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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stormdale" data-source="post: 8062915" data-attributes="member: 3555">Good Question Christian, I’ll try to have a go at answering it.Having the adventures be completed at various times can add versmilitude if you have a rival pc band that complete some of those other hooks. My secret is though is don't have an overall plot- I kind of weave one in and out as we go- long term the GDQ series might beocme the "main plot" but something else might instead. however i've bene DMing in Greyhawk for  over 30 years and so this series of adventure sis woven into the outcoems of previous stories/advenuring groupsI started with a reflection on my last couple of campaignsIn the past I’ve sprinkled quite  a few hooks into the ongoing adventures and the party has had a bit of adventure paralysis at times not sure which hook to chase down next and as a coupleof the newere playters were more used ot being led along by an "adventure path" story wanted to help them to feel there was a sei structure but also allow their choices to matter (if that makes sense). So this time decided to simply give 2-3 meaningful choices at the end of each adventure. I started with a newspaper (the Saltmarsh Sentinel) with some recent events in the world and a couple of potential adventure hooks in it as well as reports from the Amedio jungle of the exploits of the adventurer’ in the previous campaign (ToA).I have no overall campaign goal, wanting the story to emerge from the party’s adventures and tie various bits in as we go- but have a couple of possible storylines (#1 was lets blend in the 2e Sahaugin series into a nautical themed game, #2- the current way we are going lets try to aim towards GDQ 1E series into the story if they party makes it to high enough level). Let’s now look at the end of adventure 1. I made one of pcs uncle’s was the local harbourmaster. The harbourmaster had been left the mansion in SSoSM in a will after his brother, a reclusive alchemist (another uncle) had been declared dead as he hadn’t been seen in over a decade. the ncle wanted the mansion cleared of any unwanted guests so he could start repairs on itAlas, the nephew was killed by a group of lizardmen who had arrived to unload weapons off the Sea Ghost but after the battle the party retreated from the mansion carrying the dead PC. As his uncle had influence in the town he managed to get the nephew raised on condition the party did a favour for the church... clearing out of old lighthouse of an undead menace (Light of lost souls from Dungeon #2).The conversation at the end of the first adventure went something like this:"Okay you’ve cleared out the mansion on behalf of Slagga’s uncle and driven off some lizardmen. You weren’t sure way they were there (they completely missed the clues indicating the arrival of a ship- no one looked out a window of the room where the lizardmen had gone to signal the ship- I had changed the usual dungeon section as a couple of players had done it before lol).Alas, Slagga died and thanks to the intervention of his uncle, the local harbourmaster, the local priests have managed to raise Slagga from the dead but in return the church requires a service of the party so your options are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Follow up what the lizardmen were doing in the mansion which may possibly lead into the nearby Hool marshes (vague notion of using the dungeon portion of N1 cult of the Repile God if they went that way)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Repay your debt to the church- there is an abandoned lighthouse up the coast, undead are thought to be using the lighthouse to lure ships into the shallows. The church of Procan want this threat ended and this will repay your debt to the church.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Follow up on the strange codes you’ve found in the mansion and try to deal with the smuggling ring you’ve uncovered, it looks like it will be the next full moon before their ship returns to the area though.</li> </ul>At the end of each adventure we had anorher recap and new options to explore. The current arc (Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth) came about as one of the pcs magical short sword got broken so they needed to find a reclusive high level wizard to repair it. the wizard was rumoured to live on an island in the middle of a lake in the Dreadwood, one end of the lake happened to have a hill giant stronghold (Graud haug or whatever it is called  from SKT) and so in return for getting his favourite blade fixed the party agreed to travel into the mountains and retrieve a magical lanthorn from the fabled caverns of Tsojcanth- this entire arc then being  driven by a random event in one adventure. it turned out that the "wizard" was a lich and so they are worried about the potential impact of giving this item which they suspect is powerful to a lich whose intentions they do not trust <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> not sure as a dm how that will pan out but love the moral dilemmas its created...There are also regional level events about to start of which will add another level of political intrigue to the game going forward- now the players ahve driven the story we've lots of hooks/threads emerging to create an epic game- just because the party failed to continue with our Sahuangin threat arc doesn't necessarily mean the theat has been removed and I am toying with this arc coming back to bite them soon with a large scale sahuagin attack on Saltmarsh, so ignoring the original plot may also have consequences down the track.Stormdale</blockquote>

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