Allan wrote:
We have played some Dying Earth by Pelgrane, but he was not a fan of the language, and had not read the books.
Thinking about it, DE is very S&S, without the fighting correct?
What an excellent game! What excellent books! And yes, the stories fit the genre well, especially the totally amoral and utterly self-serving attitude of practically everybody. And then the stories are actually quite violent, too, even physically so, with just a diaphanous veil of comic events hardly disguising the cruelty and outright brutality of it all.
Allan wrote:
Do you think such a story will suffer from not having a villian. If the player is moving, how to have him plagued by someone, or do I just treat it like a series of short stories without an over arching badass.
I second all of hectorgrey’s excellent advice. Like him, I don’t perceive any problem. The obvious, over-arching “get back home”
PA should help the
PC pretty much all of the time in overcoming the episodic obstacles to his trip. If you want the player and his PAs to be more pro-active (which is probaly a good thing), you might want to consider and suggest to your player that his
PC might be able to, during his trip, acquire the means to eventually exact revenge on the sorcerer. The sorcerer might for example draw (much of) his eldritch powers from a pact with an arch-demon (or he might have incarcerated him), and finding out how to break the sorcerer’s hold over his patron/slave might be second storyline to be played out alongside and parallel to the return trip. You just need to dangle the
PC with occasional opportunities to learn about the demon.
Allan wrote:
The badass/villain I was trying to work out would be at his landing point, somewhere north, Taraam in Xoth, somewhere like that.
Maybe some associate of the sorcerer? But that doesn’t really matter. You just need to put obstacles in the
PC’s way, preferable living sentient, obstacles with reasons to detain the
PC of their own. If you are afraid that your game might become too episodic and fractured, such a villain might himself be located further south along the
PC’s path but have agents further north. Another powerful sorcerer might be good — one antagonistic to the original one, but nevertheless unfriendly to the
PC anyhow. Maybe he wants to wrest the arch-demon away from the first sorcerer and make him his own, while the
PC is looking for a means to banish the arch-demon for good — which the second sorcerer would in theory know how to do. This second sorcerer might even in part be responsible for the
PC banishment, having used him as an unwitting tool to test some (faulty) theory of his about the arch-demon — and in the process the
PC learned some fact (or acquired some relevant document) which the second sorcerer now would like to have, and which the
PC wants to use to break the first sorcerer’s power over the demon. Now if only the
PC could find out exactly how to
use his knowledge…
But that’s just an idea from the top of the head. There are a myriad ways to make the adventures less episodic and to give the
PC more to pursue, PA-wise, than just getting back south as soon as possible — if you two so desire.