Finding the lost city! How to run such a campaign

[dascarletm]

Hello again. So I've posted a few threads on my upcoming skypirate campaign, and it looks to me that the players will be interested in finding this long lost flying city. My questions are:

1. Has anyone ran a game with that sort of thing as a primary goal? If so any pointers/tips? How did it go, and how did you pace it? What was troubling about it?

2. Are there any adventure paths that do this sort of thing that I can use as a reference?

I'm mostly unsure on how to try and pace a campaign. I don't want to make them take forever to find it, and I don't want it to be too easy.

[Gildedragon]

Well: what interest do they have in the city, what is the city's backstory?

You need to make sure the characters are interested in it for some reason or another. But if it is being a new campaign it stands to reason they would be.

There are a couple of stages:
The legend: the city is believed to be a fiction or a tale. This works to get the characters in tune with the normal of the world, gain some xp, build a couple contacts. Though this is a skippable stage. It should exist even if just in backstory.
The evidence: something appears that points them to items of the city. A map, an artifact, a monster...
The hunt: getting to the evidence and pacing the scavenger hunt. You ought figure out a couple of different ways to find the city. Each step harder than the last. (An artifact leads to a wizard leads to an ancient outpost leads to...). They probably ought have some rivals to finding the city: from guardians that dont want it found (there is something bad hidden there) to other folk eager for its treasures.
The fallout: someone found the city, now what? This depends on what was in the city itself. Do they build a new outpost? Do they find a planar gateway? Do they free an ancient evil? Or was this city they found just an outpost for a grand lost empire? (In fact the evidence-hunt-fallout is good for each step of the hunt: item is found that points them in some direction, they go that way to find a new thing, new thing points them ahead).

Just make sure there is some variety in the steps of the quest. they may be looking for an artifact one day, the other hunting down a monster that was known to guard the skies of the city, and yet another exploring a city to find a scholar that can translate or open the item they found some time ago (and possibly protect them from either related or unrelated attacks).
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As to pacing: how many levels/sessions you want it to take? I'd say 1 or 2 steps towards the city per level, which may be some 3 sessions per step by my reckoning
If the hunt is meant to take some 4 levels, you have some 8 steps to take. Let's make it 9, with every third step being a BIG step in the quest: finding a map to a fort in an ancient cache, finding the fort, finding the city. In between and before you have: finding a pirate dealing in artifacts and finding the pirate's hideout, finding someone to translate the map... Etc
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A way to start them off on the course, if it is something like, say, Atlantis, is to have them run across a couple atlantean artifacts: mythals, a broken sword that still has a lot of power, minor schemas, etc... And then slip in a map, or a legend about the location

You can have their patron want to retrieve a map to skytlantis or a cache of skytlantean artifacts, showing the PCs that the place is believed to be real by important people. Patron might send them looking for skytlantis itself.

There can be a ritualistic hunt for skytlantis, with fame and fortune and stuff as the prize (a legend that whomever finds skytlantis will get their heart's desire)

Or they can run into a third party hunting for the artifacts or city.

[Darrin]

1. Has anyone ran a game with that sort of thing as a primary goal? If so any pointers/tips? How did it go, and how did you pace it? What was troubling about it?

My last campaign world had 12 floating cities, sort of a mishmash of anime, video games, and comics: Granstream Saga, Skies of Arcadia, and the Meridian (Crossgen) comic. There were 6 continents below that had been ravaged in an interplanar war 400 years ago. There was a 13th floating city, "Hylithia", that had disappeared during a climactic battle that resulted in the 7th continent sinking into the ocean. The PCs start off with finding an artifact, one of the long-lost "Keys to Hylithia", a short rod with 12 gemstones. A worldwide network of evil wizards and cultists were after them to get the key and finish what had started 400 years ago: open a portal and bring through an Elder Gawd (sort of an Azathoth-type thing) to destroy the world.

At the start, the PCs didn't know where Hylithia was, but it had sunk beneath the waves with the 7th continent. Actually, the Skylords in Hylithia had used the city's "force field" to plug the portal where the Elder Gawd was coming through. The Skylords had given a "Key" to each of the other 12 floating cities that could open the force field from outside the city as something of a backdoor failsafe: if something horrible happened to Hylithia, then it would take the combined efforts of all 12 remaining floating islands to get back into the city. Each gem in the Key has to be "activated" by touching it (or bringing it into close proximity of) the central floatstone at the center of each floating island. To get through Hylithia's force field, the PCs would have to visit each floating island until all 12 gems on the Key were activated.

I set up the campaign to give the PCs a list of all 12 islands, and they could pick whatever order they wanted to visit them. Each island would be controlled either by friendly forces or evil cultists, with the idea that they could go to friendly islands, find some allies to help them crack the really tough unfriendly islands, and retreat back to a friendly island if things went all pear-shaped on them. There was also some things to do down on the surface, having to do with some PC backstory and some of the "what happened 400 years ago" stuff, but I hadn't worked all that out completely.

The campaign was supposed to conclude with discovering that Hylithia had sunk into the ocean, and there was a couple ways to get down there... building a new airship/submarine (40 years ago, a previous attempt had gone badly, and the PCs were being bankrolled/mentored by the remaining survivor) or using one of the druidic moongates (a la Ultima) on the sunken continent. Hylithia actually had put up two force fields: one had expanded a few dozen miles over the countryside in an attempt to save what lives could be saved as the continent sank (not many... most of the armies underneath the city wound up as undead patrolling an eerie airbubble hellscape plunged into inky darkness underneath a couple miles of ocean), and the second was around the city itself, which was plugging the portal through which the Elder Gawd has been rather impatiently waiting to come through for 400 years. The idea was the PCs would break into the city, turn the city's central floatstone into a bomb, and lower the city into the Elder Gawd so it could go kablooie. The Evil Cultists were just fine with blowing up Hylithia, but at a much safer distance so their Elder Gawd could come through and finish destroying the world.

I think we got as far as the 2nd or 3rd island before the campaign kinda fell apart. Still noodling around with the idea of maybe trying to resurrect it in some form or other.

Anyway, it was a somewhat standard "Plot Coupon" structure: visit all the floating cities and either convince the rulers to attune the key to the floatstone or sneak past the bad guys. I figured there'd be some MacGuffin trading going on, as the bad guys wanted basically the same thing (a fully-attuned key to unlock Hylithia's force field), so if things went really badly for the PCs then they could just tag-along behind the bad guys and still get to the Big Boss Fight at the end.

As far as ship-to-ship combat goes, I just assumed that the airships pulled alongside one another, threw out grapples/gangplanks, sketched out the two deck plans, and proceeded to just buckle some swashes from there. I borrowed the Feather Fall Talisman from Sharn: City of Towers (page 170), dropped the price from 50 GP to 25 GP, and I assumed most sky-sailors would have one of those to help them land safely if they fell off the rigging. There's also a Life Ring in the Eberron Explorer's Handbook (page 31), 400 GP but it grants feather fall for up to four people at a time. Drow House Insignia might also work (360 GP, Races of Faerun p. 173). Silverbrow humans (Dragon Magic) get feather fall as an SLA 1/day.