A player in my game wanted a shadowy benefactor who pays for his stuff but also demands he do dangerous/risky jobs in return.
He specifically wants him to never meet face to face, going entirely through middlemen and knowing seemingly impossible things about his actions and whereabouts.
What are some creepy/unsettling/unexpected ways I can have his Patron contact him?
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What game?
What setting?
What system?
These are all important considerations. Include them next time you make a thread. Until you can do that, fuck off.
Every once in a while one of the strangers who contacts him (never the same person twice) will plead with the PC "Please tell him to give me my baby back!" or something equally bad.
>What game?
>What setting?
>What system?
Literally doesn't matter at all to the question. Go complain about other fun threads being off-topic and fuck off.
Bumping.
It's Napoleonic fantasy with touches of industralization via magic. System doesn't matter.
This is pretty good.
>Autism
The same methods work in Pathfinder, Conan, Star Wars and World of Darkness guys, you don't need details!
Something like youtube.com
Singing telegrams for people standing next to him, the lyrics contain details only the player character would know.
A message slipped through the characters food.
Very spooky to suddenly find out that this guy can easily access perishable, necessary goods without the group noticing.
Invitations to the opera, for shows that don’t exist.
Street vendors selling matchbooks that when dunked in water reveal hidden instructions
Spy stuff
What do the characters do? First thing that goes in my mind is spies.
The cute girl he met a the tavern leads him into a shadowy alley. She turns a corner, and he follows, only to find an agent of his patron. The girl is nowhere to be found. If he searches for her, it becomes clear she was probably an illusion. Except everyone else in the party/tavern/area remembers her too.
He gets thrown in jail. The guard outside his cell is an agent.
He's being executed, the executioner is an agent who magics him away.
He's walking in a small village. Everyone in the town stares at him constantly. They whisper single words to him. The words form the message from the patron. If they leave the town, and later come back, it's no longer there.
He walks through an ancient graveyard. Several tombstones bear parts of a message from his patron. The graveyard hadn't been disturbed since before the PC was born.
A hand written note, with red ink. The man delivering the messages eventually starts featuring visible scars and bandages.
I've had someone with a similar dealio in one of my games before. I didn't specifically tell them, but anyone whose first name started with the same letter as their last name was an agent of their benefactor.
Towards the end they started to do stuff like trying to throw the rest of the party of their trail by killing the ones they'd previously received missions from. The missions kept coming.
My Alphabits have a message for me! they say "oooooooo".
These are great, thanks.
That sounds awesome.
>One PC is a half-giant freebooter ship captain with a lucky goat and delusions of grandeur (he's a terrible drunk) as well as a love of crime
>the other a human fur trapper with an eye on breaking into supernatural hunting and a loyal spirit-linked bear companion which can juggle
A message written in chalk on a wall inside the untouched ruin/sealed tomb/etc. It's not clear how anyone from outside could have gotten there before them to write it.
Oh, and it's the ship captain specifically who has the shadowy benefactor.
Which certainly puts smuggling and ships targeted for robbery (of information from high value targets, maybe?) and such firmly in the realm of possibility.
The goat needs to start talking when they're alone
Oh yes, the goat has so far been an endless font of entertainment.
>calle brotons
There's an episode of Black Mirror, "Shutup and Dance" that can give you ideas.
tl;dw The anonymous person has an entire web of blackmailed people who each have to perform certain assignments, questions unasked. Parts of the mysterious objective are acquired and delivered by people with no idea what they're for. They just follow orders and pass it on to the next person as ordered for fear of being exposed.
At some point, the mission the ship captain gets is to deliver a message to another NPCs that has a more suitable set of expertise for whatever the message is
Message in a snowball thrown by some street kids.
Have the benefactor straight up kill the messengers if the party fails an objective. Never any messages about how the party fucked up, missions keep coming as usual but the consequence is always there. Then innocently tie in characters the PCs like into the web.
"Oh hey while you guys were out someone asked me to give you this letter" etc. then watch the pcs shit a brick cause now theres collateral.
Messages in the characterizings own handwriting
Occasionally just tie something the pcs did into it after the fact, eg characters kill a bandit leader for a completely unrelated plot point, then they get a thank you letter a week later
Message written via the weather, (clouds, words in the snow, rain on the window)
Each letter of the message written on a sheet of toilet paper, forcing you to unroll the whole thing
Literal message in a bottle of newly opened wine
Messenger Pigeon
Notes in the character's shoes placed overnight.
Messages tied to arrows fired from a great distance.
Voices on an answering machine, always unrelated except for inviting you to a certain place.
Engravings on a window pane that are only visible by the shadow they cast.
Messages tattooed on the scalp of a man. The man shaves his head in front of you to show it.
Ordering the Special at the local tavern gets you a mug of liquor. The message is at the bottom of the mug
>the party rogue notices and starts planting their own messages
The shadowy benefactor is him, or a descendant from the future
>Literally doesn't matter
Really? Weird ways a patron can contact someone isn't dependent on whether or not he's playing a modern/sci-fi/fantasy game? Even a small variance in tech level makes certain things unfeasible.
I could suggest that OP have the messages arrive by telegrams delivered by an 8 foot tall man with a dour and lifeless expression who never says anything, but that doesn't make a lick of sense if he's in a classical greek setting or is going to be on a spaceship.
People don't like it when you act like this user. Do you have problems in social situations?
>have the messages arrive by telegrams delivered by an 8 foot tall man with a dour and lifeless expression who never says anything
>on a spaceship
Who the fuck was that? How did he get on the ship? WHERE THE FUCK DID HE GO?
I'm glad you're not my DM user, you have no appreciation of how creepy the bizarre can be.
>Voices on an answering machine
Are you just suggesting pic related?
There will be falling leaves, and one of them will be white. One of them will be paper.
When autumn comes, they might all be paper.
>They're still the benefactor's messages but the Rogue believes them to be their own
This. Something like that sounds straight out of a David Lynch movie.
Occasionally when the character buys clothes or something have a note be stashed in the pocket. That's one. Kinda dumb tho.
High magic setting? He has a very vivid dream about what his patron wants him to do. Was it magically implanted, or did he just have a dream? Whether he does or doesn't do it, he risks angering his patron by either not doing as he's been asked, or doing something he wasn't asked to do and potentially working against his patron's interests.
Whichever he picks, have it be the other one.