Eben
First Post
Thanks for all the idea's so far!
Actually bardsandsages and Auraseer both raise valid points. It's a fine line between constricting a solid plot and retaining enough flexibility to accomodate your players. As to who or what constructed the oracles, I don't want to nail down too many hard facts about that, even though form a robust plot perspective this would be the thing to do, as bardsandsages points out.
The reason is the way I like to run campaigns. At first my players will think that they're in an ordinary D&D campaing (unless someone plays a spellcaster). Only at the moment the need arises to travel out of the boundaries of the one working oracle, they'll be confronted by this for the first time. Next they'll be confronted by a non-working oracle. And finally I'll drop hints an clues that magic used to work in other places as well.
At that point they'll have all the ingredients to start cooking and decide on how they want to approach this threath of invasion (as has been pointed out: digging in wouldn't seem a very bad option). Depending on their own conclusions they'll probably come up with a few theories and I'dd rather fly with that than railroading them into a pre-conceived option.
In my experience: if you have decided on something like this, your players will come up with tons of theories, but you'll still have to churn out some ancient sage or whatnot to tell them that they're wrong and it's actually like this. And it's more fun if they players have the feeling that they've actully solved your mystery.
Ideas I really like so far:
1. Introduce a dilemma as to reactivating the oracles or not;
2. Introduce something destabilizing to the power of the invaders;
3. The reversal idea (even though I'll have to re-think some things), since I think this would give players more of an incentive to find things out about the who what and why than simply finding the on switch.
4. the harvesting
Things I'm not too fond of:
1. Psyonics. It's just a matter of taste: tomatos, tomatoes. I've pretty much called the whol psyonics thing off.
2. ley lines. Those things give me intestinal problems when I hear them mentioned irl, so I'dd rather keep them out of my free time.
3. The scientific angle. I'm probably responsible for this by introducing the mechanical activation. So I'll probably drop this in favour of some mystical activation.
Peter
Actually bardsandsages and Auraseer both raise valid points. It's a fine line between constricting a solid plot and retaining enough flexibility to accomodate your players. As to who or what constructed the oracles, I don't want to nail down too many hard facts about that, even though form a robust plot perspective this would be the thing to do, as bardsandsages points out.
The reason is the way I like to run campaigns. At first my players will think that they're in an ordinary D&D campaing (unless someone plays a spellcaster). Only at the moment the need arises to travel out of the boundaries of the one working oracle, they'll be confronted by this for the first time. Next they'll be confronted by a non-working oracle. And finally I'll drop hints an clues that magic used to work in other places as well.
At that point they'll have all the ingredients to start cooking and decide on how they want to approach this threath of invasion (as has been pointed out: digging in wouldn't seem a very bad option). Depending on their own conclusions they'll probably come up with a few theories and I'dd rather fly with that than railroading them into a pre-conceived option.
In my experience: if you have decided on something like this, your players will come up with tons of theories, but you'll still have to churn out some ancient sage or whatnot to tell them that they're wrong and it's actually like this. And it's more fun if they players have the feeling that they've actully solved your mystery.
Ideas I really like so far:
1. Introduce a dilemma as to reactivating the oracles or not;
2. Introduce something destabilizing to the power of the invaders;
3. The reversal idea (even though I'll have to re-think some things), since I think this would give players more of an incentive to find things out about the who what and why than simply finding the on switch.
4. the harvesting
Things I'm not too fond of:
1. Psyonics. It's just a matter of taste: tomatos, tomatoes. I've pretty much called the whol psyonics thing off.
2. ley lines. Those things give me intestinal problems when I hear them mentioned irl, so I'dd rather keep them out of my free time.
3. The scientific angle. I'm probably responsible for this by introducing the mechanical activation. So I'll probably drop this in favour of some mystical activation.
Peter
