Forums of the Megaverse®

Ghosts and demons and alien intelligences? I'm talking weak ones, who may not even want to kill the PC's, but simply scare them.
I just realized I've used stuff from Dark Conversions before but never as the focal point and never for a group of beginners. It might be fun to challenge noobs with something they cant just blast. Maybe they need a creature who can avoid their attacks, charm or confuse one or more of their team, and teleport or fly away without warning.
That would be a great way to make players think about their obstacles instead of shooting everything.

All the time. A good mystery for the party to solve is a great way to introduce the elements of the campaign and let the players feel like they came across the threads naturally

In Heroes Unlimited I started a campaign centered around Hollow Men and Ashmedai. They started investigating a murder but it turns out that the victim had been seen after his death. As this was HU and the players didn't know much about Nightbane it was something of a shock to them when they started beating through a few thugs and bugs crawled out.

Eventually I was going to bring Dark Day to the game but these kind of terrifying shapeshifters really through them in a game they thought was going to be mostly super heroes. It also led to them doing research into the nightlords so really set things up for the future.

In my very first Phase World campaign the players reated it basically like Star Wars so they all had laser pistols and rifles and plasma guns but nothing against the supernatural so my first game with them as a full group was on derelict freighter with a hungry master vamp and a few human servants. As tough as they were one vamp was never much threat but without the proper equipment (and where on a starship do you find wood or silver, they had to jury rig a water gun) really changed the mood of the campaign.