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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 5768428" data-attributes="member: 63">I'd like to tap into the hivemind for a bit, and benefit from your ideas. I'm providing feedback to Jacob Driscoll (Kamikaze Midget) on the fourth adventure of the ZEITGEIST adventure path.It's no spoiler to share that the adventure takes place on a train over the course of several days. The PCs need to track down a person of interest with practically no information to go on except the starting and ending points of the person's trip. About half the adventure involves trying to figure out who, among all the passengers, is your guy. The second half is when you get to the destination, and hopefully are able to follow the right guy to a secret meeting.Now, this is not a typical sort of scenario that crops up in D&D adventures. Several threads of the plot proceed at the same time, and we want to make it as easy as possible for GMs to understand how they all fit together while reading the adventure, and then to track how the PCs' actions affect things when they run it.What would work best for you?Option AOne possible option is to list an overview, then present encounters and NPC actions along the journey in chronological order. So each day would have several encounters.Like, "Here are all the people and what they're doing. Okay, ready? On day one, people 1-4 show up. Person 1 does this. Person 2 does this. etc. etc. On day two, person 4 gets off the train, and person 5 gets on. The different people do these different things."Option BThe other option would be to have the overview, then list each NPC's thread in one long piece before going to the next NPC. This might make it easier to get a sense on your first read-through of what each NPC is up to and why they matter, but it would require a lot of jumping around while running the adventure.For instance, "Person 1 boards on day 1. He does this on day 1, that on day 2, this other thing on day 3, then on day 4 he's killed by person 2 unless the PCs intervene." "Person 2 boards on day 1, does X, then y, then z, then kills, then does that other thing." There would probably also be a separate thread for "stuff that affects the whole train."Option CHave some sort of index, with the names of all the prominent scenes and a quick tag line. Then the body of the adventure would include the scenes in alphabetical order by title. Different scenes might have notes saying, "See The Serial Killer, page xx."I'm not really a fan of this one, though the format might work for a more sandbox-y adventure. Finally, bear in mind that we're very conscious of the risk of having the PCs feel railroaded during an adventure which literally takes place on a railroad. We want to provide a lot of interesting NPCs and scenarios for the GM to make use of, and to explain clearly how they probably fit together, while making it easy for the GM to move stuff around as needed. Like if the PCs finger the wrong guy, how does the real villain react? Or if the party figures out who the real villain is too early, how do you make the rest of the train ride eventful?I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.</blockquote>

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