RPG Blog Carnival: Movers and Shakers

Who’s running this show, anyway?

Some campaigns can work just fine starting with a local town, a local dungeon, and working out from there. Eventually the PCs will learn of non-local stuff and move on. In fact, this can work quite well as long as the PCs are the primary focus of the campaign and works best if the world revolves around the PCs.

There’s another way, though. A campaign can still focus on the story of the PCs, but have them (at least at the start) be only a small part of the setting itself. For this to work, there needs to be other stories, other plots, going on around them for the PCs to interact with.

For that, you need Movers and Shakers: influential entities with plots and plans of their own. Not everything needs to be associated with the Movers and Shakers, and many things won’t be obviously linked to a Mover and Shaker, but this style of campaign works best if these entities exist.

In your campaign, who are the Movers and Shakers? What do they do? What plots do they have in the works? How can they be supported or suppressed? Are they known to the PCs? Are the PCs known to them?

Who’s running this show, anyway?

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15 Comments

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    • Some of these are less powerful than I usually consider when thinking of ‘movers and shakers’, but even if they move only small things short distances, they still count.

      And the idea of a kitsune fairy tickles me mightily.

      These recurring characters are wonderful. Literally so; I rarely see descriptions of recurring NPCs that make me go “cool, I want to play in this game!”… and 5e isn’t even in my top three preferred system.

      Thank you, this was a delightful read this morning. My colleagues are puzzled, I don’t usually smile like this.

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