Quote from: LucifugeTotally gonna try this.

"En Media Res" rocks.

My current D6 Space Pirates campaign started that way, and with the words, "Small, undefended mining colony my ass."  I started with the PCs already pinned down by enemy fire, barricaded behind quickly-melting plastisteel mining carts, at the blunt end of an unfinished shaft, listening to the other crewmembers dying in another part of the mine.

Perked 'em right up.

I just wanted to let you all know that I'm bookmarking this thread, and using as many ideas from it as possible. It's good to be able to plagiarize when your own ingenuity disappears.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineYou do it in between encounters.

By breaking up the combats like that, you prevent it from being just a long tactical dungeon crawl, while also boosting the urgency the players feel. They know roughly how much longer they have to stop the ceremony, and start feeling a bit of the desperate haste their characters are.

I see.
I wonder if that could be done even amidst a single long encounter. I.e. after a certain number of rounds... just to break things up and build tension and waiting.

I like Youdunnit.

I REALLY like Youdunnit.

Sudden Twists tend, in my opinion, to be kind of cheap shots on a GM's part (not to say that I've NEVER used them though), if the PC has no chance to have anticipated what was going to happen.

On the other hand, one of the best things you can do to shock your players (and one of the best things about running very long campaigns), is when something your characters did YEARS ago in game terms (and hopefully at least months and months ago in real time) suddenly comes back out of the blue, and they realize that its been simmering behind the scenes for all this time.

I did that most recently in the Roman campaign, when a nice little study group that Jong's character invented for the emperor Claudius and promptly had to leave (back in the late 40s), turned up again in the form of a massive secret government organization led by a guy with ambitions to take over the Empire (in the 120s, 80 years, and many real-life months, later).

Another great GM device is when mixed signals or mistaken identities lead a large number of people to believe that the PC is someone that he really isn't (again, something I used most recently with Jong in the Roman campaign, where a bizzare series of accidents led the entire underground of Rome to believe that Jong's character was a major mob boss, when in fact he had no idea- people just started acting strange around him at first, then making reference to things that he had no clue about, people around him started "getting whacked", he started being investigated by the authorities... essentially, everyone believed he was the capo di tuti capos, except Jong himself).

RPGPundit

Pundit,

You like messing with Jong's head - don't you ?

Quote from: chaldfontI forgot another one I really like:

Story Within a Story
The PCs find an ancient journal or an NPC tells them an epic tale relevant to their current mission. The players play the characters in the story for this session and in the process reveal secrets pertaining to the main plot.

I did this in a campaign where the PCs were opposing a Pit Fiend who was secretly taking over their home city. They found a dead paladin and his journal that told the tale of a group of paladins, brothers actually, on a mission to save their older brother from the dungeons of the Pit Fiend. They played the brothers (much higher level characters than their main characters) on a suicide mission. They learned something about the villain's evil plans and gained a healthy respect for fighting devils.

That's awesome, playing a story rather than listen to it.

Dream Sequence

Sort of like 'En Media Res'. Sort of like cut scenes. You can give the players gobs of information and then they find out that they may not be able to trust it. You can even have the players play it out like actual events.

I first did this in a tpk. I went soft on em and said, "Then you all wake up drenched in sweat, you dreamt the whole thing!". After that they were much more cautious and afraid of what might be, they 'KNEW' what they faced could and did kill them all. Of course I changed all the details right then and there. I don't think they caught on till later.