I’ve got a regular Blades in the Dark game on a Wednesday, and it’s coming to the end of the story. For reasons, the players want to steal something that has a close mythical connection to the Immortal Emperor and we focused on a bell that he may have used in a very powerful ritual.
That quickly descended, via the word Bellwether, into ‘the winning goat of the annual Bellwether Cup goat and chariot race wears the Emperor’s Bell as a prize for the year’.
So last night, as a distraction to stealing the bell, 2 of my players said ‘my character is entering the race’.
My players being who they are, we quickly realised that playing out the race would be fun so 5 minutes of thought later, we played it out. Mechanics, clocks, betting, intrateam rivalries, goats - we had it all.
And because everyone was engaged, we’ll run the actual score next week.
Huge amount of fun for something that wasn’t really planned.
So what’s your story? When has a ‘quick divert’ turned into something much bigger in your games?
In a Traveller-ish free trading game, one of the characters had been spending his portside time teaching his native language (not many people in the region spoke it, and it was becoming increasingly useful). So when one of his students got into some minor legal trouble, he went along to help out; he had some basic legal knowledge.
He didn’t know they did trial by combat here.
They didn’t know he would go berserk when wounded.
His students definitely filmed it all, though.
He still has a +1 reputation on that world as “that guy in the video”.
I have a long-running fantasy city, in the D&D setting I created in 1979-80, and in the 2010s I ran a twice-yearly campaign at Stabcon set in the city’s police force.
The city government is run by the Thieves Guild, who realised that collecting taxes and providing services efficiently was more profitable than stealing in the long run, and suppresses crime. Please note that I came up with this before The Colour of Magic was published in 1983. Rather more recently, the Thieves Guild picked up some ideas from outworld about policing and set up a “proper” police force.
In any case, the PCs, who were a detective squad, needed a social distraction, and their druid looked at the nanny goat that their station kept to provide milk for tea and said “goat racing!” This was more like greyhound racing than chariot racing; his plan was to use his ability to talk to the goats to do race-fixing and make money on the betting.
This had a explosion in popularity, and provided the required distraction. The PCs still aren’t quite sure how they lost control of the racing business.
It’s somewhat difficult and arbitrary determining what counts as a side-quest in my campaigns. There is never a planned story, at most there are certain circumstances, NPCs with goals and motivations which might clash with those of PCs, and/or an ongoing war in an area which PCs could decide to make every effort to avoid or escape, take sides in, try to profit from or ignore as far as it proves practical.
Most of the time, players come up with a plan, in or out of character, based on their characters’ motivations and goals, as well as the intelligence they have on anything relevant to achieving their objectives. If they have too little intelligence to make a plan of action, their first plan will be designed to gather more information, from which they can hopefully glean actionable intelligence. I usually have not decided anything about in which direction PCs might go or how they prioritize their goals.
So, at best, we can treat what the PCs initially planned to do as ‘the Quest’ and something they decided along the way was a necessary detour as ‘the side quest’. Working with that definition, some really fun side quests have been:
Rescuing a dragon’s egg, about ready to hatch, from a clan of hrýmþursar (frost giants), whose Jarl (lord, cognate with ‘earl’) planned to eat it as the ceremonial centerpiece of a legendary feast. This required a cunning plan, the breaking into the Jarl’s treasury, the substitution of the real egg with an illusionary one and the services of a halfling thief whom a PC in giant form was actually hiding in his pocket during the feast.
A PC betrothed to the heiress to a major noble title, set become lord of her lands with their marriage, and expecting a child with said heiress, happening to fall in love with a commoner he rescued from a demon cult of were-boars. And getting her pregnant as well. The fallout from this is still to come, as the lady heiress comes from a noble family who would be at home in Renaissance politics around the Papal Lands, and would consider poisoning her rival a measured, proportionate response. If she should happen to react badly, murdering the faithless PC in a way that bards and minstrels will sing of for centuries might be on the table.
After a PC had tortured and murdered college kid more pitiful than anything else, in order to stop the plans of a truly vile sorcerer and his dark cult, the player deliberately chose to roleplay his character drinking heavily, taking MDMA (ecstasy) and acting in a way that would make it easier for another faction whose motivation they didn’t know to follow him and doing whatever they planned to do. When that turned out to be an approach by an attractive research Fellow with a D.Phil in Celtic Studies from Oxford, Irish skin and eyes of aquamarine, he told her far too much and they ended up in bed together (I don’t know what this says about the moral fiber of my players, but this PC was engaged to be married too, to the sister of another PC, even). Under the influence of MDMA, which can engender powerful intimacy and temporarily suppress even deep-seated inhibitions, he confessed everything to her, crying. She is still the only person he has told and as far as anyone can tell, she never told anyone about his confession, not her bosses nor law enforcement. They stay in touch, though both are determined not to sleep together again, given the preexisting engagement (which the PC also confessed). This is easier while there is an ocean separating them.
After defeating a bandit lord, a PC claimed his title and demanded the defeated bandits swear fealty to him. In order to reward his men for their service, he needed to make local lords and other people of influence accept them as a tribe with whom it was possible to make allegiances. This led to the PC demonstrating his horsemanship, athletic ability, poetic gifts, singing voice and command presence by riding into town with his personal guard, singing about his legendary exploits and using bardic music to inspire his newly recruited men to ride in rhythm and unison. When the local sheikh and his guard rushed in alarm to meet them, the sheikh showed his shrewdness by recognizing the love of spectacle among his people, and had his men perform feats of riding while he recited the names and deeds of his ancestors. Long story short, this led to a Bollywood-style dance-off, the PC bandit lord pledged marriage to a daughter of the sheikh (whom he has never seen), and then ended up seducing or being seduced by the sheikh, sealing their allegiance with sexual union.
Not sure it counts as a side quest but I spent every bit of downtime in a game casting invisibility on myself and then haunting an NPC I didn’t like, taunting him with his crimes, pretending to be the unavenged ghosts of his victims etc. I basically drove him mad
This is what happens when a forever GM gets to be a player…
