[tacticslion]

Some of my plots have included:

Lady Fire Dove is not aloud to read this. kthanxbai
Having the players wake up with: no (hazy) memory, no voice (and illiterate), and no history (literally: a warforged who wasn't activated before they woke up) all waking up at the same time finding themselves surrounded by slaughter of people in strange costumes and strange places. The one without a voice or literacy knows what happened, but obviously can't communicate it. The one without any history literally had no soul/mind/senses during the events, and the one without a memory didn't know what had happened. Together the three of them were forced to struggle and wade through a series of plots and intrigues dealing with the dead people for the first four levels or so, until they finally found a) the discarded information core from the warforged, b) the way to restore the mute's voice and learn her language (which was different from the local language), or c) confront the baddies and learn directly (actually the hardest part). This game is, in fact, awesome, although the PCs occasionally so differ on what to do the game goes no where. If you have more PCs, simply tie them in via other means. One guy could be cursed to speak of it and/or is unable to act of his own volition via some super-spell-like effect or psionic tampering - he might even be an unwitting puppet of the enemy. Another could be one of the original city watch officers who arrested the PCs, but comes to believe in their innocence (and could act as their "parole" officer). A third could even be the person who 'found' the site and alerted the city watch to it. You can even combine some of these, and make fantastic story quests and elements. For example, the PC who lost her memory is actually an Inspired(a psionic race from Eberron, who were bred to be possessed by psionic outsiders - this isn't eberron, but the idea holds) and doesn't know it - she is periodically 'suppressed' and goes and does terrible things, but is then released none the wiser. The mute girl in our party is a shifter 'savage' bard (can't read/write, loses 'civilized' aspects for 'barbaric' aspects) who was a slave imported from another location, and was a preistess-in-training for her tribe (of shifters) [that's what 'savage' bards are in her culture - priestesses]. She's sung the sacred songs her whole life, and used 'dream catchers' (minor magical wards) against the 'dream spirits' (the creatures who possess Inspired and others) and has always thought of the hosts (and all with psionic powers) as utterly corrupted and evil, but the PCs are the only ones who treat her like a person - the entire rest of the city is highly racist and treats her like a slave (in fact she has papers indicating that she's the property of the PC who lost her memories, just so she can go about without being harrassed). Now, she's mute, and one of her major quests is to recover her voice to 'heal' her unknowingly 'diseased' friend. She actually just recovered her voice recently, through psionics, and has been teaching her friends her language, while making an effort to learn theirs, and is having a hard time knowing what to say or not about her friend who she watched slaugher tons of evil mages before collapseing unconscious underground. Anyway, it's powerful and interesting pathos, and makes for great RPing. Requires starting at low levels, however, otherwise you can bypass all those obstacles instantly.

Lady Fire Dove is prohbited from reading this... ever. Also, anyone else who's in my campaigns.One idea, if you have a long campaign, that will have known, limited-duration enforced 'breaks' due to player schedule conflicts, is have a central campaign interspersed with the past lives of a player character (or four) who has re-incarnated through multiple lives, playing out a different role each time, until (s)he reaches the 'main' campaign story arc which ties those together. The above story is actually an example of that. A sample is the one without a memory was, many years ago, a righteous paladin, turned into a vampire-blackguard, but forced to save the world from an undead plague... lest she be destroyed herself. She was decieved by an epic lich who wanted to save the world, and she was killed, but under an epic spell to 'cleanse' her enough to eventually be reborn once the 'taint' was gone, so she could recieve her true (non-undead) reward. Later she reincarnates as a desert elf, runs into that same lich (who kind of killed the world by saving it), and voluntarily re-helped the lich restore the world to life. The lich granted her effective infinate reincarnation (as the spell). Years (and several lives) later, this was hacked by a hag covey to get her immortality. She survived, killed much of the covey and completed the 'save the world' quest from her vampire days by plugging a hole that would eventually destroy the world with herself. Instead of destroying her spirit, however, it shunted her spirit to an alien world (the world of the current campaign) where it was reincarnated one last time in order to fight the undead-causing disaster that nearly turned her original entire world undead before was going to strike again - thus the campaign now. Each PC gets a story like that they can play (effectively: "here's your PC, let's go on a mini-adventure") during the enforced 'break' from the other players schedules. The main problem is that your schedule has to be loose enough for that, and you need PCs that absolutely eat up immersive story telling (fortunately mine do).

I got other stuff I'll post later (Tuesday maybe?), but it's late and I'mma go to bed to get to church tommorrow, then out of town.