The D) has an example of the past to draw upon: the last mantis invasion of Luir's. It started out with people noticing there were more mantis closer to the road than usual. Scouts were sent in - some made it back, some didn't. Some knew of the existence of a particular sorcerer - but didn't know that the sorc and the mantis had a connection with each other.
Eventually different links were noticed, different segments of the game world learned about each other's interest in the plotline. Some got together, others kept their distance, and yet others became adversaries as a result.
There was definitely lots of magick, but most of the fighting wasn't against a mage; it was against mantises who had no magick skills at all. But they were led by a sorcerer. So it was all mixed up and so were the forces fighting against them. Lots of mundane vs. mundane, lots of magick vs. magick, and plenty of cross-action.
In the end, it wasn't "over." The mantises invaded and sacked Luir's, Kurac moved to Ten Serak and stayed for a long time while the plot to retake Luir's was developed and implemented by the players and staff. Finally - after a long long time - the sorcerer was killed, the mantises were driven back/destroyed, the outpost was renovated, and Kurac returned to the outpost with a new bailey and totally reconfigured outpost.
This didn't take a few days, or a few weeks. It was months from point A to point B, and it was kept interesting throughout even for people who had no direct involvement in the plot.
It's worth expanding on this in a way that will start out negative but end positive.
(Please forgive the rushed tone, I am passing out and need to shoot out all this information before I am incoherent from sleep fatigue.)
The Lord of Storms plotline was a blatant attempt by Naephet to try and knock Kurac down a peg in clan numbers. Players were told their input mattered in the fight while clan staff were told their PCs would keep having mantises thrown at them until they were all eaten if they did not retreat. A pact was made by Naephet on Kurac's behalf with the gypsies, in which the gypsies got a branch from Kurac's tree of life which they somehow totally knew about because they used to be super-best friends with Kurac at some point nobody seems to remember. This pact amounted to jack fucking shit.
In addition, it was publicly agreed that since the gypsies were a stone's throw from Luir's, they would suffer as well. Suffering consisted of crashing a non-magical wooden wagon in a way that blocked the passage to gypsy lands, keeping them totally safe from the invasion, because 4-armed giant insects are terrible climbers and neither the Lord of Storms or Luir Motherfucking Dragonsthall apparently knew any spells to get it out of the way. Also, the gypsy PCs were driving their wagons through the completely blocked passage for months until Mekeda noticed it and updated the room.
Oh, and hey, that tree of life branch Kurac traded for support isn't coming back.
So now that I've gotten a very abbreviated history of how that blatant staff attempt to reduce a popular clan's size --with some hot gypsy nepotism mixed in-- actually started, let me get into what went right.
The main thing that went right was Naphet vanished for 6 months fairly close to the start of it. I want to say within the first 2 weeks of a... I think originally it was a 9 month plotline. The entire thing got dumped in Mekeda's lap because nobody else wanted the steaming pile; she was the Kuraci imm at the time it started. Naephet's plot included turning Luir's into sort of the
Mos Eisley of Zalanthas, while Kurac hopefully maybe dwindled without their tree house. It was a pretty terrible depopulation plan, which is to be expected since the number of staffers who know how to make a clan active can be counted on one hand and Naephet was not one of them. Pretty much his whole poorly communicated story got shit-canned as far as I can recall.
In any case, what made Kurac so immensely popular was a combination of 1) ambitious, competent PC leaders who 2) were expected to come up with their own pro-clan agendas, 3) pursue those agendas using subordinate players, and 4) staff interaction was mostly reacting to stuff after being told PCs had done it or giving them interaction on stuff that couldn't be coded.
Losing Luir's resulted in the biggest challenge the PCs in Kurac were ever given to overcome with their own ingenuity. Ten Serak was a player-named, player-scouted, and player-built fortification using player-collected/purchased/transported materials. Seemingly every fucking player had shit they had to do because the clan had to survive or because the clan had to retake Luir's. Hunting, raiding, magickal research, diplomatic envoys, and anything that would get money in now had this incredible tangible goal to it beyond anything set before. This also resulted in totally unaffiliated players being given shit to do (or harassed/killed/whatevered) by Kuraci PCs.
IIRC, Kurac's numbers
increased during the aftermath of that idiotic railroading. The Kurac RPT to retake Luir's was handled by Mekeda and Gesht, and was player-driven since all of the months leading up to it through its completion. I don't even know all of the shit that went into it, and I have a pretty large chunk of information on what happened behind and in front of that particular curtain (much of which is on an external hard drive atm).
After the retaking of Luir's, Kurac's PC leaders were informed it would need to be rebuilt, so they went off and whipped people into even more activity to get shit done to rebuild it. I want to say there's at least 8 months of activity that can be attributed to Naephet kicking over an anthill and then running away because he knew he'd draw too much fire if he tried to finish the job.
This all kind of leads back to what was being discussed before in this, the Thread of the Beast. My take on a good overarching storyline is it should be something that makes the dangers and/or rewards of participating in the world hinge on the activity of the players who will be affected by the outcomes. Staff should create problems and leave it to players to come up with solutions (limited nudging is allowed) and pursue them. Players should succeed and fail as is realistic, not as is good for landing your desired outcome to step 14 in your 5 year plotline for how Tek's daughter rises to be the first sorcerer-queen. (Besides who gives a fuck about breaking that particular glass ceiling?)
The storyline shouldn't be a series of planned events so much as something obvious that may or may not happen, depending on player ingenuity and efforts. It should be where where a lot of the things the staff set up RPTs for are the climaxes to player-conceived plots to try and get to that final outcome they desire. Being able to manipulate the world in a manner that makes sense is very attractive, especially when you've made things easy for players to find a way to hook into it that fits their background/focus/persona. That requires limited staff control, though, instead of the endless desire to turn them into an audience for the snippets of your bad writing that you allow them to witness.
If players have no real stake in something and cannot affect the outcome, no amount of randomly killing PCs/NPCs will ever get them to give a shit. This goes double for interrupting combat for a lightshow.
