people and journeyed to the Isle where your lost hero yet beckons you to the Tower.

A Desperate Decision

There is no retreat. Your people have no future from that Elsewhere whence you came if you fail here. Either you win the Tower, or you--and your people--shall cease to exist.

It is also hoped that your enemies cannot pursue you here now that you, symbolically and literally, burned your only way back to ash as soon as you landed. Now that you are here, and your seaside stronghold established, it is time to do what you came here for: to seek, seize, and secure the Tower- and with it, a future for your people.

There are so few of you left, and yet so much to ask of them. Risks must be weighed with extreme care lest your people be wiped out before your hopes can be made real- and you do so with the worst of conditions before you: a blank map.

A Critical Campaign

Maybe your people escaped their enemies Elsewhere. You don't know, and you would be foolish to presume that they can't follow.

Maybe you won't have too much trouble finding and claiming the Tower, but you know better than to assume so.

All you know is that you have a few hundred of your people left, and no way back to where you fled from. This is it; the only stakes greater than the future of your people are those that are the domains of the gods.

How do you handle a campaign where you don't know the terrain, you don't know the history, you don't know the denizens? You know only yourself and your own kind; the rest is unknown, and all you have to guide you is your lost hero somewhere in the Tower- made concrete by being able to see its pinnacle from your seaside stronghold.

What do you do? How do you do it? Whom do you trust to do what you cannot?

And what do you do should you encounter others that also seek the Tower?

What would you do to secure the existence of your kind and a future for your people?

If you want to find out, this Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition campaign may be for you.