Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sir Wulf" data-source="post: 5185690" data-attributes="member: 78791">Rather than working out a plot ahead of time, sometimes it's best to just consider the adventure's antagonists and what they might do once the PCs interfere with their schemes. As the PCs learn of the villains' plans, the PCs can choose what they want to do about them. Interesting villains suggest more options for the PCs than "kill them and take their stuff". As an example, the PCs find themselves in village A.  Raiders living in nearby hills repeatedly prey on the village, attacking travelers on the roads to the area and sometimes even raiding the village itself. The adventure starts when the raiders do something that ticks off the PCs, such as robbing a caravan that was expected to deliver something they want or kidnapping some innocents they can sell to slavers. So far, it's a standard railroad plot.  To give the PCs some interesting choices, add a few curve balls to the mix:  Battling one of the raiding parties, the PCs learn that the raiders aren't all blackhearted villains.  Perhaps their leaders have a legitimate grievance with the village folk: The village's ruler seized their land a generation earlier, forcing their families into serfdom.  Fleeing enslavement, they turned to banditry to survive.  These grim circumstances forced the exiles into alliance with a murderous brotherhood of brigands.  The exiles might be the only force restraining their sinister allies from more destructive rampages. By adding moral complexity, the PCs are given meaningful options.  Do they massacre the hill raiders?  Do they negotiate a compromise?  Heroes make hard choices. Sometimes those involve pushing on to defeat an evil when they're not sure they have the resources to survive.  Sometime they're moral choices, where the path of righteousness is murky and uncertain.</blockquote>

Verification