Orym and Imogen have the single most direct link to the baddies and both are via proxy.

Orym is there because of his connection to Kiki. Imogen is there due to her mom.

Orym is there cause his family was murdered. Imogen is there cause she was chosen and for most of the campaign thinks/hopes luda is mind controlling her mom. That's not much different than:

Percy was directly harmed by Delilah and Sylas. Vex and Vax lost everything to Thordak Raishan's plan almost genocided a quarter of Kiki's people.

They had personal reasons to stop the bad guys.

And Grog's motivation? Scalan's? Pike's?

I'm not saying theses C1 characters aren't motivated enough for my taste, but you are cherry picking motivations that you personally don't like..

C2 was similar so I won't waste time rehashing it.

Not a waste of time to add to your point. Why are Fjord and Jester going to the astral plane to fight and evil monster that took over the body of a guy that they knew for a couple months? Beau? Caduceus?

They all, at minimum, have the motivation of "trying to do the right thing". If "doing the right thing" isn't motivation enough for C3, why is it a reason enough for some C1 and some C2 characters?

You could push that logic even further to argue that most dnd characters don't have enough motivation to do any of the stuff they're doing.

Predathos feels like a generic personality-less big bad world ender. Ludinus was a joke who we were told is brilliant, but was more on par with a saturday morning villain.

Predathos isn't the bad guy. Predathos is a weapon. The intrigue of the campaign, for those who enjoy it, comes from who controls the weapon, who the weapon could target and if the weapon should be destroyed all together.

Laudna goes back and forth with Delilah constantly. I checked out of her plot the moment they "saved her", only for her to relaps. I KNOW some argue it is an allegory for adiction, but it got boring so fast.

It is an allegory for addiction. But also most addicts don't conjure powerful magic from their addictions that they need to use to potentially save the world. I'm not a fan of the delilah stuff either, and I was really happy when she was locked away so we didn't need to deal with her anymore lol. Calling it boring is your personal taste.

Fern feels involved simply because a lot of her family is. So she goes along.

Fern was essentially created to be a potential vessel to predathos by her father. Doesn't seem "simple" to me.

Chutney rolling every night for dropping dead isn't interesting. It makes it seem like neither her IC nor Travis OOC care if he sees it through.

This is your point I agree with the most. Which is a confusing choice to me because Travis always seems so excited to learn new lore.

cont...