Dungeons and Dragons

My normal DM is taking a little hiatus at the end of the summer, and has offered to let me run a game during that time. I, as a rule, let players choose what we are doing. The 2 campaigns I have prepped are most accurately described as this:

1. A Hunter: the Reckoning game set in my hometown. The party is playing as normal people with normal lives who hunt the things that lurk in the night on their off time. There is a turf war between angels and demons brewing downtown, Amazon is trapping and brainwashing werewolves in the national park, and the local Autism Mom group has recently started to try and cure their children through more sadistic means than normal. In the background, the secret alien invasion is about to get much worse, and the New World Order has sold us out. Have fun!

2. DnD as I wish I could play it. Open world, homebrew setting that I ran a 5e campaign in during Covid, using Knave. If you want cool abilities, you get those by finding magic items in the dungeons. Outside of that, tell me what interests you and we will do that. You want to do cleric stuff? A local priory has lost their sacred relic. Want political intrigue? The Marquis just to the north has a reputation of being horrific to his peasants, so get evidence, kidnap him, and drag him before the king to face judgement. There's a big world to explore.

Now, the thing that frustrates me is I have, on average, one sentence to convince each of my burned-out 20-something friends to do each game. If I send them anything longer than that, they will not read it. So, "monster hunting in the rust belt" is competing against "Open world where you can do whatever you want". I dont think that is fair.

I miss dungeon-crawls. But it's so hard to pitch them! Like, when I play a wizard, I want to go into dungeons, find spell scrolls for the DM's cool homebrew spells, copy them into my spellbook, and become the most versatile mage in the world; but when we play, we never even set foot in a dungeon because none of the other classes yearn for the mines at all! It just doesn't seem fair to me that the option I think is just as cool as Alien Invasion in Conspiracy Clown World, and the option I prefer, won't seem as cool to my players.

Edit:

Just to clarify, I am also excited to run Conspiracy Clown World. It was listed first because when I first heard I might get a shot to run something, that's what I started working on first. My reticence to run it, though, mainly stems from 2 problems that I think only I am having:

First, our current campaign is a morally grey, politically complex, character-driven campaign. The good guys are not winning, and that's 100% our fault; i might even go so far as to call it grimdark. Conspiracy Clown World, despite taking place in a giant funhouse painted to look like the real world, will be a morally grey, politically complex, character driven campaign in a grimdark setting with no good guys. It's more of the same. Maybe they will find it to be a pallette cleanser, but probably not me.

Second, I know from experience that I am going to feel like if I don't run Conspiracy Clown World for at least a year, I will not feel like the campaign has properly run its course. I don't think Dungeon World will be like that.

These are, from my perspective, selfish concerns. If the players want to hunt monsters in Conspiracy Clown World, thats what they are getting.