Time for another episode of BESW Flails At His Game!
(Ben might want to close his eyes or get spoiled.)
This round: Tentacles.
So, giant tentacles are descending from the sky. I want a single tentacle to be a level 30 boss-type solo, the kind of thing you can beat.... once....
Gonna be imposing the unreality effects as described earlier, but the tentacles will have near-infinite movement and provoke OAs like they don't care, so they'll ignore the movement benefits of that.
I'm thinking I'll basically just use Allabar's stats, including his personal gravity well.
One of his powers is a 5/6 recharge that imposes tentacles on nearby enemies. This I want to expand on.
In the second instance, the villain writes a letter to a high-profile lackey explaining things the lackey already knows, or allows attention-grabbing activities to continue beyond need.
In the third instance, the GM dictates that an NPC tells the party something unbidden or a bird uses the letter to make a nest in the dwarf's beard, or something.
Only in one of these scenarios is the villain not made a laughingstock and the party feels it has agency in the discovery.
I wrote a long term investigation plot for my players, it all started with a corrupt merchant Kyler; after following numerous threads and finally vanquishing the arch-boss they found papers including notes refering the the merchant. PC: What, Kyler was in on it? Never underestimate what the players can achieve through pure random idiocy ;)
I once ran a very complex campaign that was sadly cut short just as the party was about to accidentally cut off the drug supply being used by the villain to keep a certain local lizardfolk chief from declaring war on the human settlement, so the villain's plans in the settlement could bear fruit.
In a cyberpunk game I was in: Player: I dial the number of the Corp fixer. GM: Do you know it? Player: No, I'll just guess. GM: Fine, I'll give you a 1 in 100000 chance, roll it. Player: Rolls 000001 GM: I hate you.
My favorite campaigns are where the party is a lumpy bowling ball randomly knocking down the NPCs' carefully lined up plans and defying all hope of useful contingencies.
The NPCs immediately focus on the PCs and things get fun.
To my mind, a successful sandbox campaign (my favorite kind!) starts with a set of NPCs who each have goals and plans (and the smart ones have contingencies).
Left alone, they'd clash with each other, or cooperate, but most plans would resolve smoothly.
It makes the players feel important and like they have an impact in the world--because they do--and plays into the central assumption of most systems: that the PCs are special (and probably psychotic) flowers in a garden of weeds.
Even CoC, for all it's about "ordinary people coming face to face with their own insignificance," is actually about the very unusual people who are able to do that.
Sure they don't usually last long, but they're terribly special just for achieving it at all.
@Rob D&D 3.5, with a backstory the player designed all by himself: A LG dragon was captured and raped by a tribe of CE minotaurs, and gave birth to twin half-dragon minotaurs. One was LG, the other CE.
The LG twin tried to fit in to the tribe, but failed miserably and was exiled for being a nice guy.
While he was gone his sister made a pact with the Rat God, overthrew their father, and began to prep for overruning the world with an army of minotaurs and vermin.
So he had to go back home and put a stop to that, and that was the story.
Anyway, the LG twin managed to not only defeat his sister (the necessity of which made him very sad; he spent most of the combat trying to make her surrender) and stop the Rat God's plans, he also became chief of the minotaur tribe and did his best to teach them how to not be evil.
But he couldn't stay there, it wasn't his home anymore, so he appointed someone afraid of him as his rep and became a wandering hero who occasionally returned to the minotaur den to make sure they were progressing in being nice.
Yes! I shall make the Rat God a major background element.
I remember a passage in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, where the eponymous rats are wintering in a large empty house and one of them voraciously reads all the books in the library. He was terribly disappointed that The Rat Race did not mention rats at all.
umm. The film had magic. Like, green glowing blind eyes and resurrection-from-the-dead magic.
The book... not so much. At all. Its practicality and the savage nature of animal existence was actually crucial to its message.
The only fantasy element in the book (aside from animals being able to talk to each other) was actually the science fiction idea of uplifted intelligence.
Very fay, very passionate without having any kind of mortal feeling, and I'm very happy that they didn't flinch away from the original story where the rats ate all the kids.
