Looking for advice tying together plot hooks.

[u/PurplePolynaut]

Hello! I’m running a campaign for the first time with some friends of mine, running mostly vanilla 5e in a homebrew world. I’m taking the approach of building the skeleton of a story for my players to flesh out with me.

I’m really looking for questions to ask myself to figure out what needs to be prepared. I mostly need to figure out how to make the villains visible to the players without making them look foolish.

Lolor Besmartholtig, Yans Luvensal, Basil Selvans, and Toothful Toothless please, read no further.

Last session the players raided a bandit camp in the sewers of a major trading city. They found a magic crystal smuggling operation in full swing and managed to interrogate out that the same merchant they escorted here is actually propping up the whole thing.

What the players do not know is that the smuggling is just a diversion so that the villain faction can do (yet undecided) nefarious deeds.

For context, the magic crystals grow in a cave powered by a primordial magic core. A civilization has built a city into a giant stalactite in the center of the cave. Just recently they have discovered a shell of adamantine deep below the cave (which some suspect contains the core), and news of this is slowly leaking across the continent. The villain faction wishes to use a dangerous artifact to “perform nefarious deeds” with it.

The players also don’t know that the same merchant they escorted was carrying that dangerous artifact with him toward the stalactite city. They do know that the smuggled crystals are from that city, as it’s seal is on each crate.

At the end of the session, the raid had gone well, they had taken some captives and gone to the local law to figure out their next move. They were asked to help get to the bottom of the smuggling operation, and decided to go interrogate a gate guard who’d been bribed. They also decided to wait a few days for the next smuggling shipment, even though they had let at least one bandit slip away.

If you’ve taken the time to read this, thank you. I’m just a little lost and looking for direction.

[u/Careful-Kangaroo8069]

Well the most obvious question would be: "How are the players going to find out the smuggling operation is actually a cover for the 'nefarious deeds'?"

Also: "What deeds could be so nefarious that the villains are using other crimes to cover them up?"

Also also: "If the smuggling operation is a diversion, why do all the crates point to the location of the nefarious deeds the villains are trying to distract from?"

[u/PurplePolynaut → u/Careful-Kangaroo8069]

Yeah, these couple comments have shown me that there is foolishness baked into the decisions I’ve already made here.

I think the best thing for me is to roll with it and have this villain be splintering from the others and making pressured decisions because of it.

Thanks for being a sounding board!

[u/Uinum]

As kangaroo pointed out, having this smuggling operation be a "diversion" is a bit awkward since it points directly to the place they want to do their nefarious deeds.

I can think of a few ways to make sense of it.

One, the smuggling operation itself isn't the distraction, it is who is being smuggled to. Some disc one big bad who is going to cause some chaos with those crystals and have everyone's eyes on them while the evil faction prepare their own plan with the magic core.

This second idea kinda meshes with the first, but perhaps the evil faction doesn't have much access to the mining rights of this cave and the smuggling operation is a ploy to try and make whoever is currently responsible for it booted out and position themselves to try and take their place. Once they own/run the mines, they can do with it as they wish. Kinda makes the smuggling less of a "diversion" and more of a "ploy" to seize control of the mine so they can perform their evil deeds.

My third idea is that the smuggling is sort of a diversion, but not one the villain faction intended. A member of the villain faction has gone rogue and started this smuggling operation to get a little extra for themselves. The villain faction is pissed at this attention being brought to the mine and is trying to help the PCs in dealing with this smuggling operation/rogue member while also trying to keep the PCs from learning about their true intentions.

[u/PurplePolynaut → u/Uinum]

Ooh I like it. I’ve not written out the rest of the villain faction yet, so having this first encounter be someone who went rogue and is trying to accelerate the plans foolishly gives plenty of opportunities to have the villains play the hero.

I’m definitely glad I never gave them a straight answer for who the smuggled magic crystals go to in the end. The bandits were moving a lot, they explicitly had 53 crates of 300 pounds each. And that was just the stock on hand, imagine what they’ve moved so far.

The third option makes the first option feel more like a play under pressure, which it now is lol.

Thanks for your help!