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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5220672" data-attributes="member: 55271">I think describing this as a "railroad" is necessarily accurate.The best analogy would be a mystery scenario in which the PCs are trying to locate a kidnapped girl. If it turns out the girl was already dead by the time their investigation started, that seems fundamentally different from a truly railroaded adventure with a pre-scripted sequence where the girl dies and the players can't do anything about it.Similarly, if you were trying to recreate "I did it 35 minutes ago" then you would probably be looking at a railroad. (Since you would have to arrange things so that the PCs can never arrive 35 minutes earlier and stop him.) But in this case it sounds like the ritual was completed before the PCs ever arrived on the scene.I think I agree with others that a key question to ask is: What are the PCs doing?I'm not convinced that the answer to that question needs to be "they're heroes who save as much as they can" or "they're heroes who stop an even larger catastrophe" or "they're heroes who get revenge on the Deep Ones for doing this". Basically, I don't think it necessarily needs to be a campaign about heroism. But you still need to figure out what the playable action is.</blockquote>