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G'day, all.
I’m looking for some design and plotting advice. This isn’t fully fleshed-out, so there’s LOTS of room for improvement.
My group is working though our fourth Paizo adventure path right now. We’re halfway done with Carrion Crown, and are beginning to discuss which one to attack next.
We’re huge believers in crafting individual character arcs for each of the PCs that the GM can weave into the main plot. For example, our Varisian oracle in CC started receiving disturbing visions in Harrowstone Prison that foreshadowed the village of Illmarsh. Our party rogue had been a conscript archer in Ustalav during the Whispering Tyrant’s rise, and spent the centuries after Tar Barphon’s fall living as a ghoul before Professor Lorimar restored him to life and sanity. The idea is to get to the end of the AP and find that every character’s major and minor plot arcs were resolved as part of (or incidental to) the main storyline. This rewards the players for rich RP and for good character design.
Further: a generic two-weapon ranger is dry and boring; you can kill the PC off and no one cares. Whereas, a deserter from the Great Crusade who is borderline psychotic with PTSD and is hunted by Iomedean inquisitors because of the military secrets she learned at the Worldwound is crunchy – you want to see what happens to this character as she wrestles with her (literal and figurative) demons. We want strong personalities, coherent motivations, and opportunities to drop unexpected antagonists into the AP so that the players are keyed up and jump at every sudden noise.
When I take off the GM fez at the end of CC, I was thinking about going full-bore into Dreamscarred Press’s ‘Psionics Expanded’ line with a Blue (psionic goblin) cryptic (psionic rogue). For style, I wanted the flavor of the classic Cold War spy novels like Fleming, Le Carré and Forsythe. That is, something where every NPC might have a hidden agenda, and where plots and counter-plots were woven into everyday life. To justify both the race and the character arc elements, we sketched out a slightly different explanation for the Isgeri Goblinboood wars:
~ * ~ * ~ *~
The Goblinblood War had nothing to do with racial animosity between goblinkind and humanity. It was about economics … and cold-blooded politics. History teaches that the war started in 4,697 when a hobgoblin army advanced out of the Chitterwood and laid waste to an Isgeri way-station North of Logas. Few people know that the genesis of the war actually began fifteen years earlier in a conference room in Pangolais.
The Nidalese government needed a proxy war that would tie up the military forces of their Eastern neighbors. Nidalese agents provocateur covertly funded and trained the hobgoblin tribes in the Chitterwood, making an army where none had existed before. Nidal’s message was compelling: if the goblinoids could quickly to seize the trade routes between Andoran, Molthune and Druma, they could then sue for peace before any outside power could effectively repel them – thereby creating a goblinoid homeland with guaranteed longevity as a fait accompli. Isger would continue on much as it had been, facilitating and profiting on overland trade, only with a different dominant race running things.
The goblinoid war chiefs launched their assault and achieved most of their strategic objectives fairly quickly. Even the “three-sided compact” between Andoran, Cheliax and Druma couldn’t counter the goblins’ early military gains. The goblinoids enjoyed every tactical advantage, including short supply lines, occupation of the region’s dominant terrain features, and greater numbers than their opponents could field. The Hobgoblin field marshal was preparing to announce reasonable terms for a general cease-fire when her spies brought her a grim warning: the Nidalese were preparing to betray the cause.
Pangolais had made an arrogant mistake, borne of simple racial condescension. Goblins are short-sighted, foolish and easily manipulated. Hobgoblins, however, are not. When Nidalese assassins moved to decapitate their proxy’s leadership, they vanished.
The Hobgoblins’ revolutionary council had always been cunning and paranoid. They distrusted their erstwhile benefactors from the start, and had cynically dispatched their own agents into Nidal to seek out evidence of duplicity as a simple matter of operational security. Disguised goblins and their allies learned the truth behind the so-called “Isgeri war of liberation” and uncovered the Nidalese plot to assassinate the new Isgeri government at the close of the war.
Caught between enemies on the field and enemies in their camp, the marshal did what no one would have suspected: she ceded the battlefield. The goblionoids didn’t lose the Goblinblood wars: they disengaged.
Today, 70-some years after the “end” of the overt war, very little has changed. The goblinoids still want Isger for a homeland. Mora than that, they want Nidal to bleed. A cold war has been underway between Nidalese and Isgeri agents for seven decades. All across Avistan, everywhere that Nidal has a shadowy hand in another nation’s business, disguised and lethal goblinoid agents are actively opposing them from the shadows.
The goblinoids will rise again. First, though, there are accounts to be settled …
~ * ~ * ~ *~
This premise gives me several character arc options, including strong motivations to follow the main AP plot: the Blue is motivated to join the party because he thinks that it will counter a Nidalese covert action (whether that’s true or not is up to the GM). The stealthy, rogue-ish Blue is included to distrust most everyone the party meets. The GM can drop in RP and combat encounters during the gaps in the AP (e.g., when the party goes to sell loot, the stable master in town becomes a Nidalese covert operative, etc.). The GM can drop clues and red herrings into odd places in order to make the party paranoid.
Moreover, the idea of a global cold war between Nidal and Isger justifies both the PC and the character arc’s villains to be nearly anywhere, and to have a good reason to come into conflict wherever they meet.
I think the idea has legs. I’m not sure which AP it would fit into best, though. Also, what it would take to weave the other PCs’ arcs into the overall story without it becoming distracting. That’s where I’m soliciting feedback.
What do you think, fellow gamers?
KH