DMing your way into a corner

[Mathew_Freeman]

Look at Lost for some other ideas - particularly the early episodes.

Little things become magnified when you're in this situation - what if one of the colonists is stealing food and hoarding it? What if a colonists wanders off into the jungle and finds something that affects them in some unexpected way?

There might be other colonies up the coast, there might be pirates up the coast that have only ever used this place to dump treasure and are pretty annoyed that a bunch of colonists have turned up wanting to turn the land into exactly the sort of place the pirates are getting away from?

 

[Rechan]

Also. Any suggestion how to deal with The Language Gap? Anything intelligent (from other races to intelligent monsters) just isn't going to speak their language. How do I handle this?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Oh, I do!

You see, there is a fiendish virus. When infected, you speak abyssal (but don't understand it unless you know the language). Anyone that hears you gets infected. When enough people are infected, and speak Abyssal, it summons demons. It was mass confusion and a total "Tower of Babel" that caused the original colony to just disintegrate. Also, a breakout of some killer mold.

The virus is dormant, so I need to figure out how to re-introduce it to the expedition.

Even more interesting, the natives closest to the colony are terrified of this virus. This is why they have gone mute, as a way of avoiding speaking the summoning tongue.

Interesting idea...

I'm hesitant about this one. Because I don't know how that would impact matters. One idea had been to have a civilization that is utterly LOST. Something far-realms-ish, or more technologically advanced (warforged, etc) that is now abandoned.

I just get reminded of the Diamond Throne - The Giants landed on the beach of an unknown continent, and find terrible, demon/dragon-like creatures that exploit other races, and they decide to take matter into their own hands, entering a terrible war against these creatures.

Maybe the outlying settlements are not under direct control of the empire, and stand on their own. They need to be united by the colonists to fight against the Empire, that was also responsible for rooting out the foreign colony (maybe it was the colony in the first place that started a rebellion attempt.) Of course, no one knows these details in the beginning. Over time, the presence of that Empire is noticed, and its danger for the colony and the other natives becomes apparent.

 

[Gailbraithe]

You should rent and watch the series Deadwood. It deals with intrigues within a growing town very skillfully, and is chock full of ideas to pay homage to. Plus it has plenty of examples of

Some quick plot ideas stolen from what I remember of Deadwood:

• A famous adventurer and his cohort arrive at the colony. The adventurer is past his prime, and while he's drunk and gambling, a young assassin kills him with a cowardly stab in the back. The cohort is suddenly adrift, and while mourning turns to drinking, becoming a menace to herself and other. If the PCs can help her sober up and get over her grief, they could make a useful ally.
• The priest that came with the colonists has begun having increasingly strange prophetic visions, and acting in a very manic and irregular manner, and he's beginning to scare people. What's driving the priest mad?
• A cutthroat local businessman willing to do anything to get ahead has made a deal with a local group of kobolds. First he sells a newly arriving family of settlers, with no local connections, all the equipment and supplies they need, perhaps even recommending plots of land to work. Then he signals his kobold allies to attack them, and return the equipment. Then he gives them a small cut of the money he made. Because the settlers have no local connections, he has managed to sell the same equipment and plots a dozen times without anyone catching on.

 

[AtomicPope]

Whenever I feel I might be railroading players, it's because I haven't worked on the backstory enough. A world should be larger than the vista presented to the PC's. Should they walk to the horizon, something will be waiting for them, rather than the edge of the world. The intrigue of the island, the political factions, and the monsters stuff usually comes easy. What's hard is keeping the PC's interested in a geographically narrow storyline. If you're creating a lost continent campaign, here's some things to consider:
1) How hard is it to travel to and from? If the continent can be found easily, then PC's could just say, "f-this! Let's go someplace else." There should be a solid explaination why it's lost. This is the most important piece of information to consider. Maybe the lost colony isn't lost at all. Maybe there's sea monsters that wreck the ships so no one can leave the island. The colony is still there but they've lost contact because no one can leave the island continent. Whatever you come up with, it should be important, believable, and harrowing. Make sure staying on the island continent is the safe bet. Tell the PC's they're the 3rd expedition. When they arrive, have the colonists say, "You're the first of our people we've seen since the day we left home."
2) Conflicting stories adds intrigue. One thing I learned as a DM is telling the truth can be quite boring for players. It's better to have some people exaggerate. Others leave out vital information. While still others down play serious dangers with skepticism. It keeps the PC's from asking just anyone and adds a touch of character to the bumpkins. Also, when you can't trust the only sources of information available it forces the PC's to look and judge with their own eyes. If the colonists say there's a group of demonic ogres that controls the forests and the characters find out it's ettins, that changes everything. Information given should be ballpark accurate, but it's up to the PC's to get the details.
3) Diminishing Supplies. Ban any items that create food and water, and cure diseases/poisons on a daily basis. The problem with these items is they destroy necessary conflict (and they're just bad for "stranded" storylines). By removing the fast-food industry from your island (I just got an image of Joe vs the Volcano) you're creating more story options. An example might be - the town is low on food and fresh water. The river valley two miles east is lush with game and fruits, only it's a treacherous hike through the forests and a dangerous climb down. This gives you the opportunity to have the PC's fight for survival. I recently finished a D&D campaign where our group was trapped in the Underdark for 11 levels. For the first 7 levels we ran out of food. Literally, we would chase down wandering monsters to kill and eat them. It is some of the best Roleplaying we've ever had. But I must admit, Drow is an acquired taste

 

[Badapple]

Lost and Deadwood are great examples of TV shows you can draw apon for ideas of intrigue and plots.

Another great show to check out is "Babylon 5". Here are some plotlines directly from the show you can port over to your campaign:

1. The colony is established by a human kingdom because it is rich in some sort of valuable resource (like a magic resource) or is in a critical location (magical nexus point, teleport circles)
2. Representatives from other kingdoms and races have a presence at the colony because they need the resource as well, but they have to pay their taxes/acknowledge the human kingdom to earn their embassies.
3. Two of the representatives are at war with each other back at their homelands (tieflings/dragonborn, or two kingdoms), but while at the colony they are expected to behave peacefully.
4. What happened to the previous colonies? (perhaps the cause of the disease is directly related to the process of obtaining the resource/using the nexus)
5. Some of the natives (elves?, eladrin?, githyanki?) are very advanced magically, but they are cryptic and mysterious. They would be a powerful ally if they could be reached and befriended. But can they be trusted?
6. The original kingdom that runs the colony is getting more and more corrupt/totalitarian/evil whatever, and this is spilling over into the colony. Should the colony go independant? If so, how will they survive?
7. New visitors and interesting personalities constantly arrive, changing the dynamics.

 

[Merkuri]

Also. Any suggestion how to deal with The Language Gap? Anything intelligent (from other races to intelligent monsters) just isn't going to speak their language. How do I handle this?

Well, there's always magic.

And depending on how long the original colonists were there, it's possible that some of the friendly natives picked up pieces of the colonist's language.

And for some inspiration, you can look up some information on Roanoke Colony. It was a colony in the 16th century that was found abandoned for no reason. The only clue was the word "CROATOAN" carved into a tree in the middle of the colony, and the letters "Cro" carved somewhere else. Okay, maybe you don't need to look it up because that's about all the interesting stuff about Roanoke. But you might want to consider carving an ominous, meaningless word into a tree in the abandoned colony.

You could also have the adventurers find some maps in some of the abandoned colony buildings. Maybe they could look like they were drawn by children, exploring their surroundings. They won't be terribly accurate, but it'll be a start.

And maybe they could find a single native who has been living nearby the colony, hermit-style. He speaks common, but not well, and he seems very eccentric. He's friendly, and the PCs can get some information from him about interesting surroundings, but he seems to completely misunderstand (or is intentionally avoiding) questions about what happened to the colony. Sometimes he acts like the colony still exists, and occasionally his broken sentences sound remarkably like riddles. None of the other natives in the area seem to know him, but they trade odd looks with each other when the PCs mention the hermit and won't explain.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Let the PCs explore the environment for a while and make them think that this exploration business is going to be the main focus of the campaign.

Then make them discover a "Long John".

This is a term which I took from the Blue Planet RPG (and which I have elaborated on further here and here), but basically it's a substance occurring in this frontier that's so incredibly valuable that everyone will want it (such as an alchemical compound that stops aging).

So suddenly lots of colonies from other major civilizations back home will spring up, bringing their political disputes with them. Piracy will become a major problem. Merchants and prospectors will arrive in droves, hoping to get rich. The race to plunder the continent is on - and the PCs will be able to say: "I was there in the beginning!"

Seriously, though - go buy the Blue Planet RPG. It's science fiction, but it should give you all sorts of adventure ideas for just this kind of campaign.

 

[Ginnel]

Just because its a new colony doesn't mean theres no intrigue or politics, politics will probably be more open for more characters than ever in a new colony as there will be less supply and more demand for a hell of a lot of goods, Think wines, think available manpower, think horses.

So anyone with these resources will be a powerful influence.
Because the colony is far away from the old regieme more things will be overlooked merchants and quite possibly adventurers/mercenaries may well be able to achieve power more easily through their services.

Backgrounds well you can always send an old rival to track the party down, or have the party track down an old enemy

Even better suggestion is to run a mini adventure in the "Old Worlde" to show characters the flavour of what they are missing when they get to the new world, possibly giving additional hooks and a nice explanation for why they're off to the new world (maybe the first adventure is a crime or nearly so their reprieve become guards in the new world)

This type of prequel worked really well in a Tribe 8 game I played, where we played pre-apocolypse, during it and also after with a reincarnation theme.

 

[infax]

Suggestions

Some suggestions in no particular order:

* Have "friendly" natives early on. They would know of local legends, politics and geography. Their view can be skewed to their own interests (perhaps they don't value gold or treat adamantine as poisonous) which would still keep the mistery. Since you have natives going mute, all communication would be through gestures at first. That could help bridge some gaps.

* Have a hardened survivor fnid the PCs early on. He knows the region and some of the dangers colonists are likely to stumble upon. He is a source of information and can add tons of hooks for things like "in the time of the first colony, we sent a ship filled with treasure that never made its way home. We believe it was sunk around an island like so-and-so." Maybe he is deaf, so he wasn't infected. Or he was on a long-ranging exploration team and was away for the whole Tower of Babel episode (if his team fell prey to some danger, everyone dying and the survivor breaking a leg, that would add length to his time out of town, would add a plot with the danger faced by his expedition and if he doesn't recover well from the injury, it would leave he PCs in the spotlight and the survivor only as a source of information).

* Finally, an option I greatly like is letting about a full year elapse between adventures (or between character level advancement, whatever seems more convenient). This can give the game a nice pacing and allows for more development of the environment (if the game, from 1st to 30th level, happens in less than a year, the world is not likely to change a lot, if it happens over the course of 30 years, you can have all kinds of interesting things going on, births, deaths, successions, invasions, famine, discoveries and the like).

Since you mentioned you don't know how to reintroduce the demonic virus, you could make it infect anyone making divination rituals on the island (or on some regions of the island) - the contact with Astral Realms is infectious. From the start, mention there is a plan to do some important divination at some point in the game, that way, if the PCs find out about the disaster and what caused it, they may become accutely aware there is a deadline before it all happens again.