Retro Evil
The Handbook of Heroes is an empire built on tropesmanship. Thief is greedy. Paladin is lawful stupid. Druid protects her forest. But you’ve got to remember that this is a comedy webcomic. And as you might have noticed from today’s scroll-over text, princess-rescuing is generally relegated to the realm of the tongue-in-cheek. While I have no doubt that I’m overlooking counterexamples, my larger point is that certain plots demand a plot twist.
“But wait!” says the straw golem. “Subverting the trope is just as much a trope as the trope itself!”
Good call, straw golem. And that’s generally true. What we’re really talking about here is the problem of originality. As creative people, GMs want to feel as if their plots are exploring heretofore unknown territory. OK, but what if the the princess rescues herself? What if the angels are really the bad guys this time? What if these so-called heroes are the real monsters? Of course it’s all been done before. And when I was a younger writer, that mess caused me all manner of literary anxiety.
My go-to strategy in these cases is to stop worrying and get on with the campaign. Once you accept that chasing originality is a fool’s game, you can begin to settle back and enjoy your own idiosyncratic sense of style. In my experience, the particular presentation (the how) is more interesting than broad-strokes plot (the what).
But even there, playing certain storylines straight is tantamount to inviting an eye-roll. Rescuing the princess, meeting your evil twin, and finding out that it was all a dream are primary offenders. These tropes are played out, which is why they wind up serving as the butts of jokes like today’s comic.
So as an exercise in good tropesmanship, what do you say we figure out how to do this mess properly? In today’s comments, give us an example of a “played out trope,” and then let’s see if we can’t brainstorm some ways to make it work in-game. All clear? Alright! See you down in the discussion section.
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Well, considering the today’s comic, “Princess kidnapping plot” seems as good a starting points as any. So how about this.
The base plot:
An evil villain escapes prison, kidnaps the princess and plans to use her as a sacrifice in a profane ritual that will grant him powerful magic/godhood/pet godzilla/[Insert instant win button here].
Subversion
The princess is actually a potent enchantress. She picked the most skilled, dangerous prisoner in all the realm and started visiting him under pretense of rehabilitation, only to then trick him with her magic into escaping, “kidnapping” her and performing the profane ritual for her.
I like that this one has it both ways. The princess really did get kidnapped, and she isn’t precisely in league with the kidnapper (which would be a bit basic as a subversion). In that sense, she isn’t the villain; she’s a villain. That means you can set up the kidnapper as a late-game ally or a viable third party racing for the maguffin.
Putting aside socially outdated tropes, I maintain the problem with most cliches isn’t that they’re overdone but that people use them as an excuse to be lazy. A cliche should be the starting point for building a story, not a substitute. Too often you’ll see a cliche used to avoid having to provide more than trivial surface details. All it takes is a creator embracing the cliches and giving them the depth and energy they need for audiences to be reminded why they loved the cliche in the first place.
You sound like a gamer with an example in mind. What are you thinking in terms of “cliches done well?”
Well, I mean, if he’s going for princess kidnapping, at least he got the cute redhead. The Significant Green Eyed Redhead if we are doing Tropes. And who knows where love or Stockholm Syndrome will blossom, right?
I ran the “Kidnapped Princess” as a subversion plot a while ago, and my players actually loved my version cause it was really twisted. Probably says a lot about my players, but…
The “Princess” (daughter of the Great Sage of the city) was kidnapped once. The party is of course asked to check on her carriage, which is late coming from another city. They go there and find signs of a scrap, and discover that she has managed to semi-fight off her attackers using her psychic abilities (that they were not warned about). So they save from the psychic villains trying to kidnap her and take her back to the Sage, getting to know her a bit during the journey. Later, she is “kidnapped” again, only all the evidence points to she left willingly. They follow her trail and find signs of the same group of Psychics that were trying to kidnap her originally. In an earlier quest, they had heard tales of a powerful female psychic who had imprisoned a demon by basically giving all of herself to a Crystallize spell. The demon was turned to crystal, but could be freed by either breaking the statue or disrupting the power. They then are confronted by a Spectral Savant (Undead Psion) that has the strange odd birthmark on his hand that the “princess” does. The Wizard makes a quick Memory Check and realizes the Sage has no such Birthmark.
So the Twist was that the “Princess” wasn’t even the daughter of the Sage. She was the daughter of the female Psion and her Psion lover. The Sage had always held a flame for her, but he respected her decision until she died due to a botched ritual her lover was performing. (Aforementioned Demon Sealing Crystal hijinks). The Sage killed the “Princess’s” real father and raised her as his own using his own magic to alter her memory.
I gather that the psychics were kidnapping her so that they could use her power to re-bind the escaped demon? And that Great Sage didn’t want to endanger his adopted daughter? And so Great Sage couldn’t tell Princess why these people were kidnapping her because that would require admitting that she was really his daughter?
…
But then why didn’t the psychics just tell Princess themselves? Is it because they got Firestartered before they could spill the beans?
Actually, it was tied to the crazy plotline for psychics in 3.5 in the Complete Psionic. Houses of psychic humans from other dimensions whose homeland was destroyed by some Eldritch Entity. The Spectral Savant was trying to get his daughter back so he could tell her about the Entity because he believed it was coming here.
I think that there is a tendency these days to over-think storytelling because of the awareness of tropes. We have this idea that these things are tired and have been done before, or that they need a Shock Twist! to remain interesting.
Though I see where these ideas are coming from, I do disagree. I argue that the problem comes from not caring about the story in the first place.
The reason these basic plots exist is that they are dramatic: they imbue the story with drama. But let’s face it: we don’t actually want surprise or shock. These things excite us once. But if we really wanted to be surprised by twists, we wouldn’t enjoy most films. We know the good guys are going to win!
What we care about is how we get to the ending. We enjoy fun characters having an adventure and seeing how the drama is resolved.
In terms of RPGs, this should be quite straightforward: the characters are extensions of the players, so we should automatically have a lot of buy-in. They’re us! This is also why too many NPCs can be a problem. I think. Also, because the PCs are us, we are the interesting resolution.
We’re overthinking this stuff. Have players identify with their characters. Introduce dramatic thing. Sit back and enjoy the wacky hijinks.
As a case in point: my school friends still talk about the first game I ever ran as “awesome”. It was a disaster: a Middle-Earth adventure which I hadn’t prepared enough and led to one character falling off the Rauros waterfall and emerging with his pack full of fish. 15 years, and they remember that as awesome.
We’re definitely overthinking this stuff.
Oh I dunno. I think it’s possible for one’s taste to develop over time. And nostalgia goggles are a real thing:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/bad-wrong-fun
I’m not sure I’d be happy with “rescue Princess from Castle Evil Dark” as a dramatic plot though. Not played straight anyway.
Trope awareness can kill your creativity by paralyzing your ability to try anything. It’s all been done before! This genre is stupid! That’s no bueno. But I also think that it pays to be aware of the tropes so that you can be in effective dialogue with them. You’re going to be dealing with other players’ preconceptions whether you like it or not. Even a small effort to deviate from the bare-bones stock plot is enough jazz up the exercise and keep it fresh.
Interesting. For me the premise of the story is less important than the specifics and interactions. I bet this comes down to the “types of fun” thing again.
I definitely think it’s a “what you enjoy” question, which is why my advice to new Gms (cause they ask) is “Know your audience.” Some people are going to pick at the overall thing because that’s what they look at the most. Some people are going to gloss over the overarching plot in favor of “Scenes and special moments”. It’s all about what kind of audience you have.
Example: I have one player who talks about this “awesome” Rokugan game I ran where I balanced the various different clans and their motivations really well with the return of Ichiban and was able to make all of it work despite the player craziness. Because that’s what he enjoyed about it. I have a different player whose favorite story is the time he was chatting with a character and an assassin jumped out and attempted a death attack that didn’t work because said character was secretly an undead necromancer. He calmly looked at the assassin and replied “How rude, I was talking with her.” The assassin looked down at his dagger which failed to even penetrate because DR, and replied “You’re right sir, I apologize.” And left. And that’s his favorite story cause it’s a scene where he got to be awesome and the world reacted to him the way he wanted.
My Mrs wants to play a noble background dragonborn fighter, so that through a series of comedic misunderstandings she can be hired to rescue herself from herself. I have no idea how I would set that mess up as a GM, but it does sound like fund to play
I think I saw this mess in meme form the other day. Rumors get back to the distant land of Dragonbornia that the royal heir has got mixed up with some evil dragon (also the royal heir), and that only this new hero who’s out ridding the land of evil (also also the royal heir) can help.
Instead of clearing this up by simply talking to her parents, the dragonborn has to go through with the charade. That’s because the party bard / her best friend is writing an epic for bard college, and this story is the only way she’ll graduate.
My players are clever enough that I know they’ll see the tropes and homages underpinning any story I run, so I don’t try to be subtle. How the story is told is more important than the building blocks themselves.
I ran a very successful game back in the D&D 3.0 days, where the PCs’ village was transported to the top layer of the Abyss, and the PCs had to find a safe(ish) source of food and water for them. They found a portal to one of the lower layers, which was a wild grassland filled with fiendish predatory animals, but still, it was habitable for mortals. It took them several sessions to find it, explore their immediate surroundings, and set up a supply chain, but they managed it. And once they did… because I knew my players and knew what at least one of them was about to say, I beat them to the punch: “Congratulations, you found the water chip!” (This was the era when Fallout 1 was still cool.)
I started my Regency England D&D game with the party all meeting each other in a coaching inn on the way to Bath (i.e. “you all meet in an inn”), and the first mission in my latest Shadowrun game was for the team to eliminate an infestation of devil rats from the lower levels of an apartment building a company had acquired and wanted to redevelop (i.e. “can you clear these rats out of the basement?”). There’s nothing new under the sun, so why not have fun with the classics?
I think the most important phrase in there is “have fun.” You’re playing with tropes in all of these examples, not just using them straight-up. The recombination of setting with high fantasy plot point is enough. Fantasy inn? Boring. Coaching inn en route to Bath? Jolly good fun!
“…at nicht was come into that hostelrie well nine and twenty in a companie.”
Tropes go back in time a fair distance.
As a proper indie kid, I prefer Chaucer’s earlier stuff. The “Tales” are so derivative.
Can you use electricity to protect an evil lair via a live rail? Or does saying you’ve done so when you haven’t make you a vile liar?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/009/993/tumblr_m0wb2xz9Yh1r08e3p.jpg
In addition, if anyone wonders if your small evil lair is big enough for a moat, you say, “No, I’ve a rill”.
I’ll get my coat now…
My problem with the “save the princess” trope and other such “outdated” tropes is that because it is “outdated,” that is, if it were used straight it would have to be tongue in cheek or else the DM would likely be accused of sexism, it is almost always subverted. As soon as a trope like that comes up, I immediately start looking for a subversion, which kind of ruins the “surprise” element of the subversion when it does happen. It would actually subvert my expectations way more if it was played straight. The problem there though isn’t if I was surprised; it’s if the subversion is satisfying.
It’s very easy to subvert a trope or to catch the players by surprise (“and then suddenly, just before you slay the evil dragon, the alien mothership blasts open the cave’s ceiling and abducts the dragon in its tractor beam.”) To subvert it well, it needs to have more that just surprise or originality; it’s got to do so in a way that is just as good or better than what the players were expecting, and that’s a lot harder. If the princess is captured and then the princess saves herself because she is a strong empowered woman and not some retrograde damsel in distress (aside from being a cliche in itself) if done poorly it could rob the players of their own accomplishment and roll as heroic PCs. At least with the also cliche “princess is in league with her kidnappers” the players are still the agents of action and change, and if she’s secretly evil the PCs get a good boss fight and very difficult explanation to the royals out of the quest.
One subversion that I’m quite pleased with is a classic “princess has been cursed by an evil hag into a deep slumber, and only true love’s kiss can awaken her.” The king and queen have no time for that though and hire the PCs to “aggressively persuade” the hag to release the curse. Upon coming upon the hag though the players find that, while the hag is a terrible, child eating, malevolent fey, she has nothing to do with cursing the princess and is rather angry about the affair because she was hoping to keep a lower profile from the royals. She does however know why the princess is cursed, and is willing to share with the PCs if they would just do a simple favor for her… It turns out the princess is also a powerful draconic sorceress, a closely guarded secret because it would bring shame on the royal family if people found out just how recently the draconic blood entered the family (as in, one generation ago). The princess is also a hopeless romantic and dreaded entering a lovely political marriage like her parents. However her parents had arranged a marriage for her and she would soon be married to a prince she did not know, so she cast Imprisonment on herself with the condition for release: True Love’s kiss. The princess framed the hag because she didn’t want to bring shame on her family by revealing her draconic power, but someone’s going to take the fall so may as well be someone evil that really should be dealt with. And now that this has been brought to light, a few diverging options open. The queen is furious, and requests the PCs find a powerful arcanist that can dispell this curse so she can marry off her daughter and secure a vital alliance that the kingdom needs. The king is more sympathetic to his daughter’s desire and wants to at least let the engaged prince kiss her (which the queen strongly opposes, since if it fails it’s a terrible perception of the start of the relationship, both publicly and between the two.) Failing that, he’d like to let other nobles kiss her until she finds her true love prince (which the queen also strongly opposes since her daughter could easily enter a marriage with no or weak benefit to the kingdom.) And then the princess’s copper dragon father contacts the PCs and requests that they bring her to him and he will try to find her true love regardless of their background, which the king and queen would both strongly oppose and would have massive political fallback if found out.
The reason I like this one is that the subversion feels better than were the trope played straight like in Snow White or Sleeping beauty, at least from an rpg perspective. If it were played straight the PCs wouldn’t have much of a role unless one of them was the True Love (at which point that could feel like the DM was forcing a relationship on them unless one of the PCs met and hit it off with the princess before) or it would be an escort mission for the real True Love, and then it woukd be a fairly straightforward endeavor. When done this way the PCs are possibly pleasantly surprised, but even if they aren’t it still opens up a lot of room for their agency, deciding what path to take or take a 4th option, and no matter what happens there are plenty of consequences and ramifications to affect future plot threads, as well as (likely) a powerful NPC ally and a few other powerful NPCs that are now rather upset at the PCs unless they can find a very clever 4th option.
Now see, if we can just subvert the subversion then we can play it straight ironically, thus freeing up a subversive reading of an otherwise straightforward subversion!
In practice, I really am flailing at a straw golem today. No one plays these things perfectly straight. I doubt there’s a GM alive who writes notes that read, “Princess kidnapped by dragon. King offers reward for rescue. Knighthood if successful.”
But even more than that, interactivity becomes a proof against worn-out plots. Assuming that PCs aren’t tied down to plot rails, worn-out plots become a self-correcting problem. That’s because the unpredictability of PC personalities and unscripted dialogues with the princess naturally lead to unexpected outcomes.
I’ve begun to make myself curious though. I wonder what a “played-straight plot” would look like? The dragon is greedy, the princess really needs rescuing, and the magic sword is only for the pure of heart. If the GM played it without a trace of irony, I bet that we’d still have Monty Python and fractured fairy tales inside of five minutes.
I think the interactivity is the most important part. It’s what seperates ttrprgs from other media and the reason I love them. Of course, to your point, if the PCs feel like they are in a walking cliche, they’re a lot more likely to go “fractured fairy tale” mode just to shake things up and feel like they do have agency. They can avoid that feeling of “it’s all been done before, this is stupid” if instead of saving the princess from the ritual to obtain a pet godzilla they complete the ritual instead, or if when the princess frees herself from being kidnapped they then promptly kidnap her so they can still collect a reward. Of course all of those could still he really fun, but I think you do have a point about playing the cliche straight makes PC “rebellion” a whole lot more likely.
Even so, I’m trying to remember the published products that I’ve seen in recent years. I can’t recall too many that rely on the damsel trope. Sexism aside, I suppose it’s fair to say that some tropes go out of fashion.
shame about the scroll over text, doesn’t show on my mobile devices.
“It would have been the fourth time this week, but the Ice King had a scheduling conflict with Prince Humperdinck.”
If I hold down on the image on my iphone, the usual “save image” and “copy image” options pop up. The hover text is at the top of that text box.
I get the URL of the picture on my SE and iPad model A1822
happens on a lot of pages, usually I just forget to check.
I know some people stress themselves out about how to handle tropes or how to subvert them, but I find this way of thinking misses the forest for the trees. Tropes develop because there are things people like to read about and patterns that occur in storytelling/real world situations. What gives tropes a bad rap is when people make the trope their story.
Since you mention it in the comic, let’s use the kidnapped princess as an example. That’s just a skeleton to build off. From here you begin asking questions that make the story interesting. What is the kidnapper’s motive? What sort of resources does the kidnapper have? What sort of resources does the rescuer have? What is the motive of the rescuer? The princess is an actor as well, so what does she do while all this is happening? How does all of this contribute to the overall story?
You can even get more meta and ask yourself how you want your readers or players to feel about this situation. Do you want them to be sick to their stomachs and loath the human trafficking mob boss, or do you want the table to be laughing out loud as they discover all of the ways the princess has been giving the incompetent noble’s son trouble as he tries to hide the misdeed from his disapproving father?
In short, tropes will naturally appear in all writing because tropes are just common patterns. Understanding how they work is helpful to a writer, but thinking about them too much will just make your story awkward, either because it will become something completely unrelatable to your players or the tropes that do show up will feel inorganic and hacky even when subverted.
Do you think it’s possible for a trope to be “played out?”
I think that media, at times, can become over-saturated with stories that use certain tropes in a certain way. Like if someone comes out with a successful story and then everyone starts copying it, or if a trope is used to comment on a certain topic and every story after that keeps using it even when the topic has been dealt with. At that point, the audience can get desensitized, numb, and bored with a trope. If left alone for awhile though, it might be possible for a trope to resurface with fresh eyes and be interesting again.
I think that the best way to play tropes is to know with who you are playing. In my group while it’s the DM who manages the plot i help him a lot. For example, back in the second edition of Exalted, in The Manual of Exalted Power – The Sidereals, there is something called The Convention on Oversight and the book gives three options about the truth behind that convention. I do something similar, making the broad strokes and him managing the fine details of the plot. Since that we have improve a lot the two of us, and because of that we have manage to really know what the rest of the group likes. That said we not only do what they like but we try to experiment and surprise them. While, for example, i make some classical plots, defeat the evil cult, destroy the evil lich, rescue the princess, i like to play with my fellow players and their expectations. If for example in the campaign there is a good kingdom warring against an evil empire you are rather sure that neither the kingdom is good nor the empire is evil, and a lot of more secrets will be revealed changing all. If i would make a series in TVTropes that series would have his very own Wham Episode subpage. Subverting expectations, defenestrating the status quo and making an overly convoluted plot is what i really like to do. But not always since that would make the rest of the group accustomed to that, i really like to have them on the dark without knowing that is next 🙂
The risk of course is that your plot can get muddled when you go HAM on the plot twists. You want intrigue, not confusion. For that reason, I’m more of a “keep it simple” guy with my own storylines.
Lets put it this way, my convulsed campaigns are more Game of Thrones than Lost. As i said, know with who you are playing. If my group can’t stand the plot and gets confused that is problem of the plot of the campaign, not of they, unless they get confused even with “Rescue the Princess”. Back in high school i got companions that got confused even with tic-tac-toe o_O¡
Remember back in Blatant Thievery how you got confused by my little plot? What i would have do in that case in to take note of that and adjust the plot level to low, no offense. Different people have different likes and dislikes, since i am in charge of the plot together with our DM we need to know what they like and dislike and how much they can tolerate our storytelling. Right now for example the group is doing a Mage 20E technocracy campaign. So… We do a plot heavy campaign about the ascension war? About the pogrom against reality deviants? Hunting the things that lurk in the dark to help humanity? Using the power of science to go were no human has gone before? NO!!! It’s more like a comedic slice-of-life about our crew of technocrats and their job. While we like some plot heavy campaign now and then, they are not all plot heavy ones, we are not that masochistic and our DM has not the enough mental strength 🙂
Here’s a troupe that’s been overused lately in movies. The surprise twist villain. It’s been used so much that the surprise villains aren’t surprising anymore. For example, I got the movie The Nutcracker and the Four Realms from Redbox. I had never seen it before and didn’t know anything about it. And I STILL correctly called out who the true villain was even though it was supposed to be a twist! Because that seems to be all Disney knows how to do lately. Every villain has to be a twist villain to the point where I’d be more surprised if they played it straight.
My only experience with that film is second-hand outrage from Laurel.
“Why wouldn’t you use more music from the ballet! Ugh!” *table flip*
Point still stands. Surprise villains aren’t surprising if EVERY villain is a surprise villain.
I’m not so worried about tropes being played out, because these things became popular for a reason. However, I do love surprises, and I was recently talking to someone about how to subvert the ‘Sword in the Stone’ trope, which was fun. We came up with a few neat ideas like the classic ‘sword is actually sealing away something big and evil’ or ‘sword makes a person the king, and will dominate them into doing so.’
Why not a simple alignment flip? The sword wants a tyrant, not a true and noble monarch.
Ooh, I like that one!
Well in general, I don’t think there needs to be as much )or maybe any?) concern with originality in a tabletop game. No matter how completely true to a cliche your premise is, you’ll end up with something original just because you have players involved and a GM that needs to respond to the things they do. In a way this may be one of the only ways of truly crafting “original” stories anymore. And pleasantly this method or originality will probably still exist for the rest of human history.
I think I’ll address the “It was all a dream” trope first because it’s honestly a bit different than the others. The reasons (for me) that it’s problematic are numerous. First of all, it reduces the events to being nothing more than an effort in futility. It negates the value of all time and energy spent on it. And the worst offender is that it’s completely pointless as a gaming trope. We’re already aware what we’re up to is fictional. You’re just breaking immersion (and thus weakening the enjoyment) when you go out of your way to point out the fictional nature of things.
Now personally I’ve never played a game where we had to rescue a princess or encounter evil twins. And honestly I’m sure played straight (and taken as seriously as a tabletop group can ever manage to take anything seriously) these would both be a lot of fun. Assuming the GM was putting in the effort to make these proper scenarios and wasn’t just using them to be lazy.
Sure it’s true any individual group might not be open to one of these or the other (or both) for personal reasons and an unwillingness to put aside their own biases and pre-judgements of what a GM is trying to say with a premise. But I think for most of us we could enjoy classics played truly in classical style. Because honestly, the only really good reason not to enjoy these extremely broad story types is because you’ve already done them before and would like to do something else. And odds are most players have not played a game for every single classic heroic story type. (Though sure maybe people who have been playing once a week for 30+ years might have, but that’s hardly the average experience. And also screw those guys and their perfect lives! =P )
I was reading this one recently:
https://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Role-Playing-Game-New-Performing/dp/0786408154
The dude suggests that we make these games by cannibalizing consumer culture, and actually transform and “redeem” narrative-as-product by incorporating it into our own stories. In that sense, the comments in this thread are right on the money in terms of “it stops being a trope as soon as it hits play.”
Not a subversion but rather an inversion, the party had to save the prince. From his succubus girlfriend/baby-momma. Who teleported him right out from under his guards. Pretty much the minute after we gave him the macguffin and let our eyes off him. Because the plot wasn’t gonna get resolved unless we bit the hook :p
On a different note, bards have a class ability to spot trope both in and out of character.
Hey, I know that plot!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/classy-quests-part-4-4
As for bardic trope-spotting, I’ve always wanted to run a one-shot with metagame powers. No idea how it would work, but I’m imagining abilities with names like “retcon” and “plot sense.”
I say make whatever plot you want. Don’t worry about plot twists, players subvert their own expectations plenty.
Like the scoll-over on this one?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
For some reason, my first thought with “princess kidnapping plot” is that the princess is the one doing all the kidnapping and the party needs to find a way to expose and/or stop her from doing so.
https://socialnewsdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/GapxIUf-300×225.gif
…
For serious though, I would play in that game.
I’m honestly beginning to consider writing an “Edge of Tomorrow” type game where the reason the princess gets kidnapped changes with every iteration.
Kidnapping princesses “just because it’s a classic” is how the original Dragon Magazine Antipaladin was presented so it fits.
It described an example AP’s MO as kidnapping the princess, demanding a ransom, having a go-between attack the ransom delivery, re-demanding the ransom, and then upon receiving the ransom selling her into slavery and skipping town with 2 ransoms and the price of a slave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_olkV4g75c
So… probably because I have NEVER run or played a “module,” I don’t think of RPG storylines as me telling everyone a story. My thought process is more that I’m the facilitator of a fantasy world, and more my job is to come up with stuff to discover and to populate that world memorable characters who have motivations of their own.
The story side of things will more or less take care of itself so long as the players feel like they have motivations to interact with players.
…like I’m actually really surprised at how much they want to kill the first villain I introduced them to since she just showed up, told them they’d look better as her personal vampire slaves, and literally just left, off to do Evil Super Villain Vampire…stuff.
Anyways, if you build good characters that people actually WANT to interact with, I find the rest tends to take care of itself.
“Scheduling conflict with Prince Humperdinck”, huh?
…Is that what the kids are calling it today…?
Ice King’s a busy dude. He’s got fanfic to write.
Lie what they did to this one specifically in the start of the Band of Four series of books where there Is a princess to be rescued, but it turns out she’s also a self-trained sorceress with a penchant for attracting realm-destroying trouble.
Personally I like the kidnapped princess story.