Finding Someone Campaign HELP

[IDontKnow]

I have a campaign idea where the PCś are trying to find someone but idk who and why, any ideas? Thanks.

[Unoriginal]

I have a campaign idea where the PCś are trying to find someone but idk who and why, any ideas? Thanks.

Well, if you don't know who and why, then let's go with the other important question: where?

AKA: what is the setting like?

[IDontKnow]

Well, if you don't know who and why, then let's go with the other important question: where?

AKA: what is the setting like?

The setting is going to be mostly basic if so, a standard fantasy setting with dwarvish mines, fields of flowers, elven cities, towns, foggy vales etc.

[Unoriginal]

Alright, is there any other info you can give us?

Some stuff you'd like to have included in the campaign, for example?

[IDontKnow]

Alright, is there any other info you can give us?

Some stuff you'd like to have included in the campaign, for example?

Mhm, Sure. I want the campaign to be long lasting with good role play moments. I want every character to shine at certain moments.
In the campaign I know I want to include a huge climax so I was thinking maybe the person was captured or the players would have to do something before getting the person back and having the ¨final fight¨ before.

I think itś going to start of with the PC´s being sent somewhere to do something as in clear out a cave or a simple dungeon. Before having something happen and after a plot of events they now have to find this person. I was thinking of maybe that person has the power or ability or knowledge to stop something, or the characters have to find the person as a debt to someone.

Sorry it isn´t much i´m not that far into the process.

[MrStabby]

First of all you may want to look at some spells that could provide some shortcuts.

Locate animals or plants might be an issue if they have an animal companion or are the only tea drinker within 5 miles (and you are in a city)
Locate object may mean the party cannot be hunting down someone who has stolen something from them (although if they passed it on the spell could be a start)
Sending means the creature cant be known to the PCs and want to be found
Speak with dead may mean that some witnesses can be contacted which you might not have been expecting
Locate creature means the campaign is low level or the NPC is unfamiliar
Divination is a cheap way to gather information
Legend Lore will throw a problem to the campaign if there is a challenge due to mystery
Scrying will give a lot of information about the surroundings if on the same plane (or says they are on a different plane)
Gate is an "I win" button, unless they don't know the target's name or they cannot move to a different plane to the target.


I would suggest trying to find and free someone imprisoned by the the imprison spell. They can't respond, they will resist a lot of the finding spells and with a bit of mystery around their name/description you can make the PCs do some investigation.

[MThurston]

Mhm, Sure. I want the campaign to be long lasting with good role play moments. I want every character to shine at certain moments.
In the campaign I know I want to include a huge climax so I was thinking maybe the person was captured or the players would have to do something before getting the person back and having the ¨final fight¨ before.

I think itś going to start of with the PC´s being sent somewhere to do something as in clear out a cave or a simple dungeon. Before having something happen and after a plot of events they now have to find this person. I was thinking of maybe that person has the power or ability or knowledge to stop something, or the characters have to find the person as a debt to someone.

Sorry it isn´t much i´m not that far into the process.

Boy that is a big request.

The DM drives the character story. Sometimes people will not bite it.

An example of that is having a character that has a missing sister. The party goes into a town that is 100 miles away from the characters home.

The DM tells the character that he sees his sister's best friend in the crowd. Instead of following her, the character just shrugs his shoulders and goes to the bar to drink.

So the saying "You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink" comes to mind.

Ideas - the characters come from an area that had a gem that would constantly pour clean water from it. The water was used for the fields and for the people.

The people rarely got sick and the plants that were produced were high quality.

I snake oils salesman came to town to sell his wears but no body wanted his things. The salesman found out about the gem and stole it from your town.

Now people are short on water and the fields are drying up.

A group forms to find this sales man. They find him after months of chasing him from town to town. He always leaves a few hours before they arrive.

(The sales man is putting the water into vials and the water cures them. He starts to get a reputation for healing people.) So the people he helps don't want to help the party find him.

Each town has something that the party needs to do for them. The reward is to send supplies to their town.

They finally find the salesman but he had the gem taken from him and now this bad person has it.

So now the party must find a way to get it back from the bad guy.

[IDontKnow]

Thanks Everyone so far I like a lot of them and I´m still coming up with my own.

[Unoriginal]

Using real life legends as inspiration, you could have the PCs be tasked to find a King who was defeated and captured.

[IDontKnow]

Using real life legends as inspiration, you could have the PCs be tasked to find a King who was defeated and captured.

I like this idea a lot, maybe to introduce to character into it they can be in the Kingdom or City when it gets attacked and after it they learn about the King?

[IDontKnow]

I like this idea a lot, maybe to introduce to character into it they can be in the Kingdom or City when it gets attacked and after it they learn about the King?

Thanks everyone for posting too.

[Vogie]

The door swings open and a towering man steps through. Dressed in simple woolen clothing with a leather apron, it is clear he is a tradesman of some sort - a butcher, smith, or carpenter, perhaps. As the shadows flee from his face, you can see he is regarding the entire tavern while actively holding back tears.
"Please," he says, voice shaking and eyes darting across the now-silent patrons. "Please, someone help me."
No one moved. All eyes were on him.
"I think it was Goblins," he began again, trying to hold himself together "Goblins... have taken my daughter".

[JoeJ]

Thirty years ago, the king was deposed and murdered. The cabal of nobles who seized power have proven to be as incompetent as they were tyrannical, and the kingdom is on the verge of total ruin. A resistance group has formed, which the PCs belong to, and they believe they have a chance to overthrow the evil nobles if they can find somebody of the royal bloodline to serve as a figurehead and inspiration for the revolt. The queen was with child when the king was murdered. She fled, and nobody now knows where she went.

[Wuzza]

"I think it was Goblins," he began again, trying to hold himself together "Goblins... have taken my daughter".
But, it was a halfling thieves guild, using Disguise Self...… (integrate into a PC's background as desired)

[Contrast]

You could always steal the plot of the Baldurs Gate II video game:

The party, unbeknown to them, was imbued with part of a divine essence (or anything really, doesn't particularly matter). A mage obsessed with becoming a god had been punished for his hubris by his people by having part of his own soul mangled and kidnapped those with divine essence so he could extract what made them special in order to fix what had been done to his own soul. The PCs break out of confinement but need to track down the mage and get back their divine essence lest they slowly die/their soul falls apart and they become consumed.

There's a bit more to it in the game but that's the general gist of it. Obviously you can swap the specifics around to your taste.

[TyGuy]

I often like to do things as a trope with a twist.

Trope: The princess has been kidnapped. People are being hired to find her and return her safely.
Twist: The princess "kidnapped" herself to get away from a life that she didn't want.

Pick a simple idea like that and build from there. Maybe you know a player would love to be the runaway princess and so you and that player keep that a secret until an appropriate time to reveal to the party that they've been chasing one of their own incognito members. Maybe the princess discovered the next plot hook and is going to help the part on their quest Zelda-style. Maybe the princess turns out to be a real piece of work and is working for the main villain, maybe she is the main villain.

[unclimainfame]

Another easy way to make a search campaign is to have the players look for pieces of a puzzle.

If it's some place you could a map, if it's an object you could need keys to open the locks, if it's a person maybe they do not know his/her face, features, name, and have to piece all of the above together by following the trail it leaves.

Or you could just go full blown insane and put everything together for that good shonen feel:
Someone was bestowed with a godly power that made you unable to be seen, heard or divinated if unwanted (it's cheating, but it's good cheating). The party has to find these keys, protected by whatever, that unlock a gate to another plane, where a map is hidden, the map leads to an hermit that has a quest for the party, in exchange for something he'd give the party a feather. With three feathers they could start a ritual to call upon the Hawk God, wich could bestow them the All-Seeing Eyes that could pierce that godly power. They still cannot divinate the bad guy but at least they would be able to see him. So they follow the trails until the plans of the bad guy are revealed: he's trying to destroy the world for some reasons no one really cares about and to stop him GUESS WHAT the party has to find the seven scepters hidden in the seven great mountains of seven different planes and then shove all of them up... yeah, you get the point.

I made something similar a while ago, where the party was looking for this man they basically didn't know other than a vague recollection, and they were following him from town to town while solving the issues he was creating 'cause they felt responsible for it.
It wasn't straight up rinse and repeat for every town, but it allowed me to create whole new stories in every town while having a connection all throughout the main storyline.

[Sigreid]

A wise man who has the secret to defeating an elder evil that has been brought into the world wandered into the wilderness in ages past. Legend says he left behind trail markers that would guide the worthy to him when his knowledge was needed again.

The beauty of this setup is he can be alive, in suspended animation, or dead with his wisdom written down in his chosen final resting place.

[zinycor]

The simplest way for me is to let the players decide why they want to rescue this person, simply ask them why is it so important for them to find this guy? Is it just for the reward, is it someone's lover? family? vengueance? let them tell you why they care.

[Sigreid]

The simplest way for me is to let the players decide why they want to rescue this person, simply ask them why is it so important for them to find this guy? Is it just for the reward, is it someone's lover? family? vengueance? let them tell you why they care.

The town's best hooker has been kidnapped by a tribe of orcs. Rescue them and surely much canoodling is in the offing. :smallbiggrin:

[zinycor]

The town's best hooker has been kidnapped by a tribe of orcs. Rescue them and surely much canoodling is in the offing. :smallbiggrin:

You jest, but that was the actual first quest on my current campaign.

[Corran]

I have a campaign idea where the PCś are trying to find someone but idk who and why, any ideas? Thanks.
The PCs are looking for Lord Chu, their hometown's wizard. He went missing only a couple weeks ago, last seen at the town's south gate leaving on a hurry on his cart. Perhaps that has something to do with what he was heard saying the last few days before he left town. Something about teleportation magic being rigged or sth like that. The PCs set out to find him. They follow on his track, gathering clues from each destination he last visited, slowly uncovering whatevr plot the wizard is investigating, but they are always a bit too late to catch up with him. The journey leads them far and wide, eventually even in the other planes. But why does the party accept the task of finding the wizard? Leave that to the players (though tell them they must find and tell you a reason). Perhaps the wizard is the spellcaster pc's master, the uncle of the fighter, has promised gold to the rogue, or whatever.

[Mr_Fixler]

I'm currently running a game where a large portion or the plot is searching for a person who does not wish to be found. Following a major heist the thief vanished and has not resurfaced to fence or turn over their goods. The stolen maguffin is something very valuable to multiple factions. Who hired the thief? Who was the thief? Where did they go and where are they now? Why didn't they complete the job?

Even if you go with the missing king idea, create a few notes on the locations you want to visit and why they are relevant. Did the missing person stop there? Is there a clue?

Have some trail of breadcrumbs for this lost/missing/captured person. Who saw them, hid them, helped them, chased them, etc.

[IDontKnow]

Thanks everyone for the posts so far Iḿ shaping up some things but if you have any more ideas to help me please feel free to post more below.

[Nidgit]

It's really difficult to sustain players' interest in rescuing/searching for a person over a long campaign, particularly if they've never met that person. He or she essentially just becomes a mcguffin themselves, doomed to be recalled as "looking for that one dude I guess."

What I would suggest doing is letting your players drop the trail as they become involved in something bigger. Make the person's life part of the mystery for the players to peel back over time, learning important revelations that impact their current situation. Then, let the trail go cold. He was apparently killed, or someone was just pretending to be him the whole time. Let your players turn their focus to more momentous plots now that they've become embroiled in politics and great quests. When they're nearing the climax, let them discover that Mr. Magoofin wasn't actually dead- he was Imprisoned or trapped in a demiplane the whole time! They go on a penultimate quest to rescue him and return with his forbidden secret in hand just in time to combat the great evil you've been building towards.

[BurgerBeast]

Have a central conflict that will creepingly escalate as the campaign progresses, and have locating this person be one possible key to resolving this conflict. Then create some form of personal motivational tie-in for each PC to this person.

I ran a campaign once (I think it was Final Fantasy 3 inspired) in which magic was slowly waning from the world, and someone had emerged with great magical ability - and so various factions were seeking this person to either kill, enslave, exploit, or protect her.

If you don’t want to use the waning magic storyline because of ramifications to the spellcasters, you could have an ancient evil slowly emerging, and this person could be a wielder of the “ancient magic” (a psionicist or an artificer or a druid or some other specific type of caster).