The Evolution of an adventure
(I'm putting this here as it is a B5 adventure, so you can use the idea.)
I'm a GM who uses an extremely lose style. I don't usually plan more than the basic set up for an adventure, that way i can adjust it as my players react to what goes on (and try their hardest to derail the adventure)
The adventure I just started is a case in point of how my adventures evolve.
The crew of the ES Duck Dodgers was hired by Micheal Garabaldi to help find the cure to the Drahk Plague on Earth (This is set during Crusade) The crew is given various missions that, while deemed important enough to follow up on, was not deemed worthy of the Excalibur.
When handing out the first set of missions, one was:
A planet near Minbari space has been notice to have tech above the planet's current level. Find out where it is coming from.
When the players asked for a name, I blanked. Scolding myself gave it a name: Badgijm. The current tech level was equal to late 1800s Earth. Some tech on teh lower end of the spacefaring races have been noticed by Anthropologists studing them.
At this point I decided that EF shocksticks would be found (w/o serial numbers) and the Captainwho has an outstanding debt with the martian Mafia ties would be asked to make a drop of a sealed container before they got to the planet.
Lastly: when they fully started preparing to carry out the mission, and my needing to flesh out the details, I used the Fassai picture from TE for the physical description. And said that low energy weapons, and communication gear, were what has been spotted. But not in very big numbers. Also it was showing up in two rival political areas (countries). Since these were the 2 most advanced countries, Electrical power, was just now making an apperance. The tech had easy to recharge powerpacks.
The players started musing about who or what could be doing this. One said that it looked like someone was trying to keep his own twisted version of parity going.
At this I had a flash and let the characters role a deduction roll. Those who made it realized that this was how the Shadows operated. And possibly this was being done by Shadow allies (the Drahk are not the only ones)
So now they are searching for a group of unknown Shadow Allies that are giving 2 rival nations a push toward war, by promising each of them some new fancy tech, that cannot be made locally, so that they can gain control.
Any clarifications needed? Any questions?
TimS.