Jeysie: Well, OK, what the heck. Though my memory's a bit fuzzy on some of the campaign details now.
Ascii: Heh! Is this the "cancelled due to perceived DM suckitude" campaign? :D
Jeysie: Yes.
Ascii: Whee!
Jeysie: It would have started with you and Vizz inside Jeysie's house, wondering what the heck happened to her, Vizz having gone to grab his favorite cleric buddy to help him. I would have left an opening for Corinne too, just in case.
Jeysie: The decor would be... ultra-girly feminine. Basically, picture these two manly bearded fellows sitting in a house full of lacy, ruffly, stuffed doll, doily draped... stuff. In pastels.
Ascii: Jeysie has a house?
Jeysie: Some domicile, yes.
Ascii: I figured she was more the "song and dance her way into an inn every night" type.
Jeysie: Heh!
Ascii: And, heh! Love the decor.
Jeysie: Well, now that she's got a good gig boasting about you guys, and Vizz to romance, and Cool Stuff to hoard, I figured she've settled in a bit.
Jeysie: Anyhoo. So you guys would be poking around looking for clues, when there'd be a knock at the door.
Jeysie: That would be Brian's PC. He has a nice warning... seems like all the Bards in the area are being kidnapped and/or harrassed, so Jeysie might want to be careful.
Jeysie: Then, you'd chat, find out BLusk's PC was sent from the capital city of Northern Province, all that fun stuff. And you'd go there. Never did get around to fleshing out *that* bit.
Ascii: Heh.
Jeysie: Once in the city, you'd meet up with the guy who hired Brian's PC. A fellow by the name of Byron, local representative of the National Organization of Travelling Entertainers.
Jeysie: Byron was sort of a fancy info spout.
Ascii: Heh!
Jeysie: But, uh. Basically, the city, and the region, for the most part, is divided into two factions.
Jeysie: One faction of scientist/engineer types, and one faction of nature types.
Jeysie: So, one half of the city looks like your average normal city, except for one *really* huge building where the scientists, the Tinkers, have their headquarters.
Jeysie: The other half of the city looks like nothing but dense, wall-to-wall (er, border-to-border?) forest and foilage. However, if you know how to enter, you find that there's actually a whole network of buildings inside, created by carefully training the plants to grow certain ways. That's where the Leafers are.
Jeysie: So, you'd have to navigate this city figuring out who kidnapped Jeysie, and why. However, there's currently a lot of tension going on, both between the factions and inside the factions, so you'd have to deal with that, too. (Of course, it's als related to why Jeysie got kidnapped...)
Jeysie: I had/have the Tinkers pretty fleshed out, including NPCs... and the core ideas for the Leafers.
Jeysie: Which I can detail if you're still curious.
Jeysie: But I, again, broke down at the plot... everything I came up with was either way too easy too figure out, or way too obtuse.
Ascii: Heh. Please do detail.
Jeysie: The Tinkers are set up in a rigid hierarchy, and most of them live and work inside the giant headquarters.
Jeysie: The Apprentices are, well, just what they sound like. The Professors research the stuff, the Engineers both build the stuff and use it to do field work, and the Technicians are sort of like Interns who help both. There's two leaders called Inventors, one nominally that represents the researchers, and one that represents the engineers.
Jeysie: IOW, it's sort of a medieval version of the Brotherhood of Steel, although I TOTALLY never made the connection until the other day when I was thinking about it.
Ascii: Suuuuure.
Jeysie: No, seriously. It was a forehead-slapping moment.
Ascii: Uh huh.
Jeysie: It's because of all the Fallout talk recently. Before that, I hadn't played FO in... ages.
Ascii: What, that inspired the blatant rip-off, or made you realize it WAS a blatant rip-off?
Jeysie: Made me realize it WAS a blatant rip-off.
Ascii: Ah.
Jeysie: Love it when my subconscious forgets to inform the rest of me what it's doing.
Jeysie: But, the Tinker dynamic was between the two leaders. One was older, the scientist-inventor. He was a competant and intelligent leader... but a bit of a arrogant hardass. He had a group of hand-picked folks from different "ranks", mostly professors, who he has assist him in various ways.
Ascii: Like, going to the bathroom kind of assist?
Jeysie: Well, more like his lackeys. His favorites.
Jeysie: On the other hand, you have the engineer-inventor guy, who's much younger. He's a really nice guy, and a good engineer... but he's also eccentric, and has little care/knack for being any good at the "leader" part. One almost wonders how he got the job.
Jeysie: *His* "friends" consist mainly of his younger cousin, a recently-graduated Engineer, and her gang of Apprentices and Technicians.
Jeysie: The Tinkers themselves are mostly a modified Expert class. And mostly Human.
Ascii: Natch. All the really *good* scientist-types are human racists.
Jeysie: On the flipside, the Leafers are far more varied and more akin to a community of mostly Elves that share the same overriding philosophy of guarding nature. They cover more "normal" classes, though mostly Rangers and Druids. They're lead by an Elder and her assistant, who functions more of a mayor, almost, than a true "faction" leader.
Jeysie: Both sides have fought in the past, but had reached a truce in recent years... until recently. Despite the fact that all the faction leaders profess to be trying to get everyone to play nicely, the "lesser" ranks have been having "altercations" with each other. And evidence points that one or the other faction is responsible for kidnapping Jeysie...
Jeysie: And so on. And finite, more or less.
Ascii: Kewl.
Jeysie: The setting was fine. The plot, not so much. Or rather, the details.
Ascii: Well, you've written a great setup.
Jeysie: Oh sure. I'm good at that.
Ascii: That's all you really NEED, anyway. You're supposed to create the actual event progression around the PCs as they... uh, progress.
Jeysie: Not exactly. I mean, this was sort of a mystery thing.
Ascii: So? Nothing says you can't come up with the mystery as you go.
Jeysie: Kinda hard to have you guys going around looking for clues to where Jeysie is if you don't have any clues to find...
Jeysie: Sure, I could. It wouldn't actually make any sense eventually...
Ascii: Like they ever do. More than half of every mystery-type plot I've ever seen made NO sense to me after the fact.
Jeysie: Plus the ending was kind of, well, depressing.
Ascii: Why?
Jeysie: Well...
Ascii: Hurry up, I'm going to pass out in 3.4 minutes.
Jeysie: The idea is that the reason why the engineer-inventor guy seems like he's a bad leader is because, well, he is. His "wife" and the other leader are in cahoots and wanted somebody malleable enough to let them get away with their plan to start up the faction feud again, in the hopes that they'd wrestle control from the Leafers. They kidnapped Jeysie because they *also* are in league with the Family and got their hands on the Symphony... but needed someone who could *use* it.
Jeysie: Of course, they also tried framing the Leafers as being the ones responsible...
Ascii: Mmm hmm...
Jeysie: So... I guess how depressing it would be would depend on who you did or didn't get tangled up with.
Jeysie: On the whole... I like the setting better than the plot I came up with.
Jeysie: Not to mention that it's rather dependent on several factors that no longer work.
Ascii: Uh... how exactly is that plot depressing?
Jeysie: Oh, right. I forgot... you guys never care about NPCs. Never mind then.
Jeysie: Anyway. You can probably see why I had to give up on it after a while.
Ascii: Pfft.
Jeysie: Too convoluted. Too railroady. And too much not the sort of thing this group tends to find interesting.
Ascii: Actually, I meant it in the sense of, political manipulations like that aren't really that *depressing* as such. I thought you were going to say that Jeysie got whacked by them or something.
Jeysie: Nah.
Ascii: So, I probably would have played it.
Jeysie: Well, good. I still can't write it.
Jeysie: But if you want to crib the setting, feel free. It'll just have to be somewhere other than Northern Province now.
Ascii: You mean, steal it for my own use?
Jeysie: Yeah. I'm never gonna use it.
Ascii: ...well, I'll keep it in mind.
Jeysie: But... I guess you can see why I came up with the "half-DM" idea.
Ascii: I still think it was a GOOD idea.
Jeysie: Heh! I just got tripped up at the hard part.
Jeysie: Honestly, this is why I tell BLusk so much stuff when we're chatting together.
Jeysie: I have tons of ideas. I just am never going to use any of them for one reason or another... so I toss them off just in case somebody else can ever use them.
Ascii: Well, how about sharing them with ME too, then?
Jeysie: I do when you're here.