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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 9061417" data-attributes="member: 2209">For this one my advice would be to have multiple plots going on, and have some be non-adversarial to start.In one of my games it started off with everyone having a connection to professor Jones or his daughter Jessica Jones and session 1 starts with a letter asking them to be a pall bearer at his funeral.I was running an adventure path knowing who eventual bad guys were and wanted to better get them involved in the story from module 1 instead of just showing up at module 6.So I had one NPC at the module 1 funeral be a slightly creepy rich noble Christopher Walken who sponsored some of the professor's archaeology expeditions and makes an open offer of his help to the daughter and one of the PCs (the professor's on again off again girlfriend) before leaving the professor's country manor to return to the big city. Plenty of interaction with him and other NPCs and the PCs at the wake, but he leaves before things turn hinky in the country town.Module 1  ends with ghost apocalypse which was set off by separate jerk war Dr. Jack Nickolson, who has left before the group deals with the ghosts, but they find out it was Jack.Module 2 the party follows Jack's trail to big city, takes up Walken's offer of hospitality and shelter as they chase more problems left by Jack. Walken throws a party at one point with the PCs and lots of NPCs, one of who is a bit of a villain in module 2.Eventually the party was going to catch up to Jack in Module 3 as the climax there, and then six was all going to be about Walken and the connections and differing agendas between Jones, Nicholson, and Walken would be revealed particularly with Jessica Jones and Walken.Having NPCs show up earlier nonadversarially while visibly doing stuff and having connections and doing stuff on their agendas is useful, it is in the open so the player's will notice, they are unlikely to fight the PCs early, and it will come together well for the PCs when the NPC shifts into spotlight villain mode.This is much easier to tie together if you are running an adventure path where you have an overall plot and know you want to foreshadow eventual boss villains or complications.There are techniques for doing so with sandbox games, but it is bit tougher and requires some flexibility and active thinking about it as you go for things to make sense. In a sandbox game you could have different non-adversarial NPCs doing things with the PCs around and then later figure how to tie them in depending on how things go. Even things like "I am working on figuring out different parts of this incomplete prophecy, got to go!"</blockquote>

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