Summary
One of the best feelings when building aDungeons & Dragonscampaign is seeing the players invested in a big story that takes multiple sessions, where each game takes them one step further to complete your complex puzzle in what can take months or even years to reach a conclusion. However, not every story needs that much time to be completed.
When making a long campaign, some story concepts work better than others. Something big that affects the whole world around them can be effective for this type of idea. So, we have some suggestions to kickstart your plans.
Updated on July 07, 2025, by Lucas Olah:Brainstorming ideas is always useful. By reading these long story ideas, you can use one of them, combine a few of them into your own story, or even if you end up not using any of them, just reading the options here can spark an idea in your head. With that in mind, we thought it’d be helpful to add even more suggestions here for you to read and see which of these makes sense for your world.
15War
It’s Fantastic!
Simple and effective. A world desolated by constant warfare creates utter chaos anywhere the party goes, and despite what subplot they’re currently facing, they know it’s because of this continuous fighting, tying everything together.
You can also give the players a choice in what side they wish to support, if any. They can choose one, play mercenaries who are just helping whoever is paying or try to find a pacific solution for both sides. Either scenario can be its own great story.
14Pirate Adventure
Hoist The Colours
It’s hard to go wrong by letting your players take a ship and sail through your world. Whether they’re adventurers seeking something or they themselves are pirates terrorizing the seas, the concept itself works well.
It’s also efficient to give them a movable base and let them explore multiple areas in the same story, making the campaign work as an anthology (more on that later), or, depending on their goal, it gives them a way to travel quickly between places.
13Post-Apocalypse
The Last Party
In a world destroyed by [insert your apocalyptic event here], the few who survived are trying to make do with what they have. you’re able to have monsters responsible for this destruction or as survivors, which creates a lot of conflict with them, or people can fight each other for the most basic of resources.
Alternatively, you could have bigger settlements that already began to thrive after said cataclysm, but there’s still a large, uncharted region of the world that is still dangerous after whatever happened to your world.
12Siege
Trap Your Players
Admittedly, this concept is a bit hard to implement as a long story, but it’s a good one when properly executed. Essentially, the city, region, country, or wherever your party is happens to be under siege by the enemy.
Being stuck in a location works wonderfully depending on how developed it is, so be ready to design a behemoth of a city. You can create lots of issues through a siege, such as lack of resources, and solving those can be the party’s goal.
11Evil Ruler
Fight The Empire
InsertCurse of Strahdhere, and you get the idea. The land is ruled by a powerful figure who couldn’t care less about their people even if they tried. Many suffer under such a ruler; taking them down is the only salvation.
This idea doesn’t give as much choice as the previous one, but it makes for a simpler narrative focusing on a single character as the ultimate villain. Their presence and actions throughout the campaign will even make them more terrifying.
10Crime Lord
Rule From The Shadows
Take the previous concept and add some mystery to it. The world also has an evil ruler, but it’s not some big figure that appears everywhere; instead, its ruler controls important political figures from the shadows.
What may start as a simple fight against a gang can turn into something much deeper, and you can even use said political figures as red herrings whenever the players find out they’re not really the true evil they were after all this time.
9Magic School
For A Slice Of Life
You know, not every campaign needs to have huge stakes or even be action-packed. Simpler stories that are focused on roleplaying (with the occasional fight because this is still D&D) work just as well.
With that in mind, a concept with more dramatic stakes rather than action that can be a long campaign is going through a magical university like Strixhaven. Players will have a lot of NPCs to interact with, the dread of being evaluated, and different consequences rather than death. Still, they can all be killed - or worse, expelled.
8Monster Hunting
Good For Enemy Diversity
Powerful creatures roam through the world. Few see them and live to tell the tale; even fewer can vanquish such beasts. Whether it’s from the kindness of their hearts or the opportunity for money, your players' mission is to take them all down.
This idea is vague at first, but if you want to make things lead to a proper plot, you can have monsters appearing in the world suddenly and have someone in control of them, creating a mastermind behind it all — aka your BBEG.
7Search For A Legendary Artifact
Take Its Power For Yourself
Ah, the good old MacGuffin. Hidden somewhere in your world liesan artifact with incredible power:a weapon, an armor, a key to ultimate power. Or maybe a free-use wish spell. Either way, it’s something the players can use for themselves or sell to the highest bidder.
Though the whole story could simply revolve around that, you can have multiple NPCs in search of the same artifact, creating numerous enemies and the tension of finding the thing before anyone else does.
6A Cult
Classic Enemies
Taking things to a more religious side, you could have followers of an evil deity. You can make them true evil opponents, performing sacrifices and whatnot, or they can have a nice-guy facade they keep, being somewhat accepted publicly, and taking them down also takes destroying their image instead of simply fighting them.
And it can all culminate with them attempting to bring back or resurrect their God — or whatever excuse you made for the God not to be around. Is there a more proper endgame boss fight than taking down a deity?
