A deposed princess wants the party to defend her while she travels incognito to restore light to the solstice star...

Since the plot hinges on an NPC, it's important that you make her a presence as a character, but not so much of a presence that she eclipses the party. An easy way to do this is to make her a largely good person, but naive in the ways of politics and the 'real' world's dangers. If you can present her in a way that makes the PCs care about her and want to help her in this struggle, you could also encourage them to try and teach her lessons from their own perspectives and experiences, therefore indirectly shaping the behavior and beliefs of the person who might one day be a future queen. Something that, while the impact isn't felt yet, might play a huge part in a future campaign.

If she's deposed, I assume this said father of hers is no longer king, perhaps because of his anti-religious behavior making him unpopular, in which case she becomes a target by anyone who has a grudge with the old regime, which could be literally anyone. Merchants who had it good before or after the coup, religious zealots who don't believe in her repentance, bandits who think they can make quick coin off using her as a hostage, and all of that is without including the PCs' personal antagonists.

As for the fairy tale angle, in a meta way this might emphasize the princess' naivety and self-awareness to make her more endearing. She knows it's a silly thing to hope for and is something that could only happen in a fable, but she feels this is something she has to do.

(continued)

Since you're going for what I assume to be a very fairy tale feeling, I'd suggest keeping the villains and encounters memorable, but less exotic than some of your typical high fantasy fare. Less weird monster variables and more classical antagonists with a few twists to make them more fun.

For instance, there could be a coven of witches in the kingdom who's magic has expanded and grown stronger thanks to the absence of the star's light somehow upsetting cosmic forces. As such, they've grown vain, ambitious, and greedy, unwilling to let the princess' quest succeed.

Overly-ambitious and cruel nobles who either flourished under her father's reign and are now embittered after the coup would place the blame on her and seek to use her as some bargaining chip for future political maneuvers. Or inversely, these nobles were long derided and scorned by her father's court and have a more personal grudge with her after the coup, and that's not factoring religious opinions into the equation.

Bandits are flourishing in this interregnum period, some of which may have been deserters in her own father's army, and a kidnapped princess can be sold off to any noble who pays the highest bid. Said bandits could be preying on villages and forcing them to starve in the cold winter, which compels the PCs to act, and now you have Seven Samurai; the Christmas Story.

>As for the ripping off part. Do you expect your players to be familiar with the story?
As familiar as you would be with 'twas the night before christmas if you're English, or the Grinch if you're American.
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I have no plans to follow the traditional story. Maybe a shout out here and there, but not the entire plot.
These are good ideas. In the original story, the king was tricked by his evil advisor, the real BBBEG(ugh!) because he'd sold his soul to the devil. I'm throwing out that, but maybe I could put in his place.

>If she's deposed, I assume this said father of hers is no longer king
Deposed is not the right word, then. What is the word when a royal heir loses the right to inherit the kingdom?

>Deposed is not the right word, then. What is the word when a royal heir loses the right to inherit the kingdom?
disowned?

(continued for the last time I promise)

This is the most important part of the campaign you're planning, however. If your players are actual roleplayers and enjoy interacting with a world and the people in it, creating a likeable princess character is the crux of the issue.

As I said before, you want her to be likeable, but people nowadays are very quick to try and find flaws in characters, so be mindful of that while considering who she is as a princess and the skillset she might have. She might know how to ride a horse well enough, but wielding a sword or a bow may or may not be in her wheelhouse depending the cultural norms of the land. She might know how to speak artfully and know plenty of history and poetry and the like, but she probably doesn't know the price of grain or some of the more subtle peasant superstitions or be much of a political schemer. She's probably read about monsters or maybe even seen a few in menageries, but never fought one or seen one killed.

Another thing that might help you along to make things challenging is to give her some distinctive features that make concealing her difficult. Uncanny beauty, of course, is a solid start, but she might give herself away by bowing in a certain fashion common to nobles or possess some aristocratic accent she attempts to conceal. Small imperfections add up and don't have to be consistent. People, after all, are imperfect and inconsistent.

All in all, solid campaign hook, would play.

Disinherited.

Disinherited?

If it's that familiar I'd say they wouldn't mind her being around as an npc or being a little special, but try to keep her from doing too much.

If we're all the reindeer we understand Santa is the boss, but it's not fun to get bossed around for 5 hours.

You could try to make it so she's really shy or maybe can't speak or something like that. She's extremely reliant on the players. While she's lighting the star you need the players to be doing some amazing shit- like battling the king and distracting his monstrous henchmen long enough for her to do what she needs to do.

Don't have her dramatically die either that's dumb and will make her more important not less. And end the whole thing with her like... knighting them or something. Giving them some star-blessing, that sort of thing. So they're like fuck ya WE did it

She could have been disowned by her father as he grew bitter and old or even senile. Or she could have been banished due to some criminal charge that was misconstrued into making her the guilty party, purposefully or otherwise. Or you could simply say it's been decreed that a female heir has no claim whatsoever, although that one is harder as it kind of throws the entire landed nobility system into the air.

Or some sleeping beauty/snow white/oedipus shit where there's a prophecy and the child was sent away out of fear of the prophecy coming true.

It was fortold that ONLY a princess can light the star! etc

I've had good experiences with escort missions in the past, and my gaming group is like trained attack dogs: we bite on plot hooks and don't open our jaws until all life is gone.

I need something harsher: she is exiled and will be killed if the king(still her father) knows she has returned.

Oh. Banished.

If you want to stick with the witch angle, you could say that the witches, while kindly and good and at harmony with nature before, are lead by some sinister sorceress who managed to corrupt the king or convince him willingly to lay this curse on the solstice. Thus, the witches grow in power and become evil, then come across this prophesied return of the star and the princess' role in it, and have her banished under pain of death for attempting to return.

Disavowed, renounced, abandoned, ousted, deposed, driven out, ostracized, expelled.

Often they say you are 'stripped of your titles' and banished I think. Exiled works too.

>by some sinister sorceress

KRAMPUS??

If she's not paying well, my players wouldn't bother. And I wouldn't blame them. Sounds like another tedious, bullshit escort quest that is going to get on a very straight set of rails and doing mandatory encounters on the way between point A and B plus some extra magic bullshit related with the mission myself

I guess both I and my players are simply too cynical for running game like that.

(continued)

Or, thinking twice, if you/your group not a fan of prophecies and their definite nature, you could remove that entirely and say that the witches had the princess banished by her father because they sensed her potential as a force of good to restore the star. Restoring it could even turn back the clock on the witches, make them realize their evil crimes, and thus you leave the party to face the lead sorceress. This makes the solstice star an intrinsic force of good in the setting and places all responsibility on the PCs. She could not and would not have succeeded without them and the kingdom is saved thanks to them.

I wouldn't. Not because I don't want to, but I can already see my party complaining about railroading escort mission of loli DMPC.
I need new group of players. Like, right now.

>Otherwise, what stops them from wandering off?

>DM log - session 1: I have successfully convinced my players to go along with my Christmas campaign. The NPC princess has been statted and I have several planned encounters along the way. Everyone's schedules are free next week so we should be able to finish the campaign in three sessions at the most.
>DM log - session 2: Things started off a bit rough, as three of the players refused to refer to the princess as anything other than "that loli slut". Most of this week's session involved shopping for equipment, despite me telling them that they already had everything they would need for the adventure. I thought starting them out without any gold would speed things along, but they ended up trying to prostitute the princess because "their armor sucked". Hopefully I've got everyone on the same page now!
>DM log - session 3: Still in the starting town. Players seem to be upset at me for "cockblocking" them by having armed guards appear and stop them from raping the princess because "she owed them money for better armor". One of the players declared that the guards wouldn't need their armor if they were dead. Princess tried to reason with them. Had to end the session early because one player kept trying to stab the princess to stop her from screaming after watching the guards get killed.
>DM log - session 4: Still in the starting town. Players have begun to accuse me of "railroading" because they have been unable to kill the princess. Most of this session was spent with two of the players trying to purchase a tavern. I thought I had turned a corner because the players aren't trying to kill the princess anymore. One of them wants her to work at the tavern.
>DM log - session 5: It turned out that the players wanted the princess to work in the tavern as a prostitute.
>DM log - session 6: Have begun looking for a new group of players.

Your players sound like psychopaths and should probably find new hobbies. Or maybe not, they'll just start raping and murdering real people.

I could make head sorceress a white witch expy as well.

So taking and into account, I'm now thinking about a winter terrorland, where its always winter, never not!christmas. The general populace suffers hardships, but some - a moon cult perhaps lead by the witch coven, or the werewolves, or both, thrive in this new, different winter. Maybe the werewolves are not so bad, I mean when was the last time you saw bad werewolves in popular culture? You'd have to go back to the nineties.

Anyways, a couple of sessions of this without the princess. I either tell them the backstory in the first session and suffer the collective groans, or spring it on them together with her in session three.

She is not a liability, of course. We all hate to escort clumsy, unskilled people(I made it work once, in Deadlands, and it only worked because the escortee was Buster Keaton). But she is clueless and insecure, and lets the players take charge.

If they sell her out to the king that's that, of course.

>Most of this session was spent with two of the players trying to purchase a tavern.

Sounds pretty solid, OP. Good luck to you.

What can I say... the current party consists of a merc with consciousness, a Greedy wizard (with capital G), an indifferent merc looking for best paid and easiest jobs and a semi-coherent hermit that tags along ever since and is simply fucking weird, creeping out party both in and out of universe.

If they try to sell her out to the king I would 100% make it backfire on them. If you're going to up the fairytale side and have witches and big bad wolves, have her ensure the players promise in the most fairtytale of ways and if they break their promise it starts to kill them. Or otherwise be an obviously bad thing.

If they don't agree to the promise then she probably wouldn't trust them anyway and you can turn it into the King hiring them to stop her.

I usually build for eventualities where multiple actions can lead to the same outcome, and any action can lead to a more story-beneficial outcome.

If you run games where there is a hero's call and they don't answer, eventually bad thing find them. And if they consider that railroading, maybe they should GM instead. Because making it more dangerous to wander off the path is different from leashing them to the path.

>Some groups just hate all NPCs and need everything to be about them.
Fucking this.

I pretty much can't use any sort of NPCs other than minor, insignificant background characters, because players instantly throw a hiss-fit about the game turning into reenactment of some novel.
But then again, this shit only happens with one of the three groups I GM for, so at least it's not all groups.

But I don't run games with "hero's call". Again, not because I don' want to, but because my players clearly aren't interested. At least 3 of them, at least. The whole party dynamics boil down to the "good" merc having any sort of scruples and the remaining trio giving him shit because of it or outright mocking him. There are times I seriously wonder how much of this is still game and pretending and how much actual sociopathy on side of the players.
If I had other party, I would drop them all the way back to the spring of 2016.

yea fuck fun right

(continued)
So...in the original story, she found the star by always going to the left, because "the heart is on the left". I think I'll change that into her hiring them to break into one of the king's castles(perhaps the summer castle, with only a skeleton guard(not literally!) and a few servants
>I usually build for eventualities where multiple actions can lead to the same outcome, and any action can lead to a more story-beneficial outcome.
This is something I need to get better at. If they don't show any interest in why the princess need the map from the castle, then my only idea is to send assassins after them to reinforce how much the king want the map; but that's not a different path, that's just railroading.

>whole campaign is an escort mission

No thanks

My players have most fun by playing Twilight 2000. Go figure why they might have issues with OP's pitch

But you know what? Come to think about it, I could probably spin it into a Twilight 2000 scenario. Make a little girl happy by following her coping fantasy, in the process doing shit like usually. Hey, let the kid have at least few days of childhood in this fucked-up irradiated hell, right?

>restore light to the solstice star
What does that involve, concretely ?

Why didn't she pay some "classic" sellswords or just have an army with a general/commander ? Why not marry a prince/king and use his army ?

Holy shit. Can you please describe what kind of people these retards are ? Did they seem to draw any form of fun from acting like such dickheads ?

>For instance, there could be a coven of witches in the kingdom who's magic has expanded and grown stronger thanks to the absence of the star's light somehow upsetting cosmic forces. As such, they've grown vain, ambitious, and greedy, unwilling to let the princess' quest succeed.
Good idea. Could also be a group of sorcerers who used to be no more than an edgy cult (like the Brotherhood from Assassin's creed except full of nerdy occult enthusiasts and fedora social rejects) but then suddenly could connect with the Void and get powers from their creepy blood rituals.

>Or inversely, these nobles were long derided and scorned by her father's court and have a more personal grudge with her after the coup, and that's not factoring religious opinions into the equation.
I like this too, especially if they're young nobles and portrayed as ambitious "alpha males" straight out of Wall Street.
They could even be guided by mostly benevolent intentions, and seeing the princess as no better than her father because they've come to distrust the entire lineage. They think she will continue bringing chaos to the kingdom and honestly decided to look for someone else to rule in her stead, or just turn the entire think into an oligarchy. But not for entirely evil motives, they could have legit reasons and even methods, which would make dealing with them even more difficult.

>Just an example, but having positives and negatives tied to the action could cause for an interesting party dynamic and relationship between the party and princess. They start out as hired mercenaries, but slowly come to believe in either the righteousness of what they are doing or gt more and more horrified by what they're facilitaitng or keep the "it's just a job" thought process as more and more people helping/harming them clearly think otherwise.
Love this.

>I need something harsher: she is exiled and will be killed if the king(still her father) knows she has returned.
What if her coming back is a pain in everyone's neck because everyone assumed she was out of the picture ?
Possible way this can go: her dad arranged for her to die in some ""accident""" or something, but a group of nobles/benevolent relative/someone with power/the assassin in charge/etc pretended as if it had worked but made sure the princess was spared and remained hidden from her father. So everyone thinks she was gone for good, except here she comes back, which was unexpected (even to her/her saviour maybe).

Helping a princess and staying by her side is the best way to ensure to be knighted/given land once/if she gets the crown.

Not him, but essentially - not getting paid and doing an ungrateful job for useless knighthood and equally useless minor land grant that most likely is going to involve sandy soil and/or marshland.
Meanwhile, hard metal...

Also, she's a deposed princess. Her real, actual power is non-existing, so cash up-front.

>What does that involve, concretely ?
Usual fairy tale stuff: Giving away your dearest possession to a starving widow, getting a boon from saint Nicholas and using it for the good of the kingdom, singing a song like any other Disney princess.

Since I'm planning to steal everything that comes from this thread, I'm also stealing this.

I mean land owning aristocracy were wealthiest kind of people for a long while and the princess is probably a generous sort, but you're right about it being a longer term investment than a merc is used to. It's still a nice option if you want to not be some commoner for hire anymore and want to instead be a wealthy beurocrat-soldier who can leave a good legacy and have some place to settle down.

Knighthood is usually pretty damn useful when that aristocracy is powerful, it's just not useful when players do no roleplaying or exclusive roleplay far away from civilization. So a good chunk of players in my experience.

Or, you know, she might be a powerless brat.
Or the land grant of hers is going to be some complete shithole, small to boot. Mughals were notorious of running their empire like this - everyone that "deserved" a prize was handled a plot of land. Usually something around 15 acres. To govern over. And make prosper and pay due taxes. If not... well, off with your head. Nice reward, right? But even if you skip such treatment, the land grants always are small, usually not bigger than a single village in deep province. "Half of the kingdom and princess' hand" only happens in fairy tales.

And knighthood is darn useless, when all you have is a title. That's literally nothing. A funny name and a funny crest, but won't feed you, won't make people esteem you and so on and forth.

And you are clearly some filthy colonial, since you would know all of this otherwise all by yourself.

Knight =/= noble =/= aristocrate, you prancing la-la homo man

Well, I flat out won’t run games if I don’t have players invested in the cooperative experience. Or if it becomes a part of folks trying to trainwreck the game I crash that shit harder than they thought possible. Sometimes they enjoy it. Sometimes it means finding a new group, but that is not as much of an issue for me as some folks ‘round here.

That’s why I tend to build things in advance as land mark events. Instead of “they didn’t take my bait” it is “there are 3 forks in the road, each one has a different encounter, but they all have the same plot item in their loot.” Then the next fork in the path they all end with the next step, all just flavored in the direction the party seems interested in. I suppose it’s just non-linear railroading if you want to get into it, but it avoids an invisible walls feeling.

Thing is - I don't have any other group. The town I live in has quite limited population. And I'm not going to drive 30 km each way to play a game with bunch of random people in equally small town, but just not mine.

Why the need to be a whiny faggot ? Mommy didn't buy the gifts you wanted ?

It's not me who jumps to conclusion, clearly driven to them by petty greed, utterly blind how worthless the goal is.
But hey, guess you have reasons to be angry over own stupidity, so go on, vent it off

This is a cool idea OP but I would echo the people saying to be aware your players might go offroad with it. I once did something similar with Snow White except I substituted a unicorn for the prince - in the sense that the unicorn's horn was a cure-all and would wake up Snow White, not in the sense that Snow White had to kiss a unicorn.

Now I fucked up because this was part of an ongoing campaign where the PCs wanted to gather war material to fight a big evil empire. The PCs knew after each arc they would get a certain no. of points which they could trade to have permanent assets from that adventure. So:

>PCs finish adventure, kill evil queen, reinstate snow white to her petty kingdom yadda yadda
>have 4 points
>want to spend 1 point each for dwarfs, unicorn, castle and a siege weapon
>I tell them they can't have the castle for 1 point
>They offer 2 (giving up siege weapon)
>I tell them they can offer 2, but they still won't get it automatically and we'll still have to play it out
>we do
>2 dwarfs die but they seize the castle successfully
>they dethrone the princess, kick her out and abandon her
>the unicorn hates them now so I tell them it leaves
>they argue they paid the points for it
>I cave and they end up with an angry unicorn tethered in the castle courtyard that'll attack them if they go near it too

Things just got worse from there I admit the game ended up being really fun regardless though.

>reasons to be angry
First one being a cancerous jackass who ruins a civil discussion. Get your shit back to /b/, there's no room for cunts here.

Seems bad, too railroady
>Princess traveling incognito
What if a player dies? Some random chucklefuck is trusted enough to be around the princess?
>Traveling incognito
What if one of the party members want to rat her out?
>ancient holy day her father outlawed and put a curse upon
Literally why? Either the holy day is mainstream enough he can't get away with it without facing peasant revolt and noble opportunists, or it's obscure enough outlawing it is pretty much pointless wankery.
And what about it is worth risking life and limb just to restore it? Why not just ask her father to undo the curse?

>If, hypothetically of course, this happened to be the plot of a traditional christmas fairy tale in your home country, would you mask your inspiration or give explicit references(such as calling the princess Sonja, which is also her name in the story I am ripping off)?
Oh, that's why. You're an idiot. That's not how rpgs work. They are not novels.

I think I'd enjoy a script of THIS game more than whatever OP actually intends.

>the abused princess, once the PCs have finally moved on, devotes her life to destroying them and becomes the new BBEG

>A deposed princess wants the party to defend her while she travels incognito to restore light to the solstice star, so that the people will resume celebrating an ancient holy day that her father outlawed and put a curse upon.

As a player, you'd need to give me some good warning for how whimsical this game is going to be. I will not expect this kind of whimsy going in, but if you gave me a few weeks warning I could get in the mood for it.