Thoughts on where to take this idea.....

[Chester]

My turn to DM next in the group's rotation. :smallmad:

I had a thought, but I'm not sure where to go with it. Maybe nowhere. Perhaps some of you could fill in the blanks.

The party, now well-known and respected, has been off adventuring for months. One party member receives a letter from his hometown that his mother / father / whoever is gravely ill.

If the party chooses to return home, they will find that all is well, everyone is healthy, and the letter is a forgery.

The party will potentially wonder what's going on.

I still haven't figured out what's going on. That's where the playground comes in. :smallbiggrin:

Any ideas?

[JNAProductions]

Their mother/father/mentor/potato farming friend/whoever is lonely and misses them. "Why don't you ever use a Sending spell? I know you travel with a wizard, you could at least spare 25 words for me once every few days!"

[fishyfishyfishy]

Well obviously someone wanted them to return to their home. The question is why. Is a villain spying on them, hoping to learn who is closest to them so they can perform some devious activity? Were they close to discovering some important detail in a nefarious plot and this was an easy way to get them out of the way for just long enough? Instead of being an outright fake, was the letter perhaps a lie by one of the townsfolk who desperately needed them to return but knew that nothing short of a personal issue like this would get them to return? All kinds of things can come from this.

[daremetoidareyo]

What if they don't return home?

[Chester]

What if they don't return home?

I have other ideas. I can deal.

[Pugwampy]

You could have them ask around town and they find out about some monster or bandits in a cave .

After that huge bandit fight surprise em with it was the neighbor,s naughty little daughter being funny with the player and no relation with the guys they just whacked .

[ExLibrisMortis]

I'd say, Insert Elder Evil, if you don't know where to take the campaign. Clearly, the forged letter was sent by [this really important harbinger of Pandorym], and the party will be used to release it.

[Rangô]

Hey there!
One story line that I find interesting is the ancient relic, may be a party's PC is in possession of it without knowing, you could set up a villian who has discovered that they have it and he wants recover it from their bloody dead hands.
Prepare an ambush during their journey to the village, drop some information to lead them to ask new questions where they arrive, maybe related to his/her mother/mentor/potato and drop a little more info. Then you could kidnap the mother/mentor/potato and make them go wherever you want, for example to a dragon's lair.
During the campaign, the relic could be awakening its powers even more its consciousness.

[zyggythorn]

Doppelgangers/changelings. Lots of them.

[Chester]

Doppelgangers/changelings. Lots of them.

...and they don't know who's a doppleganger and who's not.....

I like this. A lot.

Now, to consider motivations. Given the party's reputation, they've also made a few enemies. One in particular was a young green dragon who was forced to leave in disgrace after the party thwarted his plans....maybe he has something to do with it? Maybe he also hired an enemy party to take them out? Something else?

[J-H]

Options:

1) Someone is possessed, and wrote the letter without knowing. The spirit that possessed them came from some buried ruins underneath the town, which are being invaded from below by drow/troglodytes/beholders/spiders/kythons/??.

2) Someone wanted them out of the area they were in to facilitate a coup/bandit raid/murder, and to frame them. The false letter was magically generated and is one of 3 hooks or clues they have to find the perp.

3) The letter is from the future. Cue shenanigans with a Chronomancer or an ancient artifact. Time loop? Time traveler? Prophecy?

[Strigon]

Now, to consider motivations. Given the party's reputation, they've also made a few enemies. One in particular was a young green dragon who was forced to leave in disgrace after the party thwarted his plans....maybe he has something to do with it? Maybe he also hired an enemy party to take them out? Something else?

There doesn't have to be any particular motivation.
The woman really was sick; a changeling wanted to take her place, so it tried to off her. They didn't succeed; she was found, but deathly ill. Nobody knows what happened to her, so they called their powerful friends in an attempt to get help. The changelings, realizing that a high-level party could put an end to their plans - especially if they had killed a loved one - panicked, and kidnapped/killed (depends on your style) a bunch more villagers, so they could try to cover up the illness with a collaborative effort.

[Flickerdart]

Yeah, you basically have a flow chart approach here:

Someone wants the party to be at a certain place
The letter is intended to bring the party to the specific village. The location is important because of some local site (unholy shrine, magicite deposit, haunted graveyard, planar rift, the last open Blockbuster location). The path that the PCs take to get there could also be important, as could the time they travel (during a particular holy day).

Someone wants the party to leave a certain place
The letter is intended to bring the party away from wherever they are. This can be because their current location is a source of power - perhaps the village lies in a different duchy, whereas the city they are in now belongs to a Duke that is very attached to the party. But the first Duke is his rival, and therefore hates the PCs. Or the PCs cannot guard the second Duke, so the first Duke has him assassinated.

Other options are:
Someone wants to split the party, hoping the PC will go off alone to treat the sickness.
Someone wants to test the PC's loyalty to the ill person, and use them as a hostage later.
The letter was real, but someone doesn't want the PCs to know. The village they see is a deception in some respect - changelings, mind-control preventing the villagers from speaking, and so on. The villain has plans for the village, and was hoping the PCs would not find out until later (or ideally never) and now the PCs must race to figure out what's wrong before the plan is complete.

[daremetoidareyo]

...and they don't know who's a doppleganger and who's not.....

I like this. A lot.

Now, to consider motivations. Given the party's reputation, they've also made a few enemies. One in particular was a young green dragon who was forced to leave in disgrace after the party thwarted his plans....maybe he has something to do with it? Maybe he also hired an enemy party to take them out? Something else?

Surprise twist, dopplegangers spend the first X# of years living as humans and only transform for the first time during a special ceremony held by kin. PC has been a doppleganger all along!

[Bobby Baratheon]

I think there's a lot of different and interesting ways you could take this. A changeling cult taking over the town would be a very fun adventure. The question, though, is why? Why do the changelings need this particular town? Are they being controlled by someone else? What if it's a distraction so that one of their number can replace the ruler of wherever the PCs are now? What if they're trying to infiltrate the realm and cause a ruckus as a smokescreen for the monstrous horde forming up in the mountains? Could there be something more insidious at work behind the scenes - like a coven of mindslayers trying to throw the realm into chaos so they can kidnap lots of food people with impunity?

[Zaq]

Maybe the letter could be a smokescreen? Imagine if this faked letter were the first of many such false missives (not necessarily all letters). Someone is going to start giving the PCs lots of false information of that type, with the goal being to get the PCs to become distrustful of that sort of thing—they wave off letters as being fake unless proven otherwise, and so on.

The obvious motive for doing such a thing would be if the villain in question knew that some kind of real and important correspondence was coming the PCs' way, and the villain needs them to either view that correspondence as false or simply view it as being less than important for just long enough. But since that's fairly obvious, we should probably do something a little bit different. What if becoming distrustful of incoming messages makes one or more of the PCs unfit for (or less well-suited for) a job or a responsibility they have? This will be easier if the PCs have some kind of roots other than just being a bunch of murderhoboes, but what if a PC is less able to serve as a liaison to some kind of noble because they don't trust the information they have coming to them? What if a church one of the PCs is part of doesn't want suspicious and paranoid people to be serving as its representatives? What if the fact that the PCs fell for something fake and didn't believe something real makes a patron or a backer start to question the party's judgment?

Not every group will bite on that plot hook, and being 100% honest, it would probably take someone who's better at GMing than I am to make that actually feel natural and not feel railroady. But it would be neat to see it work.

[Gildedragon]

They're all dead. It's just a bunch of ghosts
They've walked into a maze type trap that traps them in their ideal village memories

[icefractal]

It's Doppelgangers ... but their plan isn't working as well as intended. The original plan was to replace all the residents, including the PC's family. Then when the PCs got there, the impostors could find out their secrets, pilfer their magic stuff, maybe even send them on missions if the ruse worked well enough.

Unluckily, after they'd started replacing people and sent the letter, a Sorcerer showed up for a visit ... a very powerful one, whose family did live in the village, and is one of the ones already replaced by Doppelgangers. Said Sorcerer scares the **** out of the Doppelgangers, as they know if he ever finds out they killed his family, they'll all be dead or worse. They've been managing to keep up the deception, but haven't been able to replace any more people.

So at this point, the Doppelgangers will be trying to manipulate the PCs and Sorcerer into fighting each-other. They're hindered by the fact that they haven't yet replaced anyone the PC would automatically trust yet, and that the Sorcerer's "family" is trying to talk to him as little as possible so he won't notice any flaws in their impersonation (maybe pretending to be ill). But still, they have replaced a number of important members of the village, so they do have some leverage to try and bring about the conflict.