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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DanMcS" data-source="post: 1204089" data-attributes="member: 6530">I ran a (modern setting) game over the weekend.  Beforehand, I noted out 8 NPCs- a vampire, his three lackeys, two ghoulish dogs, George (an 8-year-old boy), and Gina, probably George's mother, or at least his guardian.  The vampire probably wanted George and Gina dead, though maybe he just wanted to kidnap them.  I had a couple of options why.  This was the extent of my pre-planning.  The vampire and victims had names, but the rest were noted as "Huey, Dewie, Louis, Spot, and Rover", because I didn't know yet whether their names would ever be important.  Somehow, the PCs were going to get involved in this plot, or it would at least go on around them if they wanted to ignore it.When I got to the game saturday, we determined that the center of action would be in Boston, because one PC (a priest) lived there, another (a dropped-out law student) could relocate, and the other two were new PCs with no hardcoded geographical bits.  Boston it was.The priest teaches at a small Jesuit/catholic college in Boston.  Another, a high-school age street kid, decided his character had gone to that school a couple years ago; still a third (an ex secret agent of some kind) had a reason to visit the occult library at this college.  Presto, center of action.(George instantly morphed into Georgia, a 16-year-old girl who attended the highschool affiliated with the college.  Gina got a couple of years older.)Huey and Dewie were spied by a PC as they cased the school and nearby subway.  They showed up as strange to his second sight.  He followed them onto the subway, got off at their stop, and lost them in the crowd.(We lost about 45 minutes in this session as the PCs felt each other out, and went through the absurd "I see dead people.  Do you see dead people?" phase seemingly required by modern settings.  It seems so much simpler to get players to suspend disbelief and team up in medieval settings.  I don't know why.)Later that night, the priest, law student, and secret agent, having joined up, went clubbing, looking for supernatural evil or at least a good martini.  Only the priest knew the teenager at all, and none of them yet knew he had seen Huey and Dewie, or that anything was afoot.(I wasn't planning for anything to happen yet that night, the dasterdly duo would strike in the morning, but hey, if the PCs wanted to find some evil night life, who was I to object?)They ran into the teen with a couple of his friends, who were working the floor at the club, stealing for a living I guess.  (Finally, the whole party was together.  This was like pulling teeth.)  One of the team of pickpockets, who gets named "Andy", had failed to report back, but someone had seen him leave the club with a girl (Georgia, of course, who now solidified as definitely a bad herself, another vampire).  The PCs searched the area, and found the kid sitting on the front steps of an apartment building, feeling light-headed.  No visible marks though.  He got sent to the hospital.Cut to the next day.  The PCs are converging on the school grounds for various reasons, and most of them spot Huey and Dewie arriving at the school.  The lackeys go to the main office, bamboozle the secretary to get Gina's address (the PCs didn't see this part up close, so they don't know if it was magic or not), and head back to the subway.  (Gina acquires a last name, it's important enough now [Haversford, the street where I went to a Halloween party friday night].)  Two PCs follow discreetly.  They eventually arrive (surprise) back at the apartment building where they found Andy last night.Huey and Dewie go upstairs, followed by two PCs, one of whom is stealthy and the other is using something like "invisibility to supernaturals".  (Huey and Dewie, I decide, are here to kill Gina, who is a vampire, and isn't supposed to have her half-vampire daughter in regular schools, going out to clubs and drinking blood, attracting attention to vampires).Action ensues.  The whole session went like this, with just-in-time decision making with regards to motives and plots, and the players never had to know any of it.  Gina and George might have been vampires, trying to live quietly and not hurt anyone, which offended the villain.  Or they might have been normal humans, his wife and daughter from before he was vamped, and he now either wanted them dead or undead.  Huey and Dewie ended up being fairly competant badasses who escaped to fight another day, while Louis, with the same stats as the other two, ended up being a wannabe-vamp poser who liked to go to goth clubs and call attention to himself instead of laying low, which got him found, ambushed, interrogated, and killed by the PCs.  Pretty much none of this except some stat outlines was predetermined.This plot isn't over, but the rest of it is much more filled out, and the PCs are invested in it now, having decided to get involved when they figured out what was going on around them.  Throughout, the players were free to go where they wanted and investigate what they wanted, but the action tended to find them.  They have a lot of leads left to follow if they want to finish this up.Don't worry too much about getting the PCs involved in the plot.  Many players say they want a freeformish game world, but they also want it to be interesting, and it's almost always interesting when there's an evil plot afoot for them to foil.</blockquote>

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