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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TKDB" data-source="post: 5866165" data-attributes="member: 6690697">I haven't really run games all that much before (a single one-shot for my family when I was home for Christmas, but that's it), but I recently got an idea for a campaign I'd really like to run. Unfortunately, there are a couple aspects of the concept that present some issues that I'll need to address.The general premise of the campaign is that the PCs are a group of elite adventurers sent to investigate some strange stuff that's been happening to the sacred ancestral forest of the elves after previous investigative teams went missing. Over the course of the campaign the players will discover that everything that's been happening in the forest is the result of the awakening of a long-forgotten fey lord, the Elvenking, who's trying to essentially remake the world into a paradise for feykind, which means uprooting the normal natural order and replacing it with the somewhat bizarre ways of the fey. Naturally, most non-fey won't take too kindly to this change (and in fact, it's debatable whether the elves and other fey folk in the forest would go along with it were it not for the fact that the Elvenking is basically brainwashing them with magic).There are two main sticking points with this idea:First, I'd like the campaign to take place pretty much entirely within the forest, under the premise that the fey magic suffusing the place is warping space, making it nigh-impossible to navigate out by normal means, and blocking magical teleportation or communication in or out of the forest. Mainly I think it'd be neat to have a higher-level game where the PCs are cut off from normal civilization for an extended period of time, but normally by the time you get to the point where you can start playing with the fun higher-powered abilities, the players also have access to distance-travel magic that makes such isolation trivial to circumvent. However, this raises the sticky issue of railroading, since I am trapping the PCs in a situation through (basically) nothing more than DM fiat.The second problem is that I'd like for the players to have a fair amount of peaceful interaction with the elves and other fey in the forest while still maintaining the fey as the main antagonists. My thought was to have four daughters of the Elvenking, each governing a part of the forest while the Elvenking builds his strength, which the players would encounter one by one. While I can easily promote peaceful interaction with the fey during the early stages of the campaign, once the players figure out more or less what's going on with regard to the Elvenking I imagine it will be difficult to get them to treat the fey with any pretence of cooperation or civility rather than simply marking them as enemies to be defeated and commencing with the beatdown. This goes double for the daughters, since I'm sure it won't take long after the first one's chapter is finished to figure out that that they're basically the BBEG's lieutenants. Any tips on how I can encourage the players to approach the fey (and particularly Elvenking's daughters) as NPCs to be interacted with in ways other than violence, despite them being antagonists that will eventually need to be stopped one way or another?</blockquote>

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