D&D Campaign Idea: Save The Dark Lord, Save The World

[Please note that this isn’t really super fleshed out with serious world details, it’s more of a sketch]

So one day the Realm is threatened by the Dread Lord, who using the Magical Macguffin will take over and rule with an iron fist for 100,000 years. A group of heroes arise to stop him.

But our Dread Lord expected this, and stops them! He apparently read the " Evil Overlord List" and came correct. As expected, his 100,000 year reign of terror and evil begins.

Until one day, maybe a millennia or two, the Dread Lord dies rather unceremoniously at a staff meeting or something.

Staff necromancers are summoned, tinctures and potions are prepared, everything and everyone handy is sacrified, but to no avail: the Dread Lord is really, really fucking dead. Dead, dead, and dead. He cannot be resurrected. This causes some rather complicated problems.

Since the Dread Lord was a smart evil overlord, he really made sure that no one could get to him, so his entire armory of Extremely Fucking Powerful Magic Shit is de-powered. His giant sword +20 of Wrecking Shit is an expensive and elaborate but otherwise normal sword. The Fully Automatic Wand of Fireballs? It’s a stick. And so on, and so on.

But worse, his death means that The Realm is coming apart at the seams. Reality itself begins to unwind in terrible and monstrous ways.

Desperate, his lieutenants start searching for a solution. Not helping this is that they’re still the trusted lieutenants of a Dread Lord so they’re shithead backstabbing assholes.

Eventually, one of them gets an idea: we can’t bring back the Dark Lord, but we can find a new one. There’s no longer a rebellion, but there’s a few random farmers/peasants used for target practice, still running around. Maybe they can be convinced to save the Realm … by ensuring it returns to darkness.

He’s got to train and equip them, while making sure they “fly under the radar” to avoid making one of the other lieutenants fuck it up, all the while ensuring them he’s a good guy and they’re saving the realm.