McGuffin scenarios

No, I don't want to.

>>51163054
So, you want Cryptomancer.

I almost always use McGuffins because I'm fucking lazy.

The party come into ownership of some object, (I just realized literally every single one was the result of the PCs stopping a bank robbery and finding the object on the thieves, huh) that object then turns out to be mysterious and powerful and significant and usually bound to them in some irreversible way.

And it leads the plot.

Means that the plot becomes robust and resistant to unexpected swerves, so you can have a narrative without railroading. Also, as I said, I'm fucking lazy.

>>51163054
Here's a classic scenario

>Bad thing/guy is destroying everything and can't be stopped
>Ancient door holding a demi-god that can stop them is close
>Door opens only with a magic talisman on it
>The talisman has been split in four pieces and scattered across the world in private and/or royal collections

You can always remove the bad thing and have the ancient door hold powerstones and gold.

>>51163093
Laziness doesn't always keep creativity out.

I'm not very fond of these weird circlejerk threads where people ask a question but then just use as an excuse to say random nothing.

>>51163129
Well then say something clever you dipshit

>>51163121
>>51163093
That's not what I'm looking for

I'm looking for ideas using a MacGuffin as something else, not as the overall goal of a scenario

Like

>Players are sent by powerful wizard to get a magic stone from another powerful evil wizard
>Players go through terrible dungeon just to find out the other wizard not only was actually a pretty nice guy just defending his lair against the attackers
>The stone was actually a story made up by the wizard to get mercenaries to fuck up his dungeon without getting his lazy ass out of his chair
>Players now have motivation to kick his ass

>>51163054
Magical Burst, a magical girl game based loosely on Madoka Magica kind of did this well.

Essentially part of the setting mechanics dictated that powerful baddies dropped these things called Oblivion Seeds, and if you collected 13 of them, you got a wish.

Anyone who's seen the inspiration source material knows that the plot won't be about getting wishes, that's just the lie that draws the characters into a doomed fight for survival where the chances of them surviving long enough to reach that goal are almost zero, and even if they get there all they're going to want to do is spend their wish to get out. Like Call of Cthulu, it's not really a game where all the characters are supposed to "win", and simply surviving and getting out alive ends up becoming the definition of winning over time, rather than whatever your hopeful starting ideas were.

>>51163483
>"I dropped my ring in the forest! Go fetch it, and I'll give you ten gold!"
>Forest filled with monsters
>Adventurers end up on an epic quest to find the source of the monsters and close it
>Takes five years of murdering, intrigue, politics, and insanity
>Find the ring in the gullet of a dragon
>Take it back to the peasant questgiver
>he's died in the meantime