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A diabolical plan has come to fruition!
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<blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4392242" data-attributes="member: 704"><p>In my experience, trying to plan something this complex from 'Day 0' will often end up backfiring due to unforseen circumstances. It will just become too difficult to introduce all the factors in a manner which will not tip your hand too early.</p><p></p><p>What does work though, is just to take a whole lot of notes as you run your typical campaign. Any NPC's that your players manage to interact with in a memorable or entertaining manner is worth keeping track of. Any origin information that you were given should be kept track of. After any given adventure, make note of which significant NPC's are still alive. If you start at 1st level, by about level 7 you should have a number of elements from previous games that provide minor plot hooks. Once you reach that point, all you need to do is have your 'Chessmaster' villain take advantage of all of them at once.</p><p></p><p>Now all you need to do to convince your players that you are a truly unholy bastard is bring all of them into play in a manner which is plausible and makes sense within the campaign world. Set your players up to undertake actions that they know will have an effect, but do not make the full effect of those actions obvious. If they want to know what is going on, they are going to have to make a direct effort to look into it. Make sure to tie in as many events that happened in game as you can justify. Players will never remember what an NPC told them, but they will remember that time they won a bar fight and left the loser tied upside down to a tree with no pants. Having that guy show up again several levels later will mean something.</p><p></p><p>My players knew that cutting a deal with Hiddukel was probably going to be dangerous. My players were getting pretty suspicious when they completed the first two tasks and nothing spectacularly bad happened. One of them even figured out that all of those tasks had something to do with the nobility. But when I presented them with tasks that had them act directly against people they were hoping to screw over anyway, none of them really questioned it.</p><p></p><p>If you have a game where the same faces show up from time to time, and you have a couple of surviving villains dangling around, you have all the tools you need to make your players wish you grievous bodily harm. All you need to do is just tie it together.</p><p></p><p>END COMMUNICATION</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Lord Zardoz, post: 4392242, member: 704"] In my experience, trying to plan something this complex from 'Day 0' will often end up backfiring due to unforseen circumstances. It will just become too difficult to introduce all the factors in a manner which will not tip your hand too early. What does work though, is just to take a whole lot of notes as you run your typical campaign. Any NPC's that your players manage to interact with in a memorable or entertaining manner is worth keeping track of. Any origin information that you were given should be kept track of. After any given adventure, make note of which significant NPC's are still alive. If you start at 1st level, by about level 7 you should have a number of elements from previous games that provide minor plot hooks. Once you reach that point, all you need to do is have your 'Chessmaster' villain take advantage of all of them at once. Now all you need to do to convince your players that you are a truly unholy bastard is bring all of them into play in a manner which is plausible and makes sense within the campaign world. Set your players up to undertake actions that they know will have an effect, but do not make the full effect of those actions obvious. If they want to know what is going on, they are going to have to make a direct effort to look into it. Make sure to tie in as many events that happened in game as you can justify. Players will never remember what an NPC told them, but they will remember that time they won a bar fight and left the loser tied upside down to a tree with no pants. Having that guy show up again several levels later will mean something. My players knew that cutting a deal with Hiddukel was probably going to be dangerous. My players were getting pretty suspicious when they completed the first two tasks and nothing spectacularly bad happened. One of them even figured out that all of those tasks had something to do with the nobility. But when I presented them with tasks that had them act directly against people they were hoping to screw over anyway, none of them really questioned it. If you have a game where the same faces show up from time to time, and you have a couple of surviving villains dangling around, you have all the tools you need to make your players wish you grievous bodily harm. All you need to do is just tie it together. END COMMUNICATION [/QUOTE]
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