Who Dat?
You know what? Today’s comic is a good excuse to do a little double duty. I’ve been running the same megadungeon campaign for nearly six years, and I’ve let a metric buttload of plot threads build up in that time. I’ve got 20+ PCs in this game. We’ve gone 15 levels down and 14 levels up, and it’s high time to collect my thoughts and start paying off some errant storylines. So in an effort to illustrate the point of today’s comic, here’s a partial list of all the subplots my campaign needs to tidy up.
- What is the source of the magic that teleports PCs in and out of the dungeon?
- What happened to all those ghouls in the woods?
- Isn’t there a nation of efreet that think the party magus is monarch of an allied kingdom?
- Will the fish people on Level 3 ever be permitted into town?
- Where are the missing sacraments of the moon goddess?
- There are 14 phase spider infants loose in town. Shouldn’t there be some consequences?
- What kinds of changes will the new Adventurer University bring to town?
- When will the gnome orphan ever admit to his sister that he’s the one who set the fire that killed their parents?
- Will the gold dragon on Level 12 ever let the cavalier out of his geas?
- What ever became of the possessed dark tapestry oracle?
- When will tensions with the Friendly Rivals adventuring party come to a head?
- Who will get the next town council seat?
- Did those medusa cultists ever manage to resurrect their god?
- Can the +2 holy greatsword possessed by the soul of a slain paladin carry on a successful romance with the party spiritualist?
- What was the deal with those mythos slugs that carved runes into the ground when killed? Did the party get them all?
- Wasn’t the party cleric trying to convert the local thieves guild to his side? That’s probably going to piss off the guild master.
- Who exactly was the party witch/investigator chasing before he got mixed up with the other PCs?
- What aquatic monster gave the bloodrager his arcane powers?
- What’s going to happen when the ogre PC is finished with his “year and a day” service to the party?
- There’s still a gate to the Abyss on Level 7. Shouldn’t the PCs get around to closing it?
I could probably go on, but I think you begin to get my point. A campaign can go in a lot of different directions, and it’s easy to collect loose threads as you move through an increasingly complex plot. It’s weirdly cathartic to sit down and write out my thoughts, but I think that’s only half the equation. Before starting on my list, I sent this question out to my players: What plot points and character-specific storylines do I still need to pay off? I can write out subplots until I drop from exhaustion, but it’s all meaningless if my players don’t care about them.
So yes, it’s theoretically interesting that Aristocrat is hanging out with the Heroes (on the off chance you’ve forgotten about her, you can see her bio on the cast page under “Companions, Familiars & Minions”). However, if no one actually cares about her story, it’s probably better to let that subplot die.
So here’s my question of the day. What storylines in your own games are you most anxious to explore? Is there a “plot thread that got away” that you’ve always regretted? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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In my current game, I’m really interested in learning what will happen with the warp gate my character is working on building as part of a researchc team. The problem is, that will probably be discovered by the rest of my group after i leave, as I’m leaving for california in early October for a job.
Any chance you could force the issue a little bit? Maybe your PC gets sucked into his own creation, and the rest of the next part of the campaign focuses on the party going after him.
Honestly probably not, the dm already has a good idea as to what he wants to do with the second half of the campaign and i dont want to mess with that. While it is frustrating that im leaving before this is done, i know the dm will still tell me how things go. Who know though, I still have 4 more sessions it looks like, so i might find out by then.
I’ve got a suggestion for number six. The phase spider infants have been adopted by a variety of people and factions. Maybe garments made from a strange blue silk start becoming popular; maybe there’s a string of unusual murders.
I was leaning towards, “Livestock goes missing, and it’s put down to common pests until a child goes missing as well. She’s gone to live with the phase spiders in the woods because, ‘I want to be a lost boy too!'” Phase spider Peter Pan, man…. I’ll have to think up some kind of fairy to protect them in their web-based tree house.
phase spiders (any spider really) are freaking creepy. If you combine them with peter pan (especially the non disney-fied version), you have the ultimate horror show. I got one response if i was a player. kill it, kill it with fire followed by disintegrate or power word: kill.
These are the same phase spiders mentioned in the story over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/tolerance
The penance quest was fostering one of the things for a while until they could find a phase spider nanny. The rest just kind of…wandered off. In town. I figure they’ve started a colony somewhere nearby and never want to grow up.
I’m just baffled no-one has realised the resemblance yet.
They’re elves. They all look like Nordic fashion models.
*They all look like weird androgynous misshapen twig-people with knife-ears.
Fixed that for you.
Loose plot threads like that is why I usually have a B or even C team of “adventurers” to go about sealing up loose plot ends that realistically you would want handled before it gets out of hand. Now if the players have made it intentional that they want to proceed certain side quests in some specific order I usually leave them open, but if they decide “let’s just forget about this whole oblivion gate business”, well, then I’d just have another group trap the benefits or just say that after 54 guardsmen sacrifices their lives, the gate was sealed.
I usually don’t have any problems from my players thus far when doing that. Though they do feel concerned about a group that could potentially rival their own in class and items, without the interpersonal party drama. unbeknownst to them I totally take account into my B/C team’s own personal quirks and dramas, but they’re only known to those willing to explore it.
Good point. I do have several competing adventuring guilds in town. By the time this exercise is over and I’ve got a full list of my subplots, I may wind up assigning them to the other parties as a means of settling scores to my own satisfaction. Not quite as satisfying, but at least it’ll give me a sense of closure!
To be fair, I think Wizard cares aboot the subplot, he just doesn’t know it’s happening so he can’t act on it.
We’ve got a subplot in our game involving a magic flower that’ll open up a portal to the feywild for the winter court when planted. The wizard signed a fey contract to plant it but keeps putting it off because “Now’s not a good time.” You don’t put off a fey contract.
You’d think he would take the “detect plot” spell. Dude could get all kinds of use out of it.
I don’t hold out much hope for your wizard though. Fey flowers are like dirty refrigerators: it just gets worse the longer you put it off.
It is too much drama for even Wizard to handle all the loose plot threads.
Talking about plot threads, in my current game, i don’t remember having a forgotten plot thread, which may be good or bad. Once, in a black crusade campaign, my whole party and i forget about the black crusade that we our self launched against the empire. That kind of thinks pass from time to time 🙂
I… How do you… THE NAME OF THE GAME IS BLACK CRUSADE!!!
That’s the beauty of Chaos. You can just do what you want. Strictly holding to one objective is for those stiffs worshipping a Corpse Emperor.
lol. I suspect I would never get tired of this reasoning in-game.
“Wait, why are you guys doing [stupid thing of the week]? That doesn’t even make sense!”
“CHAOS!”
And what abut the favorite pick-up line of the Farseers: “lets go on a date or our race is doomed… er, i have foresee it!”
Excuse me but i need to cordially disagree. Chaos without rules is only anarchy, that why chaos needs to follow laws, tenets and be as efficient and orderly as posible.
Just kidding 🙂
And in D&D you can go a complete campaign without entering a dungeon or killing a dragon. I don’t see any problem here. Have you never try one campaign in which the pcs are a group of innkeepers, helping and guiding adventurers for just 50 GP per night?
In any case, in that Black Crusade game, one of the other player and i got a idea, as we were bored, my pc don’t having anyone to backstab and her pc don’t having anything to overkill, we decided to troll the GM and to do that we make our pc fall in love of each other. As love is something strange in the WH40K’verse, we choose that option just for the evulz. Our relationship, by the other players demand, start to consume more time. I try to guide the game back on track by saying to her pc something like “I am a rogue psyker of Tzeentch, i am a devious traitoruos weasel, you are a bersekeress of Khorne, a psychotic bloodlusting beast, our was just a beautiful dream”. That only helped to consume more time. Then the GM takes his shot and also try to get the game back on rails. “Hey guys, you remember that planet? Cadia? You are about to enter orbit and unleashing chaos on the galaxy, so why not you try to focus on the impending doom of the empire?” Just for the other two player to scream “Shut up!!! Now that his evil brother is dead she has just recovered from her amnesia!!!”. In a non-canon ending from that campaign the forces of chaos discovered that there are more important things than Chaos, like love, and then they started dancing and singing with the Cadia soldiers. Idle pcs are players toys, and GM nightmares 🙂
Cue the Ewok “Yub Yub” song. Roll credits.
The question is, what will happen now that Lumberjack Explosion knows she’s up to something? Obviously Lumberjack Explosion is just a mild-mannered everyhorse, but somehow things he (I think LE is referred to as he? Is that right?) finds out tend to reach the ears of the masked vigilante known as Horsepower.
As well they might, that guy’s ears swivel right round.
What will happen if Horsepower learns of Aristocrat’s suspicions? We readers might believe that Wizard is innocent, but he has taken no action toward reclaiming the Ivy Throne from his wicked uncle, and indeed even seemed happy to hear the news of the coup!
Someone’s been paying attention. Is there perhaps room for a boy-detective sidekick on Horsepower’s team…?
For some reason, this got me wondering if you ever add in aspects of the stories we tell you into your own dnd adventures or into the webcomic.
For copyright reasons: no never not even once. That said, I doubt we’d have had this comic…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-planning
If clcman hadn’t reminded me that Druid has an allosaurus in this comic:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/beast-of-burden
Every creator is a colander. We take ideas, pass them through the sieve of our experiences, and produce finished work on the other end. The people we talk to and the ideas we discover make their way through. Some even latch on to our non-stick surface and become part of the colander itself. That’s how I conceive of it anyway.
As an answer for #6: A local stable-hand starts up his own new profitable business of exotic spider mount breeding and renting. What? I don’t see why Drow should forever corner this market if people are just willy-nilly leaving baby giant spiders around ready to be trained. =D
But… They’re sentient. 🙁
Pay them minimum wage. Problem solved!
Well then they can be adopted by some spider enthusiasts (who will feed them high grade meat in exchange for dressing them up in adorable outfits despite the lack of need for clothes) and grow up to start their own construction and light armory businesses.
They are good at lashing together bamboo scaffolding… Construction company it is!
That’s probably the least of it. Consider how strong Giant Spider silk must be to hold up all those giant spiders. With the right alchemical treatments, it might be one of the toughest substances in the world(s). =)
I see where you’re going, but keep in mind that it “takes all day to remove.”
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=243449&type=card
You say “plot threads that got away”; I say “plot threads biding their time to resurface”… even if the PCs never really acted on them.
Probably a healthier way to look at it. I’m beginning to get overwhelmed by all the things I “still need to do.” You’re excited about all the possibilities hidden behind the curtain of “what comes next?”
In a low-level quest when several of use were just learning to play D&D, there was this subplot about some sort of frog-cult in the swamp outside of town that may or may-not have have been in league with the local druidic sect. The campaign ended when some of us graduated and before we got around to investigating that, but it was proving had to drag the rest of the party out of town anyway, what with all the contests with prizes, the missing potion-shop owner, an invisible monster that got loose, something going on with the thieves guild (it’s ALWAYS the thieves guild!), etc etc etc.
*low-level campaign
I think I’m familiar with the frog-cult subplot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_the_Frog
TLDR: A space wizard did it.
I had a brilliant DM once whose game worlds always included two different organizations at cross-purposes. One of them would go around creating weird crap and setting up potential trouble because they were long-sighted types desirous of making sure their society had competent, high-level people and for that you need problems for people to solve, so that they learn to become competent. (I think the order was founded by some powerful diviner-type who foresaw a need for epic-level adventurers).
Of course the organization was used as an excuse for all sorts of power-plays, and it grew out of control and proliferated and blah blah blah, perfect in-game excuse for weird dungeons showing up in the middle of deserts.
The other organization was started by the high priest of a god(dess, depending on campaign) of knowledge and they went around trying to tie up loose ends and make life better for the common folk by calming trouble before it could get too out of hand.
So whenever he had a lot of dangling plot threads, we’d eventually pick up rumors that the tidy-up-loose-ends organization was coming into town or had been active in such-and-such a place, and a lot of those dangling threads would get snipped.
And whenever things were getting a little too cut-and-dried, the rumors would be about the first organization’s activities, and we’d uncover some new weirdness to go check out.
I never played in the particular campaign it came out in, but one of that DM’s other regular players told me that the classic D&D 3.0 illithid lore ended up being tied in to the first organization. Not actual illithids, but their lore.
Anyhow, I thought it was a very clever way to explain a lot of the Plot-Convenient strangeness that can show up in RPGs, and was a useful DM device.
Goddamn that’s meta. I’m all manner of amused that this problem became enough of a known quantity for one GM that he came up with an in-world solution. In vacuum I know that makes a strong strategy for many problems…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/artifacts/metagame-artifacts/
…but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use the strategy in this case. Well done that man!
The DM for my current campaign has updated the world he created 35 years ago when he was in High School to be our current campaign world. Some of the PCs from back then (my brother’s character among them) are now legends, some still living.
We’ve got plot threads coming out of our ears. It’s frustrating that we can’t attend to them all now that civil war has broken out, but it’s amazing how wide the sandbox-world is.
The two I’d most like to follow up on:
We discovered a city in the desert from a civilization destroyed by the Gods for hubris. The Copper Dragon that nests there lets us explore, but we haven’t been able to return since we found the f*cking Royal Library and a cave-in sent us packing. (We did pack a couple hundred tomes into the portable hole before we had to leave.)
While destroying an altar to Velsharoon and cleaning undead from an ancient graveyard, we found the tomb of a heinously powerful wizard that presented us with a puzzle to gain entry, and we haven’t been able to complete the research to get in.
Well that’s freaking amazing. I love that he still had the notes 35 years later.
Just learned my lesson in that regard. Threw away a buddy’s character sheet after the recent cross-country move. A week later: “Let’s do play by post!” Felt like a proper dummy on that one.