Need help: plot hole

Jakob · Post by **Jakob** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:27 am

Hi to all.

My Ravenloft campaign is starting in a week, everything is set, I know where to take the story, but...
...
There's something I still do not understand, and I'll sum it up in a question.

For your knowledge, the first half of the campaign will pit my players against a cult of Death based in Neblus. By this, I mean people who think Death is just what he thinks he is: the personification of the ruler of the Grey Realm.
Their leader is an elf girl from Neblus (wizard/cleric) who found out the strenght of her faith granted her clerical powers. The goal of the cult is finding "suitable" vessels (read: corpses) in which channel the essence of the three destroyed Death's Knight, so they can return to Death and give him back some of his lost power.

That said, I have some problems with the hook of one of my player's background:
...
WHY does the cult need the daughter of the baron of Neblus?

Mind you:
*She is not a suitable vessel: they need the corpse of a serial killer (War), of a bearer of plague (Pestilence) and a man who made other died of starvation (Famine).
*The only noteworthy feature of this shy elven girl is that she is haunted by the geist of her mother, who stayed in this world out of jealousy of her husband (she died killing in a fire the baron's lover and her family).

Thanks in advance for your help.

[/b]

Mortepierre · Post by **Mortepierre** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:37 am

The Baron of Neblus is an elf, so is his daughter. Elves are long-lived semi-magical creatures. To re-create the 3 Death's Knights, the cult is going to need a lot of weird & rare ingredients. The blood of a young elven virgin (noble-born) could easily be one of them, no?

Jakob · Post by **Jakob** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:14 am

Mortepierre wrote:The Baron of Neblus is an elf, so is his daughter. Elves are long-lived semi-magical creatures. To re-create the 3 Death's Knights, the cult is going to need a lot of weird & rare ingredients. The blood of a young elven virgin (noble-born) could easily be one of them, no?

Yes, I already thought about it.
The problem is that I fear turning the campaign into a "find-a-way-to-protect-the-girl"... And I'm not a fan of this.

Knowing one of my players, he would make them stay in the manor of the baron, doing nothing but control everything the girl does...

The first attempt in kidnapping (not killing, mind you) the girl was in Martira Bay (averted, during an a-solo adventure, by the intervention of one of the charachters, a Boritsi human aristocrat), and was attempted by a necropolitan ghoul expert 1/rogue 1.
The same ghoul is, as the campaign starts, attempting to kill in retaliation the noblewoman, aided by his two necropolitan zombies hounds.

Mortepierre · Post by **Mortepierre** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:40 am

Jakob wrote:Yes, I already thought about it.
The problem is that I fear turning the campaign into a "find-a-way-to-protect-the-girl"... And I'm not a fan of this.
Knowing one of my players, he would make them stay in the manor of the baron, doing nothing but control everything the girl does...

Alright, but since what you need is a reason for the cult to kidnap the girl, the end result will always be the same. I mean, whatever it may be, the target won't change and the PC's goal will still be to protect her.

Given you've already made one kidnap attempt, I confess I don't quite see how any idea we provide you with could change that

If you need a plot-twist, then send a ghost to possess the girl. She'll run away on her own and the PC won't be able to do a thing about it.

Even if they insist that it would be stupid of her to go out in the open, there are ways around it.

Noblemen don't like anything that restricts their way of life. Moreover, they have duties to perform. By tradition, the Baron's daughter could - for instance - be forced to preside over the yearly Spring welcoming celebration. While attending might be dangerous (given the previous kidnap attempt), not attending would be worse for all kinds of reason (looking like a coward, the weight of tradition, omens of doom if the ceremony doesn't go off as planned, etc...)

I know that players tend to react to this kind of situation as if they were FBI agents living in the 21st century but they've got to understand that the medieval social life was much different. You don't order a noble around, even if it's in his best interest.

Jakob · Post by **Jakob** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 8:19 am

Mortepierre wrote:
Given you've already made one kidnap attempt, I confess I don't quite see how any idea we provide you with could change that

The matter is I can change the reson why the ghoul attempted to kidnap the girl.
I can even make the ghoul not related to the cult... I just need some reason for the attempted kidnapping.

Mortepierre wrote:If you need a plot-twist, then send a ghost to possess the girl. She'll run away on her own and the PC won't be able to do a thing about it.

She will. The ghost will attempt to scare the Boritsi out of the house (she will be living and studying under the Baron's tutelage), and possessing the girl will be one of her strategies.

Mortepierre wrote: I know that players tend to react to this kind of situation as if they were FBI agents living in the 21st century

*sigh* I know.

Jasper · Post by **Jasper** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 9:55 am

Why not have it be a case of true(ly twisted) love. When he sent out his power to take the girls mother Death caught a glimpse of the girl and was smitten with her. Feelings long since forgotten since he left his mortal body behind rise up and began to cloud his mind making him unable to think of anything else.

He sent the ghoul to bring her to him without harming her so he could transform her into a lesser version of himself. As the ghoul was only given orders to bring the girl back alive and is not being directly controled by Death the ghoul is free to wreck any havoc it can before it brings back the girl.

You could even have the girl start suffering morbid visions of Deaths realm causing her to grow pale and week over time and start look

The PCs would be torn between finding a way to keep the girl from sucuming to these visons and finding herself in Deaths arms and keeping the cult from rasing the death knights

Igor the Henchman · Post by **Igor the Henchman** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 11:42 pm

If I understand your problem correctly, you need retro-active justification for an attempted kidnapping on the elf girl, but don't want her future safety to be an ongoing problem for the PCs. You basically used the girl as a hook to draw the PCs into the plot, but now you want them to move on to something else.

If so, how about this: the girl isn't a serial killer... but the cult thought she was. Maybe there's an actual serial killer out there who resembles the elf girl enough to confuse the kidnappers. Maybe the killer knows she's being followed and deliberately set up the baron's daughter to cover her escape. Later, the killer might even turn to the PCs to help her deal with the pesky undead who keep tailing her.

If that isn't workable: how about the girl's father has something in his possession that the cult wants to retrieve, so they tried to kidnap his daughter in order to trade her life against the real object of their desire?

Jester of the FoS · Post by **Jester of the FoS** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 2:11 am

Why?
Why do you really need a reason? Don't strain yourself if you really don't need to. Just tell the players the cult needs her and leave it at that. If you think of a reason later great but just otherwise just have them occasionally hunting her or trying to take her alive.
Often the fact that she's wanted is enough, the nuances of the evil ritual need not be elaborated on.

She's a MacGuffin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguffin
Don't overthink them.

Mortepierre · Post by **Mortepierre** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 4:47 am

How about a complete turnover?

The cult didn't try to kidnap the girl. The girl was just waiting for agents of the cult to pick her up AFTER she contacted them.

Why did she contact them? Because she is haunted by the geist of her mother and needs help:
a) getting rid of it
b) talking to it
c) controlling it

When the PC intervened, the girl (who isn't dumb) played the part of the innocent victim simply because she doesn't want her father to learn about what she is doing.

And why is the cult helping her? Because it pays to have the local baron's daughter in your team. Or, maybe, because she can get them something they need and that "daddy" keeps under key.

Rotipher of the FoS · Sun Mar 04, 2007 11:52 am

The simple fact that she's both a cleric and a wizard makes her a possible candidate for the True Necromancer prestige class (from Libris Mortis). If the cult thinks it needs such a master of necromancy to perform its ritual, then it might kidnap her with the goal of converting her to its beliefs and training her to serve its purposes. The fact that it would take a long time for her to become a T.N. needn't stop them from trying, as elves are long-lived and most undead are effectively ageless.

Mortepierre · Post by **Mortepierre** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 12:35 pm

I don't think the cult's leader is the same person as the baron's daughter. That's two different elf girls.

Rotipher of the FoS · Sun Mar 04, 2007 12:47 pm

Doh! Teach me to write posts when I'm groggy from antibiotics...

Oh well, maybe they're both cleric/wizards, and the cult thinks it needs two of them.

Jakob · Post by **Jakob** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 4:36 am

I simply LOVE the McGuffin hypothesis.

First thing first, thank you for all your input.
I'm working on some of those ideas, but I need to clarify something: the girl is not quite... "normal".
After all, she's just a 40-years-old elf, who has been haunted at night, for the past 15 years, by her mother's ghost. As such, she's A BIT into a withdrawal. ^_^
The presence of the ghost made all in the manor feel a sense of sadness as soon as they enter: the baron himself has retreated into a deep melancholia (the arrival of the Boritsi girl snapped him a bit out of it... But not much): his days are spent at the great window of the manor (in imaginig it, I was inspired by Munchen's Rathaus), looking at the Misty Border.

Jakob · Post by **Jakob** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 11:52 am

Well, I decided to borrow the "love" idea, but apply it just to the ghoul.

Essentially, the ghoul fell in love with the girl when she came in Il-Aluk before the Requiem (she was 20, then...) and decided to use his AMAZING GHOULISH POWER to turn her into an undead creature and live a wonderful and scavenging life with her.
Essentially, the PCs will have to protect the girl... For a while.

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Need help: plot hole

Need help: plot hole