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the campaign has started and anything in here has been erased. thank you for your ideas and comments

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Don't let your players see this thread?

Rofl.

so anybody?

anyone?

All I'll say (besides not showing all this to your players beforehand, as to not ruin any surprises) is that you should do yourself a favour and not write out all your plans for your grand sweeping narrative of linked scenarios and missions in advance.

Our very successful campaign is huge - spanning 7 12-hour sessions so far (and 3 multi-hour prologue missions) - but I didn't write it out in advance. We're up to the second and meatier part of our 4th Act now, and I haven't written a thing beyond some notes. It's always better to let the actions of the previous mission you wrote dictate how the next mission will play out so that you don't end up in a situation where you've got a long line of things that 'need' to happen for the story, but the previous sessions have taken you completely off your track.

You don't want to make it too open - nothing's worse than setting up a web on conspiracies that your players need to investigate and them saying "No! We're gonna fly to Armageddon instead and fight some Orks!", but don't get hung up with making sure everything goes to plan, because nothing will go to plan.

I've had my players kill people they weren't 'supposed to', and capture people that I thought they'd kill. Had to make up stuff on the fly and reveal information that they they 'weren't meant to know yet' because they did something contrary to what I thought they'd do.

So don't spend too much of your time writing out the characters they're going to meet, as they may not meet them at all!


As for your idea, I like the idea of setting it around a big commercial hub - a race track - rather than in a bleak mutant city or next to a warzone or whatever. The idea of this cult rising in the underbelly of a Formula 1 or NASCAR backdrop (with an added dose of GRIMDARKNESS) is quite a nice twist and not something you usually see in 40K.

... Seriously? Sgt. JOHNSON? That character needs a new name, stat, because anybody who has played any games from the Halo franchise will recognize it immediately.

FoxPhoenix135 wrote:... Seriously? Sgt. JOHNSON? That character needs a new name, stat, because anybody who has played any games from the Halo franchise will recognize it immediately.

I must be two... I saw Sgt. Johnson and laughed... cause of penis jokes... anyway....

In other news... H.B.M.C. has a bunch of good points... however, you have a lot of good information. Your player are going to derail, derange, destroy, and deviate from your plans as fast as possible. The trick is building a world (or bigger) with working political and economic structures that will continue to function like a tireless machine even if and when your hopes for the story fall apart.

An example: My last Rifts game centered around a Galaxy Spanning Empire that was held together by endless war and political maneuvering. A bit of EVE meets Warhammer 40k. I ran my first few games completely off the cuff to see what the players were going to do, before I introduced the major story-arc. In this case I had a secret branch of the Empire abducting children under the age of 15 to experiment on them in order to make super-soldiers, however the experiments were going bad and creating mutations, zombies, were-creatures, and all sorts of other horrid things for every 2-3 soldiers crafted.

My players decided to look into it, as I had hoped, but immediately realized they could make a profit by baiting the mutations they found on one planet to attack the surrounding towns. Basically the players would move in, spread rumors, then capture and release a mutant to see it cause panic and fear, before riding in and offering their services in hunting it down, at a small fee of course.

This changed my goals for the game, but as the players went about making money and not dealing with the "threat" in any real way to political and economic machine behind the experiments still functioned and became more powerful, so by the time they did decide they had to deal with it, it was a much bigger issue.

I normally set things up this way. It is good to know your major NPCs and their motivation, but it can be more useful to know that a town relies on fishing the lake/rivers in the area for food and trade. That way when a cult starts to poison the water, the world changes around the PCs even if they decide to ignore the issue and have fun instead.