What plothooks had you planned for your characters that didn't get explored?

[Ash Mantle]

What plothooks had you planned for your player characters (for DMs) or your own characters (for players) that didn't get explored?

When I was running ToA for my friends, one of my friends played a character who was searching for any signs of his father in the lost jungles of Chult and anywhere else his father may have gone to, his father a known itinerant and consumed with a thirst for uncovering forbidden knowledge. Somehow they ended up in a floating wizard's tower that led up into a spaceship where they found survivors of an attack by the mi-go. They recognised that character and directed the characters to a portal where they could see a ruined Eiffel Tower, the aperture of the portal shrinking as they looked upon it. They could have gone to a Lovecraft-King in Yellow influenced version of 1920s Paris (and also influenced by Bioshock Infinite) but they ultimately decided against it and went back into the jungle.

That player's character was meant to be find his father in that fallen, decadent Paris, who also was supposed to tell him a secret about their lineage, but alas that plot-thread went nowhere.


How about you?


A belated Merry Christmas!

 

[Blue]

Oh man, far too many to count. I intentionally make up a lot more plots then the characters can do, and they discover them (or not) and have lots of choices what to do next. Some plots if they don't take care of them grow and they haunt them. Others go off and succeed and things get worse. Others get dealt with by NPC adventuring parties (especially if the players don't seem interested in that hook).

It makes the world feel dynamic and alive - there's lots happening, things are changing even without the PCs interacting with them.

So yeah, I always recommend making lots and lots of plot hooks and not getting too attached to them.

 

[Inchoroi]

Hm. Quite a few, but none really important to the overall campaign; they've left a few bad guys undisturbed (because they haven't figured out where they are and have more important things to do, they feel), and left a few things undone because they were in a megadungeon and didn't want to get lost down there. They also didn't want to bother a long-buried sorcerer-king from an ancient civilization at level 7, which I do not blame them, since I know what that sorcerer-king could do.

There's an entire ancient language that they want to learn (its not important to the story at all, but I love languages and linguistic anthropology, so I included a lot of languages in my world, including many extinct or functionally extinct ones).

There's one major bad guy that's important to the plot, but they're just too terrified to go after him right now.

 

[Blue]

Oh, and to add on - there are what I had originally considered campaign arcs but when the players showed more interest in other threads let them fall to the wayside. Don't be afraid to kill your darlings in order to have a better campaign for everyone, and that goes for plots as much as it does for NPCs.

 

[Yunru]

Oh, and to add on - there are what I had originally considered campaign arcs but when the players showed more interest in other threads let them fall to the wayside. Don't be afraid to kill your darlings in order to have a better campaign for everyone, and that goes for plots as much as it does for NPCs.

You monster! #ShelveNotKill

 

[Blue]

You monster! #ShelveNotKill

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

 

[ccs]

Well, right now in our new PF campaign an awful lot of potential hooks & arcs are possibly ending.... Pretty much before we even got them rolling.

Most of our party (4/5 characters) ventured into a grindylow (aquatic goblins with octopus bottoms) lair in order to remove them as a threat to the local town we're building.
It went waaay south & 1 character is outright dead & the other 3 are unconscious at the feet(?) of the grindylow "queen" (who's the only foe still alive & at about 12 HP.)

Help is nearby. Our ship, with a full crew, is about 100 yards out in the bay. And PC#5 who had stayed aboard DOES know the general situation thanks to a summoned dolphin (and the ability to speak with it).
Dolphin: "All people dead. Just 1 big blue one alive. Hurt pretty bad, looting the people" The dolphin also gave accurate directions through the small cave system.
So this coming week the NPC captain of the boat needs to decide right away - wether to send in a squad (our new PCs?) to finish the last grindylow before it escapes/more return to the lair, or to cut losses & try again later.

Hopefully I'll be able to convince the DM to give finding the unconscious PCs still alive a chance if immediate action is taken. Afterall, only 1 PC died "on screen". It was about 3/4 into the session so when everyone was down that pretty much ended play as nobody had any backup characters ready & the DM didn't have a plan for a TPK already. So we didn't actually play out PCs 2-4 being killed, just spent the rest of the session BSing, rolling up new stats, & brainstorming how 4 new characters would fit.
Sure, I can easily imagine the grinylow queen finishing us all off. But hey, maybe she hasn't for some reason....

 

[Ath-kethin]

I had an illusionist villain in a campaign that spent weeks (real time) psychologically harrassing the PCs in his mountain lair/funhouse. Once they escaped I had planned on keeping them unsure of whether hey had ACTUALLY managed to get away (they had several "false escapes" while within the illusionist's lair already).

Sadly, I was hit by a car and my recovery time took the wind out of that campaign, so it never happened. The players still talk about how much they hate that illusionist, though, and that all went down 20+ years ago.