Thank you all. I had gathered that bad plots got several responses (sometimes rather vicious), extraordinarily good and/or original plots get several comments, and those in the middle get few comments. Of course, if the point of the review is improvement, we ought to be doing just the opposite. ;-)

My own take on this is that it should work well as a subplot in developing a broader politically-motivated setting. It's not much on it's own, but it is decently structured: Opening fireworks, then some background explanation that actually seems to work, then some decent role-playing opportunities. I just don't know what would happen once the pirate ship is discovered: The PC's might flee for home and cause a war, or try sabotage - and likely get themselves jailed or killed.

This plot never came to fruition in my campaign - the party quite literally self-destructed while following the Zellin up the coast, and we reset to a different set of PC's in a different part of the world to minimize the fallout. Two years later, my players started asking "whatever happened with the pirates". Sigh. Go to Comment

I echo most of what has already been said. This is a round and round good throw in plot for any scenario. It can even work in a sci-fi setting like Firefly, Fading Suns, Babylon 5, etc with minor modifications. Such is the role of a good sub and plot. (just for thinking that I threw in another .5 for its functionability)

To me what makes this such a good plot is not that it is a basic, enter bad guys, thwart bad guys, find out good guys could be actidental bad guys due to motives but that it could be a one or two shot side plot thrown into a much larger game or it could turn into a grand scenario when the players only intended to stay for a few days in this waylaid town. Kudos.

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Nice plot - the PCs will have to think about this one - if they don't think about they are liable to muck it up completely (I wonder esaquam, is that the mistake your players made).

Moon and ephe are quite right - you don't get many comments for good plots, often because it can be difficult to think of something that would improve them - and this fits neatly into hat category.

However, since you specifically asked for comments, I'll give it a go.

The pirates themselves are bit cliched but that's forgivable in this case since they're not the primary thrust of the plot, instead they serve mainly to create the situation. Even at that I like that they are realist pirates (they're after loot and not particularly interested in killing people).

What I like most is the fact that much of the PCs trouble comes from their allies. Of course, such behaviour from allies requires a believable motive, and the Zellins have a good one. I also like the fact that the Zellins are forced to move before they are completely ready, and that this goes a long ay to explaining their paranoia.

One suggestion, the politics might work better if the Zellins were a lot more friendly towards the PCs (at least openly) but remained as secretive as possible about their captured ship. Maybe even supplying a few troops to aid the PCs in defending their village - after all if Zellin troops are defending the villages while Agnarian troops are unable to help, that in itself adds weight to the Zellin claim for control of those villages.

A good plot - definitely a solid 4/5 Go to Comment

Little difficult to follow at first, but then I got it.
A great idea!
The formatting and such is great, and I think you could of just stuck with the basic example story instead of giving the plot sketch. We can pick and choose details as we like.

4/5. Go to Comment

I like the post. It fills out a very vague plot quite nicely.

I believe you did a fairly correct job on the grammer aspects of formating. The edit feature works wonder once you get the info. As for the actual format correction...

**** http://www.bartleby.com/141/ *****
Strunk's work is literally the bible for writing.

http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

http://www.junketstudies.com/rulesofw/

There are more. Google Rules of Writing or Rules of Grammer and many come up. Just be careful about pay sites. Go to Comment

hmmm, now how do I clean up the formatting: Quoted dialog, contractions, possessive pronouns?

Test "Quote", it's too hard to read... Go to Comment

Moonhunter,
Thanks for the pointers (I do have Strunk & White within reach ;-).
I was actually referring to the edit-tool with my previous comment. It seemed to be escaping (prepending a '') to all the quotes. Said she, "It's a distractin' mess." ;-) I edited this on Word, and probably got all kinds of special characters by accident (so sue me, I'm an old Unix-head and think the world is plaintext ;-). Go to Comment

I like plots that lend themselves to roleplaying of this type.It makes me want to fit it into the game I'm running now. Go to Comment

Oh those ugly special characters. I will get rid of them someday with Mathom's help! This I vow. Go to Comment

Got most of 'em out.
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