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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5151157" data-attributes="member: 3820">Yes, yes indeed. I tend to ask my players what they want to do next as early as when they're packing up after a session, and harass them again so I have a general idea of what their next plan well before I have to start planning the next evening's session. If they request more information to make an informed choice, I try to give them a paragraph or two over email, hopefully seeded with enough intriguing emphasis that yes, this is an interesting plot hook, that they bite fully.As for specific tricks to mid-level plots apart from "carefully tail player motivations..." Mostly I tend to start exploring possible connections between smaller plots, or hooks the players pick up on. For instance, I knew for one game that recently I wanted to have a troublesome bandit problem, and I wanted to have an agriculture-goddess temple taken over by plague-priests. The "mid-plot" came about when I started trying to figure out how to link the two. Before long, I put together something about a land-grab in which the bandits were paid to harass this one estate, and the "backup plan" was to hire the plague-priests to blight the land (temporarily, of course). Of course, plague magic is a little more dramatic than a blatant land grab. So the person who wanted the land was clearly more of a patsy in the grand scheme of things, and his realization of that might lead to some interesting desperate moves on his part, and stir up more activity from the pestilence-cult... and after a bit of musing, bam, there I had something to tie together several weeks of adventure. They don't just have to be adventures, mind. I tend to keep a small book in which I jot down any idea that occurs to me as befitting a given theme. So, for instance, I might jot down "succubus imprisoned in a mirror," and then later decide I want to tie that in somehow. The structured challenge of using a "secret ingredient," Iron DM-style, will sometimes provide interesting ideas for ties between otherwise unrelated things. Of course, it helps to have a long list of ingredients so you can find something that works. But that's why I keep the book around at all times, so I can grow those lists at any point.</blockquote>

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