Advice for GMing a Plotted Campaign?

[Niccodaemus]

I can't take credit for this idea, but I forget who posted it. It was in reference to a mystery style game.

For any clue, create three versions of it, in three different places. One might be the cryptic dying words of an opponent "Beware the Chamberlain!" Another might be a letter from the Chamberlain himself, incriminating him. A third might be a set of cuff links, with his initials.

You don't know that the players will find any specific one (or even if they do, that they will make the right assumptions) and if they find all three it will just confirm what they should know.

A note concerning prophecy:

I don't know if you are planning using prophecy in your game, but it can be an interesting tool. It can certainly FEEL like "railroading" if character actions have been fortold. However, use this caveat... even though you plan for the characters to fulfill the prophecy, always keep a loophole that allows for others to do it. That is... if the characters die or even walk away from the story, figure out a way that it would not make the prophecy false.

I'll give you an example.

I had a group of players traveling for weeks into a distant wilderness to find a lost crown in an elf/human city. Once the players had gotten way past the point of no return, and were in an isolated valley, a new player wanted to join the game.

Now this one always gets me, because I HATE going with "you were with the party all along". (One way to avoid this, is to have a group of hirelings go along. The new player can be among that group. Sort of like the background characters on LOST. Once in a while, one would come to the forefront. But it just didn't work with Nikki and Paulo).


Anyway, I told him to let me think on it, and I would figure out how to bring him into the game.

Now, my entire story was predicated on time travel. The players would to to the past, and somehow retrieve the crown from the living king. On the king's tomb is a prophecy to the effect that the crowns (Kings and Queens) would be joined by those who separated them.

Jump to mid week. Keith (the player), and I did a little one-on-one session. He lived in the elven/human city, and was just purchasing his first suit of armor. While in the armor shop, the city was being attacked by orcs. He rushed outside to see what the commotion was, fought one orc, an then wham! A group of riders was bearing down on him. As they were about to run him over, he got dizzy, all went dark, and he found himself in the ruins of the city. (He then very railroady got captured by some frog men)

Ok.. so now the players arrive at the ruined city. They come across some strange muddy tracks. A battle between frog creatures and a man. But them man's footprints seem to originate from nowhere. They follow the tracks, and rescue Keith's character.

Ok... now they adventure, find the portal through time, get arrested (they have found a unique sword of demon slaying and are walking around the city with it). They captain of the guard presents them with an identical (but 700 year younger sword) and wants to know wtf is up.

They spill the beans, and get an audience with the king. While explaining their story, the city is attacked by orcs, and an assassin kills the king and grabs his crown. They kill the assassin, grab the crown, find some horses, and are heading out of dodge when ... yep... Keith's character steps in front of the horses. Everyone gets pulled back to the future, with Keith's footed version of his character lagging behind a few days and meeting the frogmen.

Now.. this was risky... very plot heavy, and had two instances that were railroady. One was Keith getting caught by the frogmen. (I don't count the horses running him over.. that was more of an event).

The other was after they grabbed the crown.

However.. lets say they DIDN'T grab the crown. Or ran out on foot. Well... once they had the crown, that triggered their jump back to the future. That was a given. So... if they all died, then another group of people were on those horses, and that group would get pulled to the future. If they were running out of town on foot, they were being pursued by a group of people on horses.

In other words, there was no predetermined way for the adventure to end, although I had a specific way in mind. But whatever happened, the prophecy had to be true, as well as the incident with the horses.

I think the important point is... don't get too attached to the ENDING of your story. There are a thousand things between here and there that can thwart it, not the least being players who intentionally try to do so for fear of being "railroaded".

 

[meomwt]

I've recently been running some adventures as a prelude to The Red Hand of Doom. The players have had references to "The Horde" when confronting opponents, seen Red Hands scrawled on the walls of a shaman, there have been dreams which contain clues as to what is happening (an ancient Dwarven King grasped by a Red Claw; a Dragon which is many colours at once; and so on).

They are now becoming interested in who or what the horde is, and are likely to want to hunt them down (even if an old enemy hadn't allied herself to the Wyrmlords and decided that the party need to be taken out).

The point of all this is that if you have an idea where you want to go four or five levels away, use that information in current play - without being too heavy-handed at first - so that when the time comes, the players actively want to get involved and don't feel railroaded in.

Although - to be fair - making it up on the fly and tying things together later works as well. I've done that in the past, too, and as long as you can make it seem like you meant it, it will be ok.

The beauty of RPG's is that there isn't a box set with all the episodes on you can devour once the season is over, and memory can be subjective, so people don't always notice the iffy bits you've done off the cuff, and remember that it all hung together at the end, more or less.

 

[Ariosto]

Probably the big danger is your key hook. Are the PCs high enough level (socially?) to be involved with a king yet?

I was thinking of two suitors of the Princess, her sister, and a companion of the King.

You might want to smart with some "starter" adventures, that may introduce the PCs to the court, and reveal them in a good light (your grace, these are the brave men who took care of that discreet matter last week...).

That's a nifty idea. Many fantasy epics start with something like that, rather than jumping directly into the main action.

You mentioned the players often "don't know what to do next."

The last few DMs have been a lot longer on "atmosphere" than on coherence.

 

[Ariosto]

Here is a more improvisational, episodic, player driven arrangement:

Each PC desires vengeance upon one of the villains known collectively as the Lords of Despair. They have made a pact to finish this work together.

It is up to the players how to go about this. A couple of meetings prior to campaign start, they will have dossiers on the targets. Each session, I will get enough of their plans for next time to work up appropriate material.

Two of the Lords have significant operations for them to wreck, while the others are more or less in retirement.

As the villains come to appreciate the danger, they will ramp up countermeasures. However, their pride, selfishness and mutual distrust keep them from presenting a truly united front.

With each target felled, the players get more clues to a deeper evil (which will take a progressively greater hand in opposing them). Confronting that should dramatically cap the campaign.

This same combination of radial, progressive and "onion peel" elements could apply, for instance, to a quest to acquire a set of magic items. It could also have the PCs trying to secure and improve a frontier stronghold confronted with a set of problems.

 

[Ariosto]

The time factor here -- just one or two sessions per month -- is something to keep in mind. If we got into something taking 12 sessions, it would probably be spread over 9 months of real time (as opposed to just 3 with weekly meetings).

 

[Janx]

Here is a more improvisational, episodic, player driven arrangement:

Each PC desires vengeance upon one of the villains known collectively as the Lords of Despair. They have made a pact to finish this work together.

It is up to the players how to go about this. A couple of meetings prior to campaign start, they will have dossiers on the targets. Each session, I will get enough of their plans for next time to work up appropriate material.

Two of the Lords have significant operations for them to wreck, while the others are more or less in retirement.

As the villains come to appreciate the danger, they will ramp up countermeasures. However, their pride, selfishness and mutual distrust keep them from presenting a truly united front.

With each target felled, the players get more clues to a deeper evil (which will take a progressively greater hand in opposing them). Confronting that should dramatically cap the campaign.

This same combination of radial, progressive and "onion peel" elements could apply, for instance, to a quest to acquire a set of magic items. It could also have the PCs trying to secure and improve a frontier stronghold confronted with a set of problems.

To keep it straight in my head, I'm going to assume this plot is not the same/related to the princess rescue plot idea.

To recap the gist: the PCs hate the Lords and want to take them out.

I assume the PCs are 1st level, and the Lords are high level. The Lords may not know who the PCs are yet.

This could be a good case for the Starter sessions. Basically the PCs are good guys and MAY specifically hate the Lords. The events of the first or second session cause them to directly hate the Lords (or underlings of the Lords).

I try to arrange things as Level Appropriate. Meaning the most obvious problem/opportunity/villain is level appropriate. If the PCs choose to go off the reservation, that's their problem.

So with this, the first sessions are 1st level adventures, probably resulting in the Villain of the Week hurting them or their family/village/interests. Which gets them on board for specifically hating the Lords and working toward the big finish.

I recommend looking at things as a cascade of bad guys to the top leadership. Make sure there's motivation for pursuing the next bad guy (usually by bad guy misbehavior).

So the outline could be:
1st session: life as heroes in Despotopia, do a basic hero mission and SUCCEED (stop orcs from taking stuff as taxes from your village). The peasants rejoice.
2nd session: Boss Badd here's his orcs were thwarted bythe PCs. He sends Goon Squad to take out the PCs (or their interests). They are obviously from Boss Badd. Partial success, Goons take out some interests, the PCs beat the Goons (probably).
3rd Session: The PCs are mad at Boss Badd and go gunning from him. You'll want to outline his defenses, etc. The PCs may attack directly, secretly, even infiltrate, you never know. The expected goal is get to Boss Badd and take him out. Duke Devious is visiting Boss Badd to inspect his operations. Expect Duke Devious to be mad at the interruption, but he will retreat (not being prepared for PC-grade danger in his own territory).
4th Session: Duke Devious has regrouped back at his house. He does NOT want his superiors to know he's got trouble in his house. he starts a hunt for the PCs.

And so on it goes. I run 4-6 hour sessions. I do not plan out future sessions. I write each session before I need to run it. This lets me adjust to player interests and stated immediate plans. So I squish in whatever else they want to do (get a flaming sword), sometimes interweaving it (Duke Devious owns a Flaming sword), to encourage them toward the planned goal.

I always try to align the goal I write for the session to what the PCs would realistically pursue. I try to avoid making quests to save princesses when the PCs have no interest in such.

For the starting hook/PC match-up, I find requiring the PCs to be good guys, ties to the community and/or each other tends to set them up to pursue the "obvious" quest. From there, I try to make the first session one where I think they will succeed, and it will unify them in a common goal (we all hate Boss Badd). I like for them to end on a positive note (like Star Wars: a new hope). Complications/screw-overs happen later. I find plunging them into despair early hurts player morale when you are trying to get them to like their PCs and get used to working together.

Also a note on what i mean by Success. I expect the PCs to succeed at the quest. Not that I purposely give it away, just that defeat usually means TPK and that's a start over, and there's not much good in thinking about the next session if you assume they don't live past the current session. I think the challenge in actually suceeding is defining a good strategy and actually surviving the encounters. If you do that, you should succeed and "win". If you fail to do that, odds are good you are rolling up a new PC anyway. If the party runs away, they'll either change their goal (stop trying to save the princess) or regroup and try again. It seems reasonable that at some point they will succeed (or TPK/stop trying).