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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gimby" data-source="post: 8750156" data-attributes="member: 49875">Some time ago, I ran a short campaign (very) loosely based around Treasure Island.   The PCs were a naturalist expedition to a mysterious island and shortly after their arrival to the island a mutiny left them stranded and the adventure became dodging the treasure hunting mutineers, uncovering the island's mysteries and trying to find a way to escape.   Demonic pirates, dinosaurs, mysterious ruins, buried treasure, all that good stuff.  As part of this the first non zero session was set on board ship travelling to the island - a chance to introduce aspects of the setting (pastiche regency Europe, exploring the Not-Galapagos) and for the PCs to get to know each other in a relaxed setting.  I also put in some foreshadowing that the mutiny was likely to happen and to give them a chance to spot one of the primary antagonists stowing away aboard their ship.  I was also keeping track of how they were treating the crew to determine how hostile they would be post mutiny (turns out the PCs went out of their way to annoy the crew <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ) This all went off very smoothly - the PCs were largely oblivious to the foreshadowing but were able to piece together the reasoning when the mutiny actually happened so it didn't feel completely out of the blue.I am currently considering re-running a slightly tided up version of this for a new group in the next couple of months and on revisiting my notes I was struck by how vulnerable I'd made the start of the campaign.   If the PCs had spotted the mutiny before it happened then I'd be in trouble - depending on when and how they attempt to foil it the PCs may never end up on the island, be overwhelmed by a functionally unwinnable fight (we all know how well that usually goes down) or end up re-framing the whole adventure (from tropical island survival and evasion to having significant NPC backup and a way off the island) in a way that I'm not particularly interested in running.For the sake of this setup for running the campaign again let's assume all the players are on board with the overall framing of the campaign agreed in session zero - travel to a tropical island, explore it and end the campaign when you leave the island.   I'd like to start the meat of the campaign - the hexcrawl over the island - in a similar state to the previous group.   Betrayed, isolated, a little shocked and motivated for a bit of payback.As far as I can see I have a few options for getting to this starting state:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Just run it like last time - Pro: play is quite natural and allows the players the satisfaction of putting the pieces together themselves - Con: As above, risks a very awkward, potentially fatal start to the game</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Run as before but remove the foreshadowing : Pro: play is natural and doesn't risk the campaign disrupting issues - Con: Mutiny comes out of the blue completely, players may feel they should have been able to spot something before it happened.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Start in media res just after the mutiny happens - Pro: dodges the issues above, gets into the main part of the game straight away - Con: Reduced impact of the betrayal, misses the low tension introduction</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Start in media res and flash back to how they got there - Pro: dodges the above and allows for the intro session - Con: Paradox dodging and can feel quite frustrating as the players know they are walking into a trap they can't do anything about.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Tell the players about the mutiny in session zero and get them to play along - Pro: informed player buy in -  Con : Similar to the flashback and "ruins the suprise"</li> </ul>Details aside, what I'm attempting to do is force/railroad a starting situation to an adventure where I'd like a bit of play before reaching that start point for largely flavour reasons.  Again, assume that this is self-contained and all the players have bought into the basic premise.It feels like this is something that other DMs would have faced, does anyone have any advice on how to approach this? Am I overthinking this? Is the whole premise flawed from the ground up?</blockquote>

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