I've created some decent BBEG characters, but building up to it has been mainly random encounters along the road while they work toward the main quest. Aside from having bounties posted in towns and running the false hydra, I haven't been able to think of more unique(ish) things to find or do along the way. The players are enjoying themselves and haven't mentioned things getting boring yet, but I want to stay ahead of the curve and am curious what unique encounters people have thought of. If there's links of articles or videos rather than typing it all out to me yourself; feel free to provide them. The players are level 6 and there's four of them, but future/more difficult ideas for down the road can help as well.
Context of the world: Homebrew campaign where the main kingdom has banned open worship of deities and magic use. there is plenty of different geographical locations for different ideas as well as a pretty large ocean they're near. creatures of undeath and the abyss are slowly leaking into the material plane. The players are working with a resistance group against the king to dethrone him.
NNCHRIS: SOUL THIEF, MASTER OF THE ARCANE, AND KING OF NEW YORKNN Gdl Creator of Ilheia and her Knights of the Fallen Stars ldG Lesser Student of Technomancy [undergrad student in computer science] Supporter of the 2014 rules, and a MASSIVE Homebrewer. Come to me all ye who seek salvation in wording thy brews! Open to homebrew trades at any time!! Or feel free to request HB, and Ill see if I can get it done for ya! Characters (Outdated)
I tend to draw my ideas for "Fill" material from three main sources when running a lengthy campaign. These are as follows:
1) Character Backstories. This can be as simple as adding something like "The name this place sounds familiar. You recognize it as your mentor's home town and the place where he grew up" all the way up to designing a complete story arc around the recurrent dream that led one character to leave home and become an adventurer or to having the party confront the evil necromancer who killed the cleric's parents all those years ago.
2) Story Links. Since a campaign to me encompasses a number of adventures, I like find ways to connect them. For example, if I am running a module that says "the cultists have a captive/or captives whom they plan to sacrifice" and I expect the player characters to rescue said captive(s), I might make the prisoner a young boy, who then asks them to help him return home, only to have the party arrive in his village just before it is attacked by orcs or lizardfolk or whatever is appropriate to the characters current level.
3) Foreshadowing. I like to introduce hints of things that will become important in later plot development. Chapter five should take my players into the Feywilde, so on their journey north to the start of chapter four, I had them come across a place where the veil between the realms was thin. Here, they discovered that a Dusk Hag was using a homebrewed Nightmare Monster to prey upon the children of the local village. In another incident, I replaced the swarm they encountered in an old tomb with one of strange spider-like creatures that fed on magic -- Something that will become a problem in the final chapters of the campaign.
I believe that the more links I weave into my plot, the more immersive and cohesive both the plot and the world as a whole will become. This is particularly important in a homebrew setting where you cannot simply default to published sources to fill in the gaps. And the players really seem to love discovering the details, especially those that pertain to their own backstories or to the people they have met throughout their journeys.
Wonderful help, thank you. I've sown some seeds of backstory, but two of my players decided to be hermits and wrote (almost) no real connections or history. They became adventures after helping the other members with mild undead issues that endangered their homes. Things can still be done, but it's all future context that already plays in (they're new I'm not bothered by it) I've got some thinking to do, but because the party is mostly new it's hard to provoke creative thought without OOC hinting to them and I'm a semi-experienced player turned new DM out of necessity. The process is fun, but I have been a person who's diametrically opposed to creative writing most of my life.
Dethroning a king doesn't sound like something you can do by just leveling up to l20. At least that's not the best way.
Easiest way to prevent them from doing that: make a ticking clock.
Say the king is gathering materials and knowledge for a ritual to turn himself into a powerful lich. If he succeeds he will be nigh impossible to defeat. This plot basically writes itself. The players will probably think of the idea on their own that they need to get the materials before he does. But once they get one of the materials, the king will learn of their existence and send out lieutenants to smite them.
You can keep such a multi-MacGuffin plot going indefinitely. The players get their hands on one of the materials. But somehow it's stolen back from them and transferred to a highly secure location. Do they try a direct assault on that keep, or do they try to learn the location of the next material component?
Maybe they don't have the full trust of the resistance group and will need to do quests for various minor leaders within the group to move up the informal ranks and gain access to top secret intel. Maybe until they do this they don't even know about the king's plans.
Maybe the players learn about a good NPC within the king's circle. Now let the players come up with a plan. They might decide to try to persuade this NPC to aid them in their cause. The NPC might get caught, and the players might have to rescue this innocent person they endangered.
Dethroning a king doesn't sound like something you can do by just leveling up to l20. At least that's not the best way.
Easiest way to prevent them from doing that: make a ticking clock.
Say the king is gathering materials and knowledge for a ritual to turn himself into a powerful lich. If he succeeds he will be nigh impossible to defeat. This plot basically writes itself. The players will probably think of the idea on their own that they need to get the materials before he does. But once they get one of the materials, the king will learn of their existence and send out lieutenants to smite them.
You can keep such a multi-MacGuffin plot going indefinitely. The players get their hands on one of the materials. But somehow it's stolen back from them and transferred to a highly secure location. Do they try a direct assault on that keep, or do they try to learn the location of the next material component?
Maybe they don't have the full trust of the resistance group and will need to do quests for various minor leaders within the group to move up the informal ranks and gain access to top secret intel. Maybe until they do this they don't even know about the king's plans.
Maybe the players learn about a good NPC within the king's circle. Now let the players come up with a plan. They might decide to try to persuade this NPC to aid them in their cause. The NPC might get caught, and the players might have to rescue this innocent person they endangered.
I am not missing a plot, and some of your ideas are almost on the nose of what is happening within the plot. The king is also the proposed BBEG to the players, but not the actual one so the main story is moving well. I was just inquiring about more fun side things that aren't just "you're attacked by wolves in the camp" "You notice several bounties on a billboard" like the false hydra scenario I mentioned as I'm not super creative and have run into a sort of writers block.
Oh, in that case, I like to mine published one-shots, re-skin them for my world, and sometimes link the hooks to characters and plot points in my story. Usually they have more of a hook than just, “Here, kill this bag of hit points.”
If you are looking for pre-build content that could be fun but not necessarily on the main plot line, a good source can be various published material re-skinned to fit your world.
- Tales from the Yawning Portal
- Ghosts of Saltmarsh
- DMsGuild - lots of Adventurers League adventures as well as CCC AL adventures designed for each of the AL storyline seasons (related to the hardcover releases from WotC). However there is bound to be some of those that would work with your world. In addition, some of them have mini-arc storylines of 2-4 adventures each of which typically runs in 2-4 hours each. So that might be a good place to look for inspiration with minimal work and time invested.
I've created some decent BBEG characters, but building up to it has been mainly random encounters along the road while they work toward the main quest. Aside from having bounties posted in towns and running the false hydra, I haven't been able to think of more unique(ish) things to find or do along the way. The players are enjoying themselves and haven't mentioned things getting boring yet, but I want to stay ahead of the curve and am curious what unique encounters people have thought of. If there's links of articles or videos rather than typing it all out to me yourself; feel free to provide them. The players are level 6 and there's four of them, but future/more difficult ideas for down the road can help as well.
Context of the world:
Homebrew campaign where the main kingdom has banned open worship of deities and magic use.
there is plenty of different geographical locations for different ideas as well as a pretty large ocean they're near.
creatures of undeath and the abyss are slowly leaking into the material plane.
The players are working with a resistance group against the king to dethrone him.
what are the character classes?
NNCHRIS: SOUL THIEF, MASTER OF THE ARCANE, AND KING OF NEW YORKNN
Gdl Creator of Ilheia and her Knights of the Fallen Stars ldG
Lesser Student of Technomancy [undergrad student in computer science]
Supporter of the 2014 rules, and a MASSIVE Homebrewer. Come to me all ye who seek salvation in wording thy brews!
Open to homebrew trades at any time!! Or feel free to request HB, and Ill see if I can get it done for ya!
Characters (Outdated)
Life domain cleric, psi warrior fighter, barbdruid, and sorcerer
I tend to draw my ideas for "Fill" material from three main sources when running a lengthy campaign. These are as follows:
1) Character Backstories. This can be as simple as adding something like "The name this place sounds familiar. You recognize it as your mentor's home town and the place where he grew up" all the way up to designing a complete story arc around the recurrent dream that led one character to leave home and become an adventurer or to having the party confront the evil necromancer who killed the cleric's parents all those years ago.
2) Story Links. Since a campaign to me encompasses a number of adventures, I like find ways to connect them. For example, if I am running a module that says "the cultists have a captive/or captives whom they plan to sacrifice" and I expect the player characters to rescue said captive(s), I might make the prisoner a young boy, who then asks them to help him return home, only to have the party arrive in his village just before it is attacked by orcs or lizardfolk or whatever is appropriate to the characters current level.
3) Foreshadowing. I like to introduce hints of things that will become important in later plot development. Chapter five should take my players into the Feywilde, so on their journey north to the start of chapter four, I had them come across a place where the veil between the realms was thin. Here, they discovered that a Dusk Hag was using a homebrewed Nightmare Monster to prey upon the children of the local village. In another incident, I replaced the swarm they encountered in an old tomb with one of strange spider-like creatures that fed on magic -- Something that will become a problem in the final chapters of the campaign.
I believe that the more links I weave into my plot, the more immersive and cohesive both the plot and the world as a whole will become. This is particularly important in a homebrew setting where you cannot simply default to published sources to fill in the gaps. And the players really seem to love discovering the details, especially those that pertain to their own backstories or to the people they have met throughout their journeys.
Wonderful help, thank you. I've sown some seeds of backstory, but two of my players decided to be hermits and wrote (almost) no real connections or history. They became adventures after helping the other members with mild undead issues that endangered their homes. Things can still be done, but it's all future context that already plays in (they're new I'm not bothered by it)
I've got some thinking to do, but because the party is mostly new it's hard to provoke creative thought without OOC hinting to them and I'm a semi-experienced player turned new DM out of necessity. The process is fun, but I have been a person who's diametrically opposed to creative writing most of my life.
So not really filler material, but a whole plot.
Dethroning a king doesn't sound like something you can do by just leveling up to l20. At least that's not the best way.
Easiest way to prevent them from doing that: make a ticking clock.
Say the king is gathering materials and knowledge for a ritual to turn himself into a powerful lich. If he succeeds he will be nigh impossible to defeat. This plot basically writes itself. The players will probably think of the idea on their own that they need to get the materials before he does. But once they get one of the materials, the king will learn of their existence and send out lieutenants to smite them.
You can keep such a multi-MacGuffin plot going indefinitely. The players get their hands on one of the materials. But somehow it's stolen back from them and transferred to a highly secure location. Do they try a direct assault on that keep, or do they try to learn the location of the next material component?
Maybe they don't have the full trust of the resistance group and will need to do quests for various minor leaders within the group to move up the informal ranks and gain access to top secret intel. Maybe until they do this they don't even know about the king's plans.
Maybe the players learn about a good NPC within the king's circle. Now let the players come up with a plan. They might decide to try to persuade this NPC to aid them in their cause. The NPC might get caught, and the players might have to rescue this innocent person they endangered.
I am not missing a plot, and some of your ideas are almost on the nose of what is happening within the plot. The king is also the proposed BBEG to the players, but not the actual one so the main story is moving well.
I was just inquiring about more fun side things that aren't just "you're attacked by wolves in the camp" "You notice several bounties on a billboard" like the false hydra scenario I mentioned as I'm not super creative and have run into a sort of writers block.
Oh, in that case, I like to mine published one-shots, re-skin them for my world, and sometimes link the hooks to characters and plot points in my story. Usually they have more of a hook than just, “Here, kill this bag of hit points.”
If you are looking for pre-build content that could be fun but not necessarily on the main plot line, a good source can be various published material re-skinned to fit your world.
- Tales from the Yawning Portal
- Ghosts of Saltmarsh
- DMsGuild - lots of Adventurers League adventures as well as CCC AL adventures designed for each of the AL storyline seasons (related to the hardcover releases from WotC). However there is bound to be some of those that would work with your world. In addition, some of them have mini-arc storylines of 2-4 adventures each of which typically runs in 2-4 hours each. So that might be a good place to look for inspiration with minimal work and time invested.
Thank you all for the tips. I have a bit of research/reading to do then!