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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 2080113" data-attributes="member: 198">Thanks. As some of the other posters have already mentioned, a good way to do it is to listen to players think aloud and mine it for ideas, but this time that didn't really have anything to do with it. Which is why I enjoyed it even more, since I've been giving my PCs very free rein to follow just about any plot thread they want and create some of their own, so even I'm not sure where the story is going. What I did in this case was to simply have a half dozen non-player characters and groups who could potentially turn into BBEGs, depending on whether the PCs run up against them. I worked out what their various agendas were and how they intersect with each other. And just set the PCs free to follow their own aims. Sure enough, they've managed to piss off three groups, make a couple more indebted or at least interested in them, and given me fodder for dozens of sessions worth. And one of the big advantages, IMO, is that the players feel rightly that they are the ones making their own story and decisions rather than just creating a story which I had prepared.That being said, I have to say that PCs can hang themselves better than I could. For example, early in the campaign, they fought and killed an unusual warforged with metal claws and a magical "cannon" that fired a gout of fire (mechanically a warforged with the half-dragon template). The warforged PC got the idea to have similar claws made for himself and managed to persuade a particular group to create and 'install' such claws on him. I had intended that group to have a vested interest in warforged. So when the PC shows up with info about (and parts from) an unusual warforged and agrees to let them render him comatose to work on him, they promptly took the opportunity to plant an amulet of inescapable location on him so that he could be scried on with impunity. That opened up a whole lot of plot options and was something I came up with on the fly midway through the session when the PC sprung the idea on me to go get those claws built. It also let the PC feel like he had options for creativity in the game and came up in play when he was in situations when he couldn't use a weapon. The PCs discovered someone scrying on them regularly and got really worried about it. And when they discovered the amulet (today's session), it opened up new avenues for them to explore and for me to follow depending on how they go about it. And all because a PC came up with something I didn't plan and I gave him enough rope <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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