Plots, hooks and ideas

So, I noticed we don't really have a specific place to discuss any plot or story ideas for games.

"Let it be so", said the roleplaying Gods.
Share your ideas for adventure, hooks, plots, twists, and other thoughts for games that seem like they'd be interesting.

An idea that I had the other night seemed like a fun place to start off a game, and also gives reasons for PC's to be in the same place at the same time with a common element in their background.

The game starts at a funeral, a bit macabre for sure. The deceased was an adventurer that each of the players has met and been helped by in the past. Each of the PC's has been contacted by the bearer of the Will, and told they were left something in the will by the deceased. This can give each of the characters a bit of plot device: they know this person, even if only breifly - they helped with something you did in the past, or maybe you helped them out, but you've interacted in such a way that you were memorable.


Now, from here you have a meeting point - the funeral. A hook - you've been left something in this man/woman/things will.
You can go about the points from here in many ways honestly:
The deceased has an unfinished quest perhaps, and to complete it is how you get what they left.
Maybe they were slain and you need to avenge their death.
It's possible they're not actually dead and the curator requires you to solve a mystery and bring the adventurer back from wherever or find out what happened to them.
You need to notify the lost next of kin to their estate to get a reward.

The list can go on to many options depending on your GM style and the theme of the game.

That's the first of many plots and hooks to be written about, but please, feel free to add in comments or ideas of your own as well everyone, we all have so many ideas for so many different things :)

I'm relatively new at GM'ing and have found some inspiration from this list of plots

That game start reminds me of the Carrion Crown Adventure Path. All the characters knows this one wealthy dude, and is invited to his funeral. Strange stuff starts happening, leading to a 6 part investigation.

In fact, I often buy the first volume in the Pathfinder adventure paths, because I like Pathfinder best at low levels and they can be a treasure trove for encounter ideas. They usually have a good way to start a campaign that isn't the usual you all meet in a tavern.

My podcast has a ton of ideas for stories. The old format was about pulling ideas from media (mostly movies). The latest format is world-building, so we've got quite a few ideas there, as well, embodied in locations and NPCs. www.sharkbonepodcast.com

I have only ever once had my players meet in a tavern. They didn't actually meet inside it. They met in the middle of the night, outside of it and ended up accidentally burning the tavern down because two rival gangs decided to have a brawl in the alley.

Personally, I don't use published adventures very often, I prefer giving my players something original that they haven't read about somewhere before. Encounters are fun, but come after the hook typically unless the hook and plot stems from an initial encounter happening at the very beginning of the game that makes everything go from there, which is also fun sometimes

The other day I got to have some fun with my group.

The hook? The world has kinds of hit a bad point - the elemental planes have collapsed upon the material plane - as a result of some scientific (and magical) tinkering in the past.

The plot? The party is sent on a temporal adventure, to the past, to change the outcome of this event. To save the world as it were.
For me this works really well in my realm actually. I had a party before that had helped out the scientist to capture and study some elementals - which led to this happening.

Options? lots!! oh man, you can do paradoxes like the grandfather paradox - going back in time and accidentally killing your relatives so you don't exist. Or, sleeping with your grandparent so you're a self fulfilling paradox in a bootstraper paradox. really, you can do all sorts of things with it.

in my players instance - the reason they were chosen for this task is because they have a direct link to the past via relatives alive in that time (the party i had there before). now, the players don't know this of course, they've never met relatives from 600years ago typically. so they can have a huge impact on their own characters background from here as well. one of my players is a merchant/brewer, with a secret family recipe... my hopes it he sells his brew to people there and thus the recipe is actually first created by being brought to the past from the future!

anyways, this is the current plot for my rl game i'm running :)

Time travel is a lot of fun. As a player in the last D&D campaign I played in, there was a bunch of time travel, and people started worrying about butterfly effects et al. I gave a lengthy meta-speech to the DM about how my character wasn't going to worry about such triflings, as those cause-and-effect paradoxes only make sense in a world without magic. [Aside: Later I made it clear to her (the DM) that as a player, I would totally respect and go along with however she wanted to handle the timey wimey wibbly wobbly bits.]

Talking about plot hooks, have you ever played X-COM: Enemy Unknown? Great game, and in a thread someone mentioned offhandedly that there should be a tabletop RPG game of same. I thought about it, and realized that the basic premise is translatable to different genres.

X-Com Modification for RPGs

X-Com is known for:
Build bases => Use radar => Shoot down ships => Investigate crash sites => Kill aliens => Recover technology => Research technology => Upgrade bases => Repeat (from use radar to upgrade bases) => unlock interplanetary transport => Travel to Mars => Defeat alien home base

In a fantasy world, that becomes something like:
From a base => Use Magical Divination => Investigate gates/teleports => Kill fiends => Recover lore => Research lore =>
Upgrade magic => Repeat => Unlock "Gate" spell or portal => Travel to Hell => Defeat Lord of hell

The hook is the repeated invasions and how the PCs must try and find a way to stop it before their world is ravaged or destroyed.

XCom could be done with basically Spycraft. Though now I'm tempted to see about making a RPG for XCOM...

This guy put together XCOM with Cortex Plus.

In that sort of scenario, you'd be giving yourself quests to do x y or z and deal with them. It can itself give a GM plenty of leads to go on with you, which is fantastic if you can help out your GM like that. Really, it lets them know what your characters are interested in.

Today's gonna be an idea, rather than a plot, or hook.

Spells.. spells are interesting and powerful. Most games have a way of adjudicating how they work and how many you can cast in a given amount of time. (D&D for instance uses Spells/Day). Tinker with this a bit perhaps. If you have a group who relies on a caster and wont function without them being at full power, why not compensate.

Spells are generally cast with some amount of will power or innate ability. Perhaps if you've run out of spells for the day and suddenly need one badly in a situation, the caster can draw on his ability to gain him a few extra spells that day, be it at a cost.. Perhaps the cost is in HP, or needing to pass a will/fort save, perhaps they can cast a few extra but every one of them grants them a level of fatigue for the next day - clearly casting past your limits would make you extremely tired the next day right?

What do you generally do when your spellcasters run out of juice? Should you halt party advancement for a whole 8hour rest in game just to recharge spells and halt the narrative down, or do you think some ways around it that sound logical might work for you?