Repo Men

Inspired by R.E.P.O., this is the usual XP-for-treasure format with a hook to tie the adventures together.

Aeons ago, various boss monsters borrowed money from some entity (probably a powerful fiend like Mammon or an ultroloth, although you can obviously use whatever entity you wish if you're avoiding canonical Dungeons & Dragons factions), and now the time has come to collect. You are agents of the entity in question, delving into dungeons and trying to repossess treasure for your infernal masters.

The characters would gain XP for treasure, as usual, although the twist is that they probably aren't keeping any of this treasure themselves. I imagine they receive a commission in scrip (maybe 10% or so) which can be spent at the company store. In addition to standard equipment, the company store also carries hirelings and magic items. (I would probably randomize the latter so that there's a constant churn of weird items coming through.)

Obviously, the GM has to determine how magic items from dungeons work. Can you keep them? Can you squirrel them away? Do they enter the company store after the adventure?

It's essentially the same idea as standard class-and-level adventure games: enter the dungeon, loot everything to the bare walls, and get out. This setup has a few benefits that might make it worthwhile for certain groups:

1. If your players aren't interested in overland travel, this is a good excuse to give them various dungeons in the same campaign without having to travel to them. The central "hub" of the campaign is Hell's mercenary barracks, or whatever other extradimensional base of operations you devise.
2. The company store allows you to put whatever weird items into your campaign you want without altering the original adventures. It's Hell's lost and found, essentially.
3. The format allows people to drop in and out as desired.

I haven't quite figured out what adventures I'd like to use. (Obviously, if you get to it before I do, you can use whatever you like.) I'm thinking of dungeons that have "boss monsters" in them, a creature around which the dungeon is built (and who might be in debt to a powerful fiend). As such, the capstone is likely to be something like I6: Ravenloft or S1: Tomb of Horrors, but everything before then is open to suggestion. A cursed house like The Cursed Chateau or Tegel Manor? A frontier ruin like Prison of the Hated Pretender or The Submerged Spire of Sarpedon the Shaper? A larger village investigation leading to a dungeon like Against the Cult of the Reptile God or The Village of Hommlet?

Apart from needing a central figure whose stuff can be repossessed, you can really run any adventure you like.

A final note: this also seems like a good campaign frame to have in your back pocket if you run something like Fires of Dis or The Shrike, where the characters go to Hell and so might end up indentured to some powerful demon. In which case, just start throwing dungeons at them with a mandate to deliver all of value to their master. Of course, intrepid players will probably try to determine how to wriggle out of their infernal contracts, which seems like an interesting wrinkle to this campaign...