Post by kaulguard on Jan 3, 2016 7:35:49 GMT
My players are random. Truly and seriously unpredictable. I had originally planned a war epic based on WWII: Elves as Nazis and Taurin as Japan, bent on conquering the world. A straightforward fantasy tale with adventure and romance that would fulfill their expectations of the genre (none of them had ever played before) and serve as a wonderful backdrop for any tale they cared to tell. Guys, my players are straight murder hobos. They'll save a lost child one minute, and toss the boy a purse of gold as they wave goodbye; and assassinate the old man on the Council in his bed because they didn't like the way he talked to them at the meeting the next. I love them, they're great! But, the story went off the rails some time ago, to be honest, and while it has been a riot for me to to go off on some of the tangents that we have been on, we quite frankly lost the plot. I'm trying to recreate our sessions from notes in the 'Stories of Awesomness' thread "To War And Arms", and anybody that follows that will soon be scratching your heads, I assure you. But, like I say, we're pretty happy with it, and it's fine.
So, I'm listening to RAH Real Monsters episode 43(I think): Mindflayers and Minotaur. Minotaur was about what I expected to hear, they covered it fine. I think how I want to tell these guys about my Taurin, I think they'd like some Shogun Taurin, and laugh at my Taurin Ninja Clans. But, it's your basic episode of the Block, informative and gets me thinking. But then, the Mindflayers section blows my mind.
Let me digress.
Before I got, not dissatisfied but discontented, with CritJuice (I love the podcast, LOVE IT, but I have these hours I'm working and I didn't really want to be entertained, I wanted to LEARN something to help me with my game) and found the best damned D&D podcast ever created by the hands of man, I was throwing a lot of different things at my players to keep them interested. And also, things would come up that had to be improvised and sometimes they liked that stuff a lot. Examples: We had our own 'food mage' sort of encounter (not really, and it was a published adventure called 'Something's Cooking' actually, now that I think on it.) because two of my players couldn't make it and I didn't want to progress the story without them, so I sent them on a side quest... at any rate, during the course of the adventure they met this imp. I played him as a cigar chomping 'wise guy'. (Oh, you done it now. Woganpuck is gonna be mad, guys. Yer cursed. And yer cursed. And you better believe YER cursed.) They loved him. So, when a player missed a few months later, we did another side quest (It was cool, time stopped around them and the Imp brought them into a section of Avrnus, returning them to the exact moment in time that they left when it was over and they had unwittingly served his purpose, even though they had to save the baby Archon) with the Imp. Recently, when a player missed, they were in a world just like their own but populated by Leonin, so for continuity I brought back this NAMELESS imp as a cheshire cat type creature puffin on a hooka, and asking them to retrieve a maguffin. So, that's the Imp. Has nothing to do with anything, but he's important to them, and so he SHOULD be important to me, right? I mean, he should tie into the story in some way. Yeah, he doesn't. He's just some random imp that I gave some personality to.
I have a DOZEN loose threads or more like this. Not even a glimmer of an idea as to how it fits into any larger plot. Usually, I'm able to pull them together in a way that makes sense, and I'm almost always happy with it. But guys, I had no ideas on how to wrap this campaign up. I had a strong sense of where I wanted to go, but I allowed to players to pull me in whatever directions they seemed to want to go, and we were lost in the weeds.
Another example. A friend of mine, big D&D guy, came to visit and asked if he could guest in one of our sessions. I was thrilled, and made a fey named Calico Catbird for him to play. (no halflings in my world. Or rather, halflings are Fey. They start really small and grow to halfling child size by age two, grow for thirty years or so into grown halfling size, then shrink for the next thirty years until they are fey as we know them. An elderly fey is like a lightening bug. Why? Who knows, I thought it would be cool. Don't judge me.) Anyway, it was time for my players to be introduced to the big bad, and since the Drithi (elves) are Nazis, I had long since decided that the Fey would be the race the Drithi hated in much the same way the Nazis hated the Jews. Heavy stuff, but these are grown people and I wanted them to hate the Drithi (They do). So, Calico was interred in a work camp in a land south of where the PCs operate called Osland. He's an archaeologist among his people, and an expert in the ancient tribe that lived in the now-swamp the PCs are searching- a perfect one-shot character for my group. I intro the big bad, Ssafrax, the prince of the Drithi, the head Nazi. (they don't know it yet, but they find out later that the three PCs who are Drithkin all have the same father, and it's the missing King of the Drithi, so this is their brother) He WANTS the PCs to find the maguffin they're searching for, we don't have to be enemies. Here, have this aid from my hands. And a flying boat.
I have to digress again. I know I'm still in the same digression, but I'm getting there, what do you want from me? I knew the session before that I was going to intro the big bad, and my friend, and I wanted to lead up to it. I had read one of the Penumbra encounter books, and one of the encounters intrigued me. I didn't care a bit about the backstory or the ending, but the 'observer' from the 'Institute of Crystalline Thought' kind of caught my imagination. So I had him appear to the players. I decided that Leslynn hadn't gotten much screen time, I knew her father was the King of the Drithi and that she was about to meet, all unknowing, her brother. The shadowy figure with a silvery featureless face blares "Greetings! I am an isomorphic observer from the Institute of Crystalline Thought! I am sent to observe the critical event that will soon occur!" I played him for laughs, like the robot from Lost in Space, and they loved him. I mean, they hated him, but they enjoyed it. He clearly thought that Leslynn was by far the most important person in the group, and was very obnoxious about how the rest of the PCs were just her spear carriers. It was fun and funny, and once they met Ssafrax and Calico was with the group, he announced somewhat dejectedly that the event had not happened as the historian that controlled him believed it should have, the research was a waste, and he vanished. The adventure continues, they are continuing to search for the Rod of Seven Parts, in this case the Rod of Life and Death. We don't get through the entire ruins, but we have the maguffin, by the end of the night, but it's the only night my friend is in town. So, hardly with any thought, I had the isomorphic observer appear, shout that they needed to understand what had gone wrong and not to be alarmed, but we are taking a sample for further study. And he snatches Calico.
Weeks later, I decided that the PCs had gotten into some trouble that realistically they just wouldn't be able to walk away from, and I had this mini-campaign I wanted to run, "The Red Hand of Doom" (a great module for a war theme). So, I had Martin Keeper (a 500 year old lich sorceror, the bane of King Etair back in the day, and besties with the missing king of the Drithi, Rictovarios AKA Alonzig the hermit, it's a long story) go to teleport the PCs away from a Drithi ambush (sent by their half-brother Ssafrax), when the isomorph arrives, "Greetings! I am an isomorphic observer from the Institute of Crystalline Thought! I AM-" Martin's teleport spell goes awry, his body merges with the isomorph (Penumbra describes it as a golem made from pure arcane energy, and I loved that concept), and the PCs see black.
Dramatic stuff, right? They were on the edge of their seats, let me tell you. Heck, me too. But, I want to reiterate... this was just to get them to an area away from the action so that I could run a side module that I was going to try to fit in somehow to the larger story. I didn't have... you know... a 'plan'. So. My players are liking the module, they save the townsfolk, they delay the horde, they are doing the things. I'm bored. By this time, I'm listening to the Block, and I have a ton of stuff I want to try out with my guys. I have Martin appear to the PCs as this half isomorph, clearly struggling and in pain, then vanishing. I'm going for the Dr. Manhattan rebuilding himself scenes from Watchmen. I don't have any idea what I'm doing with him, I just don't want the PCs to think I forgot about him. I decide to bring back Gwydyon Luck, just to screw with them.
Gwydyon was supposed to be a long-running recurring badguy. I love his concept, I love his story. I love how much they freaking HATE him. I decide that poor sap they killed, whose head is in their knapsack, wasn't Gwydyon at all. So, I have the bartender talking up my newly 6th level fighter's shiny new cohort bard about a bard that recently came through town, Gwydyon Luck. I figure they'll check the head, I'll say that it is caked with putty and makeup, and that it wasn't Gwydyon. But one of my players says, "Well, I have his head in my bag, so this must be an alternate universe". He was just kidding, but friends and neighbors, THAT went in the game. After they saved a town from the little girl that had been terrorizing it for twenty years as a vampire, and made an enemy of her 'little' brother by killing her, I had them run into some bounty hunters that had been chasing them since way back, only they were very different, and had Leslynn on the end of a leash. Dun Dun DUN! Of course, Leslynn is right here, who's that?!
An alternate world! I think parallel universes are very cool, so I'm looking forward to this. I absently decide that the Institute of Crystalline Thought is going to judge them and cast them adrift in the realities, and I vaguely decide that they are mind flayers from the end of time. I have the PCs jump world into blackness with them in stark light, being judged by the Institute for causing a temporal rift by reckless and irresponsible action. "Guilty" "Guilty... they get spun off into the realities, but there is an interlude with none other than our old friend Calico Catbird. I figure he's a planeswalker type now, escaped the Institute and ready to assist them. But, again, no plan. Just trying to justify our "Sliders" storyline I want to run. They flash into a Leonin world, as I mentioned, with very similar town names, and the exact same 'Red Hand of Doom" scenario playing out. Their counterparts are better people than they are, more like heroes, but it's fun for them to see their half orc barbarian as a sabre-toothed tiger Leonin, and their dwarf as a little bobcat. it's fun, and we're still clockin the RHOD scenarios. It has a cat themed bad guy in there I figure I'll use. I don't. Rich Howard has me wanting to run it underwater, so I have the world turn.
One more digression. Look, I know, ok. But, hell, you've come this far. Ok? Ok.
I have a race called the Sa Kadel. They're my homebrew Psions. Thy essentially look human, but they're hippies. It started as a bad pun, ok? They were from an island called Sa Kadel. I was going to call them Sa-Kadelics. Ha ha. I had this whole punny history for them. They were lost at sea, and the island upon which they washed ashore was near barren, just a humongous obsidian mountain surrounded by beach. But they were called to a paradise in the center of the mountain by a very strong psionic compulsion. So, they started digging. They dug for generations. They lived in the dark, with this compulsion, and the only thing they did was dig (Can you dig? Yeah, I dig.). They became as one, mentally, and understand intuitively that man is that which thinks. Evil and good are just, like, concepts. That which thinks, is man, regardless of its shape. (You dig what I'm sayin' man?) They used mine carts, made from precious resources, and keeping the carts aligned in the groove of the tracks was a near holy office among the Sa Kadel. (All is groovy, man? Can you dig?) Generations in the dark dulled their eyesight, so they wear tinted shaded glasses and wear incredible explosions of color. Anyway, this whole thing. I've had the Sa Kadel show up here and there, but not under that name. A gypsy leonin recently told Caryn (our rogue) to "seek out the Sa Kadel" She doesn't know that's the name for the hippie guys. But no plan there either. Just an idea, a hook for whatever comes along, you know. You never can tell what the hook'll be that catches the big fish.
So. Listening to the RAH Real Monsters, I caught a whopper. Slam dunk, guaranteed. Mitch and Chris were describing how the Mind Flayers procreate. Gross. I can see it as they describe it, and I'm thinking how horrifying it would be to show my players that. And... it hits me. The DMs were just talking about how sometimes, the whatever the thing doesn't become a mindflayer. It doesn't get the tentacles and the face and whatever. Sometimes, it is a failed experiment, and while it is a mindflayer mentally, and still craves brains to eat, it retains the appearance of the original race. Ssafrax is a mindflayer, one of the failed experiments. The Institute of Crystalline Thought is NOT a university of history type organization, like I thought, it is the true big bad. These guys live at the end of time, masters of time and planar travel, but they are looking for points in the history of each plane to leverage into their own taking control of each and every plane of existence, throughout time. They are slowly, very slowly, conquering the multiverse. Ssafrax is just one of their agents on this plane. It is he who has excited the Drithi to war after all...
Boom. This ties up so many loose ends for me. It frees up Leslynn to become a princess of the Drithi, because if they're only doing what they're doing because of Ssafrax, and he's a mind flayer, then redemption is possible. The Sa Kadel become their natural foil, and because Mitch and Chris mentioned that mind flayers hate the undead, I figure the maguffin hunt should pay off in that way as well, and the necromantic Rod of Life and Death should come in nicely. Suddenly, I have a plan for the rest of the story, one that ties in most of those dozen dropped plot points. I jotted down the ending: "Stop the Institute of Crystalline Thought" (who'd have thought THOSE would turn out to be the big bad, huh?), and worked backwards to where they are right now, facing a Drithi-fish on a Dragon Turtle (those pesky Wyrmlords from the Red Hand of Doom translate nicely). Some of it is dealing with backstory, some of it is just stuff I want to get done. Here's the outline:
The Blue and White Flower (they're going to get this for the imp)
Nexus of Worlds - Sa Kadel (I want to find a way for the PCs of various worlds to band together to beat the hordes in every world. I imagine a sort of nexus where there is an army of PCs (600 Rics, 621 Jamstaers, etc.), and the host of allies that each of the groups have gathered to fight the horde from each and every world.
The Triumphant Return (I want to get back to Sevestri Provencium)
Paganus and the Missing Prince (a story I've wanted to tell since we started)
Into the Desert (filling some to-order Player Request stuff)
Caryn Settles with Wraith (long story)
Leslyn and the Drithi (where I think we'll find Ssafrax is not what he seems)
Calico Catbird (I think I want him to be a failed experiment too. Maybe a mindflayer named Al'houn, but Calico's memories are such that he rebels against his evil kinfolk)
Alaric Vs. Alocsaka (backstory business)
Save Martin Keeper (probably should happen earlier, but he's pretty OP. Not sure I want him on the table until later in the game)
The Gods (When my PCs die, before they are resurrected I have them meet their god. I think the gods are going to ask the PCs fof help against the Institute. A danger to the GOds?
Ssafrax and World Dominatinon. (we should deal with this)
Stop Institute of Crystalline Thought (before we get here)
Maybe the Institute is going to unleash the eldrazi. If they can't have it...
EDIT: (It kind of petered out here at the end, but I took some cold medicine and was having trouble keeping my eyes open, much less making any coherent thoughts. Or as coherent as I ever am, I guess) My point is, we were having fun, and what we were doing was totally fine, but I wanted there to be an overarching story. I had all these threads and nothing to do with them. You never know what will inspire you, you know? For me, it was something Mitch and Chris said in one of the episodes, and it's going to be EPIC. I don't have all the details, and the above outline will likely take us another 9 months to a year of playing, but at least I know where we are headed now. That's gold, my friends. Pure gold.
Anyway, that's my idea for the Rest of the Story. If you read this Great Wall o' Text, you have the patience of Job. Did it make any sense? Do you have any ideas for me to add or subtract or just to throw out there? I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading my ramble!
TL;DR - Amazing podcast, how sweet the sound, that saved a DM like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see.
So, I'm listening to RAH Real Monsters episode 43(I think): Mindflayers and Minotaur. Minotaur was about what I expected to hear, they covered it fine. I think how I want to tell these guys about my Taurin, I think they'd like some Shogun Taurin, and laugh at my Taurin Ninja Clans. But, it's your basic episode of the Block, informative and gets me thinking. But then, the Mindflayers section blows my mind.
Let me digress.
Before I got, not dissatisfied but discontented, with CritJuice (I love the podcast, LOVE IT, but I have these hours I'm working and I didn't really want to be entertained, I wanted to LEARN something to help me with my game) and found the best damned D&D podcast ever created by the hands of man, I was throwing a lot of different things at my players to keep them interested. And also, things would come up that had to be improvised and sometimes they liked that stuff a lot. Examples: We had our own 'food mage' sort of encounter (not really, and it was a published adventure called 'Something's Cooking' actually, now that I think on it.) because two of my players couldn't make it and I didn't want to progress the story without them, so I sent them on a side quest... at any rate, during the course of the adventure they met this imp. I played him as a cigar chomping 'wise guy'. (Oh, you done it now. Woganpuck is gonna be mad, guys. Yer cursed. And yer cursed. And you better believe YER cursed.) They loved him. So, when a player missed a few months later, we did another side quest (It was cool, time stopped around them and the Imp brought them into a section of Avrnus, returning them to the exact moment in time that they left when it was over and they had unwittingly served his purpose, even though they had to save the baby Archon) with the Imp. Recently, when a player missed, they were in a world just like their own but populated by Leonin, so for continuity I brought back this NAMELESS imp as a cheshire cat type creature puffin on a hooka, and asking them to retrieve a maguffin. So, that's the Imp. Has nothing to do with anything, but he's important to them, and so he SHOULD be important to me, right? I mean, he should tie into the story in some way. Yeah, he doesn't. He's just some random imp that I gave some personality to.
I have a DOZEN loose threads or more like this. Not even a glimmer of an idea as to how it fits into any larger plot. Usually, I'm able to pull them together in a way that makes sense, and I'm almost always happy with it. But guys, I had no ideas on how to wrap this campaign up. I had a strong sense of where I wanted to go, but I allowed to players to pull me in whatever directions they seemed to want to go, and we were lost in the weeds.
Another example. A friend of mine, big D&D guy, came to visit and asked if he could guest in one of our sessions. I was thrilled, and made a fey named Calico Catbird for him to play. (no halflings in my world. Or rather, halflings are Fey. They start really small and grow to halfling child size by age two, grow for thirty years or so into grown halfling size, then shrink for the next thirty years until they are fey as we know them. An elderly fey is like a lightening bug. Why? Who knows, I thought it would be cool. Don't judge me.) Anyway, it was time for my players to be introduced to the big bad, and since the Drithi (elves) are Nazis, I had long since decided that the Fey would be the race the Drithi hated in much the same way the Nazis hated the Jews. Heavy stuff, but these are grown people and I wanted them to hate the Drithi (They do). So, Calico was interred in a work camp in a land south of where the PCs operate called Osland. He's an archaeologist among his people, and an expert in the ancient tribe that lived in the now-swamp the PCs are searching- a perfect one-shot character for my group. I intro the big bad, Ssafrax, the prince of the Drithi, the head Nazi. (they don't know it yet, but they find out later that the three PCs who are Drithkin all have the same father, and it's the missing King of the Drithi, so this is their brother) He WANTS the PCs to find the maguffin they're searching for, we don't have to be enemies. Here, have this aid from my hands. And a flying boat.
I have to digress again. I know I'm still in the same digression, but I'm getting there, what do you want from me? I knew the session before that I was going to intro the big bad, and my friend, and I wanted to lead up to it. I had read one of the Penumbra encounter books, and one of the encounters intrigued me. I didn't care a bit about the backstory or the ending, but the 'observer' from the 'Institute of Crystalline Thought' kind of caught my imagination. So I had him appear to the players. I decided that Leslynn hadn't gotten much screen time, I knew her father was the King of the Drithi and that she was about to meet, all unknowing, her brother. The shadowy figure with a silvery featureless face blares "Greetings! I am an isomorphic observer from the Institute of Crystalline Thought! I am sent to observe the critical event that will soon occur!" I played him for laughs, like the robot from Lost in Space, and they loved him. I mean, they hated him, but they enjoyed it. He clearly thought that Leslynn was by far the most important person in the group, and was very obnoxious about how the rest of the PCs were just her spear carriers. It was fun and funny, and once they met Ssafrax and Calico was with the group, he announced somewhat dejectedly that the event had not happened as the historian that controlled him believed it should have, the research was a waste, and he vanished. The adventure continues, they are continuing to search for the Rod of Seven Parts, in this case the Rod of Life and Death. We don't get through the entire ruins, but we have the maguffin, by the end of the night, but it's the only night my friend is in town. So, hardly with any thought, I had the isomorphic observer appear, shout that they needed to understand what had gone wrong and not to be alarmed, but we are taking a sample for further study. And he snatches Calico.
Weeks later, I decided that the PCs had gotten into some trouble that realistically they just wouldn't be able to walk away from, and I had this mini-campaign I wanted to run, "The Red Hand of Doom" (a great module for a war theme). So, I had Martin Keeper (a 500 year old lich sorceror, the bane of King Etair back in the day, and besties with the missing king of the Drithi, Rictovarios AKA Alonzig the hermit, it's a long story) go to teleport the PCs away from a Drithi ambush (sent by their half-brother Ssafrax), when the isomorph arrives, "Greetings! I am an isomorphic observer from the Institute of Crystalline Thought! I AM-" Martin's teleport spell goes awry, his body merges with the isomorph (Penumbra describes it as a golem made from pure arcane energy, and I loved that concept), and the PCs see black.
Dramatic stuff, right? They were on the edge of their seats, let me tell you. Heck, me too. But, I want to reiterate... this was just to get them to an area away from the action so that I could run a side module that I was going to try to fit in somehow to the larger story. I didn't have... you know... a 'plan'. So. My players are liking the module, they save the townsfolk, they delay the horde, they are doing the things. I'm bored. By this time, I'm listening to the Block, and I have a ton of stuff I want to try out with my guys. I have Martin appear to the PCs as this half isomorph, clearly struggling and in pain, then vanishing. I'm going for the Dr. Manhattan rebuilding himself scenes from Watchmen. I don't have any idea what I'm doing with him, I just don't want the PCs to think I forgot about him. I decide to bring back Gwydyon Luck, just to screw with them.
Gwydyon was supposed to be a long-running recurring badguy. I love his concept, I love his story. I love how much they freaking HATE him. I decide that poor sap they killed, whose head is in their knapsack, wasn't Gwydyon at all. So, I have the bartender talking up my newly 6th level fighter's shiny new cohort bard about a bard that recently came through town, Gwydyon Luck. I figure they'll check the head, I'll say that it is caked with putty and makeup, and that it wasn't Gwydyon. But one of my players says, "Well, I have his head in my bag, so this must be an alternate universe". He was just kidding, but friends and neighbors, THAT went in the game. After they saved a town from the little girl that had been terrorizing it for twenty years as a vampire, and made an enemy of her 'little' brother by killing her, I had them run into some bounty hunters that had been chasing them since way back, only they were very different, and had Leslynn on the end of a leash. Dun Dun DUN! Of course, Leslynn is right here, who's that?!
An alternate world! I think parallel universes are very cool, so I'm looking forward to this. I absently decide that the Institute of Crystalline Thought is going to judge them and cast them adrift in the realities, and I vaguely decide that they are mind flayers from the end of time. I have the PCs jump world into blackness with them in stark light, being judged by the Institute for causing a temporal rift by reckless and irresponsible action. "Guilty" "Guilty... they get spun off into the realities, but there is an interlude with none other than our old friend Calico Catbird. I figure he's a planeswalker type now, escaped the Institute and ready to assist them. But, again, no plan. Just trying to justify our "Sliders" storyline I want to run. They flash into a Leonin world, as I mentioned, with very similar town names, and the exact same 'Red Hand of Doom" scenario playing out. Their counterparts are better people than they are, more like heroes, but it's fun for them to see their half orc barbarian as a sabre-toothed tiger Leonin, and their dwarf as a little bobcat. it's fun, and we're still clockin the RHOD scenarios. It has a cat themed bad guy in there I figure I'll use. I don't. Rich Howard has me wanting to run it underwater, so I have the world turn.
One more digression. Look, I know, ok. But, hell, you've come this far. Ok? Ok.
I have a race called the Sa Kadel. They're my homebrew Psions. Thy essentially look human, but they're hippies. It started as a bad pun, ok? They were from an island called Sa Kadel. I was going to call them Sa-Kadelics. Ha ha. I had this whole punny history for them. They were lost at sea, and the island upon which they washed ashore was near barren, just a humongous obsidian mountain surrounded by beach. But they were called to a paradise in the center of the mountain by a very strong psionic compulsion. So, they started digging. They dug for generations. They lived in the dark, with this compulsion, and the only thing they did was dig (Can you dig? Yeah, I dig.). They became as one, mentally, and understand intuitively that man is that which thinks. Evil and good are just, like, concepts. That which thinks, is man, regardless of its shape. (You dig what I'm sayin' man?) They used mine carts, made from precious resources, and keeping the carts aligned in the groove of the tracks was a near holy office among the Sa Kadel. (All is groovy, man? Can you dig?) Generations in the dark dulled their eyesight, so they wear tinted shaded glasses and wear incredible explosions of color. Anyway, this whole thing. I've had the Sa Kadel show up here and there, but not under that name. A gypsy leonin recently told Caryn (our rogue) to "seek out the Sa Kadel" She doesn't know that's the name for the hippie guys. But no plan there either. Just an idea, a hook for whatever comes along, you know. You never can tell what the hook'll be that catches the big fish.
So. Listening to the RAH Real Monsters, I caught a whopper. Slam dunk, guaranteed. Mitch and Chris were describing how the Mind Flayers procreate. Gross. I can see it as they describe it, and I'm thinking how horrifying it would be to show my players that. And... it hits me. The DMs were just talking about how sometimes, the whatever the thing doesn't become a mindflayer. It doesn't get the tentacles and the face and whatever. Sometimes, it is a failed experiment, and while it is a mindflayer mentally, and still craves brains to eat, it retains the appearance of the original race. Ssafrax is a mindflayer, one of the failed experiments. The Institute of Crystalline Thought is NOT a university of history type organization, like I thought, it is the true big bad. These guys live at the end of time, masters of time and planar travel, but they are looking for points in the history of each plane to leverage into their own taking control of each and every plane of existence, throughout time. They are slowly, very slowly, conquering the multiverse. Ssafrax is just one of their agents on this plane. It is he who has excited the Drithi to war after all...
Boom. This ties up so many loose ends for me. It frees up Leslynn to become a princess of the Drithi, because if they're only doing what they're doing because of Ssafrax, and he's a mind flayer, then redemption is possible. The Sa Kadel become their natural foil, and because Mitch and Chris mentioned that mind flayers hate the undead, I figure the maguffin hunt should pay off in that way as well, and the necromantic Rod of Life and Death should come in nicely. Suddenly, I have a plan for the rest of the story, one that ties in most of those dozen dropped plot points. I jotted down the ending: "Stop the Institute of Crystalline Thought" (who'd have thought THOSE would turn out to be the big bad, huh?), and worked backwards to where they are right now, facing a Drithi-fish on a Dragon Turtle (those pesky Wyrmlords from the Red Hand of Doom translate nicely). Some of it is dealing with backstory, some of it is just stuff I want to get done. Here's the outline:
The Blue and White Flower (they're going to get this for the imp)
Nexus of Worlds - Sa Kadel (I want to find a way for the PCs of various worlds to band together to beat the hordes in every world. I imagine a sort of nexus where there is an army of PCs (600 Rics, 621 Jamstaers, etc.), and the host of allies that each of the groups have gathered to fight the horde from each and every world.
The Triumphant Return (I want to get back to Sevestri Provencium)
Paganus and the Missing Prince (a story I've wanted to tell since we started)
Into the Desert (filling some to-order Player Request stuff)
Caryn Settles with Wraith (long story)
Leslyn and the Drithi (where I think we'll find Ssafrax is not what he seems)
Calico Catbird (I think I want him to be a failed experiment too. Maybe a mindflayer named Al'houn, but Calico's memories are such that he rebels against his evil kinfolk)
Alaric Vs. Alocsaka (backstory business)
Save Martin Keeper (probably should happen earlier, but he's pretty OP. Not sure I want him on the table until later in the game)
The Gods (When my PCs die, before they are resurrected I have them meet their god. I think the gods are going to ask the PCs fof help against the Institute. A danger to the GOds?
Ssafrax and World Dominatinon. (we should deal with this)
Stop Institute of Crystalline Thought (before we get here)
Maybe the Institute is going to unleash the eldrazi. If they can't have it...
EDIT: (It kind of petered out here at the end, but I took some cold medicine and was having trouble keeping my eyes open, much less making any coherent thoughts. Or as coherent as I ever am, I guess) My point is, we were having fun, and what we were doing was totally fine, but I wanted there to be an overarching story. I had all these threads and nothing to do with them. You never know what will inspire you, you know? For me, it was something Mitch and Chris said in one of the episodes, and it's going to be EPIC. I don't have all the details, and the above outline will likely take us another 9 months to a year of playing, but at least I know where we are headed now. That's gold, my friends. Pure gold.
Anyway, that's my idea for the Rest of the Story. If you read this Great Wall o' Text, you have the patience of Job. Did it make any sense? Do you have any ideas for me to add or subtract or just to throw out there? I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading my ramble!
TL;DR - Amazing podcast, how sweet the sound, that saved a DM like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see.