If you’re looking for a way to pump some new life into a long-running or stagnant campaign why not make a radical change like thrusting the PCs into the past. I can already hear some of you scoffing at the idea, but in a world with magic is time travel really that unlikely?
Players get bored when they’re not challenged. Sure you can throw more powerful monsters at them but even that gets repetitive. What I’ve found is that anything that takes them out of their comfort zone is good for the game. Players don’t realize how much the success of their characters relies on the familiar. High level PCs usually have a reputation and their deeds are well-known by the community. Taking all of that away from them can have a greater effect that you might think.
Although I’ve played multiple characters in multiple campaigns over the years every camping took place in more or less the same time period. In established worlds like Forgotten Realms or Eberron, keeping the action in line with cannon allowed us to interact with well-known NPCs and work elements from new releases into our games. Even though I played in numerous campaigns set in the Realms during my high school years they all happened simultaneously.
Now fast forward your campaign setting 50 years. Assuming there wasn’t a cataclysmic disaster (like the Spell Plague) and things progressed without any significant interference, what changes do you think happened to the world and the people in it during that time. Just think of how much things have change in the last 50 years in real life and imagine the kinds of change that will come in the next 50.
So in a world with magic what do you think their future will look like? How technologically or magically advanced to you think your campaign world will become in the next 50 years? A more important question is how much has your campaign world advanced over the last 50 years? While contemplating that brain teaser think about how your PCs would react if they found themselves thrust back into that time.
