I've DMed myself into a corner; please help me out!

[Jolly Giant]

Long post, but I hope you'll tough it out...


I've gone and put myself in a pretty trickey situation lately. Now I wonder if anyone on these boards have any ideas on how to deal with it. Maybe some of you have even been in the same situation?

I've been DMing a campaign with evil PCs for some years now. It's been great fun, with plenty of stuff that would give Eric's grandma a stroke. The problem is, one of the players are studying in an out of town school, so we only play whenever he's home for his holidays. To ensure everyone (including me) got their D&D fix, I agreed to DM a second campaign we could play while he is out of town.

The evil party (where the PCs have reached ECL 30 by now) are about become the catalysts for a vast interplanar war between the good and evil deities. They'll be leading armies of demons, yugoloths and undead into Elysium, Arborea and Ysgard while the deities fight between themselves.

I thought it would be fun to let the players see things from both sides, show them how what repercussions this war would have for people on the material plane. So that became the theme for my second campaign...

The players went from playing fiendish level 30 characters to playing level 1 good guys (I restricted alignement to NG or LG for this campaign). The real problem is that it's taken a lot longer than expected before we get to play the evil campaign again, and there's been plenty of time to play the good guy campaign, so now the good guys are way ahead of the evil ones on my game world's calendar.

They have climbed rapidly in levels, taking some insane risks and going up against opponents that should be way out of their league; yet somehow surviving. The PCs are currently at level 11-12, have access to planeshift and are eager to get involved in the war they know their deities are fighting. But of course, I don't want to give away anything major that will one day take place in the evil campaign and I can't really be sure what will have happened until we've played through it either...

I've tried my best to keep the PCs occupied on the material plane, but they are eager to get to the roots of all the catastrophies happening on the material plane and they know the source of it all must be the war raging on the outer planes...

I'm starting to think I'll just have to put the campaign on hold for a while, but then we won't get to play at all! None of the other players want to DM... Anybody ever been in a similar situation? Anybody have any good ideas? Please..?

 

[MerakSpielman]

You gotta switch back to their evil counterparts for a while 'till you catch up... I don't really see any other way to do it.

 

[Thanee]

Well, one option (altho a kinda cheesy one):

Just let them go!

They are eager to join the war, they have the means... so let them go!

However, something is going wrong... they end up somewhere else...

Either the evil side (some deity or whatnot) or even the good side (to protect them, since they actually are not ready to join in the war yet) has sent them to someplace where they cannot easily escape. Maybe even back in time or whatever.

Well, at least it would give you unlimited opportunity to have fun in the meantime!

Bye
Thanee

 

[BlackMoria]

The Manual of the Planes has information that time runs different on some planes in relation to the prime material. So, if they are eager to take the fight 'off world', set up the adventure so that the first problem they have to tackle is on a plane in which there is significant time slippage. So they spend considerable time on that plane but for the prime, nearly no time has passed.

Since the characters are probably not savvy 'planeswalkers' at this point, they probably don't know this and you should be able to play with time differentials to your hearts content so that you can have both parties at the correct point in 'time and space' that you desire.

 

[random user]

Though kind of cheesy, if you all come to a consensus it's workable:

You could divert them to a plane of time, or some plane where time flows differently, perhaps through a mishap when they wanted to go to a different plane.

In this plane they could have a bunch of adventures, not dealing with your central plot very much (or perhaps just one particular point) and it can take a long time, but when they eventually leave the plane they will find that only a small amount of time has passed in what they consider their reality.

One other thing that you might try and do, though it may be hard to pull off (as a btw it's something I'm doing in my campaign and my players seem to be enjoying it) is to somehow give them a group dream to share. In the dream (it can be some other random location or even something like they take over other people's lives in the past (or future!)), they have all their equipment but have some alternate goals to pursue (like figuring out a hidden piece of information, escape a trap, etc). The interesting thing about this is that it too takes up no "in-game" time... well 8 hours or so, but whatever.

I'm sure there are other ways to mess with the flow of time as well. Those are just a couple that I thought of.

 

[Thanee]

I sense some kind of temporal anomaly here...

Bye
Thanee

 

[Patlin]

Control the Information Flow

If you limit the amount of information (especially the specifics like names) you ought to be able to proceed without spoiling the epic evil campaign. Surely the bad guys have other generals besides the evil PCs, so even allowing the good guys to know what some of the evil guys have been up to doesn't necessarilly give away anything. The level gaps are still extreme, and you can use this for some fun foreshadowing. Maybe the good guys find out that in their abscence a few of their powerfull allies have been destroyed by the forces of evil. Maybe these allies, to the good PCs, seem of nearly godly power. To a 30th level group, however, they may only be a minor encounter. The good PCs may spend a few sessions frantically helping the forces of good to recover from the loss of these key allies, and a month or two later the (out-of-synch) evil group might encounter and slay the same allies as a minor part of a larger quest.

The good news is that even if the allies escaped, you never revealed it was the evil PCs that did the people in, so that narrow escape can be a temporary respite only as some more anonymous agents of darkness correct your plot lines.

Don't give out names, dates, etc. and you ought to be able to use the situation to your advantage... what would have been a minor encounter for the evil group will gain significance, since they know what a mess that simple conduct had on the forces of good.

 

[Jolly Giant]

I sense some kind of temporal anomaly here...

Me too! ...and that might just be the way to go!

I'll certainly give the "different time plane" thing several of you good people mentioned some thought. That might just do the trick!

 

[Jolly Giant]

Patlin:

I've already used those most of those ideas you suggested several times; great minds think alike, eh?

Several of the good guys' allies have mysteriously vanished or been brutally murdered, and whenever that happens the players all go "I'll bet it's our evil characters that did this!" It's sooo funny! Well, to me as the DM, anyway...

 

[Selganor]

Another solution might be (although some players will hate you for that) to let them run into a "dreammaster" (or something like that)

I.e. some powerful being that doesn't kill them but puts them into a dreamworld that they THINK is the real one.
This way he (and whoever is able to peek into this "dimension") can study the tactics of the PCs and prepare for them once they escape from this dimension (which should be a matter of time anyway)
This way he might even be able to test some plans that he isn't sure of if they would work the way he planned.

Anyway, once the party escapes this trap (somewhen they should be able to figure out they're not in the real world and escaping should be possible for a detemined party of that level) they see that although they had quite some time fighting evil apparently no (or not as much) time has passed in "the real world" and some things they "knew" would happen would now work out different (because they already pointed out the weakness of these plans)