I’ve got a couple of decades experience DMing and building my own campaigns (4 sessions away from completing a two year campaign right now), and my initial impression is that this is not a great idea at all. Actually, I’ll go a step further. It’s a really bad idea.
In general, campaigns should be centered around the players. You are responsible for telling their story. You are clearly very excited about Gale being Karsus, but will your players care? Will the revelation about this NPC’s backstory be interesting to them? Maybe you could make it work, sure, but here is sounds like basically you as the DM would be playing a character in the party who is the most important person in the story. That’s not good DMing. Build around your players. Otherwise the campaign becomes a bit masterbatory and that isn’t fun as a player. They are left just watching you gush over your own character while they get sidelined to supporting cast roles.
If you want to build a story about Krasus, I’d drop the Gale bit completely and have the party traveling with some random person they need to protect who they grow to like only to later discover he is Krasus reborn. He then leaves the party and becomes the villain and they need to put him down. That’s a story where the narrative is focused on the players. The drama comes from them trying to redeem or slay a friend.
The ending is also terrible. In my current campaign the party will “die” at the end (their fate will actually be left ambiguous and they won’t really be dead, as these characters are playing important roles in my next sequel campaign), but that is only after they have saved the world and completed all of their characters’ personal narratives (which I tied into the main plot of the campaign) so it will feel justified and bittersweet. Killing off the party so that the real adventure for the real main character (Gale, not them) can begin is just bad story telling.
Yeah… don’t do this.
Last edited by Warlocke; 21/01/23 06:14 PM.
