Brainstorming my DnD campaign concept again lol

(btw, quick notice: the next 4 pages of Friends on Another Side are almost complete, will be posting an update about it hopefully tomorrow)

After a few months thinking about it on-again-off-again in between work, I think I've finally found what I think is a good direction for the story concept. Revised pitch:

Campaign takes place in a fictional, self-aware video game that not only isekais people into it, but also smashes up other game settings to assimilate into a singularity. The backstory being that a game studio was forced by executive demands to insert this weird, new, hyper-advanced AI into their work-in-progress MMO, and it ended up becoming extremely self-aware, contagious, and developing fourth-wall-breaking properties, gathering information not just of the other incomplete projects the studio developed, but the devs themselves and some playtesters, threatening to drag everything else into it.

As a result, the project is a patchwork of different genres and tones all sorta crashing together under the view of this sapient, manifesting AI that serves as the BBEG. I'm picturing that different arcs take place in settings informed by entirely different games and genres, slowly bleeding together as the players make their way through figuring out how to stop it.

I think what I'm gonna do is prompt players while coming up with their characters to suggest that they come up with possibly the most un-DnD-like concepts they'd be most interested in, and THEN we figure out how they can be shaped to fit in the game mechanically lol (I dare not suggest ideas right now, I wanna see what the players end up coming up with). Maybe with an additional prompt of "what's the hypothetical game they originally come from?"

I'm thinking there's a lot of that whole "mismatched crossover" concept, it might be really fun having a tonally incoherent party travelling to like, a traditional JRPG MMO, a modern-day survival horror/new weird setting, a scifi cozy/farming sim, a comedic dating sim with monster girls, stuff like that -- I think it would be very fun seeing what folks would come up with and how we could all tie that together.