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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1556350" data-attributes="member: 16936">I'd agree.  I'd also go so far as to say that the plot should be brazenly stolen from whatever source strikes you as being cool and easy to file the names off of (so clever players don't immediately see what you're plagiarizing).For example, if I had to run our Saturday game on just two hours of notice, at this point I'd probably be swiping the framework of the plot to Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, just because it's what I'm reading at the moment and I know only one of the players has even the slightest chance of having read this book himself.I'd likely end up with a plot where the party is confronted by a sudden, inexplicable loss (probably an NPC they like, but maybe a McGuffin or a treasured item or whatever), and is then barraged with quirky, bizarre, and somewhat unsettling offers from various NPCs to either help them regain what they lost or to bully them into giving it up forever.  Center most of the action around one area (just as ThoughtBubble suggests himself in the first post), look for places to bring the party into direct conflict with some kind of bad-guy Goon Squad out to drive them away, let them get closer to what they're looking for, and then lather-rinse-repeat this process until they've got a pretty clear idea of what they're going to do, then trigger the big climax and let them try to get their prize.That's about ten minutes of my prep time, so I can now throw twenty or so into the town, twenty more on quick-and-dirty NPC notes (names and a few "what they know" ideas, mostly), half an hour on pulling out stats and important rules for NPCs and things I can try out this time around, and the rest of the time on trying to come up with two or three good, big obstacles for the party to deal with (fights and so on).Won't be the greatest thing ever written, but assuming I could get the players to buy into the general premise of it all, it's a decent enough story for an afternoon of gaming, and easier on me by far than trying to be original or even just trying to have something less free-form put together in under 2 hours.(I kinda know that this works already, because I already did it once, stealing brazenly from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep for a story about a wizard and his two younger apprentices, a missing flesh golem, and an assassin's guild, and it looked like everyone was having fun for most of it.)--i find that preparing to run a published module actually takes more effortryan</blockquote>

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