Hey guys.
I'm just getting ready to start on a new game. The story is ready, I've chosen my players, all that's left is for me to fill in the blanks in my notebook and start building my individual sessions.
Amidst all the work I've been putting in, I've left one thing very important to the plot out. The campaign will involve the players travelling around a single country, trying to assemble the MacGuffin before the bad guy can assemble his own and release a great evil power upon the world. Despite the fact I've outlined this entire campaign, I seemed to encounter a block asto the exact form of the macguffin, but my creative juices were flowing so heavily for the story that I just continued to write the story that was coming to me and figured I'd come up with the exact form of the macguffin at a later date.
Well, as I mentioned earlier, this campaign is pretty much ready to go and I've got players chomping at the bit to play in it, so I really need to come up with this last detail, and fast. Since I'm still experiencing a block as to what to make it, I figured I'd toss it out here and see what kind of cool ideas all of you guys had, considering the density of creative talent on these boards.
A shattered statue or artifact weapon of a god, with awesome, world-changing powers? The BBEG is assembling a comparable artifact of an enemy god. Whoever finishes first bathes the world in either good or evil.
Not real original, but it works fine.
Can you tell us a bit more about your game? In which country is it set? Maybe you could give a broad overview of the theme of your game? Some information about your players might be useful as well. Is there anything juicy in their back stories? Once I've got a better grounding from you, I'll see if I can throw out some useful ideas.
An intelligent magic item that has an agenda of its own.
My first thought is a Construct of some sort. Perhaps they need to repair a golem, or create a homunculus as a clone of a long dead figure.
Many of the same ideas would work for undead as well. Perhaps a mummy or lich needs to be brought back, although it would probably help if the PC didn't know about the undead part until after.
This is also a good chance to set some nice campaign related limits. For example, a part of the macguffin could be an item that summons, but throws off teleport.
And one last thing, remember that some nice divination spells exist. Come up with some reasons why someone hasn't just located the thing and made off with it already.
Thanks for the quick replies! I do like the statue idea. The plot's there (not exactly THE most original, but it's been a story I've had outlined for years and finally have the right mix of players that tthe "investigation" portion of the campaign won't leave them scratching their heads).
Can you tell us a bit more about your game? In which country is it set? Maybe you could give a broad overview of the theme of your game? Some information about your players might be useful as well. Is there anything juicy in their back stories? Once I've got a better grounding from you, I'll see if I can throw out some useful ideas.
It's set in a homebrew game, but the country is pretty similar to Nirmithas (having recently won their independance). The broad strokes kinda look like this:
The players are all citizens of a small town that gets attacked one day by a powerful wizard and his horde of monsters in search of assembling this item. He gets the item, and leaves his mooks behind to "clean up the mess." The players rise to the challenge and defend their burning home from the attack. This is when they learn of two powerful artifacts that once sealed a great evil. One of the artifacts (I'll refer from here on out to as the "bad" artifact) holds a portion of the evil power, and with it, the power could be given back to the source, giving the entity enough power to break the cage, however the second artifact (referred to hereafter as the "good" artifact) is the actual key to the cage. The town the players begin in has a piece of both artifacts, and the town's priest tells the aforementioned myth, giving the players his piece of the good artifact. The players then must stop the BBEG from assembling the bad artifact, but also must assemble the good artifact in the event they aren't able to stop him. Occasionally, a piece of each artifact will be in the same location, where the players and BBEG's paths will cross. Eventually, the players discover that the BBEG isn't a powerful wizard at all, and is actually a power-hungry blue dragon that has been masquerading in human form. Pretty straight forward plot, not alot of twists and turns, unlike the game I just finished (I felt like giving my players a break). Again though, the plot-part I've got. It's what exactly the item is that I'm stuck on - not what it does.
And one last thing, remember that some nice divination spells exist. Come up with some reasons why someone hasn't just located the thing and made off with it already.
Thanks! This is good advice. I already came up with a reason for this, and because of the power these two artifacts hold, the original owners knew they needed to keep them hidden and so the macguffins were split into multiple parts, and were protected with powerful wish-magic to prevent divination of any kind - which means the players have to rely alot more on non-magical means of identification. My players want an investigation-heavy game, that's why I chose to dust off this old plot and finally run it as a game.
If there are two of them, and each requires all the parts to be made whole and working, all either side has to do is get one part of each item, and then wait for the other one to come after them. What is stopping either the good or bad guy from locating one of the parts of the "other" item to prevent that item's completion? If I get one bit of yours, and all the bits of mine, game over.
Just a thought - have you checked out the Carrion Crown adventure path? I'm GM'ing it now, and it seems like you could use it as a great foundation for your campaign.
How about double MacGuffin. There was a cartoon in the early 80's. The hero had half the star sword, the villian had the other, but together the swords were exponentially more powerful. Imagine if such a sword (i know its cliche but so is a MacGuffin) was in pieces. Perhaps the villan has a head start on collecting parts of his/her half of the sword and starts hunting/racing the PC's for the other half.
A cool idea I have thought about using in the past is making the pieces of the macguffin physically huge (you know to symbolize the immense power they unlock or hold and all that jazz). Perhaps they have to rearrange a set of buildings to make a specific shape, or the key is made up of absurdly huge pieces because in my ind deity's tend to be on the larger side of things and would proportionally be a normal sized key for them. Makes for in interesting plot development on how exactly they are going to be able to move the objects since magic is going to be unreliable and wonky.
Is there anything wrong with just making them keys? Where is your deep, dark evil sealed away? You could also go for something more interesting and metaphorical like a lever, a bore, a dimensional corkscrew, or something along those lines. You could even have there be something like the great machine in Fringe. Actually, I think that's an interesting idea.
If you have two minor MacGuffins, essentially two keys, each could activate the machine in a different way. To deal with the logical solution of the BBEG just camping on the machine, you could make it have really bad effects on anyone near it. To address the concerns of a poster above about just stealing one piece of the other teams key, you could have the pieces of the 2 keys interact poorly when in proximity to each other. This would also let you create some cool places that have been effected by the presence of opposing pieces.
Twist idea: The good priest is another agent of the villain. There is no bad MacGuffin. The good MacGuffin is warded so that no evil creature can touch it, so the villain has tricked the PCs into gathering and assembling the pieces for him.
As to what it is: I'm thinking a full set of clothing -- one magic item from each of the slots. Belts, boots, gloves, vests, the works (You can leave off a few if you can't get them together.) And once you're wearing all the right clothes, you can walk right through the gate only invited guests with the right garb can pass...
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5 lion constructs which when combined form Voltron, Defender of the Universe.
5 lion constructs which when combined form Voltron, Defender of the Universe.
+1
The sequel to this adventure is also called Voltron but the items are wagons, carriages and small carts.
Voltron is actually a cool idea. I'd base it off a chimera like creature though.
Pieces of a suit of armor. Crown, septer, and ring. Shattered fragments of a god's heart. Fallen stars of a forgotten constellation. Fang, claw, eye, horn, heart, and wings of six legendary beasts.
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Maybe the Maguffin is actually a room. One of the pieces is a key- that, when inserted into any door's lock, opens a door to the room. The room itself is a normal bedroom you might find in a tavern. Scattered around the world are around a hundred objects that were, at one point in time, located in the room- until... *something* happened. Nobody knows what, but all anyone knows is that after this "event" happened, that room, wherever it was originally located, no longer existed in the real world and could only be accessed via the key. All of the objects (quills, coins, chairs, articles of clothing, etc.) that were in the room at the time of this "event" were forever changed, along with the room, and all of them have (fairly random) supernatural powers that can alter reality or defy physics in some way or another. Some people say that a god died in the room, and that all of the objects are pieces of his corpse- and if you were to gather them all in the room, you would be able to talk to this god, or, possibly, become that god. Others say that's crap, and the objects were actually put in the world by that god as some sort of a test, causing people to scour the world for them like pilgrims during the crusades. Other people still say that that's all nonsense, and all of these objects are merely signs that the magic of the world is going haywire.
Hows about:
- The statues in the center of town in every village are actually inanimate golems.
- The bits the PC's are looking for allow them to fire up the network and get the golems doing good like defending the towns from attack, aiding in fires, repairs to major buildings etc... Think of a benevolent AI.
- The bits the BBEG are looking for allow him to upload himself into the golems and rule the kingdom with many many stone, iron and adamantine fists and make him immortal.
-For a twist the PC's could try to use the BBEG's bits to upload a champion of legend to protect the kingdom instead.
This would give you a bit of flexibility in having them actually have to track down the BBEG to prevent him or his successors from ever getting control of the golems... it might also lead to some fun about having to figure out if the corpse of the saint they've recovered is actually someone who can be trusted to be a full time golem wrangler... Were the storied of their good deeds accurate, or exagerations or were the motivations for his/her actions totally understood?
(Think of the town from Firefly who loved Jayne because he accidently dumped money on them while fleeing from a botched robbery.)
"will involve the players traveling around a single country, trying to assemble the MacGuffin before the bad guy can assemble his own"
Ummm....Why? If the players are traveling around to gather the same thing that the villain is why not just let the characters do the work and ambush them when they have it mostly or completely assembled??
Also wouldn't it occur to the players that they may in fact be working for the bad guy if they are doing the same thing he is?
Why not have the characters obtain and destroy a few key components?
Just wondering, not criticizing...
The inspiration for this idea came directly from The Wheel of Time series, so credit where its due, but...
How about a recently unearthed statue, a massive one which is capable of channelling tremendous magical power - perhaps it was used in the defense of a long-dead empire or created as an ultimate weapon but never used - anyway, to control it requires a smaller statue that looks just like it, or a suit of armor, or a special helm or a staff with multiple parts (:-P) or just about anything you can come up with that needs to be assembled.
The pieces of the controller were entrusted to noble families to ensure its use never fell into the wrong hands... houses rise and fall, and now pieces may be lost, buried with ancestors or whatever. Multiple triggers may exist, but a better way to go would be if the good guys and the bad guys each had parts of it and were not only in a race for the remaining pieces but also trying to steal away the parts each other had (Okay, THAT'S from G.I. Joe).
I would also reccomend making some of the 'parts' non-traditional, like to activate the controller requires that blood be spilt from a particular bloodline now lost, etc. Good chance to use Knowledge checks, to do research and puzzle things out.
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- The statues in the center of town in every village are actually inanimate golems.
Ooh, I like the idea that there might be a 'terra cotta army' of sorts waiting in plain sight all over the country, and by bringing each of the statues appropriate items, they could be activated to either attack every community from within, or defend them against assault, depending on who activates them and gives them instruction...
Just watch your carbs, MacGuffins tend to be very high in calories.
Pokemon
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Pages of a magical tome. Etched onto animal skins in Druidic. The players have to collect and re-bind the book. If one of them is a Druid, he'd be able to read it (it'd be whatever mystical mumbo-jumbo you can think of) but if he translates them for the rest of the party (or stands idly by while they succeed on too many Linguistics checks) then he loses his druid powers.
If the party doesn't have a druid, this has the added bonus of introducing a new group of villains-- pretty much any druid who finds a page or discovers the PCs have these pages would oppose them out of a duty to keep the Druidic language secret.
Well my idea kind of answers the 'who did the said locking' question.
Have the 'Good' Artifact that unlocks the prison consist of: a rod of Blue Adamantine (a very rare metal indeed), a large emerald that absorbed what little goodness the imprisoned entity may have possessed, plus three or four other items of whatever you want. Then to top it off, it must be used, willingly (so no mind control from the BBG), by a direct descendant of one of the spellcasters that imprisoned the being in the first place.
As for the 'Evil' Artifact, it contains the so much of the entity's power that it lies dorment. Releasing that power awakens it. The only item I can think of for it, is the gem that contains the power. A Ruby Cylinder that is placed in an Iron Golem for protection. The rest of the Artifact is just used to channel the power back to the entity.
What if the bad artifact is indeed a material thing, parts of a statue/amulet/ weapon/ cage/ book/ ark/ tablet/ anything that fits the evil god. BUT the good artifact is actually the essence/spirit/power/magic mojo or such contained in the person of an NPC or even one of the PC's and the mortal vessel is completely unaware they are the key that locks the evil in it's cage.
There are a couple stories you could draw inspiration from.
In the Elfstone's of Shanarra an ancient tree acts as a seal locking the demonic dimension away. Every several thousand years the tree needs a replacement. You could use the pieces as parts of a ritual device that transforms a young elf into the new tree.
In Dungeon Siege 2 there are two artifacts that were once forged by the good giants and the evil giants. The evil one is a sword the good one is a shield. In the past when the sword met the shield it created a cataclysm that reshaped the world and altered the way magic worked. Two bad guys work to get the shield remade (it was shattered) one wants it for world conquest the other one to enslave the world to a group of evil death mages. The second bad guy is a deceiver and plays the heroes and main BBEG against each other to achieve his final victory. Unfortunately the artifacts have destinies of their own. The evil sword seems to drive it's wielders mad with power. And much to everyone's surprise the reforged shield is stronger than the sword the second time the sword meets shield. The evil sword is shattered. The second bad guy steals the good shield but can't use it since he is evil. So the expansion of the game involves chasing down the second bad guy before he reassembles the sword and finishes the portal to the evil death mages that want to enslave everyone.
How about this as an inversion:
Instead of two sets of artifacts to assemble into two constructs...
There are remnants of a Godswar from millennia ago, which have been laying dormant while the assorted spells that keep them from being scryed on have slowly run out - when you're a hundredth level wizard, even your decade-per-caster-level spells eventually run out.
Now there's an arms-race as people attempt to collect artifacts that do things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Nearly all of them offer Mind Boggling Power at Sanity Wrecking Prices!
Your party is there to recover these items for an employer or two. Some of them should be items that Nobody Should Have - and they'll have to explain to their employer why they were sunk into the ocean/dropped into volcanoes/given to his enemies because the side effect will hurt the enemies more than the power will help.
Some of them have already been picked up by other adventuring teams for other employers.
Some of them are for sale on the black market.
It's a bit more Warehouse 13 than what you've proposed, but is much more flexible...
How about each X generations, a few children are born with part of the whole. Having your party find and protect a gaggle of children is just plain fun.
After they are assembled the children must sing/dance/play in proximity to draw out the power/item/spirit...
Strictly speaking, the following is not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin has nothing to do with the plot--it's just something everybody wants. The Maltese Falcon is the classic example.
The Doomsday Clock
The clock has the ability to give somebody infinite time. If you set the minute hand back, time in an area with a 30' radius around the clock stops as if it was under the effect of a Time Stop spell for a minute.
The clock can be used an unlimited number of times, but it can never be turned back more than a minute at a time. If left alone, it continues to advance the time normally and never needs winding or tending.
If the clock should ever strike midnight, the minute can no longer be turned back and the following effects target everything and every one in a radius of 500 miles around the clock and repeat once a minute for as long as the clock continues to function. All effects are as if cast by a 20th level caster.
Storm of Vengeance
Stormbolts
Feast of Ashes
Cup of Dust
Slow
Waves of Exhaustion
Horrid Wilting
Fester, Mass
Sands of Time
The clock cannot be destroyed, but 3 of the gears can be jammed or removed with a DC 35 Disable Device check. This will stop the clock from functioning or advancing until they are replaced.
The bad guy could have learned about the clock and be seeking the 3 gears that had been previously removed to make it work.
You could go with the single greatest MaGuffin of modern cinema:
THE CLOVERFIELD MONSTER
I would look for real world inspiration. Lost knowledge from the library of Alexandria, find the Golden Fleece, kill the Medusa and turn the Kraken to stone.
A now-legendary adventuring wizard kept a journal since he was fresh out of apprenticehood. On a lark, he made it magical so he never had to worry about running out of pages, ink, or having it ruined by water (kind of the way enthusiastic engineering students will over-design side projects in school). He merely thought into it, and the words appeared on the page. Later, he was able to occasionally make illustration pages that gave the viewer a vision of his memory.
It is now very, very important.
His adventuring band ended up locking the great evil away with a ritual that was researched during his travels, most of which was detailed (sometimes in roundabout ways) in his journal. After sealing away the evil, he perished, but the book remained.
Realizing the danger of his book, people tore out tracts and scattered them, but few portions were actually really destroyed (kept out of hero worship, sold for money as a celebrity relics, kept by bibliophile mages and clerics who don't believe in destroying knowledge- humanity will do weird things). The villain has acquired the main cover and forced his spirit back into it, attaching a device that renders him more pliable, even if greatly dulled. (If the device is destroyed, the spirit will make the book enormously unhelpful until another can be made- a potential delaying device for the party). He has also acquired a few tracts to date, but there are more he needs.
The journal does not contain the entire ritual itself. Some elements are described explicitly, when its relevance was not grasped, but most of it is not contained inside- simply hinted at in roundabout ways, or the locations and events of where the ritual's elements and components were gathered are named. The villain will have to not only gather the tracts, but study them and find the ritual's process via retracing the mage's steps.
One of his friends- either another member of his band, or someone he met on his adventures and had a great influence on- created a similar book after seeing his. When his spirit departed, hers left as well to find him. Seeing what has happened, she causes her book to be found (perhaps only able to act in indirect ways without the help of a skilled medium), and she possesses her own book.
Less advanced than his, her own book contains none of the valuable information, but if the mage's tracts are placed in her book, she can absorb its contents into her own. Since she is not under the effects of a controlling artifact, she is much more helpful in digesting the tracts for those she trusts, but she is not as skilled as the mage was and probably couldn't suss out the ritual on her own. She could provide direction as to the context of ambiguous sections or how things were different in history. (Interesting fluff possibility- she can only communicate via altering the text on the inside cover of her book and occasionally "poltergeist-ing" small objects. She also might only speak an old/obscure language and would have to learn others over the course of an adventure)
The party would be racing the villain for tracts, but could leave them where they were after copying them to trick the villain into thinking he is ahead of them. The tracts themselves are quite resilient to damage, and if they leave the plane, the main book can be used to track them down with a sympathetic link. Both the party and the villain have to ponder what is useful and what is not in the information contained in the passages, and look for components to the ritual. The villain wants to reverse the ritual and unseal the great evil- for the party, the ritual can be re-enacted to renew its strength and make sure that even if the villain is not killed, the evil cannot be released for generations more.
@Parka: So...sort of like a PF version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? C'mon gang; Lets go sleuthing!
@Parka: So...sort of like a PF version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? C'mon gang; Lets go sleuthing!
Did not watch much more than a few episodes of the game show. I was mainly thinking along the lines of a McGuffin that was more than just a tool. Multiple types of adventures are possible- anything that the passage relates could be an important part of the ritual. You might have to secure the aid of a neutral nature spirit when it comes time for the ritual. You might have to speak words of power at a ley line convergence (which isn't where it used to be, thanks to continental shift or the influence of new cities nearby). A tract might be guarded by an academic or religious order devoted to preserving knowledge, and they don't believe you that you don't want to destroy it or use it to unleash the evil. If you get a hold of it anyway, copy it with your book, then leave it there intact, they become a resource, as they will fight the villain just as hard as they did you. The party can also form a plan to leave the tracts behind them, but alter the ingredients/needed events they point to in order to fool the villain. Done well, this might even work until the first time the villain catches on, and has to go back and double-check each item (buying them more time). Then again, this would likely be really hard since this is a centuries-old dragon with massive influence.
The fact that the McGuffin itself is actually just a guidebook to the rest of a variety of McGuffins gives you an extra "layer" of leeway to work with if you want it. It also makes both villain and heroes searching for the same item, instead of trying to come up with a reason there are two identical items and having to find them both. The party still has to protect their book, but they don't need to keep hold of the tracts they find. It might even be a liability if they do- if the villain can track the tracts themselves (perhaps only once in a while, like one tract each full moon or something), holding on to them for too long can prove dangerous (though a clever party can make a plan using it).
Dotting. There are some good ideas here, good luck.
SGH