The captain of the guard is in the employ of the thieves guild. When the
guild receives an item he really wants, he sets up an elaborate system to
get it. He arrests the PCs on false or trumped up charges (a good way to
get them introduced), then offers them absolution if they do him a favour.
He wants them to infiltrate the thieves guild by a secret back door and find
out some info on some item that will be showing up soon. When the PCs get
through the sewers to the guild, the captain's men will frame them for a
robbery that just took place. The players escape the angry thieves, but get
captured by the town guard. Along the way they have picked up enough clues
to figure out what has gone on, but they can't prove it. So they must
escape from jail and go confront the captain as he is leaving town with the
item. After this excitement, the PCs don't have much choice to become
roving adventurers, since the thieves guild wants their heads.
I've been GMing for over a decade now. Every once in a while, people ask me
how I come up with plots. I'm not entirely sure, except that I look for
problems and then complicate them. The two most useful questions in
plotting are "Why?" and "How?" ("Who?" "Where?" "What?" and "When?" also get
a work out.)
Anyway, I thought I'd share a technique that I use when I'm absolutely
tapped out or when I can't seem to come up with anything original. You know
the times -- all you can come up with is cliche material you've done a
hundred times in the past. The first idea that comes to mind establishes
squatter's rights on your frontal lobes.
(I want to emphasise that this isn't the only technique, or the best
technique. It's simply a technique that I find useful.)
The technique is to limit yourself. When you've got the whole wide universe
to work with, then you have *too many* possibilities. By setting arbitrary
restrictions, you remove things from consideration and narrow your focus.
You've already got a bunch of stuff established which places restrictions on
you. You know what genre you're working in -- that gives you a bunch of
genre conventions you can choose to work with or against. You know what
your player characters are (usually), and you probably have some sense of
location and season. All of these things are restrictions. If you're doing
a sword and sorcery campaign, the question of aliens doesn't come up.
That set of restrictions presumably isn't enough (or you wouldn't need this
technique). The next thing to do is set some arbitrary restriction: the
entire adventure takes place in a single room, for example, or the entire
adventure is built around what you did last weekend. Other possibilities
include story anthologies and (ahem) a dictionary of cliches or quotations.
The technique really relies on forcing the juxtaposition of unusual elements.
Here's a (lengthy) example. I have a Dark Champions campaign. I know the
characters, I know the time of year, I know the city (none of which tells me
what the next story is). So I'm sitting here listening to the soundtrack
album for "Dumb and Dumber" and I decide that I'll create a plot that
incorporates something from each song on the album.
Here are the songs on the album:
The Ballad of Peter PumpkinHead - Crash Test Dummies
New Age Girl - Deadeye Dick
Insomniac - Echobelly
If You Don't Love Me (I'll Kill Myself) - Pete Droge
Crash - The Primitives
Whiney, Whiney (What Really Drives Me Crazy) - Willi One Blood
Too Much Of A Good Thing - The Sons
You Sexy Thing - Deee-Lite
Where I Find My Heaven - Gigolo Aunts
Hurdy Gurdy Man - Butthole Surfers
Take - The Lupins
The Bear Song - Green Jelly
Get Ready - The Proclaimers
Hmm. Peter Pumpkinhead and The Bear Song suggest some kind of kid
song/nursery rhyme feel. Get Ready supports that with lines like "Fee Fi Fo
Fum." You Sexy Thing, Too Much of a Good Thing, and If You Don't Love Me
(I'll Kill Myself) all suggest some kind of excess, perhaps emotional
overdrive -- maybe a mind control plot? Somebody discovers a real
aphrodisiac and starts dumping it in the water? Someone is infatuated with
another person, makes the threats to suicide if he or she doesn't return the
affection, but the other person's attitude could be described as Whiney,
Whiney (What Really Drives Me Crazy).
New Age Girl is a sort-of love song to someone named Mary Moon who is (in
fact) a New Age Girl. She's now an NPC in the adventure.
First plot that comes to mind with this: take the lowest charisma hero who
often complains he doesn't have a love relationship and give him a groupie
(Mary Moon) who follows him around as the group tries to track down someone
who's committing a series of thefts (Take) based on nursery rhymes. That
leaves me with Hurdy Gurdy Man, Crash, Insomniac, and Where I Find My Heaven
as plot elements to incorporate.
I don't like it. So we'll try again. Instead, let's start with the
insomniac. Suppose someone has the oft-used psionic power of tangible
hallucinations and dreams. He or she knows it and has started trying to stay
awake (Insomniac). It's not easy to make a living if you have this kind of
disability, so he or she is living as a street musician (Hurdy Gurdy Man).
That also gives us the street-level feel and makes the psionic harder to
track down. He or she has a tremendous crush on Mary Moon (we're back to her
again).
The first hallucination is Peter Pumpkinhead, a reasonably nice fellow.
Freaked, she leaves and is pursued by other nursery-rhyme characters.
Although Peter is quite likeable, but the others (the Bear that went over
the mountain, for instance) don't have to be. Not knowing what's going on,
Mary seeks out the PCs; if the PCs are too hard to find, they'll encounter
her, trapped by the Bear. This leads to both Mary and the PCs trapped in
the psionic's ideal world (Where I Find My Heaven). It's not pleasant for
the PCs, because he regards them as competition (Too Much of a Good Thing).
This is obvious because Mary has a crush on one of the PCs (You Sexy
Thing). This environment, combined with Mary's information, lets them know
who they're looking for. The PCs can get out by moving fast enough and far
enough -- the psionic's powers aren't all-encompassing, after all.
This, with the uppers, unhinges the psionic (If You Don't Love Me, Whiney
Whiney). The first evidence is when Peter Pumpkinhead (trustworthy up until
now) turns psychotic.
In the meantime, (1) the psionic, worried, has been awake on uppers long
enough for hallucinations to start anyway, and (2) our villain of the piece
has figured out where these nursery-rhyme apparitions are coming from, and
is also searching for the psionic.
Still to include: Take (a robbery of some kind?) and Crash.
The bad guy catches the psionic, uses hypnosis or mind control to generate
some truly unpleasant hallucinations to perform robberies (Take), including
running an armoured car off the road (Crash) and picking up the money.
The good guys catch up, there is a fight and the problem of what to do with
the psionic. I leave that up to the players.
Now, a lot of the details still need to be worked out, but there's a basic
setup, antagonist, and conflict.
Not entirely without cliches (to really eliminate cliches, you'd have to
know the characters better), but it's certainly different than what I would
have come up with otherwise.
Anyway, it's a technique I find useful, so I thought I'd share it for those
who are having trouble jump-starting their plots.
[The Net Book of Plots Home Page]
Email: Alexander Forst-Rakoczy