Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ambrus" data-source="post: 1878273" data-attributes="member: 17691">Here's what's happened in my campaign:For the last 35+ sessions, the party has been embroiled in a quest to recover the McGuffin artifact. They've successfully played through the Banewarrens adventure (at the end of which I placed the artifact). Naturally there are other factions outside the party who want the McGuffin for their own ends. One, the branch of a LG church has been generally supporting the party in hopes that it'll be returned to heaven (from where it supposedly came). Another is a group of heretical demon-worshippers bent on corruption and conquest. Yet another is a seemingly neutral group of gnome and dwarf psions trying to fulfil an ancient prophecy.On the way out of the dungeon, the party successfully repelled an ambush by the demon-worshipping faction. They then met up with some of the psion gnomes in the dungeon with whom they'd developed an alliance of sorts (though both groups originally started on the wrong foot when they first met, resulting in some gnome deaths). The party decided to trust the gnomes because they wanted their help getting the McGuffin out of the city above secretly (it can't be teleported or plane shifted). The gnomes had a ship waiting at the docks for just this purpose. Unfortunately, the city docks were all under crown surveillance because the kingdom is gearing up for a war and is weary of all the cargo and people arriving or departing the city.Finally, the gnomes convinced the party that the only way to safely get on the ship and out of the city was to have all the party members (along with the McGuffin) placed into wooden crates and carried onto the ship. Later, after the party agrees to this plan, gets itself crated up (all in separate crates) and carried around by workmen, the party begins to suspect something is up. After half a day, they bust out of their crates only to realise that they are in a warehouse, still in the city, with their equipment but that the ship, gnomes and McGuffin are all long gone.The funny thing is that I didn't really plan what happened (I honestly don't put much thought into what the NPCs are going to do ahead of time). There are just so many factions who were after the artifact, and I'd been playing each group with the idea in mind that any one of them, including the party, may eventually end up with it. I didn't know where the party was going to go with the artifact, who they would trust and how they'd plan to leave the city. I didn't imagine that the opportunity to separate the party from the artifact would have presented itself so easily to the NPCs involved. The party has become one of the most powerful, unpredictable and dangerous factions involved in this race. One of the other factions simply couldn't ignore this opportunity to separate them from it when it presented itself.Overall, the tone at the end of the game was mostly melancholy, though a few of the players are, understandably, quite upset. They've been fighting to recover this artifact for well over a year of gaming. Now, only a few games after finally finding it, it is taken away from them. Some players find it a lame plot development. Was I unwise in handling the situation the way I did? Am I just mean? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

Verification