Tarinia Faynrik |
Ive never done a thread before so hopefully its in the right place and done correctly.
I always been fascinated by a few things. They are always my favorite thing in video games and some i have not seen yet in a campaign. Haunted houses, Fairy tale references and worlds. All are my favorite but one thing i always find lacking. Is mysteries.
I was curious about doing a phantom thief sort of campaign or filler. Yet i'm not exactly sure how to go about it. I was thinking maybe the pc's are hired to gaurd and look out for trouble. Then of course the Phantom thief strikes and the mystery begins.
Everyone is a suspect and of course the fingers get pointed to those that stand out the most, the PCs. Random encounters of murder and false clues would also be taken into account.
I'm wondering if there is any advice to give to make it more fun. To keep the aspect of mystery to it. What would be a good starting level and if you could revolve an entire campaign from the starting level to nearly finish following and trying to capture this phantom thief? Any suggestions would be appreciated cause really i don't have much outside of bare bones.
Tels |
I'm going to link you to Ashiel's Blog that specifically mentions something that could be of use to you.
SiuoL |
Hmm... I suggest you make the people that haired the PCs to be the real bad guys. They were to guard whatever it was with no question asked. Then job failed and they are to find the phantom thief if the wish to stay in the city. After they follow all those clues, beating up thugs and solved puzzles, they found the phantom thief in his hideout. They then have a good fight with the phantom thief, of course the phantom thief will lose because he is not build to fight, as well as he has no intention to kill anyone. So the team can choose to kill the phantom thief or keep him/her alive.
After that, they team will have a choice to bring the phantom thief so they get to stay at the city as well as the bounty, or to discover why the phantom thief stole things from the people who hired the PCs. Everything onwards will be up to you, but I think it would be fun. Make rogue roll for class check (Pure rogue level +d20) if you have one in your team, for special connections in order to look for clues.
Ashiel |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Ive never done a thread before so hopefully its in the right place and done correctly.
I always been fascinated by a few things. They are always my favorite thing in video games and some i have not seen yet in a campaign. Haunted houses, Fairy tale references and worlds. All are my favorite but one thing i always find lacking. Is mysteries.
I was curious about doing a phantom thief sort of campaign or filler. Yet i'm not exactly sure how to go about it. I was thinking maybe the pc's are hired to gaurd and look out for trouble. Then of course the Phantom thief strikes and the mystery begins.
Everyone is a suspect and of course the fingers get pointed to those that stand out the most, the PCs. Random encounters of murder and false clues would also be taken into account.
I'm wondering if there is any advice to give to make it more fun. To keep the aspect of mystery to it. What would be a good starting level and if you could revolve an entire campaign from the starting level to nearly finish following and trying to capture this phantom thief? Any suggestions would be appreciated cause really i don't have much outside of bare bones.
Generally speaking you'd probably want the campaign to remain pretty low-level if you're looking for more of a Sherlock Holmes kind of mystery thing, where you're tracking and investigating clues and leads and such. Higher levels can change the dynamics of that sort of thing in ways that can be quite jarring for those trying to stick closely to the genre.
It's not that clues and chases and such can't be done at high levels but it changes. At low to mid levels, tracking things like footprint clues, questioning eyewitnesses on what they saw, or chasing a suspect through a marketplace are entirely appropriate. At high levels, you're trying to figure out when the victim was replaced with a simulacrum and who was benefitting from it, asking god for advice on where to look next, and chasing dudes across continents, planets, and planes of existence. The tropes are there but they're different.
There's also the fact that mystery games can be difficult to pull off well. Generally speaking, it's never going to be as obvious to the layers as the GM. A general rule of thumb a good friend of mine once suggested was, put five clues for the players to find for every one clue that they would need, because odds are they'll miss the other four. :P
Sometimes dealing with mysteries require a sort of intuitive GMing where you feel out the game bit by bit (and sometimes the best mystery games occur when the GM isn't even sure as to what the truth is themselves just yet).
Also, Tels beat me to it (thanks Tels, you're so nice :3) but my method of Event-based GMing has helped me a ton when it comes to setting up stuff like this in other games. I think I actually used a mystery scenario as the example in that blogpost. (^-^)