15 DnD Campaign Ideas & Plot Hooks to Get Your Game Started

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Plan a unique and exciting long-term campaign for your players

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IN THIS ARTICLE

1 The Expedition

2 High Seas Campaign

3 Reformed Bad Guys

4 Magic School

5 The Perfect Heist

6 The Social Game

7 Spaceship Crew

8 The City that Never Sleeps

9 Save the Child

10 Nights at the Museum

11 A Deadly Curse

12 The Nemesis

13 Artifact Hunt

14 Tavern Stories

15 Rival Guilds

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Co-authored by Madeleine Flamiano and Glenn Carreau

Last Updated: March 24, 2024 Fact Checked

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You and your friends are starting a D&D campaign in a few days, but you’re still brainstorming plot hook ideas. Every DM (Dungeon Master) has been there at one time or another, but don’t worry—we’re here to help you set up your campaign. Designing an entire campaign by yourself can be equal parts fun and challenging in between all the plot threads, characters, and encounters to keep track of, so we’ve narrowed down a list of possible campaign ideas for you to choose from. Ready to create a brand-new D&D campaign? Then read on!

Steps

1

The Expedition

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1. Task the party with exploring a new continent or realm. Let each PC (player character) bring different skills to the table, whether it’s survival skills, research, or combat, to protect their crew against the unknown. As a DM, you have a ton of freedom with this campaign idea; try introducing new and exciting creatures and threats! As time passes, players may want to establish their own settlements in the areas they discover.

   • Introduce the new realm any way you like! Perhaps a strange new plane has been discovered, or a large chasm opened up in the group to reveal a world beneath the surface.
   • Try exploring a territory filled with dangers, like a post-apocalyptic landscape or a land mutated by a Lich’s relic.
   • Establish a home base for the PCs at the beginning of the campaign so they have a main hub to return to in between exploring—a bustling port city, for example, or a wild frontier outpost.
   • Then, give the PCs a reason to leave their main hub. For example, they might need to explore a mysterious landmark nearby, or fight a monster that’s been hunting other explorers.
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2

High Seas Campaign

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1. Take to the seas as adventurous sailors or dangerous pirates. Let your players explore the ocean and all its wonders! Set each session somewhere new—an island, a stretch of coastal land, or on the sea itself, and create a cast of colorful NPCs to interact with the PCs as their crewmates. Perhaps they encounter a band of rival pirates, a deadly Kraken, or a haunted ghost ship that looks abandoned until they try to board it.

   • Before starting the campaign, have your players create unique backstories for why their character ended up on the ship and what they’re hoping to find on the voyage.
     • Did they want to see the world? Find a priceless treasure? Escape their life on the mainland? The options are endless.
   • Give the PCs a quest or challenge to accomplish each session. For example, perhaps they’re part of a treasure hunt, or they’re chasing a bounty on a rival pirate ship.

3

Reformed Bad Guys

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1. Create a redemption-themed campaign for your players. Who doesn’t love a good redemption arc? For this campaign, start every PC as a member of a villain’s evil horde. Then, something happens to give them all a change of heart; maybe the evil plot is just too evil, or a noble hero inspires them to leave the dark side. From there, they decide to give heroics a try and must work together to escape the life they left behind.

   • Players could start the game as low-level minions, high-ranking soldiers, or even one of the BBEG’s (Big Bad Evil Guy) closest advisors.
   • Let your players figure out how to move on from their complicated past over the course of the campaign. What will they do to turn over a new leaf—and who’s trying to stop them?
   • If one of your players doesn’t want to make a formerly evil PC, let them play as something else—like an adventurer who helped the ex-villains escape and wants to teach them to be productive members of society once more.
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4

Magic School

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1. Set the game inside a magical school where the players are students. Fans of Harry Potter, The Magicians, and other “magic school” fiction may enjoy a D&D campaign at an adventuring academy! Use the official Strixhaven D&D campaign setting, or create your own school system that makes more sense for your party members. In-between classes (and classmate drama), introduce threats to the school and encounters both on and off-campus.

   • Create a cast of other students to be NPCs (non-player characters) your PCs can talk to and play off of throughout the game.
   • Come up with intriguing plot hooks and mysteries for the PCs to explore. For example, maybe one of the teachers has been acting suspiciously, or students begin disappearing without a trace.

5

The Perfect Heist

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1. Cast players in the role of thieves planning to pull off a daring heist. Maybe the PCs are a group of criminals who have been working together for years, or they were recently brought together for their special abilities. Give them their objective (essentially, tell them what they need to steal and who they need to steal it from) and challenge them to plan the perfect heist.

   • Good-aligned characters could be recovering gold stolen from poor citizens to redistribute it or locating a stolen artifact in a museum to return it to its rightful owner.
   • Alternatively, evil characters could steal…just about anything! After all, if they’re evil, they might be stealing solely out of greed or because they want a powerful item for themselves.
   • Add a twist to your heist campaign halfway through to keep players on their toes. For example, perhaps the person who hired them is the real bad guy, or the person who hired them and the target are secretly working together.
   • For ongoing campaigns, use the heist as a plot hook for more fun later on. Maybe they find a mysterious letter with gold and instructions for another heist, or they steal something they shouldn’t have.
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6

The Social Game

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1. Make a campaign setting based on the Regency era of the early 1800s. If you have players who prefer roleplay to combat, consider using RPGs like Good Society to play a Regency campaign. Each PC is involved in high society, whether they’re nobility, royalty, or a commoner on the outside looking in. Create plotlines based on things like romance, rivals, and social intrigue as the players try to navigate the competitive social scene together.

   • Good Society is a separate RPG, but try blending it with D&D! Use the mechanics of Good Society as well as the mechanics of D&D, so your players are still rolling ability scores and checks to navigate the campaign.

7

Spaceship Crew

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1. Use the Spelljammer setting to create an outer space adventure. Whether you grew up with dreams of flying in the Millenium Falcon or the Starship Enterprise, a space-based setting is perfect for any sci-fi fan. Gather an adventurous crew under the Spelljammer campaign setting (or a homebrew setting of your choosing) to explore the far reaches of space and navigate the stars on a ship full of colorful characters.

   • Spelljammer is a classic D&D campaign setting, with the newest iteration published for 5th edition in the Spelljammer: Adventures in Space campaign guidebook.
   • In D&D, a Spelljammer vessel is a legendary spacefaring ship capable of traversing wildspace and, in some instances, traveling to other planes of existence.
   • There are a ton of different locations to use within the Spelljammer setting, from Rock of Bral (a city set on an asteroid) to Stardock (an abandoned mind-flayer port).
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8

The City that Never Sleeps

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1. Choose or create an urban setting for your next campaign. Some campaigns focus on dungeon-crawling or exploring vast amounts of wilderness, but cities can also serve as vibrant, exciting settings! Pick a city you’d like to use for the campaign (like Waterdeep or Baldur’s Gate from the Forgotten Realms, for example) and create a D&D campaign that uses the city as the backdrop for the main plot.

   • For example, maybe there’s political unrest there, and players need to decide whether to help the city’s rulers quell it or join the revolution.
   • Perhaps your PCs are detectives, hot on the trail of a crime boss or underground operation that needs to be disrupted—like a thieves’ guild or a sinister cabal of assassins.
   • City adventures provide plenty of opportunities for roleplay as well as combat and exploration. The PCs must figure out who they can trust, where each character’s allegiances lie, and, ultimately, how they want to resolve the issue at hand.

9

Save the Child

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1. Task the party with finding and rescuing a powerful, prophesied child. Begin the campaign with a prophecy: a chosen one is meant to defeat some great evil entity and save the world one day, but in the meantime, the PCs have to keep them safe long enough for the prophecy to come true! For now, the mythical “chosen one” is still just a child, and the PCs are their temporary guardians.

   • For example, the PCs might learn that the person who hired them to find the chosen one isn’t really their parent but the villain that the child will vanquish someday.
   • From there, give the party a chance to prevent the disaster and bring the child somewhere safe—or even raise and protect it themselves!
   • Create a likable child NPC to accompany on their travels—and keep players on their toes by creating enemy ambushes every so often. As long as the child is with them, the campaign’s villain continues to pursue them,
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10

Nights at the Museum

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1. Cast players as museum curators who deal with dangerous artifacts. An ancient museum full of books and artifacts is the perfect place to get into some trouble! Set your campaign in a museum that each character is in charge of curating, and create sessions for the campaign focused around a particular artifact within the museum, leading to an adventure for the party.

   • For example, they might spend one session transporting a priceless artifact from one place to another (and fending off bandits or monsters along the way) and another trying to break a mysterious enchantment caused by one of the artifacts.
   • Use this idea if you’re looking for an open-ended campaign—after all, the museum could have countless artifacts that need cataloging or transporting.

11

A Deadly Curse

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1. Place a curse over the land and challenge players to break it. Come up with a powerful curse, one that poisons the land, creates strange and mutated creatures, spreads a deadly disease, or a combination of those ideas. Whatever curse you choose, start the PCs at the beginning of a dangerous journey to discover the source of the curse, the truth behind its creation, and hopefully, how to remove it once and for all.

   • The curse might be the result of a bitter and angry god, a wizard’s experiment gone wrong, a demon trying to sow chaos throughout the realm, or a sinister cult acting on the orders of some alien entity.
   • Use one of the above causes for your campaign’s curse, or come up with an entirely different cause on your own!
   • Create a complex curse that requires the PCs to do some problem-solving if you’re looking to run a longer campaign.
     • For example, perhaps the spell to break the curse requires several rare reagents that players must hunt down, or perhaps the spell is simply level 9, so the PCs must work to get more powerful before they can cast it.
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12

The Nemesis

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1. Create an enemy that grows and evolves with the party over time. In some of the best D&D campaigns, the NPCs and villains don’t feel static—they change over time, with their lives shaped by the PCs’ actions. Try incorporating that into your own campaign! Create a nemesis for the PCs, introduce them early on, and build an adventure with that nemesis rising to power just as the PCs do.

   • To give the campaign more stakes, design a nemesis who only became the party’s adversary because of something they did.
   • For example, perhaps the nemesis is a fledgling necromancer the PCs confronted (and spared) who was so enraged at his defeat that he began studying forbidden rituals to increase his power.
   • By the end of the campaign, maybe the party must stop the necromancer from summoning an army of undead or completing a ritual designed to turn themselves into an all-powerful lich.

13

Artifact Hunt

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1. Pit the party against a dangerous rival vying to find the artifacts first. In this campaign, your PCs are adventurers or mercenaries tasked with hunting down an ancient and powerful artifact lost to time. The catch? Someone else—either a foe with evil intentions or a rival mercenary group—hunting it as well. The PCs must follow clues and delve into dark dungeons in search of their quarry.

   • To make a longer campaign, perhaps the PCs have to hunt down several legendary artifacts made by the gods. That way, they'd have to go on multiple adventures to find everything.
   • Shake things up by creating obstacles throughout the adventure. If the PCs take too long to find a particular artifact, maybe another group gets to it first, and they have to steal it (or fight the group for it).
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14

Tavern Stories

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1. Play an episodic campaign with different adventurers every session. Want to see your players take on different characters each time you play D&D? Create a D&D campaign centered around a tavern and a tavern keeper who tells stories that they’ve heard over the years. Each story the tavern keeper tells is actually an adventure, and players must create a new PC to go with each adventure (and story) the tavern keeper mentions.

   • Perhaps one story centers around a group of adventurers that saved the locals from a band of ogres, and the next is about a group of explorers who got lost in a nearby portal to the Feywild.
   • Because each session is a standalone story, go as crazy as you like using different settings for each story. One could take place in a Domain of Dread, and another in Avernus (in the Nine Hells), for example.

15

Rival Guilds

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1. Have players take charge of a thieves’ guild or criminal organization. Looking for a campaign where PCs aren’t all good-aligned? Then cast them all as criminals! The players are members of a thieves guild, but they aren’t the only gang in town. A rival thieves’ guild is competing for territory and resources—so the players must work to ensure the organization comes out on top.

   • Consider using D&D 5e’s Acquisitions Incorporated sourcebook and its Franchise mechanic to make the chain of command in your thieves’ guild feel more authentic.
   • Rather than having your players explore dungeons for treasure, create warehouses, businesses, and wealthy nobles’ estates for them to raid.
   • Use humanoid enemies primarily—although you might find good opportunities to get creative with your enemies too. For example, perhaps a dragon is controlling the rival thieves guild or a local noble has made a deal with a devil.
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Tips

• There are plenty of pre-designed D&D campaign settings to use for your adventure, from classic high fantasy worlds like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and Dragonlance, to more stylized settings like the gothic Barovia, Spelljammer (where high fantasy meets science fiction) or Eberron, a fantasy setting mixed with steampunk and noir themes. Many existing D&D adventure books take place in these settings as well.
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• Alternatively, use a setting from your favorite movie or video game! You might design a campaign set in the world of Tamriel (from The Elder Scrolls video game series) or Middle-Earth (from The Lord of the Rings), for example.
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