I've got a long running Icar campaign and I am always looking for new things to spice it up and keep it fresh. I was wondering if any of the GMs out there knew any cool devices I might use to spice it. Stuff like:

Randomly kill off an NPC the team likes
Helpful NPCs are often made mid-campaign butchering fodder

Agree with one of the players to kill off their character, don't tell the other players
Speaks for itself. Gives the team a new feeling of character mortality.

Turn the 'main' plotline on its head
The player team suddenly find out that they're actually on the bad guys side.

Can anyone think of any others?

Please ignore.

Secret Identity:  During group character generation, the player in question rolls up a completely different character than the one he's actually going to play, the one we rolled up a week ago privately (great for keeping other=player-metagamey stuff out of "secret identity" backgrounds).

Cliffhangers, sometimes in the middle of a session.  "As Lady Gale raises her hand to cast her evil spell, one of the you fire your crossbow at her -- and she disappears! Chili, anyone?"

"Time Travel":

One of my favorite devices -- it often makes an appearance in my D&D campaigns. Sometimes this doesnt literally mean time travel, but rather time compression-- the PCs go someplace, and while they are gone, time passes rapidly, so that when they come back, a year or more has passed. The most recent example is in my current campaign (the party spent time in an interdimensional prison called the Egg of Rodnak, only to return and find that nearly 2 years have passed).

Sometimes it literally does mean time travel, as in one of my campaigns where the characters travelled 60 years into the future, then had the PC's meet up with their descendants, and find out their 'comedy relief' goblin lackey had gone on to become a powerful yet aging crimelord. Then they witness a series of catastrophic disasters and in doing so, they get enough information to go back in time and try to reverse things.

Another related technique is - at the conclusion of a major storyline for the campaign where the players have elected to continue playing their same characters I'll set things up by saying "Over a year has passed since last you met..." and then using that as sort of a sequel-marker for a new campaign using the same PCs.

The Thick of It

More properly known as in media res, I sometimes start campaigns with the pc's in the thick of the action. Usually the opening scene is the final battle or resoloution of another story they haven't played through.

Example: The characters are making a last ditch effort to hold a castle against a rampaging horde of beastmen that have attacked their city. Acrid smoke and the stench of dead bodies hang in the air. The city guard are wounded and exhausted and the pc's themselves have some minor injuries. Play begins with the castle gates shuddering then splintering under the force of a great battering ram. From the wreckage the howling enemy charges. The characters ready their weapons against the coming onslaught. Roll initiative.

Once the scene is done I usually move game time forward six months to a year, giving the characters plenty of time to interact whilst establishing the aftermath of previous events. Nothing quite brings a group together like the immediate and visceral threat of violence, I've found.

Quote from: DrewThe Thick of It

More properly known as in media res, I sometimes start campaigns with the pc's in the thick of the action.

That one's aces, too.  I love to do that, when I think to do it.

Get the Players to answer the hard questions for you.

I've used this in conjunction with In Media Res techniques.  You know 'Bam, you are in a fight'.

"Who are we fighting?"

"You tell me..."


That's the crude and obvious way to do it, but it can seriously invest players in a game if they know that they can define...to an extent... the badguys.

More regularly I just set up a situation and listen to the players brainstorm, selecting one of their ideas as 'the right one', either at random or because it seems to make the most sense.  From that moment on, that course of action is 'the right one'.

This works really well for me as I don't preplan much, and my players have an incredible amount of freedom in the game.  In my RQ campaign, in the third or fourth session the party up and moved, with no warning at all, half a continent away by signing up on a trade caravan.  Every nascent plot idea I was setting up withered on the vine, but whole new vista's were opened up...

Now I just have to get them to stop loitering in cities and with large, well supported caravans! there is only so many times you can run 'bandit's attack' without it getting silly.

A Bad Guy Becomes a Good Guy
You can do this several different ways. The best, I think, is how they did it in Farscape. The arch-villain suddenly becomes a PC, or the PCs are given a really hard choice: the best way to solve their problems is to work with their greatest enemy. Suspense builds as they plan for the day when the villain will double-cross them.

A Good Guy Becomes a Bad Guy... Or Does He?
A PC must act like one of the villains to further the party's goals. The other players have to decide if they are going to trust him or not.

Steal Your Player's Ideas
I try to keep my adventures pretty open-ended. Usually one of the players will say something like, "Wouldn't it suck if..." Then I make that thing happen instead of what I planned.

Player-Created Content
What god does your PC worship? What town does he come from? Where is it? What's the culture like? Your PC has an old friend in town you can use as a contact--who is he? What's he like? All this stuff trumps what I had planned (and is usually much more detailed and much cooler).

The PCs all begin the campaign with amnesia.
I instructed the players to create characters fitting in a particular social niche, but not to worry about their backgrounds. The campaign began with them waking up in a dingy room, and each of them had a letter from themselves explaining that:

- They had erased their own memories.
- There was a good reason for them to erase their memories, but they couldn't be allowed to remember it.
- They had hidden the keys to their memories around the city.
- If they reallt wanted their memories back, the device which could use the keys to restore their memories, and a letter with the details of where the memory-keys were hidden, were in the middle of the room.

Of course, there was no such device or letter in the middle of the room when they woke up...

This was for an A|State game, in which this approach worked really well - half the joy of A|State is exploring the setting, and they got to see it with fresh eyes IC and OOC rather than having to slog through setting material in order to get a handle on things.

Here are some that I've used:

Cut to...

I've always been rather fond of inserting short scenes featuring NPCs in between fast-paced action-combat scenes. I think it helps pace things by giving the players a breather in between one combat scene and the next without giving their characters time to rest. You see it done in TV all the time to good effect.

The Doppleganger

One or more of the PCs has an imitator, either literally a doppleganger or possibly just a villain with many similarities in his history and powers. As the PC grows more powerful, so does the doppleganger, until they must finally confront one another.

On several different occasions I've saddled my PC's with a pregnant NPC.
and when the time comes to deliver the baby the reactions are always priceless-

every one looks at the 1/2 Orc cleric of Thor "What are ya lookin at me for? I'm a warrior priest not a midwife!"
after a qiuick round of arguements that ended with the womans screams and curses, the gnome thief ended up delivering the baby.  fun stuff

That's when X shows up.

Say it casually, almost flippantly, but make sure X is something that no one was expecting.  'That's when Dracula shows up' in a post-apocalytpic setting, to give my most recent usage.

Defeat.  I think it's very important for a group of characters to be defeated/not succeed in the quest/fail to rescue the prince before he is murdered, etc., sometimes through no fault of their own.  It makes them realize there's always a bigger fish in the pond and that everything won't always be roses.  

To be fair, I usually include a way for the characters to redeem themselves.  If they were beaten in a fight, they might learn the NPC's weakness, if they failed to retrieve the Circlet of Power before the evil Priests of Narthan, I might offer a way for them to steal it back, and if the prince is killed, they might suddenly learn about his child that is also in need of rescuing in a far away dugeon.

This works extremely well in long term games, but not so good in short ones.  

Pete

Quote from: PseudoephedrineHere are some that I've used:

Cut to...

I've always been rather fond of inserting short scenes featuring NPCs in between fast-paced action-combat scenes. I think it helps pace things by giving the players a breather in between one combat scene and the next without giving their characters time to rest. You see it done in TV all the time to good effect.

Yeah, cut scenes are a great way of outlining npc's motives and goals without having them stand over the players cackling. I also like dropping in the odd cutaway that helps illuminate the setting a little. I try to limit them to 2-3 minutes tops, just enough to give a taste of what's out there without wandering into full-on exposition territory.