Quick-Start Campaign Concepts

1. The Sentinels of the Road (The Wandering Heroes)

The characters are Sentinels — the idealist wanderers of Pocatello who travel the post-Rapture west on a combination of crusade, pilgrimage, and coming-of-age journey, defending the innocent from the dastardly and corrupt. They have no patron state, no institutional backing, no steady salary. They have a code.

This is the setting's most flexible campaign structure, because the Sentinels go where injustice is — which means everywhere. The characters can start in the Great Basin and move west into Pacifica, or south into the Southlands, or east toward Gateway City, following rumors of wrongdoing, supernatural threats, or people in need. The overarching enemy is anything that preys on the defenseless: Aztlan slave raids, Authority expansion, a corrupted warlock's influence spreading through a mountain town, a Bossman's debt-bondage operation in Lost Vegas that's gotten out of hand, a Barstow clan pushing north into farmsteads. By mid-campaign the characters aren't just wandering do-gooders — they're the only people who know how all the pieces connect.

Good for: Players who like moral clarity with tactical complexity, episodic structure with long-arc payoff, and the western "ride into town, fix things, ride out" rhythm.

2. The Vault of Old Sacramento (The Treasure Hunters)

Deep in the ruins of Old Sacramento — the drowned city now submerged beneath the Sacramento Sea — there are vaults from the Old World. The characters are a crew of salvagers: a Weird Scientist who can decode pre-fall tech, a Huckster who knows how to read a room and a trap, a Shaman for the supernatural threats, a gunfighter for the non-supernatural ones, and a Soulless navigator who knows the underwater ruins from childhood scavenging. Together they've heard a rumor of something in a pre-fall research facility. The vault, if it exists, will not be empty.

Good for: Players who like dungeon-crawling energy in unusual settings, resource management, and the satisfaction of decoding Old World puzzles. Escalates naturally as what they find attracts interested parties — the Authority sends agents, the Koos wants a cut, and whatever was living in the vault already has opinions about being disturbed.

3. The Iron Road (The World-Changers)

Reno's five families are quietly approaching various interests about financing the restoration of the transcontinental railroad — California to Deseret to Montana. The characters are agents of one such interest, tasked with the impossible: scouting the route, securing right-of-way agreements, dealing with the bandits and neobarbs who inhabit the passes, negotiating with Deseret (which has agendas of its own), and figuring out why The Authority's agents keep appearing a step ahead of them. The stakes escalate when it becomes clear that whoever controls the railroad will reshape the entire continent's balance of power — and several major factions have decided they'd rather burn it than let anyone else build it.

Good for: Players who love geopolitics, complex faction play, and the feeling that their decisions matter at a civilizational scale. Rewards deep engagement with the setting's geography.

4. The Emerald City Blues (Urban Intrigue, Pacific Northwest)

Set in New Seattle — the Emerald City — the characters are residents or newcomers to the Sound's most vibrant commercial hub. A Harbor Master assassination. A disappeared Koos factor. Morlock movement patterns that suggest something is coordinating them from below. A Siren who knows more than she's saying. A Soulless ward that went quiet three weeks ago and nobody wants to talk about. The Space Needle, which people enter and come out changed, has seen an unusual number of pilgrims from a particular trade house lately. The characters are whatever the Emerald City's society needs them to be: Rangers, merchant factors, Mendicant Virginis healers, scholars, Siren house associates, or simply scavengers smart enough to notice that something is wrong.

Good for: Players who love urban mysteries, rich NPC casts, layered conspiracies, and the joy of a single city as a sandbox full of competing interests. The Underroads beneath Old Seattle add a dungeon-crawl layer whenever the table wants to change register.

5. Blood and Copper in the Southlands (Sandbox at the Crossroads of Everything)

The characters arrive in Yuma — capital of the Republic of the Lower Colorado, the "New Venice of the Southwest" — at the worst possible time. The Koos has just tightened its grip on the Gulf of Baja. A new claimant to the Blood Guard throne of Fort Mohave is making overtures about annexation. An Aztlan raiding party was destroyed thirty miles north of the Grapevine Line by something that wasn't the New California army. And in Havasu City, the weird-science engineering community has built something that everyone with power wants, and that nobody should have. The Republic is the only thing holding the Southlands together. Whether the characters work for it, around it, or despite it, they are in the place where everything happens.

Good for: Players who love a living, breathing world where every action has political consequences, species variety in the party (Trolls, Wendigos, and Siren characters are all plausible here), and the feeling of being in the eye of a storm that's about to break.

6. The Gateway Affair (Political Intrigue, Eastern Lands)

Gateway City sits at the crossroads of every Eastern power's ambition — protected by powered armor, steam-driven airships, and a trade goddess who actually shows up when her people need her. It has held its neutrality for decades through brilliance, geography, and the quiet influence of agents nobody can quite identify. Now someone has found a grimoire in the warehouse district, and the Inquisition has arrived at the city gates demanding access. The Hawkeye Empire has dispatched "observers." An Aeronaut with Ironholm markings is moored at the military spire, its mission undeclared. And the characters — investigators for the Consortium, or Collegium Arcana scholars, or simply people who were in the wrong coffeehouse at the wrong time — are the only ones positioned to find out what the book actually is before anyone burns anything down.

Gateway City has mechas, airships, a Roman-style legal code, an arcane university, a patron spirit who grants miracles to the faithful, and Psyker agents from New Manhattan who have been running covert influence operations in the city since before living memory. It is the most complete urban environment in the eastern half of the setting, and this scenario barely scratches its surface.

Good for: Players who love intrigue over violence, the texture of a densely built city with competing institutions, and the particular satisfaction of a mystery where pulling on one thread unravels something much larger. The Demon Code backstory gives any GM an enormous amount of room to build toward — because wherever that grimoire came from, it isn't the only one.