It’s one thing to say “This Meta Plot…has issues”, it is another to sit down and write your own. I have done nothing really right for the past few years (heh heh) but I did spend some time on custom home-brew settings, so here are my thoughts of crafting your own meta-plot. Feel free to discuss with me as I am not a great author of any renown.
So to go on from where I have stopped on the meta-plot series, I am going to write down my thoughts on writing a meta-plot. Whether the result is good depends on the writer 
1. Decide on the Level of the Meta Plot
No, no I am not talking about a Leve 20 Meta Plot or something of that type. Meta Plot exists on different scope and level. There’s no definite chart. but it might look something like this:
- Dungeon/Scenario : Why is the dungeon created? What are the limitations of the sandbox?
- Campaign : What factions are involved? What’s going on in the background? Why are things happening?
- World : Who created the world? What is the cause of so much problems? What’s going on in the world?
- Cosmos: Who/what created whatever/whoever created the world? What laws bind those forces?
2. Bottom up or top-down?
You could start with a world-specific meta-plot (”this fantasy world is acutally seeded by a high-tech worldship from a doomed star-faring civilisation”) and start let the original idea runs downward (”monsters are actually the native creatures of the planet”) and let it seed campagins (”lore-spheres from the worldship have been scattered all over and they contain incredible knowledge”) and specific scenarios (”a particular lore-sphere has been stolen and a mystic realises it contains a spell that could rip the world asunder! Recover it at all cost”).
I personally go with a top-down approach but sometimes you could think of something at a dungeon level and let it spread. Let’s take a simple example, say a fortified keep on a hill. The purpose of the keep? Mm…let say it is to a trade hub for the evil races. The adventurers defeat the monsters there, conquer it and take home the plunder. According to the meta-plot for the dungeon, a few questions have to be asked:
- If the keep is a trade hub, who are the trading partners?
- Likewise, who is going to be upset that the hub is destroyed?
- What are monster merchants like, anyway?
All these could be used to spawn more dungeons and perhaps, over time, explanations would have to be devised to explain those dungeons (”Why do monsters trade with each other instead of devouring each other? Because they all belong to the same god!”)
More to come….using customs, norms and law, as well as themes, to write your own meta plot.
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