To get to the actual issue I'm facing, I need a method to isolate the area that the adventure takes place so that the heroes actually ARE the only people who can solve the issues at hand. Since they are middle-heroic tier, this seems to be an unlikely situation most of the time.
My current though is to have a magical shield of some sort which activates once the heroes are in the location, also known as "a wizard did it". I also considered having the adventure take place in such a backwater that nobody else in the area is powerful enough to deal with the problem. But, if it's a backwater, then it seems odd for anything in the area to be a threat to anything outside of it.
How do I isolate the area without lessening the threat posed to the world at large?
Thanks for whatever help you can give.
You can make it that the PCs are the only ones with all the pieces of the puzzle to get to the bad guys. (think of stargate.wikia.com/wiki/The_Brotherhood ) Or that they are they only ones to know about their plans ( Level 9 Dungeon Delve WotC).
This can also be remedied by getting another threat or two (made up or real) that is occupying the "higher-level" folks.
Well, often times, it's those threats that develop in isolated areas that are most dangerous. Think about it. The bad guys have security--the forces of good aren't there to interfere. So they plot and scheme and weave their dark magic. Eventually, they pose a huge threat due to all they've managed to achieve.
So in your case, let's say the campaign centers on a backwater village, at first. Maybe the PCs arrive to check on a sick relative. Lots of people are getting sick. The sickness is actually a disease spread by consuming infected livestock, and the evil cult is responsible. The cult is using the village as an "experiment" because they want to develop deadly tools for biological warfare. Using backwater villages helps keep their scheming under wraps--most of the high-level NPCs just don't care or don't know what's going on. Ultimately, the cultists plan to unleash their madness on bigger cities, or find ways to weaponize their diseases to serve their war-loving masters....
Good luck.
A small "crack" team of adventurers would be able to get to cult 17b without drawing quite so much attention to itself as an army. This is the excuse for many action and adventure movies - James Bond, the Expendables and so on.
Adventurers also have the ability to focus on the one issue at hand. A ruler has other problems such as stopping his siblings from seizing power, preventing the peasants from revolting whilst at the same time charging them taxes, maintaining border security and so on. So as far as priorities go, cult 17b is somewhere low down on the list and if a government were to take everybody's threat to destroy the world seriously then it would pretty soon be broke.
Also - a historical argument if you want, standing armies were not common in medevial times. There were knights and folk available for policing, but raising an army required recruiting the peasants which was a very serious business. A peasant army would not produce resources, but consumes them, so raising an army to go and smite cultists 17b might cause more problems than it solved.
However, providing a few adventurers with a couple of hundred gold coin in a completely deniable operation, would seem like a cheaper solution. Fantasy special forces/black ops campaign anyone?
The isolated area method is actually what I'm using right now: in fact, cult 17b chose the isolated area specifically because they knew they would be safe from wandering adventurers and meddling kids.
Also, cult 17b is sufficiently tied into the local population centers that it would be impossible to root out by a larger force through anything less than genocide.
I didn't think of political isolation before, so I'll see if I can work that one into the system as well. I actually built a campaign around the "black-ops" method before, but that was a wartime campaign, and I never thought of using it during peace.
Other ideas I considered included a "time-stop" spell over a large area (enemies can't attack if they're trapped in time!), placing the adventure on an island or distant continent (effectively, having them deal with villains on the Americas in the 1600's), and once I just had everyone else in the area dealing with a larger, but ultimately less urgent threat (the heroes deal with cult 17b, the NPCs work to rebuild the wards which will keep the city warm next winter).
Other ideas are welcome, of course. I just thought that I should actually contribute to a thread that I started.
Answer: "They don't know about it yet."
This is the simplest way of handling it. The question you posed is why Forgotten Realms had trouble working a lot of times on high level material. Why aren't more powerful people working on this? The king is a paragon-level human, why isn't he . . .
Here's the deal. A king has duties, and one of them is to make darned sure he remains on the throne. He can't do that if he is consistently putting himself in danger. A king is not necessarily a paragon-level human, he is just someone who wears the crown at this time. He doesn't need to be the biggest baddest guy in the kingdom, he just needs to be clever and wise enough to keep the grip on his power.
Why aren't sorcerers stepping in? They're not omniscient beings, and those who are are less likely to interfere since throwing massive power around can screw things up worse than guiding those with just the right amount of power to solve it into place.
Now . . . the answer of the questions for sure:
How to keep this isolates so Evil Cult #31212 can do whatever they want? Secrecy. They don't announce their presence, and members hide their enrollment if they travel into town. Maybe their lair is in the wilderness where nobody travels due to ill repute, so nobody would really notice their antics. This is "social isolation". It's simple, and effective.
"Political isolation" is where they are just too far from a center of power or the law to really be a consideration. Like, say, international waters in the real world. Also simple, and it can effectively explain why nobody does anything . . . nobody has the long enough reach to get there with enough force short of marching an army.
"Geographical isolation", where they simply are isolated due to geography . . . an island, a mountain, an island mountain in the air . . . this is the simplest, and yet overused. Beware using it more than once. Players might get tired of assaulting islands/mountains/fortresses after a while.
If you want to get creative, though, perhaps the base of operations is in a pocket dimension not on this world, and only trusted members are told how to reach it. This one, I'm using already, where the bulk of elven cities are simply not findable unless you know what to look for.
Mathius
That's my answer when people start asking things like "Why doesn't the all-powerful wizard just do it his damn self?" or "Hey! Look at that gaping plot hole I'm going to shove my ego through!"
Yes, questions like that are legitimate and logical. No, they never contribute to having a better time.
If creating a world that vibrant is part of the fun for you, then knock yourself out. But don't feel like you have to so your players will have fun. 80 percent of them don't care about that level of verisimilitude, and another 15 percent wouldn't notice. Of the five percent left, at least half are douches anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
SUAG. Shut. Up. And. Game.
That's my answer when people start asking things like "Why doesn't the all-powerful wizard just do it his damn self?" or "Hey! Look at that gaping plot hole I'm going to shove my ego through!"
Yes, questions like that are legitimate and logical. No, they never contribute to having a better time.
If creating a world that vibrant is part of the fun for you, then knock yourself out. But don't feel like you have to so your players will have fun. 80 percent of them don't care about that level of verisimilitude, and another 15 percent wouldn't notice. Of the five percent left, at least half are douches anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
I like you.
Not sure if I like the dismissive bluntness, but you know . . . it is also the perfect answer. Right up there with "Because I said so. Now be quiet and eat your string beans."I like the SUAG suggestion, of course, and I can see the value in it. Maybe I have been overthinking it, but I just like to have an answer ready in case someone does ask these plot-hole-based questions. From what I've read in this thread, simple and easy answers are better than long, complicated ones. I'll be taking this to heart as I design the rest of my adventures.
I think I'll go with the "quantum solution" : until someone asks, the answer is not relevant. If the players don't care, it doesn't matter, and if they do care, then a quick answer which doesn't bog down gameplay will work best.
Also, to respond to catskilleagle; If anyone in my group is a stickler for verisimilitude, it's me. That's probably why I end up being the game master in the first place! I suppose I hadn't considered that my players might not care about consistency as much as they care about adventure. Thank you for the reminder.
Well, THIS thread has officially escaped my control. (Not that I'm complaining!)
I like the SUAG suggestion, of course, and I can see the value in it. Maybe I have been overthinking it, but I just like to have an answer ready in case someone does ask these plot-hole-based questions. From what I've read in this thread, simple and easy answers are better than long, complicated ones. I'll be taking this to heart as I design the rest of my adventures.
I think I'll go with the "quantum solution" : until someone asks, the answer is not relevant. If the players don't care, it doesn't matter, and if they do care, then a quick answer which doesn't bog down gameplay will work best.
Also, to respond to catskilleagle; If anyone in my group is a stickler for verisimilitude, it's me. That's probably why I end up being the game master in the first place! I suppose I hadn't considered that my players might not care about consistency as much as they care about adventure. Thank you for the reminder.
My non-helpful answer aside...
I agree that, by and large, until a PC asks (and has sufficient reason to know) then a lot of questions of "why doesn't elminster (or epic-whoever) deal with it" don't need to be answered. If there is a reason that a player might know ICly why a certain situation is the way it is, then give an answer and make note of it, so you can stick to that answer in the future (unless the info is false by design...such as an NPC lying to a PC). Since the information is IC, the players can't rightly demand to know (they can demand to know, but you're under no obligation to provide players with IC information OOCly).
If the PCs are -really- determined to find out why evil cult 17b hasn't been soundly squashed, they could try to figure it out in character instead of actually dealing with evil cult 17b. I imagine storming up to the king/wizard of awesomeness/high priest of uber god and demanding an explanation for why they couldn't be bothered to deal with it could make them unpopular (it could also be really entertaining).
You have a few options on your side that might work better than the wizard's shield when it comes to isolating adventurers at a site. Something similar to the shield idea would be a mobious strip/infinite egress...the entrance to the location has some twists and turns when they enter, and if they try to leave, the twists and turns loop infinitely until they turn back. This could be a ritual done by the wizard or whomever, and it won't be broken until a condition (which could just happen to be the reason why the adventurer's are there in the first place) is met. Character's could figure out what the effect is with Arcana checks, and figure out what they need to do with the same.
You could also have severe weather roll in (either unfortunate coincidence, or by design from magic). If the character's need to leave the site, they have to succeed at a skill challenge of x difficulty. Make the consequences of failure severe enough in regards to the benefits (making it to the closest village to get a good nights sleep) of succeeding so that it's just unappealing to leave.
Those options would likely prevent a sense of being rail roaded, while playing on either interesting magical effects, or inherent notions of self-preservation.
@Malphaeus: give it time. I tend to shrink on people.
@Kereminde: I dislike the way you're so bluntly dismissive of my dismissive bluntness.
But you're right, it's not very useful to use those exact words or take that attitude when dealing with it in the moment. In our group it's a catch phrase, and thus funny...and also applied when somebody interrupts game to tell a joke or start some other conversation.@Kazian: quantum is a good way to go. Another advantage is that you can change your mind about something right up to the point where the players interact with it. Overplanning a campaign sometimes means not doing something awesome because it interacts poorly with elements the players will never experience.
But you're right, it's not very useful to use those exact words or take that attitude when dealing with it in the moment. In our group it's a catch phrase, and thus funny...and also applied when somebody interrupts game to tell a joke or start some other conversation."See, that's not the same. I just glance at the clock and ask if we need a 15 minute break. Oftentimes they do, just to get up and smoke/get food/bathroom . . .
It's good, but once more it's more fun to look across the table if someone asks and say: "Well, you tell me why they would get involved." Give THEM the question to play with in their minds, and if they give you a good enough answer . . . hey, free content!