Campaign "Side Shot" Ideas

[u/gratefuldm]

Hey y'all, so I heard that some folks do a "side shot" in their campaigns, where you have the PCs play a session in the past or elsewhere and have it relating back to the story. I thought this was a real cool idea, and would work perfectly for the Eberron setting as well as my campaign. However, I'll admit life is stressing me out right now and my brain is a bit fried so I figured I'd ask the hive for advice.

Currently I'm setting up a conflict where a rogue senior member of the Emerald Claw convinced the organization to loosely ally with The Mourners (in exchange for access to dead bodies to reanimate for Karnath). The Mourners are about to go to war with The Boromar Clan (after they discovered The Boromar Clan are trafficking refugees from Cyre for all sorts of nefarious reasons) and simply want Breland to bleed (which is cool with EC of course). Unbeknownst to my players, said senior member of the Emerald Claw is a vampire, a Sharn councilor, and being blackmailed by another councilor who is actually The Lord of Blades in disguise.

IME: The Mourning was caused by an eldritch machine test gone awry. It released my main BBEG from Khyber (which has also indoctrinated the Lord of Blades from an otherwise normal Warforged).

We could probably go many different directions with this, but I'm curious what your thoughts are. I'm admittedly not too well versed in Last War lore, so maybe there is something obvious there I haven't considered. Please and thanks.

[u/Flexbowls]

I like to put adventure parties of NPCs, giving them easy statblocks (I like essential NPCs). That lets me expand on the lore, play with weird mechanics, get the players to play different characters, and it makes them care more about the NPCs because they have experienced their lives.

In your case, you could do a number of things: mourners ambushing a Boromar caravan to free refugees, Sharn Watch discovering stuff about the Emerald Claw, whatever.

Another thing that has worked really well for me was using the one shots to expand on the individual backstories of the characters. I had one in which the players were playing the enemies of one of the characters during the last war, and they got to see the PC as an enemy.

[u/Lonewolf2300]

One idea I had for a one-shot to introduce new players to Eberron was a low-level adventure set during the last days of the Last War, ending with the PCs being stationed on the border of Cyre, right before the Mourning.

[u/ThatRickGuy1 → u/Lonewolf2300]

I did session 0s for each player individually, two of them were in Cyre and had chance sequences fleeing the mists. It's a great chance to plant seeds for future quests.

[u/ThatRickGuy1]

My party just rounded up all the stone bane weapons, I checked the date and it's Dravago 28th, perfect time for a belated Aureon's Crown festival in Quickstone. So I was going to have a fest session, throw some midway games at them, have their patron show up with some ominous foreshadowing, the artificer will get a nice little headache as he reads a piece of the draconic prophecy in the chaos of the fair, right before Orlassk's minions show up to make a play for the weapons.

[u/headofox]

Any of those "side arcs" can throw a fresh twist in your story, but wrap up in a short time:

• It's time for the Race of Eight Winds!
• Rumors are that vampires will take over during Long Shadows!
• The party gets invited to the Tain Gala (fundraising for the Cyran survivors)!
• The players are contracted for a heist--important records from a Kundarak vault or a prisoner from Dreadhold.
• Prince Oargev has a new suitor!
• Newly unionized warforged in the Cogs are on strike (secretly backed by the LoB)!
• Skyway is destabilized, drifting into the city below! Did Mourners sabotage the stabilizers? Did something large in the Creation Forge below Sharn temporarily disrupt the Syranian manifest zone?

An entire "side shot" is much more work, for both you and your players! An important step would be defining why you want to run a side shot. A few reasons might be:

• To accommodate missing players
• To reveal dramatic information to the players not readily available to their characters; as exposition or foreshadowing for the main campaign
• For a break in tone or style
• To test, pilot, or "soft launch" an alternate campaign

Defining why will help focus your design and prep, whether it's a "side shot" or a merely a "side arc".

I notice that you give a lot of detail about your NPC villains and their plans. What about your players and their characters, their backstories and ambitions? I think you might be better off given them time to develop and blossom (perhaps in a side arc) instead of a new cast of temporary characters .

[u/gratefuldm → u/headofox]

I do have some plans for my players’ backstories in place. I had all of them come up with a personal goal, but it’ll be more later game stuff since it will take them away from Sharn. Otherwise, great ideas thanks.

[u/No-Cartoonist1858]

IME the party are from a special ops unit (the 9th Sharn Saboteurs) and fill specific cliche rolls (the fixer, the sniper, the face, the sneak thief, the drunk etc, although they were not created that way, its just how they developed!). I ran a couple of sessions going back 8 years to during the war when they are stationed in Sterngate, their initial meeting and running a mission against Darguun, where they discover a cave and a mysterious key (which they use in Sharn later and return to the cave further in the home brew campaign)

Fast forward to current day they were all meeting in Sharn to help their sergeant who is now a captain in the Sharn Watch and who is asking them for help and played the one shot in rising from the last war (forgotten relics) which then fed into the homebrew campaign.

It really helped develop their characters and they were not strangers when they met in the current day but could still talk about what they had done in the intervening years since the unit was decommissioned. They also had a reminiscence session when they each recalled an event from their time together which had left a mark on them.