As a DM/GM, sometimes we're tasked with creating situations so dramatic that we alter the very outlook of our world setting. I'm staring down the long barrel of the repercussions of my world-altering event and wondering what have other DM's done and how the players have reacted to it in your games.
For the record, here's what I've done (set in the Forgotten Realms, Cormyr):
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Sitressa Vyshaan, a scion of the reviled elven House Vyshaan, has waited long enough. Consorting with various parties throughout the Dalelands region as well as the returned Shadovar, they have come upon a means to move old mythals and reactivate their powers. Sitressa's vengeance would not be sated by this discovery, though - she did perceive that when a pre-existing mythal came in contact with another one, devastating effects could be achieved. By strategically launching an attack against Evermeet, she and her forces effectively razed the island of Evermeet to the ground. The entire population of Evermeet (with a few exceptions that managed to magically whisk themselves away) is dust and ash.
Sitressa's last known whereabouts were being seen heading towards Old Cormanthor and its ancient city of Myth Drannor.
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There's a lot of other details that are going on behind the scenes (obviously) and I'm planning to tie up quite a few loose dangly plot threads I've got floating about. Not to mention all the juicy roleplaying options I've got - Sitressa is the mistress of the father of a character, Evermeet is the childhood home of another, the sheer loss of all the Names is going to affect the truenamer monk, and the repercussions on the Weave is going to mess up the power-addicted sorcerer even more. Mwah-hah-hah!
And yes, this is an Epic Level Campaign.
In my old Mage campaign, the PCs were coming to grips with Pentex as it started to implement its plans for the end of the earth. Unfortunately, we didn't get far before the game collapsed... but a grand plan had been laid.
I'm planning for a world-changing event to occur in an upcoming campaign. If the PCs last until around 12th-level (starting at 5th), then the villain will get a hold of many powerful artifacts that the PCs recovered from a dungeon's depths and possibly destroy some villages and towns.
~evil laughter~ So Lilith, Evermeet is now Evermoot? ~WEG~ Oh, those poor players! As I said before, oh Demon Queen of Victuals, You are pure, unaduterated evil! EVIL!!! Can I join your game? ~pouts~ Damn, too far away to join!
Well, you have some choices; but basically; if your players can't affect the game environment they will loose faith in you and the game. You can always have gods and npcs oppose the players choices and try to fix or undo things; but basically I would recommend that you let the game go and have reprecussions in the world as seems fit; it is after all their game also. Any big problem they cause is just an opportunity for another groups of young adventures to fix. Reclaiming thrones and reclaiming lost lands is the thing heroes do; it all seems to work out so dont worry about your world breaking or such.
Valegrim, as my other half put it (he's also one of the players), it will either be the best thing I've ever done as a DM, or the biggest belly-flop. One of the things I'm concerned about is my pacing - I have a tendency to either rush things or to plod through bits. I've determined that I'm going to have to lay out all my loose danglies (plot threads) and tie everything together and do some creative brainstorming to get my ideas organized.
We were discussing game at lunch yesterday and giving real world parallels to the events that transpired in Sunday's game, and it's pretty staggering when you think about it in those terms. The psychological effects of an entire species damn near wiped out in a single night is something that will be chewed upon for a while, not to mention the abject fear that might be struck in some other nations. "If this could happen to Evermeet, it could happen to us."
But this way, I've got at least a year of game fodder, which isn't easy, especially at Epic levels, before we plan on moving out of Bend. That way, I can wrap up the campaign that's been running since September 2003 with a big shiny bow.
And then start to do a webcomic of it. :P
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We were wanting to try out some god-like characters and we were talking about "what if XXXX character we played back when was epic level" and so on. To kind of go with it, I let people choose their character from any world they wanted and it was my job to make it all work. The problem was that there were characters from Eberron and some from Forgotten Realms. I made the main emphasis be a massive destructive "portal" of some kind that linked the two worlds with the quori behind it all. (They were feeding on the weave and trying to use it to free them in Eberron.) Overall, it worked fairly well, but I made it a kind of treasure hunt which really bogged down with epic levels and we never finished it.
Hmmm for me the biggest world-altering decision as a DM/GM would have had to have been when I was running my "homebrew" campaign Argoth (circa 2nd edition) and using the Sea Devils Monstrous Arcana sourcebook and module trilogy, and the players failed to stop the Deep Mother from awakening the godling Anggelisus(sp?) who upon his return consumed the captive PCs and began opening vortices from the Elemental Plane of Water and flooding the world of Argoth. (Off camera (as it were) it is said that this evil plot was halted before the world was entirely covered by its oceans.) Although years later (our time) I decided to run a 3rd edition "sequel" and have it take place in "Argoth; the Drowned World." I set this new campaign centuries after the Drowning of the World. The wizard in the party was on the cusp of uncovering how the world was once very different, and discovering what had happened and how it MIGHT be undone. Unfortunately, "grown-up" life prevented further exploration of "Argoth; The Drowned World." I really enjoyed that campaign and would like to one day see about coming back to it, perhaps with newer players, unaware of what has gone on before.
PS: it should be noted that the player of the wizard in the 3e game, was also a player in the 2e game (and of a wizard sort, a wild mage) and two things he did (or failed to do) may have caused the group to fail (in the 2e game.) He forgot about having 2 scrolls of protection from water, and a spell of his creation backfired badly, harming enemies and allies, and manifested as ice (and they were underwater at the time.) ~sigh~ good times, fond memories.
But this way, I've got at least a year of game fodder, which isn't easy, especially at Epic levels, before we plan on moving out of Bend.
If you don't mind me asking, where ya moving to?
Oh, and Lilith + Webcomic = Good. :-D
/off-topic
My Eberron PCs were on the trail of a yugoloth who wanted to restart the last war for its artistic possibilities, but turned around in Karrnath after a PC and a cohort got killed.
As a result, they only got his schemes secondhand in Sharn, managed to sour a major deal with the Emerald Claw, but really focused on more mundane matters until their hand was forced.
By the time they finally decided to deal with the creature, Karrnath was engulfed in civil war... and the Emerald Claw won. Vol is now the direct ruler of Karrnath, although she delegates authority to her Church. None of the other major nations want to make a move for fear of triggering attacks while their defenses are down, and the new Karrnath is content to make diplomatic overtures.
Suffice it to say, my Eberron's become a rather darker place.
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Valegrim, as my other half put it (he's also one of the players), it will either be the best thing I've ever done as a DM, or the biggest belly-flop.
I think all the good stuff in life is like that.
I had a brainstorm. A really powerful individual is capturing ALL (if he or she can help it) of the remaining elves in an insanely desperate plan to save the species. Kinda one of those villains that means well, but is totally off-base with their assumptions about life.
~in an Italian accent~ Itsa looks likesa the Deomon Queen of Victulas is cooking a Castastro pie! A nice and warm one!
~in an Italian accent~ Itsa looks likesa the Deomon Queen of Victulas is cooking a Castastro pie! A nice and warm one!
Yep - except right now I'm making a shopping list of what's in my catastro-pie. The oven's hot, time to make the dough. :P
Thanis, I'm thinking 'bout moving to Portland, Oregon. *crosses fingers*
my biggest world altering event that doesn't reflect direct player character actions is actually the culmination of a series of subthreads from my current and last three campaigns that will all come to a head between this campaign (still going on) and the next one.
At the end of the campaign before this one, a war between the Mehari Empire (the PC's standard home base in my campaign) and Hasham Lahn, a neighboring country that is a long standing rival of the Empire was ended suddenly with some unusual process that very few of the world's population knows much about.
All that is known for certain by most of the population is that neither side won entirely, that there is now a 'no man's land' region between the two countries that neither side lays claim to (A lawless land where criminals often hide, a frontier in a settled land), and a city near this land is now an independant land. Creatures from the Planes have been showing up over much of the land without necessarily being summoned, indicating that whatever the process was, it left the barriers between planes weakened.
The generals of the Mehari Empire chafe at this 'draw' and blame the rulers of the Empire (which is a theocracy). They are in the process of researching and gaining a power base as they scheme, and in the five to ten year gap between the end of the current campaign and the start of the next, they will strike.
The Empire will be fragmented, the Emperor's family dead or in hiding, the military ruling things and keeping the church from the power it had until recently. Paladins are not allowed to serve in the military, and all of the countries near the Empire look at the fragmented nation and think of expansion.
Into this a new group of heroes rise from humble beginnings....
I'm thinking 'bout moving to Portland, Oregon. *crosses fingers*
No No...the middle east is where its at! I command all of you to move to Qatar!
<Sigh> Hey a guy can dream can't he?
I'm thinking 'bout moving to Portland, Oregon. *crosses fingers*No No...the middle east is where its at! I command all of you to move to Qatar!
<Sigh> Hey a guy can dream can't he?
Portland Rocks! If I had a choice of cities to live in it would be Portland. The Rivers, proximity to the Columbia River Gorge, Mt. Hood, the Oregon Coast, Powell's Books, The Original House of Pancakes (if you haven't been there you can't know), besides just being a really neat city.
If you are going to the Middle East come to Dubai - Its super hip right now (much hipper than Qatar - come on Raider). But the Middle East will definately give you a new perspective on what a cosmopolitan city looks like - America for all of the talk about being a melting pot is very homegeneous by comparison.
Don't get me wrong - there are quite a few things I like about the Middle East, the least of which is the food. :) However, there is a large variety of reasons, a list which is growing, to move out of this town and into another. Powell's Books is just one of them - school is another.
Vattnisse, I'm pretty sure that there's a shuttle from Eugene to Portland that goes up on a daily/weekly basis. :)
Biggest world-altering decisions as a GM eh ?
I would have to use the example of the most recent one, in a GURPS campaign. The players had all arrived at GW Hospital in DC. One of the PCs is an MD, so she was rummaging for trouble in the morgue before proceeding to the ER. (Literally - the player said "I'm looking for something exciting at work.") Well, the Fed and the fireman went downstairs as well to observe her autopsy. The fireman failed his Fright Check, acquired a quirk : "Finds the dead fascinating" ... and proceeded to start rummaging through the drawers. The doc and the fed quickly leave for the ER after discovering that the victim [who was originally found as a John Doe in an alley in Southeast DC] had something eat several organs and then exit the carcass through the same entry wound above those organs. The other 4 PCs arrive, as they had more or less planned on going out on the town to party a bit (they had previously driven off a small pack of werewolves with battle rifles and hand grenades - that was what the werewolves had). The fireman, alone in the basement, totally forgetting the pervasiveness of closed circuit cameras in many modern institutional buildings, eventually hears the security guard enter the room. A brief discussion follows. Now, the fireman had already died once and had the foresight to prepurchase an extra life by way of reincarnation for his character. In this case, he came back with some fairly useful, albiet not full scaled, fire-and-heat related abilities. So, he shifts to "thermal imaging" vision while kneeling on the floor with an open door, bag freshly zippered open ... and realizes the guard, while animate and rather clearly unhappy with his presence in the morgue, does not have human-level body heat. He also feels some *thing* moving in the torso of the carass beneath his hands.
Needless to say, a scuffle ensues, a vampire security guard gets set on fire for a few seconds (before putting itself out with the fire extinguisher on the wall), the fireman encounters a second vamp guard in the hall, the second vamp critfumbles and starts doing the electricity-tango (his steel-rod reinforced nightstick went into a main electrical junction box on the wall - oopsth) and the first vamp sneaks up behind the fireman and literally knocks his brain out of his skull (with a critical hit to the head and double athletic human strength, well ...)
Generally, I don't smoke PCs in GURPS, and generally I run the game almost entirely ad-lib, with a general tendency to stick to consistencies I establish as the campaign developes. However, the hospital's power starts failing catastrophically, emergency lights are coming on ... and the cell phones come out and start failing too. Then the police and fire dispatch systems start malf'ing, failing altogether in a matter of hours. And I ask myself "what was percolating in the chest of the cadaver ?" I'd already had in mind to have something icky creepy this go 'round. The world-altering decision was to take it to "dawn of the dead" level. The loss of power spread worldwide, satellites (unknown to the PCs so far) have largely started dropping out of the sky like bird poo and tentaclecritterbeasties are crawling out of the carcasses of the infected. The PCs split as soon as they realized there was a Tentaclecritterbeastie in the hospital - as well as realizing that they'd almost fed four more PCs into a meat grinder. (One fatality and two serious injuries occured among the player characters, out of 7 in about 5 to 10 minutes' game time. The same vamp smoked one and injured the other two. The Fed currently talks like Christopher Walken, the gun bunny is delerious and rather badly in need of a blood transfusion at the moment ...)
See if that sounds like a sufficiently world-altering decision. <weg>
I'm thinking 'bout moving to Portland, Oregon. *crosses fingers*No No...the middle east is where its at! I command all of you to move to Qatar!
<Sigh> Hey a guy can dream can't he?
If it wasn't for my family, my job, etc. I'd take you up on it. I went to Egypt and Morocco as a kid and I was fascinated by the culture. That's the closest I've gotten to the middle east. I love middle eastern food....
Biggest game altering decision?
Kinda mundane actually--I introduced Spelljammer into the campaign. The players loved the Rock of Bral and the goofy fun it was.
I one time had a Top Secret campaign move into a D&D world--that was a riot. Who knew the warhead on a Redeye MANPAD wasn't big enough to take down a red dragon?
MANPAD = Man Portable Air Defense System (shoulder launched anti-air missiles generally have fairly small warheads as planes in flight are pretty fragile....and dragons in flight are not.)
Destorying Evermeet....hmmmm. On some levels will it matter? This isn't to say that it isn't a sigificant event in the history of elves but to most of the realms at large, Evermeet is more of a legend than a reality. The classic if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?
Of course, the essential destruction of the elven race would be a huge impact on the remaining elves. I can see half-elves rising to prominence as it would be entirely possible that there are more half-elves than elves.
Players might seek a way to restore elves to the world. Perhaps exploring the planes to find elves that would return to FR and colonize and restore them as a race. This option is good way to recover esp at epic lvl.
Perhaps the remaining elves become angry with their human successors and begin consolidating who is left with the intent with reclaiming their anceint homelands that the human's drove them out of unleashing so much destruction and chaos that drow would sigh in envy.
*chuckles* One of my ideas has always to have the Elves return and take back what was once theirs. So Evermeet is utterly destroyed but at the last moment a magical signal to an armada of elven vessels sailing the planes is sent and they all return with one mission. Retake and rebuild their lost lands and remove who ever was squatting on their old property. Definitely epic lvl stuff too.
As for my world altering event, I was running a Palladium Fantasy RPG and in one of the early adventures my group found the 'Foot of Osiris'. Without even trying this odd little artifact led to the best campaign I have ever run. The players investigated how Osirus died and discoverd that his body had been ripped apart and spread around the world. On their own initiative, they began seeking the rest of Osirus. Their goal? To ressurect this dead god. It totally changed the direction and focus of the campaign. Over then next two years (real time) the group slowly collected Osirus, discovered a process to help them find each missing part, and came up with a plan to actually raise this god from the dead.
Of course as things progressed, other god's got involved and not all of them wanted Osirus to return. The closer the players got to success the harder and worse the opposition became. The gods were beginning to take sides and what ended up happening was a God's War.
The Assassin god was stalking my now high level group as well has their arch nemisis the Dark Lord (cliché I know).
It all cumlinated in the death of several gods, the ascention of new ones. The players ended up becoming the final diplomats between the old remaining gods and these new ones lead by the now resurrected Osirus. In the end, they settled things by taking anyone who wanted to new land and start over again with the new gods becoming the icons of this new people.
It was really great. The players still talk about it and its been almost 20 years since I ran it.
Well, it's been about 21 months' game time since the " Big D'oh!! " and no one else has died ... yet. Two characters have retired (into political positions of all things) and thier replacements are ... interesting.
World altering decisions are hard to predict, sure enough.
As a D&D DM, I'd wager having Tharizdun start prodding the cracks of reality would be the case ... that was a basis FOR a campaign, rather than a decision to alter it in play. (Granted, the campaign in question began after the PCs failed miserably in a previous attempt to stuff his carcass into a bottle...)
Can I just say Lilith? Keep a cautious eye out for Sel Carim, cause it has always been HIS personal asperation to smoke Evermeet and he may take exception (...or hug you)
As far as the biggest world alteration I've been witness to, we played a game of L5R once where we journeyed to Tengoku and over the course of a few months time utterly bungled what we were there to do and let the doors to the Realm of Slaughter open and the Fountain of Time be magically stoppered by some crazy kenku bakemono thing. So basically until we were able to fix it the 28 days later army was allowed to stride through heaven killing whatever it wanted in crazy legions. We got it fixed--sorta' only to find out that in the world we had been gone 60 years and that due to the deaths of two of the dragons that embody the elements there is now no Void but what people are reincarnated with (you can still spend it, but spend your last and your everlasting essence is snuffed! Yipe!) and the sky looked funny--because no AIR! Or to put it more accurately there's no new air and the sky level is slowly dropping like the water in a leaky snowglobe (double yipe!). Beautiful night skies though--heck the days are pretty cool too now that you can see stars in the daytime. Because void is gone now, so to has the power behind honor, and the world has been thrown into a warring states period with clans having broken down into warring family lines. Cool setting...but whoa.
A moon slams into the game world, everything dies, unless they want to play cockaroaches. <weg>
A moon slams into the game world, everything dies, unless they want to play cockaroaches. <weg>
But wait! Perhaps by getting four masks (that will only try to attack them in the end as it is) the PCs can awaken four naked ugly fellows to push the moon back into orbit.
Oh, and did I mention that said moon has a face?
(Hmm...this reminds me of something...what is it? ;) )
A moon slams into the game world, everything dies, unless they want to play cockaroaches. <weg>But wait! Perhaps by getting four masks (that will only try to attack them in the end as it is) the PCs can awaken four naked ugly fellows to push the moon back into orbit.
Oh, and did I mention that said moon has a face?
(Hmm...this reminds me of something...what is it? ;) )
Sounds like one of the Greek Titan myths ...
Lets see...
In my last 3e Planescape game: I killed off Anthraxus, Mydianchlarus, Cholerix, and Bubonix. Xenghara was sold to the Hag Countess of Baator (with the implication that she'd had a connection to the hag coven that had created him and who he'd later slaughtered). I ripped the third layer of Elysium, Belarian, free from its plane and drug it across the Great Wheel to become (briefly) the 4th Gloom.
That was just before half the campaign was done.
Progress a bit further and the death toll on the part of the Companions of Elysium was pretty brutal, and likewise I killed off around 1/3 of the Baernaloths who comprised The Demented. And a few other named individuals in Sigil had some very good or very unfortunate things happen to them.
In the current campaign (150 years after that first one), the planes are very different in some ways regarding the balance of power on the planes of conflict.
Alternative World-Altering Decisions (degree of recommendability is, of course up to the GM):
Zombie plague sweeps the world, almost everyone dies, PCs find themselves hip deep in the Hungry Dead.
A big meteor falls, everyone dies.
Thermonuclear detonation, everyone nearby dies.
A planet slams into the game world, everyone on both worlds dies, campaign goes in File 13.
Sapient, tool-using Utahraptors invade, devouring all in thier path, everyone probably becomes Meat Snacks.
The PCs all get married, have babies, become domesticated, a generation passes, the Great Wyrm they cheesed off 20 years ago kills them all in thier sleep, everybody dies except children bent on revenge ...
A Devouring Horde of carnivorous hobbits pours from a gate in the largest metropolis of the game world. They seem to revolve culturally around a book titled " To Serve Man ".
The Great Artifact Hunt. PCs embark on a series of quests to track down the " kewl " artificts, find them, find out that they are cursed items, finally get rid of them, resume tracking down the REAL artifacts, hilarity ensues.
The BBEG of the campaign is an Evil Overlord fully versed in the 300 rules of Evil Overlords. PC deaths and hilarity ensues.