A campaign about returning magical items from whence they came.
Not in the “plunged into the fires of Mt. Doom” sense.
Artifact repatriation. The heroes work for an international commission aimed at reversing centuries of plunder. Oh, sure, the adventurers of yesteryear may have had solid reasons for looting the Ancient Tomb of the Noonday King, but those justifications have passed, and the Noonday King’s regalia really should be returned home, not sitting in a foreign adventurer’s ancestral manor.
Possible adventures include:
Archaeologically respectful dungeon crawls, aimed at returning items to original context if possible
Consulting and cooperation with host museums in native cultures to provide security and academic collaboration
Liberating artifacts from foreign collections, if imperial governments or plutocrats or nobles initially refuse to return them
Realizing that an ancient conspiracy is modifying paperwork and falsifying academic reports to turn the repatriation committee into a MacGuffin delivery service for an ancient lich-king
Persuading the world to keep going on with the good parts of this program even if the one time an ancient lich-king nearly got most of his ancient rivals’ regalia delivered to his tomb home under false pretenses so he could start some real shit, because, hey, they stopped him, the system worked!
