The first adventure in Logan's Pass (The Burning Plague for those playing along at home) introduced a warband of goblins who were basically caught between the human villagers outside the mine and the bigger baddie further in. From that one feature in a prepared adventure, I postulated that the goblins were expanding their influence. And how do goblins expand? They do it the old-fashioned way: they invade places.
And just like that, there's a race war happening in the background as the gnomes have been displaced by the goblin hordes. Grond will remain in gnomish hands for as long as they can manufacture ammunition for the giant iron golem that the city was built on, but that's the only city the gnomes have left. Every other gnome has become a refugee.
Boom. That's how you add a feature to your world. Go big or don't bother.
The world grew from the PC's perceptions and the players' decisions about which hook to follow next. So we looked at the Gnomish Confederacy and how it got screwed by hordes of goblins. We took a trip to the Dwarven Kingdom and discovered that the drow experimented on dwarves to splice together a dwarf/drider abomination which angered Wulfgar to no end. A band of orcs were setting up shop in the no-mans-land between the human kingdom of Arket and the Dwarven Kingdom, a 50-mile border that the dwarves abandoned by treaty after the war and which the humans didn't have the numbers or motivation to settle. Some orcs were gifted by Set with special powers to keep the tribes working together - the Cult of the Burning Fist was born. Dragons came into reality early as some goblins bribed a white dragon into creating an unseasonable blizzard to cover the theft of magical tomes from Adris's local Mage's Guild. Pandora's elven mentor fell victim to Lycanthropy and the party needed to dispatch him. All of these hooks came from or were expanded by the characters' backgrounds.
Then the party discovered the Druid Bowls. These scrying devices were scattered throughout the world so druids could keep up with natural happenings and help each other out. And they talked to people thousands of miles away and started learning about the world. They found problems across the planet and teleported hither and yon to try and deal with a few of the larger issues.
They met Sarah and Bob. Turns out Sarah broke the quarantine and came to this planet to discover what the heck was happening and report back to her bosses via Mind Link. With the party's help, she discovered that someone was breeding displacer beasts and somehow using them to cloak mechs. She died trying to prevent a shuttle from leaving the atmosphere. Later, under a pyramid in the Sindari Desert, the party found a robot dwarf named Bob who maintained a library of all the knowledge in the universe. Bob interfaced with the elf-maintained library planet to keep up to date, though he had been told to hide as much as possible while doing so. The party saw a satellite map of the world and started asking questions of what was beyond the sky. Turns out there's quite a bit happening out there with hundreds of populated worlds to explore and an ancient enemy resurfacing to start a war between the stars. And Bob maintains a communication chamber to talk with representatives from other planets.
Right about then I could hear the players' minds blowing out. I love that sound.
The moral of the story? Keep ahead of the players, but don't get too attached to what happens next. You'll be more sane. I'm working out how to communicate and organize Schrodinger's Gun GMing, so stay tuned for more in-depth theoretical discussions in that vein.
An aside: I love how these posts just spill from my head. I try to internalize as much of the adventure and the world as possible for flexibility's sake. It's much easier for me to improvise if I don't need to refer to notes. A side effect of that approach comes out in posts like this - the info is still in there, it just needs an outlet. Oh, look - here's an outlet now!
Thanks for reading!
This stuff is awesome - keep posting...
ReplyDeleteNo worries, my head is still full of the game history, but we're getting to the part where I may need to refer to my notes.
ReplyDeleteThanks!