First plot of the game: a behind-the-scenes villain to be determined later makes a teen in the PC's neighborhood paranoid that the local kids are going to be hurt or taken away by fairies.
Not unheard of, and at least one kid in the neighborhood already was: the targeted teen. He's a changeling, which means he's going to start manifesting supernatural powers.
In this case, his paranoia leads to accidentally and probably unknowingly animating the lawn ornaments of the neighborhood as vigilant guards over the area's kids.
So the PCs, who I'm going to ask are created with an interest in the protection of a particular neighborhood of their designing, come in when the kids all start reporting similar nightmares about toys coming to life.
Since the gnomes are only guardians, and constructs take a lot of power and finesse to make smart, the party's investigations will set the gnomes on them.
Queue confusion, finger-pointing, witch hunts, etc.
It's almost certain that one of the PCs will also be a teenage changeling just coming into his powers, so the plot is designed to accomodate the player's desire for his first story to feature the discovery of his true nature and how he deals with it.
The player just doesn't expect that the whole story will be pointed directly at that issue.
No, I think he'll just have to deal with his revelation simultaneously with the manipulated kid's dealing with it too.
Parallel journeys: giving the party an NPC to project onto.
Probably because it also deals with animated objects, I'm using the Wonderfalls character development model.
Trick the main character into giving someone else advice about a situation that parallels the main character's own Problem Of The Episode, and see if they notice that they're dispensing wisdom they should take to heart themselves.
In FATE, what I need to do is set up situations where multiple story threads collide, and not expect anything in particular to come of it, but encourage whatever does happen to be spectacular.
For the bigoted racist nationalist half-orc, I put him in a position where if he failed to teach the child king of his people how to be more tolerant and responsible, the nation would fall and it would trigger a catastrophic world war.
The PC fell back on the legal argument that in their government priests couldn't be rulers; the rulers took oaths of nonviolence so that they could declare war but couldn't gain glory from it, and the priests led the armies.
(Half-orc nation: a governmental system designed to balance physical supremacy with human rationality.)
Priests were chosen by the spirits, which meant that anyone with a Primal power source was a priest, and the PC had multiclassed into a Primal class. This gave him the right to convene a meeting of the priesthood to decide whether or not to depose the king, but barred him from qualifying as a candidate.
The rebel leader was brought to the meeting --he was pretending to be a priest so he'd have legitimacy in declaring the PC king-- and not called out on his lie, so that by including him in the conclave he had a personal stake in supporting its conclusion.
Due to a quirk of the campaign (invading nation scattering the half-orcs and forcing them to take asylum in other nations), there weren't any other priests available and you needed three for a quorum.
So the PC pulled out the bag of ancient half-orc warriors trapped in a magic tapestry that he'd cut down from a dungeon several levels earlier (and was waiting to find someone who could free them), so he used his newfound priest powers to free a warrior priest from the tapestry.
They briefed her on the situation and a council was held.
@Eric I'd set up most of the governmental system at the start the campaign a year earlier, based on the player's desire to play a half-orc palace guard who rode an elephant.
We'd spent the first five levels of the campaign in the nation before it was invaded (and helped the previous king escape the invasion), so it was a familiar setting.
4e half-orcs have a lot of potential: they believe their race was created by the god of storms and bravery, as the perfect blend of orcish strength and human ingenuity.
So I created a caste society with strong Hindi inspiration, and created the rough outline of a governmental model based on checks and balances to take advantage of both strength and reason without letting either take precedence.
Half-orcs in other D&D settings are pariahs: they're almost always the result of rape and come from broken homes, raised by people who cannot see the half-orc as one of them. They're mentally and socially scarred and have no sense of community or belonging.
In 4e, you can have half-orcs with a sense of pride and superiority, a community of like-minded people striving to achieve the physical and mental potential their god created them to express.
They struggle to maintain a balance between strength and reason, but they are united by that struggle.
And their god is the god of awesome.
> He revels in strength, battlefield prowess, and thunder. He is a mercurial god, unbridled and wild. He gives few commands:
✦ Be strong, but do not use your strength for wanton destruction. ✦ Be brave and scorn cowardice in any form. ✦ Prove your might in battle to win glory and renown.
My players interpreted this as meaning that Kord is the god who meets his followers in the next life with a chest-bump, hands them a leg of mutton, and joins them on a comfy couch for an instant-replay of whatever astonishing feat led to their death.
So I didn't really have any need to say "no, you're wrong."
In my campaigns, the most common answer to a priest's prayer "Please, provide aid to these people and grant them mercy through your might" is "Why do you think you're there?"
Anything more interventionist and the PCs run the risk of being sidelined.
I imagine the gods as being locked in a deific Cold War, where if any god directly intervenes in the world, his rivals are then free to do the same.
So they must use their followers and priests as proxies in the world.
One of my big problems with most default fantasy settings is that there's always a wizard's tower, a paladin's league, or something like that, which could deal with the problem much more effectively than the PCs can and has a vested interest in doing so.
My problem is that when your world is populated by powerful people and organizations, it becomes increasingly contrived for them to never intervene on the PCs' quests.
Avatars are cool though, especially when they are so powerful that anyone who meets them thinks they are the gods themselves, only to be pleasantly surprised to find out they are merely watered-down versions of the god in question
Nations and empires have fallen, and civilization is reduced to flickering lights in the savage, wild darkness.
It provides an environment there the PCs matter. They can be civilizing influences, or they can help send the civilized races down the toilet.
The only other strategy I've found to work well in a D&D type setting is to make the party agents of one of the powers.
The best results so far have been to have the PCs be the black ops team for a LG nation.
It anticipates and accommodates the usual PC wanton violence, and addressed concerns about "why don't the big players send in the big guns?" with "They did--we're the big guns."
Still makes the players matter, because it gives them an important role in the world.
I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with this issue in DFRPG; it might not be an issue unless the players want to go big.
@Rob Hi!
We're kinda off topic, but since this is stuff I've already said at least twice in the main chat I don't feel I'm depriving anyone of my great wisdom.
@Eric If you cross the Buffyverse with the Mythos and write a 1930s style detective novel in that setting, you'd get something a lot like the Dresdenverse.
In setting creation, you design locations and create an NPC as the "face" of each of those locations.
Then you make your PCs (you can appropriate a face as a PC if you like), and then finish up the setting, making changes as appropriate based on your PCs.
Setting creation also has the group define the Themes and Threats of the setting, which are basically their way of teling the GM what kind of game and villains they want.
For the GM, creating stories involves looking at the PCs, NPCs, locations, Threats, and Themes, and finding patterns and connections that can create conflict.
Create an opening scenario that ushers in that conflict, and sit back and watch what happens.
@Rob Yes, although if you use it with another system you'll have to appropriate some of the mechanics steps as flavor.
PC creation involves explicitly defining your character's backstory, conflicts, troubles, and relationship to the other PCs, and using those to create mechanical Aspects that drive your player.
You'd need to do something similar even if you're not going to use them as mechanics in the game.
@Jonn_Underwood My players sometimes visit the main chat, and I love to talk about my campaign ideas and bounce concepts around, so I made this place to do it without inhibiting my players' ability to stick around the main chat.
BESW's Spoil-Lair
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