Story Seeds #2

Another pack of ideas. Use them as you wish and do not forget to send feedback in comments!

Blizzard

This story hook is a great starting point for horror/survival themed session: players' characters get lost during a snowstorm. They can see nothing but white, and the only thing they can hear is the moaning of the wind. Suddenly, they find an old, strangely looking cloak, and a moment later members of a gruesome cult start to attack them screaming something about "the secret artefact" and "the ceremony". Sessions where the visibility is limited by snow storm or fog are very easy to manage, since a GM can treat the whole scenario as a classical dungeon: places with something important for the story are like chambers, rambling in the mist is like a passage or corridor between two rooms, while the fog is "walls".

The Conqueror

This one is not so universal, for it requires specific political conditions, however, I have found it most interesting and thus decided to post it anyway. The story takes place somewhere on the border of a war zone: one country invades another and starts to push forward into their territory. The main general of the invading nation is some kind of legend - he managed to earn a nickname - the Conqueror (you can give him the first name fitting to your campaign). Thus far there is not much space for your players, is it? The problem is that the next province to conquer is the undiscovered lonesome marshland. The Conqueror and his contingent, drunk with the series of successful battles, have disappeared when they entered the land. The player characters are hired to follow their trace and find them.

Pervert

 

A pervert rapes and kills an innocent child on a playground. Well, at least he is accused of these dreadful deeds. You know what such situation looks like in small towns -- everyone wants the man suffer a painful death. The assumption is that the characters are outsiders and they are hired to investigate the whole case. The real fun begins when during the investigation they discover a lot of serious crimes that cannot be proved committed by the same guy, and the fact that he is not guilty of the one that he is accused of. Will the players' characters put the guy in jail for the thing he has not done? And what will they do with the real rapist and killer who walks free?

Story Seeds #1

Since I am in the middle of writing my M.A. thesis and I have not got much time lately for creating articles that would be of a satisfactory quality, I have decided to start a small series of posts in which I will give you several story seeds. These will not be fully prepared scenarios, just few sentences describing a particular problem in general. Whether you need a hook to start a campaign, a single scenario or a side quest, you can use these and develop them in a way you like. I will try to choose stories from different genres, and keep them as setting-free as I can, so you will be able to easily adjust them to your setting, whether it is heroic fantasy, horror, space opera or post-apocalypse. I hope you find these posts useful.

Unknown teenager

In the small town surrounded by farms people start disappearing. No one knows what is going on, except one of the farmers. This fellow has got a son who is unknown to the community, because he was born with mental illness/mutation (or whatever else that fits to your campaign) and the father hid him. Now the boy is sixteen and has started to kidnap and kill people. The old father, despite everything, loves the boy, and every time someone is murdered, he takes care of the body, that he buries somewhere on his farm. How long the father will be able to hide his son's deeds? Who will be caught, since all the evidence points the father? Will the old man's love to his child be that great to take the responsibility? And last but not least: will players' characters catch the right guy?

Engagement

Sitting in a bar or an inn characters can see a boy who proposes to his beautiful girlfriend. She is clearly happy, however she seems to be a little worried too. A moment later a strange mist covers the whole room, no one can see anything, and when some people open the windows and the mist disappears, the beauty is missing. Guests sitting close to the entrance admit that they have heard opening and closing the door during this unfortunate event, and that is the beginning of the theory that the girl has been kidnapped. The truth, however, is much more complicated: the girl is a mutant/shape-shifter who has lived among the people for a very long time, but there are periods (night, for example) when she is unable to hide her true nature. If she marry the poor boy, there will be no possibility to keep him unaware of her condition during this time, and, having this in mind, she panicked, used her special powers/some kind of device and ran away.

The old gambler

The last story seed is short and much more open than the previous two. The police/city guards find more and more half-eaten bodies. There is no connection among the victims -- they are of different age, gender, wealth and occupation. The only fact that they share, apart from being half-eaten, is a dead sparrow left near the place where the gruesome feast took its place. The only way to discover the real murderer is to outplay the old gambler who is known in the town for having 'an evil blood' and his ancestors 'shall remain unknown for their deeds forever'.

"Few days earlier..."

Few days ago I read a great article on slyflourish.com about strong starts of RPG sessions. Since this is merely a comment and one additional trick I came up with, I strongly recommend you to read the original article before reading this post. I am not going to retype anything what is in the article by SlyFlourish for two reasons: Firstly, the guy did a very good job and, secondly, that would be copyright violation in my personal view. So, read the article and come back to my comment.

I really wanted to introduce this pattern to my game, but the problem was I had the scenario ready and I did not want to change the beginning. I could have done that, but one of the main assumptions of the campaign is that the characters always start sitting in the kitchen of their house. Maybe it seems stupid but I have my reasons.

I came up with a nice trick how to bring these two goals together. Sly Flourish in his article gave examples of movies which have a cold open - the action starts in the first seconds. However, some other type of introductions in movies came to my mind. The movies I am talking about also start with a fight or other kind of a strong scene that attracts the audience's attention and gives no explanation what has happened before, but after this punch-in-a-face intro, the screen fades to black and we can see white letters: "Few days earlier...".

How to bring this idea to RPGs? Pretty simple: Describe the scene, the enemies, ask the players to roll the initiative and that is it! Let the fight go on for a few turns - I think playing the whole of it is not a very good idea since stopping it in the middle creates even more suspense.

The important part of the trick is to note all information about the fight, so, when the main story will get to the point before the few-days-earlier intro, you and your players will be able to start from the moment where you have stopped. I have even tried to remember the way in which I described the scene and the enemies just before the fight - I repeated myself to clearly state that this is the moment. After that I have summarised these few turns we had already finished and the fight could be continued.

the final word from me: I believe that the fight picked up for this kind of intro should not be the main fight of a scenario. The players will know the setting of the fight, so they will be able to prepare themselves in any way possible, and the point of this trick is not to make a boss easier to deal with, but to help them dive into the story from the very beginning of a scenario.