What do I do with this campaign?

[Rechan]

I'm not new to DMing, but I am new to face-to-face games. I finally managed to get some people together, but now I'm not sure how to handle what they want.

See, I sat them all down, and said two things. One, "I want to build my campaign around what you want, and your characters, rather than the other way around, so what kinda game do you want?" and two, "I want your characters to have a reason to be together. So, make them with a cohesive background."

What did I receive?

A social/skill based campaign, with cinematic combat (This suits my style fine).
The party are drifters/con artists/gypsies.

The characters are:

Elven Swashbuckler 2; the Face of the party and the 'tumble and buckle swashes in a fight' guy.
Half-Elven Rogue1/Cleric1; the "Fortune teller", cleric to the God of Thieves, disguise specialist.
Halfling Rogue1/Sor1; Bellydancer, distraction extraordinare, pickpocket.
Half-Orc Barbarian2; Axe thrower, Strong Man, "clown".

Their story is that right now (or within the first session, if I chose to play that), the party is separated from their troupe. And so they are trying to find them/get by on their skills. I am intentionally going to avoid "Monsters/raiders killed your troupe - go get vengeance".

Of course there will be "We're going to set up a con, a scam, to get money. We're going to get into trouble with the authorities." My uncertainty with this campaign is that I want to do some extended plots. Stories that are beyond day to day to day, and I'm drawing a blank. Intrigue and mystery, and some good cinematic action, yeah that's waht I want. But I can't think of any.

I feel intimidated. And uncertain what to do. Help?

 

[kenobi65]

Have them pull off a scam on someone. Have that someone have powerful friends (or, maybe, just a heckuva lot of relatives) who want revenge.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, gypsies are wanderers. They've got a troupe, they go from town to town...

My first guess at a long-term goal is "What happened to your ancestral homeland?"

The PC's jobs will be to go back there and earn it back for their people. Looking at the party, I think the homeland should have been taken by tricksy fey or 3e-style heavily Lawful devils (or Inevitables or Modrons or what-have-you), which gives their particular style time to shine (they could even ally with tricksy fey).

Other possibilities:
* Gypsy curses.
* Being exposed to bigtory from 'sedentary' peoples.
* Dealing with an environmental disaster
* Any plot involving a circus. Seriously, wandering gypsies can draw parallels with migratory carnivals and the like. Actors, clowns, wild animals, unhealthy food...the PC's are carnies!
* Planar travel. Nothing says 'wandering' like going between dimensions!
* Gypsies bring news to places; what about if whatever apocaylpse their fleeing has followed them? The reason they're wandering is because if they stop, they will be overtaken by whatever it is that haunts the lands they come from.
* Of course there will be sparring with authorities, but what if this is more of a 'rival' nature, where the town guards want no trouble and the PCs cause trouble but there's no real ill-will (just a need for peace!). This could make the authorities into unlikely allies.
* In a vein with the above, perhaps the 'authority' of the land they are traveling to is too stringent, is being corrupted or being tricked. Infiltrating the high ranks of society as 'smelly vagabonds' could be an interesting challenge, and make some of their more freedom-loving ways stand out all the more in comparison.

 

[Darkwolf71]

Absolutly no advice for you what-so-ever.

Sounds like a great campaign though. Good luck with it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Sounds like a great setup, I like the PCs. To some extent the nature of the game and characters - gypsies, con artists - are opposed to the very concept of long term events. These people want to constantly be on the move, travelling to new lands and encountering new unsuspecting victims.

You could try researching con artists and gypsies in fact and fiction (movies, books, maybe even rpgs). The Rhenee in Greyhawk, for example are analogs of gypsies though they travel by barge.

Possible plots:
1) A woman on the run from her powerful husband seeks protection from the party. She may also have a lover or could develop a relationship with one of the PCs.
2) The PCs steal a mysterious jade idol which is actually a macguffin. All sorts of groups are after it - a church, the king's agents, a drow noble house, gargoyles working for a wizard, the knights templar, ninjas, whatever.
3) The Rod of Seven Parts. Typical fatnasy bollux. A great artefact is needed to save the world but for some reason it has been split up into X parts. The PCs are after it, along with the organisations listed above. Fits in with the need of the PCs to keep on the move.
4) Cthulhu lies dreaming. But his cultists are awake. PCs encounter these cultists, and subsidiary organisations such as crime gangs, in various guises on their travels, gathering power to wake their dark master. As the stars draw into alignment, monsters walk the Earth.

 

[Quickleaf]

Troupe leaders implicated PCs for a theft they didn't commit during their separation, and now the authorities are after the PCs who must clear their names and evade an overzealous sheriff. Nothing is as it seems. The troupe leaders chose the PCs as scapegoats because of a fortunteller's reading that PCs are destined to...(fill in the blank). The sheriff is on the take. And the stolen macguffin is actually a decoy.

 

[Aeric]

If I asked my players that, I would get shrugs and blank stares and the ever-helpful, "run what you feel like running." Of course, when I do pick something that I feel like running, 9 times out of 10 they turn around and say that it doesn't interest them.

So huzzah to you for having players who know what they want!

 

[Evilhalfling]

well eventually they are going to have to find thier troop - what if the rest of the troop is cursed, and they have to reverse it?
* the Carnival is sucked into the mists each day at dawn, free to wanader mortal world only at night.
* they are slowly turning into monsters (2nd ed plotline)
* One PC/NPC who is in the minitroop is a lost prince or other figure of importance on the run from a murder plot and/or family members.
* Bat Gnome shows up. He rides a gaint Bat, and throws thriKreen wedges. Okay so not a long term plotline. But I had fun running it.

 

[LostSoul]

I feel intimidated. And uncertain what to do. Help?

I think you need to get more information from the players. "We're a band of wandering gypsies!" doesn't tell you much about what they are looking for in the game.

My gut instinct would be to go with a character-focused game. But you'll need to get character information from the players, and they didn't give it to you, so I don't know if that's what they want.

An idea:

Make it a "crisis of the week" game. Each session (or couple of sessions) they go to a town and have to deal with the problems there. They roll into town and discover it's full of werewolves! But the werewolves are the good guys and only bad because of the hag's curse.

I think doing something like asking the players "Give me 3 goals your PC has, and the reasons why you as a player think reaching for those goals would be fun to play out" would give you somewhere to start off, at the very least.

 

[EvilMountainDew]

The best thing I could come up with is having them be framed by some rich guy.

So, they walk into a city and they notice they're being watched by some fat merchant. They wander around like a clueless party for a while and then a bunch of guards attempt to arrest them for charges of theft or some similar charge. They'll probably argue but hopefully they won't fight the guards (people should realize that you can't kill guards and get away safely). If they figure that they'll get away since they didn't do it, they'll get charged with stealing some something that has a bit of a story. You could use this story to introduce some sort of intrigue, maybe once they hear about it they'll want to actually take it, or whatever.

I figure the merchant or whatever sees them and figures that he can pass the blame to them to get away with what he did.