Question
As some of you know, I have been re-reading and editing the first two books of the "Out of the Frying Pan" story hour for posting as a download (the first book is already done), but as I was reading last night I noticed where the first major break in the campaign was from where I thought would happen, or seemed likely to happen to what actually happened, and it amazed me how it really effect the direction and tone of the campaign in some pretty serious ways.
I then began to recall othe places where I had to craft and re-craft the campaign to handle new ideas or directions I did not expect the PCs to go in, or PC deaths and I thought it might be cool to do an annotated version of the story hour with more extensive notes about such things and how I dealt with them and what was planned and what was not, and what were the sources for things, etc. . .
This is the kind of thing I would have posted about here in the the story hour threads, but since hardly anyone ever asked I never bothered - but since no one ever asked I was wondering if such a thing would even be of interest to any of my regular or not so regular readers?
Of course, this annotated version would be filled with spoilers for itself since notes would refer to later developments in the campaign.
The primary example (and what made me think of this) was the PCs' arrival in Summit for the first time and their little "haunted inn" adventure (which turned out to be the 'traitor' gnomes doing it). . . The PCs went directly after the gnomes, while I was sure they would erroneously connect the disappearing townsfolk with the events of the inn and investigate that, eventually finding the packs of gnolls responsible and their connection to the false priest of bast outside of town (essentially completing the adventure I had 'the Shepherds' complete when it had been ignored long enough) and then tangle with the gnomes and meet up with Mozek and be slightly higher level when meeting him and eventually getting to Aze Nuquerna to fight the charmed elves and Richard the Red at an even higher level (with more time having passed).
I was trying something different by having two unconnected adventures overlap in such a way that one led to another or that clues would bring the PCs in one direction or another - hoping that the PCs would avoid the more obscured one (the actions of the gnomes) for the more concrete and immediate task of finding missing people.