You ever know the feeling when things are going too well and you don't know how to react to it?
I have been playing a game with six players now; 23 sessions that took them through a long starting adventure that also introduced the major bad guy and gave my players a sense of what's coming... And that should be great, but where I'd hoped I would have a rough sketch of the future plotline in my mind by now is just empty void and an image of a wind-up cymbal monkey. SO, I was thinking, maybe some of you experienced DMs can help me get ideas for a rough sketch for the future of my campaign.
Here's the short and low of the background for the campaign. Quick notes - the Raven is my setting's version of the Raven Queen, and Zoltas is the continent the campaign is set in.
- - -
Before the Eastern Migration arrived in Zoltas, the continent was ruled by the Rock Gnomes. These ingenious little beings were the creators of wonderful technology and magical artifacts that didn’t see its like for a thousand years, and the Rock Gnomes were generous, loaning out their machines and expertise to the Dwarves, Elves, Halflings and many other races that lived among them. Though the Gnomes didn’t see it that way, they were the rulers of the less-developed tribes and people of Zoltas; helping them when they needed protection in return for foodstuffs and labor. All was not well within the Rock Gnomes’ society. It was laid-back, but easy; without struggle and room for ambition beyond creating more and more advanced trinkets to amuse each other. Not every Gnome liked this, and some delved into darker studies; necromancy, the study of fiends and other grim knowledge. One group, led by the former High Priest of the Raven Exatos, contacted the gods and attempted to travel to them, as they wished to be the custodians of the Gods The Gods saw their greedy hearts, and they were cast out of the Outer Planes and cursed to loose their magical expertise. In frustration, they found a patron in Nihayal, a horrid Nightshade that sought to learn from and consume the Material Plane. They formed the Deadhands Society, and hatched an evil plan: They saw the Great Wheel as a limitation, a construct to rule and divide mortals into good and evil, orderly and destructive. They would let Nihayal consume the Material plane to force the Gods to remake the world without the Gods’ own preconceptions built into the framework.
In exile, the Deadhands Society worked to spread Nihayal’s necrotic corruption. They mastered necromancy and created strongholds and dungeons of black stone, created from voidstone. They perfected the war-machines used by their Rock Gnome brethren and waged a silent war against the small kingdoms of Zoltas. Finally, on the eve of an eclipse, the Deadhands Society, now grown to rival their former nation of Rock Gnomes, formed a ritual to bring Nihayal and its legions of Nightshades into the Material Plane. They succeeded, and for eight long years, undead and Nightshades stalked Zoltas as the continent died out; freezing and consumed. Finally, a heroic band of adventurers challenged Nihayal before it could assault the last resisting city ofthe Rock Gnomes. They had the support of many Gods, who had been concerned by the development on the Material Plane. They had shaped an ethereal chain called the Silver Chord, which the adventurers used to bind Nihayal with and forced it to be thrown into the Shadowfell, where the Raven and other death gods stood ready to imprison it.
The Material Plane was saved, but Zoltas wasn’t. What remained of living creatures fled the continent in search of food, and only druids and their entourage remained to nurse it back to life. It would be another three hundred years before new life would properly settle Zoltas; in 1502, when Catherine del Zolt and the Eastern Migration landed where the city of Corril stands today.
The Deadhands Society The Deadhands Society works from the shadows, influencing key figures and moments in time to feed Nihayal with souls and life. Though small, their members are powerful necromancers, deadlocks, mortals and creatures, spanning many different races, from dragons to halflings. The sentient members of the Society all know the Society’s plans, but often differ in how exactly they believe it should be carried out, or to what extend. Many are also self-serving and use Nihayal’s gifts to their own ends. Their name stems from the fact that a member of the inner circle will lose all flesh and sinew on their right hand, leaving behind a skeletal, fanged claw instead. The Deadhands Society is Neutral Evil
- - -
That's the basic background. My players have spent the last year fighting an old lord come back as a ghoulish vampire and his ally, a warlock of Nihayal called Elizabeth. Elizabeth escaped with her life, giving a cryptic warning the the players had a year left to live, which they should use constructively. She is the newest member of the Deadhands, but the players don't know this.
Meanwhile, one of my players played a Warforged which, unbeknownst to any of them, was created by the Deadhands Society as a footsoldier and assassin; he was one of many. That character died in the last battle against the bad guy, and out of his body came a small brass orb with inscriptions on it, pulsing with magical power. The players found a similar orb in the ghoulish vampire's estate, alongside a map pointing to somewhere north.
I haven't decided what those are yet. My initial idea is that they are magical containers of a soul, left behind by the Rock Gnomes maybe to continue their work for or against Nihayal. They could be important artefacts, or keys to an important thing.
This is where I'm stumped - I know I want the players to confront the Deadhands one by one, but not why. I want Nihayal to spawn in at an old, eldritch gate in the kingdom's capital and begin sucking the life out of the world as the climax to the story, but not if it should be summoned or if its arrival should be inevitable.
My inspiration, if that matters, is Mass Effect and the Reapers.
- - -
The reason I need help now is that the players are going to a ruin (the point where the map points to) because they're seeking a way to get their dead friend back. They will arrive at this Rock Gnome ruin in the north, a magitek fortress and... That's where I'm stumped. I know I want them to realize the breadth and severity of the threat they're against here, I want it to be the moment where they understand what the rest of the campaign's focus is gonna be. This could be through an artefact or something that heralds Nihayal's coming, but I just don't know what.
I guess what I need is a structure, a skeletal sketch of how the overall campaign could go. I want to make an engaging story, but also a fun game for my players in a way that would feel exciting and easy to follow, where they don't feel sidetracked by the plot.
Thank you if you got this far; this is rambling, I know, but I just feel so lost 😅
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I have some semblance of an idea of what I'm doing!
Maybe the orbs were engineered by the Rock Gnome to contain the life essence of gnomes who had passed on, so that they and their thoughts, theories, and knowledge wouldn’t be lost when they died. Maybe they doubled as a source of magical power, allowing the gnomes to build intelligent war machines which contained the knowledge and capabilities of the soul within the orb.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
Okay, so I think I have a grasp of your story and what you are looking for, but if I'm misunderstanding something here I apologize. Anyway, here are the first ideas that pop into my mind.
So thing number one is you need to do is to introduce your players to the BBEG, namely this Nihayal, and show the threat it poses while also getting your dead PC back. I think the best way to do both those things in the immediate future would be to have them go to this Magitek fortress and maybe find a portal into this dark, undead realm where Nihayal and your player's soul are both residing. Nihayal is still confined by the Silver Chord so he can't destroy the players, but maybe he can communicate with them and mess with them while they are trying to fetch the dead PC's soul in a nightmare shadow labyrinth of death. At some point in the adventure, maybe the players are forced to touch something like a drop of Nihayal's blood or something else that briefly and vividly lets them see into it's mind, consuming all, devouring the material plane and ending all life. Maybe they even take a certain amount of psychic damage from this vision as it's so traumatizing it could shatter lesser minds.
Phase 2 would be to, while your players are there, make your players think that those orbs are somehow hurting Nihayal. Like, those orbs coming together in this twisted realm are burning his essence. Maybe they somehow learn that there are more of these things, each one held by a member of the Deadhands for safe keeping, for if they were ever all brought together before Nihayal, his very essence would be torn from existence.
However, Nihayal is actually conning the players. In truth, these orbs were created by Rock Gnomes who, not liking the idea that a God could decide to just ruin their day and exterminate their society on a whim, developed these items to destroy any constructs or things created by the gods as a preemptive defense against anyone who would try to come for the Rock Gnomes. These orbs, if all of them are brought to Nihayal, could be used to shatter the Silver Chord, freeing Nihayal to once again devour the world.
It turns out that the Deadhands have spent the last few decades/centuries collecting these from around the world, but the other gods, able to sense the deadhands by the Nihayal taint on their souls, have created defenses so that no living person tainted by him can enter Shadowfell. So you see, this first excursion here was the deadhands testing to make sure the players could pass through, which is why they killed one of them that was actually made by them. Now, as the players continue to hunt them down, for their lord they are willing to fight and die by the adventurers in the service of Nihayal to really sell the lie.
You could do a lot of foreshadowing of this ahead of time so it doesn't come across as cheap, and also plant some way to ACTUALLY kill him. You can be subtle enough to actively try to get the players to carry through with the ruse, but also legitimately be giving clues along the way that what they are doing is actually playing into their hands. One idea that could be cool is to have some old prophecies that they find about the return of Nihayal and the "deadhands" that will bring him back to the world, only subtly describe the players themselves, not the actual deadhands they are fighting. Like if the deadhands happened to be members of the same races as the adventurers or something, then you could subtly play with that and maybe down the line the players might start thinking 'wait....are we the baddies?'
That's just the first thing that comes to mind. Hopefully something in there helps you figure out where you're going!
*edited to point out that technically this leaves Mass Effect as inspiration...you'd just be attempting to make your players into the Saren of your story without them realizing it....
So maybe take a step back from the overall plot and look at what you have and instead of planning what your players are doing plan what the dead hands are doing.
in a way you have 3 D&D parties in your story - it’s just that only one is being played by your group.
holy champions of yore, dead hand lords, your actual adventure.
So play out the other two groups story a bit more and look at the effects they are having in the world.
You potentially have a good set up for a non linear narrative here , your dead hand lords are basically Megaman villains that the party can face in any order. Don’t roll them out I’ve at a time, seed all the remaining ones in story points they can follow and see which bait gets hooked.
as for your holy guardians that fought back the abyss before - which gods powered them? Do any of the current party worship one of those gods? Are any of those heroes still alive? We’re they even real or the gods themselves that time and legend have made into those warriors? Had the gods always had chosen champions or was this a special case? Is there a lineage? We’re the people powered by gods or were the weapons and artefacts they held? are any of those artefacts still around? How did they win?
Let’s pull at one of those threads - one of your party through lineage or faith has a tie to the former champion. Due to {insert maguffin} they are able to relive one of the final battles - they play it out as themselves everyone else plays a different character that is one of the god squad. You play out a flashback scene with this party that allows them to get some of the information you are trying to convey.
If I were doing this I would even let the players design the heroes they are playing as ahead of time but don’t tell them what they are used for. Tell your players that you want them to create a back up character that exists in a prequel of the current campaign for the purposes of being able to do some in world one shots when a single person has to miss a session (which you can also do) don’t tell them exactly where the characters fit but work with them individually to build these holy hero archetypes out. One reason to do this is that sometimes the best single source of creativity the DM has access to is their players, they might come up with some great stuff for you to use.
When I get stuck I don’t ask “What”, I ask “Why” follow through your npc and BBEG thought patterns and the reasons they are the way they are or are doing it that way.
Okay so I've been thinking about this a lot - like "not being able to sleep" a lot - and I begin to form some ideas. Thank you for your comments, they've really been helpful!
Off the top; the Warforged player is not coming back to that character, at least not for a long while. He has a new character already, so they don't have to retrieve their old buddy's soul or life.
I really like the idea with the Megaman-style villain setup for the Deadhands; I'm definitely going to do that. I know I want a Death Knight who's searching for knowledge, and who's killing people to save their souls from Nihayal; a mad Beholder who thinks they can fight Nihayal and take over the world; a Dracolich who is the most dedicated of the bunch and may hunt the players to stop them; Elizabeth of course but I'll weave her in and out of the story as needed (she may do a turn against Nihayal; she's honestly in over her head); and a coven of Hags, who is in the Deadhands to corrupt and get rich before retreating to one of the lower Planes. I'll use them as individual villains for different stories.
Here's where I'm stumped still. I want to make the plot simple, because many of my players are quite new to DnD and I want them to feel like they can drive the action without being confused. The greatest problem for me is these god damn Brass Orbs; my initial idea was that they held the souls of dead Rock Gnomes, and the one that was in my player's Warforged character was the soul of a defector from the Deadhands, playing the long game so he could reactivate when Nihayal's coming was close. Of course it didn't go quite so well - the Warforged had its own personality and only a vague idea of what it was supposed to be doing, and now he's dead. An idea I had was to have a magitek machine they could slot the Orb into in the magitek fortress, which would allow that defector to speak to the players and set them on missions, but that felt contrived...
The Orbs could also be artefacts in and off themselves that could be used against Nihayal or the Silver Chord, so each individual adventure was about aquiring another. Maybe they each have a receptical they need to be places in around the kingdom, which will contain Nihayal's arrival or drain its powers. The Orbs then could still be the souls of important Rock Gnomes or even whole groups of Rock Gnomes; that would make the plotline kind of similar to Fullmetal Alchemist and Hohenheim's act to counter Father.
I also really like the idea of finding items that the previous heroes used, though the whole flashback idea is perhaps a bit too strange for my group I think. Maybe I could do that organically, as they travel they may find the tombs of those heroes, who were buried with their gear and, in some cases, a Brass Orb for protection. I think I'll ask my players to make a hero each that I can use as those original heroes who defeated Nihayal; that sounds fun!
Also, I feel like those Orbs should have an effect, kind of like the Beacon in CR Campaign 2. Any ideas?
Again, thank you so much for helping and humoring me!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I have some semblance of an idea of what I'm doing!
What if the warforged relationship with the orb was a symbiotic one rather than a bonded soul. - the body is a being and the orb is a being and together they are warforged. Opens up the idea of replacing the orb at some point of at least puts a choice on the character to do so and face an RPG decision about wether the orb is what makes them who they are. The orb could also get damaged and need replacing.
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You ever know the feeling when things are going too well and you don't know how to react to it?
I have been playing a game with six players now; 23 sessions that took them through a long starting adventure that also introduced the major bad guy and gave my players a sense of what's coming... And that should be great, but where I'd hoped I would have a rough sketch of the future plotline in my mind by now is just empty void and an image of a wind-up cymbal monkey. SO, I was thinking, maybe some of you experienced DMs can help me get ideas for a rough sketch for the future of my campaign.
Here's the short and low of the background for the campaign. Quick notes - the Raven is my setting's version of the Raven Queen, and Zoltas is the continent the campaign is set in.
- - -
Before the Eastern Migration arrived in Zoltas, the continent was ruled by the Rock Gnomes. These
ingenious little beings were the creators of wonderful technology and magical artifacts that didn’t
see its like for a thousand years, and the Rock Gnomes were generous, loaning out their machines
and expertise to the Dwarves, Elves, Halflings and many other races that lived among them. Though
the Gnomes didn’t see it that way, they were the rulers of the less-developed tribes and people of
Zoltas; helping them when they needed protection in return for foodstuffs and labor.
All was not well within the Rock Gnomes’ society. It was laid-back, but easy; without
struggle and room for ambition beyond creating more and more advanced trinkets to amuse each
other. Not every Gnome liked this, and some delved into darker studies; necromancy, the study of
fiends and other grim knowledge. One group, led by the former High Priest of the Raven Exatos,
contacted the gods and attempted to travel to them, as they wished to be the custodians of the Gods
The Gods saw their greedy hearts, and they were cast out of the Outer Planes and cursed to loose
their magical expertise. In frustration, they found a patron in Nihayal, a horrid Nightshade that
sought to learn from and consume the Material Plane. They formed the Deadhands Society, and
hatched an evil plan: They saw the Great Wheel as a limitation, a construct to rule and divide
mortals into good and evil, orderly and destructive. They would let Nihayal consume the Material
plane to force the Gods to remake the world without the Gods’ own preconceptions built into the
framework.
In exile, the Deadhands Society worked to spread Nihayal’s necrotic corruption. They
mastered necromancy and created strongholds and dungeons of black stone, created from voidstone. They perfected the war-machines used by their Rock Gnome brethren and waged a silent war against the small kingdoms of Zoltas. Finally, on the eve of an eclipse, the Deadhands Society, now grown to rival their former nation of Rock Gnomes, formed a ritual to bring Nihayal and its legions of Nightshades into the Material Plane. They succeeded, and for eight long years, undead and
Nightshades stalked Zoltas as the continent died out; freezing and consumed. Finally, a heroic band
of adventurers challenged Nihayal before it could assault the last resisting city of the Rock Gnomes.
They had the support of many Gods, who had been concerned by the development on the Material
Plane. They had shaped an ethereal chain called the Silver Chord, which the adventurers used to
bind Nihayal with and forced it to be thrown into the Shadowfell, where the Raven and other death
gods stood ready to imprison it.
The Material Plane was saved, but Zoltas wasn’t. What remained of living creatures fled the
continent in search of food, and only druids and their entourage remained to nurse it back to life. It
would be another three hundred years before new life would properly settle Zoltas; in 1502, when
Catherine del Zolt and the Eastern Migration landed where the city of Corril stands today.
The Deadhands Society
The Deadhands Society works from the shadows, influencing key figures and moments in time to
feed Nihayal with souls and life. Though small, their members are powerful necromancers,
deadlocks, mortals and creatures, spanning many different races, from dragons to halflings. The
sentient members of the Society all know the Society’s plans, but often differ in how exactly they
believe it should be carried out, or to what extend. Many are also self-serving and use Nihayal’s
gifts to their own ends. Their name stems from the fact that a member of the inner circle will lose
all flesh and sinew on their right hand, leaving behind a skeletal, fanged claw instead.
The Deadhands Society is Neutral Evil
- - -
That's the basic background. My players have spent the last year fighting an old lord come back as a ghoulish vampire and his ally, a warlock of Nihayal called Elizabeth. Elizabeth escaped with her life, giving a cryptic warning the the players had a year left to live, which they should use constructively. She is the newest member of the Deadhands, but the players don't know this.
Meanwhile, one of my players played a Warforged which, unbeknownst to any of them, was created by the Deadhands Society as a footsoldier and assassin; he was one of many. That character died in the last battle against the bad guy, and out of his body came a small brass orb with inscriptions on it, pulsing with magical power. The players found a similar orb in the ghoulish vampire's estate, alongside a map pointing to somewhere north.
I haven't decided what those are yet. My initial idea is that they are magical containers of a soul, left behind by the Rock Gnomes maybe to continue their work for or against Nihayal. They could be important artefacts, or keys to an important thing.
This is where I'm stumped - I know I want the players to confront the Deadhands one by one, but not why. I want Nihayal to spawn in at an old, eldritch gate in the kingdom's capital and begin sucking the life out of the world as the climax to the story, but not if it should be summoned or if its arrival should be inevitable.
My inspiration, if that matters, is Mass Effect and the Reapers.
- - -
The reason I need help now is that the players are going to a ruin (the point where the map points to) because they're seeking a way to get their dead friend back. They will arrive at this Rock Gnome ruin in the north, a magitek fortress and... That's where I'm stumped. I know I want them to realize the breadth and severity of the threat they're against here, I want it to be the moment where they understand what the rest of the campaign's focus is gonna be. This could be through an artefact or something that heralds Nihayal's coming, but I just don't know what.
I guess what I need is a structure, a skeletal sketch of how the overall campaign could go. I want to make an engaging story, but also a fun game for my players in a way that would feel exciting and easy to follow, where they don't feel sidetracked by the plot.
Thank you if you got this far; this is rambling, I know, but I just feel so lost 😅
I have some semblance of an idea of what I'm doing!
Maybe the orbs were engineered by the Rock Gnome to contain the life essence of gnomes who had passed on, so that they and their thoughts, theories, and knowledge wouldn’t be lost when they died. Maybe they doubled as a source of magical power, allowing the gnomes to build intelligent war machines which contained the knowledge and capabilities of the soul within the orb.
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
Okay, so I think I have a grasp of your story and what you are looking for, but if I'm misunderstanding something here I apologize. Anyway, here are the first ideas that pop into my mind.
So thing number one is you need to do is to introduce your players to the BBEG, namely this Nihayal, and show the threat it poses while also getting your dead PC back. I think the best way to do both those things in the immediate future would be to have them go to this Magitek fortress and maybe find a portal into this dark, undead realm where Nihayal and your player's soul are both residing. Nihayal is still confined by the Silver Chord so he can't destroy the players, but maybe he can communicate with them and mess with them while they are trying to fetch the dead PC's soul in a nightmare shadow labyrinth of death. At some point in the adventure, maybe the players are forced to touch something like a drop of Nihayal's blood or something else that briefly and vividly lets them see into it's mind, consuming all, devouring the material plane and ending all life. Maybe they even take a certain amount of psychic damage from this vision as it's so traumatizing it could shatter lesser minds.
Phase 2 would be to, while your players are there, make your players think that those orbs are somehow hurting Nihayal. Like, those orbs coming together in this twisted realm are burning his essence. Maybe they somehow learn that there are more of these things, each one held by a member of the Deadhands for safe keeping, for if they were ever all brought together before Nihayal, his very essence would be torn from existence.
However, Nihayal is actually conning the players. In truth, these orbs were created by Rock Gnomes who, not liking the idea that a God could decide to just ruin their day and exterminate their society on a whim, developed these items to destroy any constructs or things created by the gods as a preemptive defense against anyone who would try to come for the Rock Gnomes. These orbs, if all of them are brought to Nihayal, could be used to shatter the Silver Chord, freeing Nihayal to once again devour the world.
It turns out that the Deadhands have spent the last few decades/centuries collecting these from around the world, but the other gods, able to sense the deadhands by the Nihayal taint on their souls, have created defenses so that no living person tainted by him can enter Shadowfell. So you see, this first excursion here was the deadhands testing to make sure the players could pass through, which is why they killed one of them that was actually made by them. Now, as the players continue to hunt them down, for their lord they are willing to fight and die by the adventurers in the service of Nihayal to really sell the lie.
You could do a lot of foreshadowing of this ahead of time so it doesn't come across as cheap, and also plant some way to ACTUALLY kill him. You can be subtle enough to actively try to get the players to carry through with the ruse, but also legitimately be giving clues along the way that what they are doing is actually playing into their hands. One idea that could be cool is to have some old prophecies that they find about the return of Nihayal and the "deadhands" that will bring him back to the world, only subtly describe the players themselves, not the actual deadhands they are fighting. Like if the deadhands happened to be members of the same races as the adventurers or something, then you could subtly play with that and maybe down the line the players might start thinking 'wait....are we the baddies?'
That's just the first thing that comes to mind. Hopefully something in there helps you figure out where you're going!
*edited to point out that technically this leaves Mass Effect as inspiration...you'd just be attempting to make your players into the Saren of your story without them realizing it....
So maybe take a step back from the overall plot and look at what you have and instead of planning what your players are doing plan what the dead hands are doing.
in a way you have 3 D&D parties in your story - it’s just that only one is being played by your group.
holy champions of yore, dead hand lords, your actual adventure.
So play out the other two groups story a bit more and look at the effects they are having in the world.
You potentially have a good set up for a non linear narrative here , your dead hand lords are basically Megaman villains that the party can face in any order. Don’t roll them out I’ve at a time, seed all the remaining ones in story points they can follow and see which bait gets hooked.
as for your holy guardians that fought back the abyss before - which gods powered them? Do any of the current party worship one of those gods? Are any of those heroes still alive? We’re they even real or the gods themselves that time and legend have made into those warriors? Had the gods always had chosen champions or was this a special case? Is there a lineage? We’re the people powered by gods or were the weapons and artefacts they held? are any of those artefacts still around? How did they win?
Let’s pull at one of those threads - one of your party through lineage or faith has a tie to the former champion. Due to {insert maguffin} they are able to relive one of the final battles - they play it out as themselves everyone else plays a different character that is one of the god squad. You play out a flashback scene with this party that allows them to get some of the information you are trying to convey.
If I were doing this I would even let the players design the heroes they are playing as ahead of time but don’t tell them what they are used for. Tell your players that you want them to create a back up character that exists in a prequel of the current campaign for the purposes of being able to do some in world one shots when a single person has to miss a session (which you can also do) don’t tell them exactly where the characters fit but work with them individually to build these holy hero archetypes out. One reason to do this is that sometimes the best single source of creativity the DM has access to is their players, they might come up with some great stuff for you to use.
When I get stuck I don’t ask “What”, I ask “Why” follow through your npc and BBEG thought patterns and the reasons they are the way they are or are doing it that way.
Okay so I've been thinking about this a lot - like "not being able to sleep" a lot - and I begin to form some ideas. Thank you for your comments, they've really been helpful!
Off the top; the Warforged player is not coming back to that character, at least not for a long while. He has a new character already, so they don't have to retrieve their old buddy's soul or life.
I really like the idea with the Megaman-style villain setup for the Deadhands; I'm definitely going to do that. I know I want a Death Knight who's searching for knowledge, and who's killing people to save their souls from Nihayal; a mad Beholder who thinks they can fight Nihayal and take over the world; a Dracolich who is the most dedicated of the bunch and may hunt the players to stop them; Elizabeth of course but I'll weave her in and out of the story as needed (she may do a turn against Nihayal; she's honestly in over her head); and a coven of Hags, who is in the Deadhands to corrupt and get rich before retreating to one of the lower Planes. I'll use them as individual villains for different stories.
Here's where I'm stumped still. I want to make the plot simple, because many of my players are quite new to DnD and I want them to feel like they can drive the action without being confused. The greatest problem for me is these god damn Brass Orbs; my initial idea was that they held the souls of dead Rock Gnomes, and the one that was in my player's Warforged character was the soul of a defector from the Deadhands, playing the long game so he could reactivate when Nihayal's coming was close. Of course it didn't go quite so well - the Warforged had its own personality and only a vague idea of what it was supposed to be doing, and now he's dead. An idea I had was to have a magitek machine they could slot the Orb into in the magitek fortress, which would allow that defector to speak to the players and set them on missions, but that felt contrived...
The Orbs could also be artefacts in and off themselves that could be used against Nihayal or the Silver Chord, so each individual adventure was about aquiring another. Maybe they each have a receptical they need to be places in around the kingdom, which will contain Nihayal's arrival or drain its powers. The Orbs then could still be the souls of important Rock Gnomes or even whole groups of Rock Gnomes; that would make the plotline kind of similar to Fullmetal Alchemist and Hohenheim's act to counter Father.
I also really like the idea of finding items that the previous heroes used, though the whole flashback idea is perhaps a bit too strange for my group I think. Maybe I could do that organically, as they travel they may find the tombs of those heroes, who were buried with their gear and, in some cases, a Brass Orb for protection. I think I'll ask my players to make a hero each that I can use as those original heroes who defeated Nihayal; that sounds fun!
Also, I feel like those Orbs should have an effect, kind of like the Beacon in CR Campaign 2. Any ideas?
Again, thank you so much for helping and humoring me!
I have some semblance of an idea of what I'm doing!
What if the warforged relationship with the orb was a symbiotic one rather than a bonded soul. - the body is a being and the orb is a being and together they are warforged. Opens up the idea of replacing the orb at some point of at least puts a choice on the character to do so and face an RPG decision about wether the orb is what makes them who they are. The orb could also get damaged and need replacing.