Campaign Promises

In my spare time I've been doing a lot of writing. Part of that writing isn't always me talking about my emotions because sometimes I even need a break from that. So to break up the monotony of me always being down and reflecting on my past mistakes, I started writing D&D campaigns again.

Not simple one shots, but epic adventures that explore different facets of storytelling and player interactivity. Ways I can convey a narrative plotline while still keeping sessions fun. Finding ways to engage players that go beyond simple combat. Things that will elicit a genuine reaction from the players. One of the things I wanted to experiment with is a narrative heavy campaign that would pull the players into an engaging story where they are solving a mystery.

After doing some research I finally found the answer. The False Hydra.

It's a homebrew monster, meaning it doesn't exist in any official rulebook. Someone on the internet created it, and it spread because it's genuinely unsettling in a way most D&D monsters aren't. Most monsters are scary because they can kill you. The False Hydra is scary because it makes you doubt what's real.

The short version: it's a massive creature that emits a constant, inaudible song. Anyone who hears it forgets the people it eats. Not "they saw something terrible and blocked it out." Completely erased. A man's wife gets taken in the night and by morning he's setting her place at the table out of habit, with no memory of who it was for. A whole town slowly hollowing out and nobody noticing because the grief gets swallowed too.

That's what got me. The horror isn't in the monster itself, it's in the NPCs around it. Players will talk to a grieving farmer and something won't add up. They'll notice an extra chair, a name carved into a doorframe, a child's toy with no child. The mystery lives in the gaps. And because the players themselves aren't immune, you can start feeding them false information, making them question their own notes from earlier sessions.

As a dungeon master, that's the kind of tool that gets your mind running.

Now that I had the BBEG ( Big Bad Evil Guy), I needed a campaign hook. That's when I thought of incorporating pirates. One Piece has always lived in the back of my head as a blueprint for how to do adventure storytelling right: found family, escalating stakes, a world that keeps expanding the further you sail into it. I wanted some of that energy. But I didn't want the players to be the pirates. That felt too clean, too much agency too fast. I wanted them to start with nothing. No weapons, no bearings, no idea what's happening on shore.

So they wake up in the hold of a slaver ship.

They don't know each other. They don't know where they're going. All they know is the smell of salt water through the hull and the sound of boots on the deck above them. Whatever life they had before, it's somewhere behind them on the water.

And in a town they've never heard of, something is eating people. And nobody remembers.

That's the campaign. That's where they're headed, not as heroes, but as survivors who stumble into something bigger than themselves. The False Hydra doesn't care who you are when you arrive. Neither does the ship.

I'm still building it out. But that's the part of writing I don't talk about enough, the moment a thing stops being an idea and starts feeling real.