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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4284662" data-attributes="member: 1054">As others have said...don't tell them. Or, perhaps more technically, make sure their CHARACTERS don't know. Whether the players know or not is part of your social contract. (I'm assuming your players know how to distinguish between player knowledge and character knowledge.)The PCs might know of BBEG as a distant force, or not even suspect he/she/it exists. What they do know is that orc raids have increased and they need to do something about the local orcs. Once they find the orc chieftain who has claimed he is the destined king of the orcs and slay him, they find evidence showing he's the pawn/puppet of a cunning stone giant warlord. It takes a while to battle to the stone giant's mountain fortress, and there, they discover the presumed mastermind is himself an agent of an even greater power...and so on, until you finally reach Vecna/Orcus/Elminster/whoever.Ideally, there's plenty of red herrings and side trips, so it isn't as obvious and simplistic all-aboard-the-plot-train as above. Indeed, the best thing to do is listen to the players speculate, wait for them to come up with something WAY cooler than you ever could, and swap some stuff around. And if the players quickly figure out the plot and rush to head it off...change it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> They decide it's Vecna and immediately load up on Swords Of Vecna Slaying, then they find out someone else was acting like Vecna precisely to fool enemies into taking all the wrong precautions...(One of my favorite villains was a half-fiend medusa who left hints and rumours that he was a mind flayer...gee, all those anti-psionic precautions sure came in handy, didn't they? Heh heh heh... (Like it mattered. Bastard PCs not only took him down without *anyone* getting petrified, but made him cry like a little girl and pilot his flying boat for them...))</blockquote>

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