There are only two campaign plots

[NichG]

I guess I'd turn it around and say, can you really make a campaign (at least 75 sessions) out of just hunting down and killing a single Dark Lord?

[Earthwalker]

what plots have we got up to so far ?

Stop the Dark Lord Rising.
Fight against the Dark Lord that has risen and get back to a nicer world.
Explore the unknown (Wilderness usualy)
Build an Empire
Keep making money (A system of one shot adventures just to get more money, ala Shadowrun)

Am I missing any basic plots ?

[Jade_Tarem]

As has been brought up earlier in the thread, anything is going to look the same if you 'zoom out' and generalize enough that the differences are negligible. Likewise, saying that 'a man goes on a journey' or 'a stranger comes to down' is just a metaphor for 'in any good story, something happens.' Waiting for Godot has already been brought up, and is an excellent example of something that is not a story, but rather a cruel trick played on the audience.

So certainly there are lots of different stories. It gets tricky, though, when you restrict yourself to adventure plots. Given that dark lords (or... powerful political figures, I guess) and world politics shape everything at some level, you can argue that there is no escape from those plots so long as you count 'dealing with any part of the empire/nation' to be a subset of those plots. Adventurers need a long-term goal and tend to rapidly gain power of all kinds - magical, monetary, and even political - which generally propels them to the dark lord's sphere of influence sooner or later.

But that doesn't have to be the case! Tabletop RPGs tend to feature a lot of combat, but there are other available motivations for a band of adventurers.

The treasure motive has already been brought up - maybe your party catches wind of a rad artifact, lost secret, or maybe just a great big pile of money.

For new ideas, you may want to examine the great driver of all adventure - conflict. We're taught that there are four types of conflict - man vs. society, man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. self. Realistically, they'll all show up over the course of the campaign, but you also have to pick one to design the campaign's theme and main plot around. The two types of campaigns the OP brings up, Overthrow the Dark Lord and Stop the Dark Lord, correspond to the first two types of conflict because those are easy to model in the context of an adventure. They are also generally clear cut and easy to understand, which is good because not all adventuring parties can handle a great deal of complexity and nuance in their game, if you catch my meaning. For that same reason, Man vs. Self is rarely provides the basis for a good adventure arc where you Go to New Places and Meet the New Monster Manual.

Man vs. Nature, though, is frequently overlooked as a source of adventure, instead making cameo appearances at low levels before the party can create enough magical output to survive volcanic eruptions and make the weather sit, roll over, and beg.

But, just like the roadside brigand is much more impressive when she's the Bandit Queen of Ruzavia, increasing the scale of the threat can still make for a fantastic campaign. Here are some ideas:

1) Monsters have always been part of the world, but something has changed. Monstrous giant vermin, long-extinct animals, and even freaking dinosaurs are beginning to show up with alarming frequency. The PCs can deal with the local threat, but they'll find that the entire continent - perhaps the entire world - is having the same problem. They'll need to track down the source of the threat and, worse still, unite a divided land in order to enact an organized solution, perhaps against the wishes of those who seek to use the chaos to their own advantage.*

2) After ten thousand years of use, the weather control machine created by an ancient, epic wizard to keep the world from perishing to natural disaster has finally begun to break down. A continent-wide storm is brewing in the middle of the ocean with the demented machine at its heart, and it will wipe the world clean if left unchecked. The players begin as part of a wide-reaching initiative to find someone, anyone, who can fix it (conventional weather magic relied on the wondrous weather machine functioning correctly), and soon find themselves in the sole possession of a key part or password that only they can use. But just having the needed component isn't enough - they must acquire the skills, the equipment, and the plan to get to the machine through the fury of the Ten Thousand Year Storm... and when they get there, they must unravel the old wizard's secrets to once again master nature itself!

3) The players wake up on a strange planet full of stranger beasts. It is clear that civilization once existed, but all that remains are ruins and malfunctioning constructs. They must find a way to tame the wilderness and become self reliant in the immediate sense, but if they ever want to get home, they must also determine where (when?) they are, what this strange new place is, and what happened to it, not to mention how they got here! Once the mysteries are finally solved, they must wrest the means of their own rescue from a world determined to teach them their place on the food chain...


So there you have it. Three adventure ideas, all lacking a Dark Lord and the overthrow or potential overthrow of a nation. Do I know of any published adventure material for this off the top of my head? No, but I bet there's something out there like it. And if there isn't, then you could always run a home game that way.

*While that is a Man vs. Man conflict, it doesn't change the driving force of the game any more than having to fight the mountain weather made Man vs. Nature the driving conflict of Lord of the Rings.

Edit: Parts of this got ninja'd, but I'm going to leave it as-is.

[Aliquid]

what plots have we got up to so far ?

Stop the Dark Lord Rising.
Fight against the Dark Lord that has risen and get back to a nicer world.
Explore the unknown (Wilderness usualy)
Build an Empire
Keep making money (A system of one shot adventures just to get more money, ala Shadowrun)

Am I missing any basic plots ?

- Solve a mystery

[Friv]

what plots have we got up to so far ?

Stop the Dark Lord Rising.
Fight against the Dark Lord that has risen and get back to a nicer world.
Explore the unknown (Wilderness usualy)
Build an Empire
Keep making money (A system of one shot adventures just to get more money, ala Shadowrun)

Am I missing any basic plots ?

Assuming that episodic plots don't count...

*) Follow the trail of a missing something or someone of narrative importance
*) Try to become the best of whatever it is that you and your friends do (we will become the world's greatest wizards / superheroes / football team / Pokemon trainers)

[Amphetryon]

- Solve a mystery

Solving a mystery is a variant of exploring the unknown, itself a variant of build an Empire/make money; the presence (or lack thereof) of a Dark Lord only changes peripherals on the "explore/build" paradigm.

[Yora]

With "solve a mystery" and "explore the unknown" I feel that it still needs to answer the question why the player characters would care. What would they accomplish if they succeed and why would it be a problem if they don't?

With Invasion, Rebellion, and Treasure Hunt, the unspoken reasons are very familiar to us. To preserve a decent way of life, to restore a decent way of life, and to create a life of wealth for yourself. The motivation comes prepackaged with the action. Mystery and Explorations are means, but they don't have an automatically implied end.
I think Exploration most often is a more specific case of Treasure Hunt, while Mystery is often the beginning part of Invasion (You rarely know the villain plans an invasion of soldiers/demons/undead right from the start; that's commonly the answer to the mystery.)

[Anonymouswizard]

I guess I'd turn it around and say, can you really make a campaign (at least 75 sessions) out of just hunting down and killing a single Dark Lord?

Why is a campaign 75 sessions long? I've been in two campaigns in the 20-30 session mark, and most don't last that long.

[Aliquid]

Solving a mystery is a variant of exploring the unknown, itself a variant of build an Empire/make money; the presence (or lack thereof) of a Dark Lord only changes peripherals on the "explore/build" paradigm.

I can buy that solving a mystery is a variant of exploring the unknown. You might not be exploring an unknown location, but you are exploring an issue with an unknown answer.

But I don't agree that it has to be a variant on building an empire/making money. You can easily have a mystery to solve and not make a profit or build an empire in the process.

With "solve a mystery" and "explore the unknown" I feel that it still needs to answer the question why the player characters would care. What would they accomplish if they succeed and why would it be a problem if they don't?

Depends on the player. Personally I'm a curious person, so I'm happy to explore for the sake of exploring.

I think Exploration most often is a more specific case of Treasure Hunt, while Mystery is often the beginning part of Invasion (You rarely know the villain plans an invasion of soldiers/demons/undead right from the start; that's commonly the answer to the mystery.)

It typically is, but it doesn't have to be.

[BRC]

With "solve a mystery" and "explore the unknown" I feel that it still needs to answer the question why the player characters would care. What would they accomplish if they succeed and why would it be a problem if they don't?

With Invasion, Rebellion, and Treasure Hunt, the unspoken reasons are very familiar to us. To preserve a decent way of life, to restore a decent way of life, and to create a life of wealth for yourself. The motivation comes prepackaged with the action. Mystery and Explorations are means, but they don't have an automatically implied end.
I think Exploration most often is a more specific case of Treasure Hunt, while Mystery is often the beginning part of Invasion (You rarely know the villain plans an invasion of soldiers/demons/undead right from the start; that's commonly the answer to the mystery.)

Invasion is really just "Preserve a good status quo", while Rebellion is "Change a bad status quo". Treasure hunt is "Establish a good status quo", but on a more personal level, rather than for the setting as a whole.

Mystery can easily exist outside the context of changing the status quo . Consider, "My father was murdered. I must find out who killed him".
That's not really preserving a status quo. The evil act is already been done. Nor is it necessarily changing the status quo. The murderer may not be planning to kill again, and bringing them to justice won't really impact the setting very much. It won't even really impact your character's situation very much. Unlike a treasure hunt, your character may not end the adventure any better off than they started it, except for the personal satisfaction of having brought the killer to justice.

It's the job of the GM to provide a reason for the PCs to be interested. This is no more the case with Mysteries than it is with Rebellion plots. You assume that the plot is "Overthrow the evil ruler", because you assume that the GM is making the ruler evil to give the PCs incentive to overthrow him.

If you're going to frame the Rebellion plot as "Overthrow the Ruler that the PCs have reason to overthrow", it's only fair to frame the Mystery plot in the same way. "Solve the mystery that the PCs have a reason to solve".

Exploration can come out the same way, with no real impact on the status quo at any scale, but there is a considerable difference. A Mystery plot has a built-in antagonist, the culprit or conspiracy you are seeking to unearth. An Exploration campaign may have the environment itself as an antagonist, but that's a very different feel. There's at least as much difference between Exploration and Mystery as there is between Invasion and Rebellion.

[NichG]

With "solve a mystery" and "explore the unknown" I feel that it still needs to answer the question why the player characters would care. What would they accomplish if they succeed and why would it be a problem if they don't?

With Invasion, Rebellion, and Treasure Hunt, the unspoken reasons are very familiar to us. To preserve a decent way of life, to restore a decent way of life, and to create a life of wealth for yourself. The motivation comes prepackaged with the action. Mystery and Explorations are means, but they don't have an automatically implied end.
I think Exploration most often is a more specific case of Treasure Hunt, while Mystery is often the beginning part of Invasion (You rarely know the villain plans an invasion of soldiers/demons/undead right from the start; that's commonly the answer to the mystery.)

A specific example of Mystery from my last campaign:

- The characters all wake up in weird situations with amnesia, in a supernaturally-nuked steampunk city.
- They have various opportunities to discover their past, but also have to deal with other forces in the city trying to hunt them or eachother down.
- The players discover that the gods of the world were shattered when the 'nuke' went off, and that the god-souls got intermixed with other people
- The players discover that when they remember their past, they're actually rewriting the timeline to be consistent, and that they can have some control over what they remember.
- They realize that the other forces in the city are basically squads sent into this place by the militaries of the two forces of the war, trying to rewrite the past so their side won. The players decide they don't like either side.
- The players realize that the gods intentionally sparked off the war and even gave humanity the superweapon because every 10000 years they needed to clean house on the timeline or things got too intertwined for fate to be malleable. But they got caught in their own scheme since the people they gave it to modified it.
- The players also discover that the more they know, the more tenuous their connection with 'this' world becomes, and they begin to fade out
- So the players had to solve enough of the mystery to know what to change about the past and how, without solving the whole thing and becoming unable to influence it.
- What follows is the players trying to rewrite the gods to not be jerks

So the 'invasion' aspect is there, but its secondary to the apotheosis theme - being able to make the world look the way one wants it to. You can basically attach 'Mystery' to almost anything.

Why is a campaign 75 sessions long? I've been in two campaigns in the 20-30 session mark, and most don't last that long.

About a year and a half is the standard for me for something that runs to completion, which is about 75 sessions. The point was more to address the incredulity about certain stories being able to be stretched into campaigns. 'Dark Lord' is not actually a very good plotline for a long story arc, because what tends to happen is that the players plan and execute an assassination scheme once they know who the guy is and where he is. Partially because 'we have to become stronger so we can take him out' tends to feel very meta for characters who aren't explicitly aware of leveling up. Either you'll be able to take him or not, but fighting gryphons on the other side of the world doesn't logically increase your chances.

[Centik]

Our game is based on character quests. Mine, for example, revolves around amassing enough gold to free my old troupe from slavery at the hands of Red Wizards of Thay.

[VoxRationis]

'Dark Lord' is not actually a very good plotline for a long story arc, because what tends to happen is that the players plan and execute an assassination scheme once they know who the guy is and where he is. Partially because 'we have to become stronger so we can take him out' tends to feel very meta for characters who aren't explicitly aware of leveling up. Either you'll be able to take him or not, but fighting gryphons on the other side of the world doesn't logically increase your chances.

That's why a well-made Dark Lord story has either: A) a lot of territory between you and the Dark Lord (Lord of the Rings); B) numerous quests along the way to collect resources to defeat the Dark Lord, the acquisition of which "coincidentally" allows the players to gain levels sufficient to tackle him (Dragon Age: Origins); C) numerous quests along the way to answer those questions of "who the guy is" and "where he is," which, again, "coincidentally" allows the players to level up before meeting him.

[Amphetryon]

I can buy that solving a mystery is a variant of exploring the unknown. You might not be exploring an unknown location, but you are exploring an issue with an unknown answer.

But I don't agree that it has to be a variant on building an empire/making money. You can easily have a mystery to solve and not make a profit or build an empire in the process.

Building an empire/making money stories are about establishing new inroads and expanding frontiers/opportunities; both of these can easily be described accurately as branching out (exploring) into previously hostile/uncharted territory (the unknown).

[Hawkstar]

Solving a mystery is a variant of exploring the unknown

Not really, unless you're stupidly broad in defining "The Unknown"

[Aliquid]

Building an empire/making money stories are about establishing new inroads and expanding frontiers/opportunities; both of these can easily be described accurately as branching out (exploring) into previously hostile/uncharted territory (the unknown).

You'r argument just supported building an empire is a variant of exploration... Not that exploration is a variant of building an empire.

[1Forge]

Well i run a campaign that is "stop the stubborn peoples from fighting all the time" (especially the elves with anyone else) and theres also "kill the monsters, and sell the loot repeat as necessary"

Stop the Dark Lord Rising.
Fight against the Dark Lord that has risen and get back to a nicer world.
Explore the unknown
Build an Empire
Keep making money
Solve a mystery

and now mediate the dispute (or political intrigue)

[Amphetryon]

You'r argument just supported building an empire is a variant of exploration... Not that exploration is a variant of building an empire.

A and B are variants of the same concept. I care not whether you're following traditional alphabet order or not.

Not really, unless you're stupidly broad in defining "The Unknown"

Ah, the classic "your argument is stupid" approach, slightly reworded in what would seem to be an effort to avoid personal attacks. Nifty.

[Aliquid]

A and B are variants of the same concept. I care not whether you're following traditional alphabet order or not.

Not true at all.
You can say that all thumbs are a type of finger, but you can't say all fingers are a type of thumb.

[Jade_Tarem]

Building an empire/making money stories are about establishing new inroads and expanding frontiers/opportunities; both of these can easily be described accurately as branching out (exploring) into previously hostile/uncharted territory (the unknown).

Yes, but by that definition, having a particularly epic bowel movement in a random, dingy Waffle House bathroom also counts as exploring the unknown. While generalizing to the point of tautology means that you can't be wrong, it also isn't terribly helpful in a discussion that is presumably about creating unconventional campaign plots.

[Dimers]

With "solve a mystery" and "explore the unknown" I feel that it still needs to answer the question why the player characters would care. What would they accomplish if they succeed and why would it be a problem if they don't?

Why they care is very game-specific. Take the previously mentioned Planescape: Torment, for an example. The Nameless One can have any number of motivations, developing his alignment over time, but if nothing else then he wants to stop getting murdered by shadows. Morte wants to solve the mystery out of guilt -- but also has a lot of motivation to prolong the mystery. Annah's in it for love, or thereabouts, and to a lesser degree to show up her rivals. Grace takes it as an intellectual challenge and a new experience, nothing more. Nordom gloms on because the Nameless One rescues him from his own personal hell and gives him back the structure he needs to function. Dakkon is bound, quite unwillingly, by a promise he made ages ago ... though perhaps you can give him a more positive motivation in-game (ditto Morte). Vhaillor needs to solve the mystery because he's an icon of justice. The only party character who doesn't have their own obvious and unique motivation is Ignus, who appears to be in the game just to have someone evil available.

(Mind you, that's without bringing in all the characters who spend less time with the Nameless One but do have an interest -- Ravel, Deionarra, Pharod, Fell, some of the Godsmen, Trias, Reekwind, Dora ...)

What do all of these characters accomplish if they succeed? It varies. A lot.

Why would it be a problem if they don't? It varies. In most cases it prolongs their torment, but even that isn't universally true.

Planescape: Torment is definitely not an evil overlord story, and it's a fine example of the "man versus self" that Jade Tarem mentioned in passing. In fact, it puts together multiple "man versus self" stories -- Morte and Dakkon are certainly in that category too, and the others to some extent.

The Ars Magica game I'm in at the moment was heavily influenced by one player's motivation to amuse himself with terrorizing peasants, but my character's main motivation is preservation of books, another wants to amass political power through making royalty happy (and occasionally assassinating other mages), and a fourth had nothing more complex in mind than eating honey. Our common motivation is to preserve our little slice of territory. No dark lord in sight (unless you count our guy who likes to terrorize the villagers we own).

[darkscizor]

Or helping a dark lord and his armies take over the world, of course.

[Shadowsend]

I've always wanted to run a campaign that starts at all the level one characters finding an all-powerful genie who can grant them one wish. They decide what it is and ask for it, and then the genie grants it and disappears. Ripples ensue.

[Gamgee]

First campaign ever was DnD 3.5 stop the dragon so yea. Granted this was my first campaign.
Alien Invasion Campaign in modern day where we need to stop them.
I've run conquer the galaxy campaign. (KOTOR Saga Ed)
I've run a military Mandalorian campaign to conquer a world. (Saga Ed)
Numerous other Saga campaigns. From joe shmoes to super important destiny folks.
Conan 2ed Sword and Sorcery game with no overarching plot or large goals. Just out to make some cash.
Warhammer 40k Deathwatch mystery/stop the bad guys from waking up/who the hell is this new faction
Warhammer 40k Only War. A day in the Life. As titled. No over arching plot. Its a military campaign through and through.
Numenera. Stop the bad guy campaign/heal the damage he does to the land. This one takes a familiar premise and flips it on its head.
Saga Edition. Sith Apprentice campaign. This was too ambitious. I wanted everyone to be a Sith apprentice vying for the position of the apprentice the Lord would take. PvP and survival ish. Playing kidnapped kids ect. Too bad no one wanted to be a sith! Except for like two people. Everyone wanted their unique snowflake TM* droids, or battle hardened mercs, or other things.
DnD 5th. This is a plain old simple hope to someday reach level 20 and stop the big bad guy.

[TeChameleon]

Huh. Yeah, my campaigns (both as player and GM) thus far haven't exactly had an overabundance of dark lords.

* First campaign: memory is a bit dim, honestly- it wasn't that long ago, but it was an Eberron campaign, and I have no idea to this day what the hell was going on
* Second campaign: This one's still ongoing, actually- seven or eight years and counting thus far. It started off... oog. The overarching plot was initially about making an attempt to prevent Orcus from manifesting into the Prime Material and undeading up the place, which I suppose is at least tangentially related to the dark lord thing, but that fell by the wayside years ago when my character, the party's resident wizard, proceeded to use an ancient artifact to rip the good-aligned lands out the ground in their entirety to make a floating continent.

Fast forward four hundred years, my character wakes up from doing the king under the hill/sleeping in Avalon thing to discover a world that venerates his very memory and a critical success on an Arcana check to help prove his identity was considered him being disoriented and weakened from his long slumber. This, naturally, did not improve his mood any, and he has since decided this whole 'being venerated' thing is for the birds. So he decided to travel incognito using the enormous business empire he had inadvertently created while trying to stop Orcus (he apparently invented the franchise restaurant, which thrived for four centuries and made him rather wealthy), and continue his life's goal of trying to set everything that annoys him on fire.

I was the only one who decided to keep their character from the beginning campaign, and this time around we've mostly been dealing with the fallout of the first party's efforts to thwart Orcus and what happened when the floating continent was created. Most currently, this includes fighting in a civil war in the reborn Dragonborn Empire against the brother of one of the PCs, who framed said PC for combined regicide/patricide/fratricide, when it was in fact said brother (and now the 'rightful' emperor) who did it. Again, some dark lord overtones, but if we lose, the status quo doesn't actually change, and the guy isn't even that bad of a ruler, just kind of a **** when it comes to family. We've also been dealing with the genocidally xenophobic descendants of the elven nation that fled into the feywild when Orcus was advancing on them- apparently four hundred years of their ruling class being messed with by Rakshasa hasn't exactly made them especially stable. And, of course, there's the aforementioned Rakshasa, who are doing... something. We're not even sure what at this point, but given that it seems to include our death, we kind of don't want it to happen. Although we've been having all kinds of fun with that, since the DM gave us a Helm of Alignment Reversal as... almost a throwaway gag, I think... and we promptly started jamming it on as many Rakshasa heads as we could manage, which has kind of thrown a bit of a spanner in the works of whatever they're trying to do

* The Shadowrun campaign I've been running- Shadowrun as a setting doesn't exactly lend itself to dark lords, and I have no real interest in introducing them- it's mostly been the PCs trying to a) find cool toys and b) make the world suck a bit less. Oh, and having the crap scared out of them by small pink teddy bears. I don't run horror adventures often, but I do rather have fun when I do

[ImNotTrevor]

I have a campaign going that is perhaps seen as a variant of the "stop the dark lord" trope, but I like to think that it is different enough to not be the same.

About 40 years before the first session, the world was rocked by a bizarre natural disaster. Somewhere far away, a bunch of wizards were having a fight and it caused a magical backlash focused through a wayward Labyrinth spell. Within moments, the entire world was converted into a gigantic maze.

Now, the characters have a rather good reason to explore: To survive. Cities that once relied on trade are closed off from one another, sometimes they themselves are split in half by massive stone walls, a section of the city now resting high above the other two. Rivers run dry as they are cut off from their sources. Bandits brave the tops of the walls, allowing them to attack cities from high above. The world sucks, and nobody knows how to fix it.

The maze has an epicenter, but it's not a place where they could likely go. A tower surrounded by a magical maelstrom that defies reality lying somewhere to the west, that will act like a battery that feeds the magic of the labyrinth, and will continue to do so for thousands of years. How are they supposed to take it down?

I have no idea. Maybe they aren't meant to. Maybe the freshly born god that they are occasionally assisted by is guiding them towards making it impossible to undo the labyrinth at all. I don't know. It will depend on a lot of what they do. I don't write the crap out that far in advance. They have a session, and the world responds to them, so on and so forth. The Labyrinth has no agenda, so it doesn't do anything to stop them. Since it's part of the environment, they trouble themselves with solving other issues. They now seem focused on building a world that has adapted to the Labyrinth, and that's fine by me.

I prefer, personally, to not have a "story." Story is what happens after the session is over and you look back on it. That's where the story comes from. Trying to write something out ahead of time can cause lots of problems. I'm a huge fan of importing the Fronts system from Apocalypse World. It's super portable, and makes for an amazing bunch of sessions. Long story short for Fronts:
There is bad stuff in the world. Bad people. Bad places. Bad groups. Bad afflictions. the longer they go unstopped, the worse they become. The more chaos and disruption your characters cause, the more Fronts come into being. My players aren't fighting Shazeldim, Lord of Demons Who Seeks to Conquer. They're fighting The Corrupt Guards and The Skitter Gang and The Meatcutters and The Drought and The Burning Doll. Each their own problems, one of them, the Burning Doll, was literally created by the players. The Skitter Gang only became a problem because the players antagonized them. The others are simply additional issues inspired by things the players were asking about, so I provided things to do in those distant lands.

The players aren't the Chosen Ones who are destined to end all suffering. They're firemen putting out fires, sometimes (and in one case, quite literally) fires they started themselves. I find that this method is:
A) Much more fun, and way less stressful for me.
B) Way more fun for my players, who feel like their actions matter in more ways than just "we killed the things and got the gold."
C) The world feels ALIVE and REAL. It's not just a backdrop sprinkled with dungeons. Things happen out of sight that are important.

The only thing to keep in mind is that the stuff that happens outside of the influence of the characters should NOT screw them over. Screw with them, sure. Screw them over, never.

Remember: ALWAYS give your players what they worked for. But you are never obligated to give them what they HOPED for. ;D

[TheTeaMustFlow]

If you want to be unnecessarily broad about it, most plots in most media can be boiled down to `make something happen` or `stop something from happening`. This does not prevent a huge amount of variety within those two categories.

D&D&Such just tends to be rather more obvious about it than most media.

[Wardog]

In the campaign I'm writing currently plot is more..."Prevent neutral lords from preventing a neutral lord and his allies from going too far in his attempt to prevent a neutral lord from returning, so they don't go too far in trying to heal the world."
.

What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

[dafrca]

@ Yora; While I think a few people have given viable alternatives, I would agree that a great number of RPG campaigns fall into the two categories you gave. Why? Because I think they are fun to do and lend themselves very well to the "small party of heroes resolves the problem" mindset of most RPG games.

Well, this might help:

http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/plots.htm

Thanks for the link Kami2awa, I had not seen that particular site and I like how he listed them out.

[Shamash]

Fritz leiber plots were most about getting money, getting girls and getting food to sruvive to the other day.