It’s always like this with sprawling epics. You spend all your time planting plot seeds. You hope they germinate into beautiful story flowers. But inevitably, only a select few of them will manage the trick. The water and sunshine of player attention pools in one small corner, and the rest of your garden withers in turn. This is especially true towards the end of a campaign. With the group’s attention focused on climactic events, it’s too late to go back and revive old adventure hooks.
That mysterious informant you introduced in Session 12? No one ever investigated her. Your players will never know what her deal was.
Or what about your swashbuckler’s mysterious lineage? Wasn’t there something about being the last scion of a lost vampire civilization? Looks like you’ll have to settle for the sequel campaign and play as one of her descendants.
And what about that evil awakened horse villain from the last arc? She didn’t die on-screen. Maybe the group could do a one-shot in few months tying up that little loose end.
My point is that, much like this comic, campaigns have a way of filling up with dangling plot threads. Paying them all off is an impossible task, but that’s as it should be. You know how there’s always another adventure or a new quest for your party? A new antagonist to fight or yet another lost MacGuffin to recover? There will always be space left open to invent additional adventures. That’s the charm of the format after all. You can theoretically play forever! But just because a few of Chekhov’s Guns failed to fire, it’s doesn’t mean you failed as a storyteller.
These games we play are chronicles, not linear stories. The party acts, and that activity becomes the story you recount in retrospect. So long as your characters survive, it’s always possible to add yet another page to the chronicle. And if that means you can never explore every corner of your world, I’ll take that as a feature rather than a bug.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk about unfinished tales? What was a plot hook that your group never paid off? Do you regret it, or did it feel natural to let that one go? Tell us your tale of unfinished business and unfulfilled quests down in the comments!
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“Fighter no wanna weave. Fighter wanna MURDER!”
(screechy parrot voice)
A metaphorical cookie with theoretical chocolate chip to whoever’s first to identify that reference.)
No doubt Fighter has an aarakocra all picked out for the next campaign.
You know I started thinking how the team would be as GM, Fighter probably 99% combat, Wizard 99% story and role play, Cleric would just go “it’s not in the rules so you can’t do it”, but Rogue I am drawing a blank aside for it would probably fall in between Fighter and Wizard with extra backstabs.
As for the actual theme of the day. I had planned a civil war to take place in the area the players had been active, only to be forced to let that on the side line as the players decided to become draft dodgers and switch kingdoms.
I think that sort of happened in Campaign 2 of Critical Role. If my years of writing this comic have taught me anything, it’s that these tropes really are more common than you’d think.
Thief as DM?
She’d better make a habit of rolling behind the screen, because none of those dice arre showing anything above a 7.
I crafted a mechanic wherein anyone who spilled blood within a certain tavern on the edge of the feywild would release angry skeleton archers upon the central dining room. (It involved the site being a former dark temple, a breach of the laws of hospitality, yadda-yadda.) In 30 years, no one has ever so much as thrown a punch in that bar nor questioned why the bartender keeps a mace of disruption behind the bar.
Your patience is truly astounding. I’d have broken down and invented some assassination at ye old inn ages ago!
I had made a version of Merlin. He was a mage who Awakened just as Weaver, Wyrm and Wyld broke the Universe and time lost all meaning. He could time travel and spent his essentially limitless lifespan trying to move the Apocalypse further into the future. But he could never be anywhere twice. So agents….
The entropist and the seer were in touch with Wyrm after a Merlin time jaunt… the sane part of Wyrm bound up in the Weaver’s web, not the flailing limbs.
One PC intentionally built up paradox “for fun and profit”, so they were a living bomb.
I heavily hacked up a Mage adventure by adding my own half-demon protagonist in place of Skinner Haigt, who was kind of Punisher with a smidgen of Ghost Rider. Merlin had bamfed them six months forward in time so they could stop a Bad Thing(tm). However it hadn’t gone well and things were falling apart in Mexico City. The PCs had caught up with GhostPunisher, who they thought was the BBEG until they saw him killing cultists who were juuust finished waking an Antedeluvian.
As blood-starved death raced towards them, Mr. Paradox made an insane roll and triggered a paradox event.
And they all woke up in their own beds, six months ago, like they were supposed to without Merlin’s meddling. Paradox having cleaned up some glaring loose ends.
The game ended before six in-game months passed….which is when they would have popped RIGHT BACK INTO THE SAME SPOT….but with six months more experience.
Sigh
Oh man… That’s so rough. Those “what might have been” blues are all too real when a campaign ends early.
In my experience, dropped plot threads most commonly occur when the players kill some guy because they don’t want him to be a recurring antagonist. Gygax forbid that any enemy stick around long enough to develop a relationship with the party more complex than your relationship with wooden ducks at a shooting gallery!
So you’re saying that the difficulty of building recurring villains that actually survive is a feature, not a bug?
GYGAAAAAAX!
*shakes fist*
I’ve been DMing with the same group for eight years, across three campaigns. Plenty of plot hooks and hanging threads get ignored, but there were some BIG ones that never got resolved in our first campaign that I’ve joked with the players mean a Sequel is assured.
My favorites from their romp through the Forgotten Realms:
The party had an encounter with an Ancient Dracolich (Nalavarauthatoryl) in their time in Cormyr, destroyed her, and claimed her phylactery from the person that had been holding it. They later killed an ancient gemstone dragon in a planar prison and accidentally let the phylactery out near it. Nala claimed a new body, beat the already exhausted party to a pulp, and used the party’s escape from that particular dimensional pit trap to return to the realms. Even as the party resolved the campaign crisis, she’s still out there, free from the control of her previous masters and off doing gods-know-what.
The party made a couple of deals with Shameshka the Marauder after their time in Sigil. They did her some favors in exchange for her assistance in a couple matters. The repercussions of the party empowering one of the most influential crime bosses in the multiverse was never explored in depth. It was one of my players’ big post-game questions, to which I simply cackled in answer.
The final hanging thread was a draconic prophesy and a mysterious child that the party were aware of and peripheral to. They had questions, and knew about some weird deal between the Sovereign of their home city and a powerful metallic dragon. There was a lot of groundwork laid, and some real interest. It was intended to be the original rising action for the middle of the campaign… until it got left behind and forgotten when they ended up in Sigil. Sigh. Maybe next campaign…
I love the wistful hope you get when envisioning a “next campaign.” All your ideas seem to sparkle most beautifully when they’re just in the planning stages.
Any dang way, here’s hoping it actually happens for you! Dragon-centric games and prophecies sound like a blast.
I misread that as evil awakened house, and was very concerned I missed something.
That’s just an oversized mimic.
Pretty sure it’s a gazebo
Oh, what a tangled web we weave….
…When it’s simpler just to cleave…
I remember in my Battle Network game, the opening pitch was that there was strife over a load of noise being made over a particular update. And that was the plot hook for the first dungeon or so.
Then in order to spite one of my players for trying to call the plot ahead of time, I accidentally wrote an abuse case and active conspiracy. OOPS. The fallout of that has naturally been what most of the rest of the campaign has been about.
Spite is a surprisingly powerful motivator, lol.
Heh, this describes my recently finished Curse of Strahd campaign. We played about half of it in 4th edition but due to issues (longer combats, players being overwhelmed with abilities, lack of good options for all classes) we decided to finish it in 5th edition. I’d originally intended the campaign to be a 1-20 affair, with defeating Strahd being the PCs entry to their Epic Destiny (21-30 class, for those unfamiliar with 4e). Because of that, there were numerous plot hooks sprinkled around that would lead to further adventures in the paragon (11-20) tier. Since Curse of Strahd is normally intended as a 1-11ish campaign in 5e, I dislike 5e overall anyway, and I was definitely feeling the DM burnout, this meant a very abrupt curtailment of the further questlines. What became of the legendary monster hunter they’d received clues about? Who’s wagon did they steal and why did she leave them a skull token? What were the consequences of the warlock accepting lycanthropy and the sorceress using a deck of many things as her implement? etc., etc. I managed to wrap up a few loose ends in the finale, but definitely didn’t do the potential quests justice.
I’m confused. Does the demon mean sit /on/ the throne?
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/404601/where-does-sit-the-throne-come-from
I imagine Gestalt is experiencing some serious levels of spider-demon-induced trauma right now.
She is have a BAD TIME™.