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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7399018" data-attributes="member: 4937">UPDATE: I knew this seemed familiar.  The OP is a complete word for word copy of a prior post by a different poster.  Is this SPAM?You asked for a lot more help than I have time to give, but I'll try to give some pointers to the main question - how to make a linear campaign not feel like they are being led around by the nose.1) Adopt a broad-narrow-broad structure.   A linear campaign depends on a series of gates, in this case associated with the acquisition of a piece of the rod of seven parts.  At the point the story passes through a gate, the PC's may not have a lot of choices.  But in the space before each gate, you can present a small sandbox with no clear path through it, and allow the players to figure out how to find the gate and how to pass through the gate on their own.2) Vary your challenges.  For each 'broad' area, the likeliest path through the setting should be different and involve very different challenges.  If the different problems you pose in different episodes are sufficiently different, the players won't get bored.  One episode might involve a dungeon crawl through a trap filled tomb.  Another episode might involve diplomacy and political intrigue in an exotic locale where the players must either win through the gate on merits, or find a way to steal the key and sneak through.  Still another might involve a wilderness journey.3) Once your establish a pattern, throw a curve.  By the third or fourth episode players will start to feel like they are in a familiar place.  That is the point to change the rules of the story.  You can either do this in a narrative way, for example by suddenly giving the party reasons to change the goals of their quest so that what was once an expedition to recover the road becomes a race to stop it from being recovered.   Or you can do it by changing a fundamental assumption of the prior scenarios, such as the fact that the piece of the rod is in a single place.  For example, you might have the rod in the hands of a wanderer or in the belly of a leviathan or aboard a haunted ship, so that getting to the next gate stops being a simple matter of going in a particular direction but participating in a race of some sort.  Imagine the confusion at first if the wanderer teleports around and they must follow him by a trail of destruction he's creating with the rod piece, piecing together who the wanderer is and then trying to figure out where he is going.  Or you can add new complications, like a rival group trying to stop the process or a previous ally turning out to not be who they seemed.Do some brainstorming.  Who in your setting would want the rod assembled and why?  Who would definitely not want the rod assembled and why?   Make the answers for that non-intuitive, then start of by setting up your 'board' in a way that a player with limited information will assume the stereotype.  For example, it could be the forces of chaos that want the rod assembled, precisely because they want to destroy it for all time.  Or it could be the powers of the seven heavens that actually want the rod to stay in pieces, safely hidden away and not harming mortals with the destructive power of pure law.  One example of a successful narrative framework is set that in motion, then pull out the rug from underneath them with a betrayal, changing the story the players perceive themselves to be in, and then just when they are comfortable again, pull the rug again by having the appearance of a powerful force of chaos change the board and necessitate the recovery of the rod.</blockquote>

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