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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 218762" data-attributes="member: 172">With my ice age story arc finally coming to a close, I need to start thinking about what is coming next in the game.I was insprired by the writeup of mirror realms in the Manual of the Planes. Basically, the concept is that<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There are numerous planes that connect a limited number of mirrors that you can travel to if you have the right spells.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">However, as soon as you enter the plane, a mirror duplicate of yourself is created, with opposite alignment. This mirror self hunts you down and tries to kill you.</li> </ul>Now, before I launch into what I want to do, we must turn our attention to the dramatis personae NPCs of the game:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Arcane Alliance: A secret cabal of mages that is determined to bring usher in mages as a ruling class.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Galea: A female summoner and member of the arcane alliance. Not in the inner circle, but a powerful operative. The party HATES Galea.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Roetha: A mirror magess, and the former disciple of a now deceased member of the Arcane Alliance. Roetha is now a member of a secret society called the Emerald Brotherhood and is friendly and well known to the party.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Emerald Brotherhood: A secret society that is concerned with maintaining the safety and security of the people of the land. As such, they actively struggle against the Arcane Alliance and similar organizations.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Gavannon Alderhard: A knight in service to the same kingdom the PCs serve. They have only met him once, in reality, I have set him up to be a traitor. He is secretly allied with dark elves and follows an evil goddess. I decided a long time ago that his keep would be the site that an artifact called the doom engine would be built</li> </ul>Now this plot doesn't need to be completed immediately; its fruition is a month or two off. But I need to get started setting hooks so it can go off as smoothly as possible.Now here's the idea. The party has usually been able to handle their problems in a fairly straightforward fashion (i.e., find out what the bad guys are up to, find a way to stop them, thrash them) so I was going for something a little more complicated and memorable here.The basic thing that I want to do is this. Galea as she exists in the campaign is not the real Galea. For that matter, Gavannon Alderheart, the lord of Drake Keep, is not the real Gavannon Alderheart.Here's the backstory I have settled on so far:Galea  and Gavannon were good kind hearted people who met and fell in love and were betrothed. However, for some reason I have yet to decide, they made their way into a mirror plane and were slain by their mirror selves. The mirror selves escaped, and have taken the place of their good reflections. They are also no longer betrothed, but have went their separate ways.Now, ideally, I want the party to stumble on this fact. Ressurecting the real Galea and Gavannon is a possibility, but ultimately not required. The ultimate point of the adventure/story arc would be for the party to discover that Galea is not the real Galea and through that, discover that there is a traitor in their midst, and thus create a convenient segue into the adventure where the party takes on Gavannon and quests against the drow.Now the question is, how to do this in an adventure-maximizing way.One way would be for the Roetha to let the party know about a mirror she has found that she knows is linked to a mirror owned by a member of the Arcane Alliance, and she might provide them with a spell that will let them traverse the mirror and they run into the corpses of the real Galea and Gavannon. As intruiging as that sounds, I am having a problem deciding how I could work that event into the game and am planning on forgoing the trip into the mirror plane as knowledge that they were there, came out changed, and the nature of the plane (however they discover that information) would be sufficient.Another possibility is that an honor obsessed relative (or former love) who knows Galea has been searching for her, and finds that the party beleives her to be a criminal. He challenges the party to defend her honor. The party is high enough level that any one of them could scrag this NPC easily. But the party, if astute, will soon learn that not only is this individual not evil, but quite certain in the conviction that Galea is a woman with a good heart and it genuinely pains him to see a good woman slighted as he sees it.Once they discover this, then perhaps they might explore a little, and if they ask the right questions they might discover that she was once betrothed of Gavannon and start asking him questions (not knowing that he shared her fate), they might learn from Roetha the nature of the mirror plane, and eventually stumble on the fact that both of them are mirror-dopplegangers.That is where I am standing. I am trying to tie this together and am having a little trouble. Any ideas?</blockquote>

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