So most of my players prefer a sort of free-form non-linear game with some railroading as necessary. I'm designing a reboot for when the current game ends and in said reboot the party begins in a town with a megadungeon nearby.
Since I and a lot of my players enjoy a bit of plot with our dungeon hacking, I have a sort of ROTRL vibe going. They get thrown together in the first scene when some giant rats attack in town, then as they go on in between major plot events and trips to the megadungeon they have these downtime encounters with the folks in town
The main plot device for the campaign is the townsfolk. They are going to be handing out the missions, one way or another. My question (finally) is: should I have missions specific to each NPC or should I have a roster of potential mission starters and roll these randomly, adapting them to the NPC at hand.
For example: one of the first people the party meets is the mom of the kids they try to save in the very first scene. Hopefully they succeed and become the heroes of the town and this mom. Anyway, I was going to have a mission keyed to the mom where she wants to know what happened to her husband (dragged off to the megadungeon). However, then I got to thinking: what if instead I had like 4 mission starters (missing family member, lost item, divine revelation, arcane event) that she then has to adapt to her? If I rolled divine revelation, maybe the mom's been having bad dreams about her kids and gives some insight to suggest something's coming after them from the megadungeon?
Anyway, keyed missions or random missions: which do you think is better?
I think you're off on the wrong foot. If they want a "free-form non-linear" game then the worse possible thing would be a "megadungeon". Megadungeon is the opposite of free form. You also don't want "major plot events".
Take your town folk, decide what has happened to them, and leave it at that. As the players learn about things that have happened, they decide what to do about it.
Ok, I thought that might be the case. So if I avoid the megadungeon and just turn that into dozens of smaller "adventure sites" instead, your suggestion is to tie specific missions to specific NPCs?
Megadungeon can work as free form as long as it is mega enough to provide its own ecosystem and internal economy (i.e. not just the super-big lair of a single creature/organisation). Basically, a dozen of separate adventure sites within the same "dungeon".
I find that cue cards (or plot cards, or quest cards) can work to railroad a free-form game without resorting to a huge locomotive. These can vary from simple game-starters such as "hire player B as your guide to town X" to more lasting, complex quests such as "return lost prince to the king". Such cue cards can represent quests given to the PCs or internal ambitions of the characters; they are simply driving goals that orient players toward something you have worked on.
When I used that, I included also more silly ones or more open-ended ones such as "jump out of a window" and see how the player would integrate it into its play. All cue cards came with some kind of reward, sometimes in XP, sometimes in the form of re-roll or punctual bonus... One player received a "get out of jail for free" card...
'findel
@Findel: I PM'd you a question about your cue cards.
I had a thought, after reading todd's post. Rather than have a megadungeon per se, instead there is a "dungeon-like" wilderness nearby. Here's what I mean:
Take a Small City (the one I designed is called Inderwick) and place a forested bog area immediately to its south-west. Then drop some boreal forest to the northeast. In classic dark ages fantasy europe style, there's open land around the city's hinterlands; these lands are arable for pastures, farms and such. As a result the immediate surroundings of the city are "suburbs" forming villages in the shadow of the city's walls, anywhere from 5-10 miles due north or due east of the city.
Now take a magical global event that caused the wilds to grow uncontrolably for decades at a rate many times normal expansion. The forested bogs that before came nearly to the gates of the southern half of the city just simply consumed a quarter of the settlement. Meanwhile the boreal woodland similarly gobbled most of the villages in the hinterlands. People either fled to a sister city to the north in the rugged hills or retreated into what was left of the main city. Here they waited out the disaster the best they could.
Now when the game reboots at level 1, the PCs come into the city 20 years after the event (I'm calling this the Wilding). Over the past 5 years a group of mercenaries hired by the city called the Lantern Watch has reclaimed some sparse holdings in the south quarter but there is still much of the city's old structure lying in ruins amid this new wilderness. Out in the hinterlands similar ruins where the villages once stood litter the landscape.
So...the party will come into the city, meet some NPCs and explore the city. These NPCs will provide them with quests or at least random ideas based around the wilds, the ruins or whatever. So one NPC might have a husband that's gone missing in the southern quarter; another NPC may have a desperate need for a root that's known to grow in the treacherous bogs; a third NPC has to get an important missive to the city to the north.
The "dungeons that make up the Megadungeon" then become the ruins, their underhalls (if any) and other wilderness encounters. Essentially, the city the PCs begin in is at the heart of the "Megadungeon" they'll be exploring.
Phew, now, with that out of the way...
should I have specific events keyed to the NPCs individually, or rather do a random assortment that can be modified and added to an NPC/Place whenever needed?