Fifth Element Part 4

There's a really interesting challenge in these types of episodes in adding interesting side-content without feeling like I'm guiding the players down a garden path. It's a lot easier in episodes with less clear external objectives, then you can put all manner of shiny objects in the world and the players might get interested or they might not. But this kind of end-of-world-stakes type story, where the objectives are so clear, it can become a challenge to fill the world with interesting material that doesn't feel extraneous to the story.

The big challenge with stories like this is to make diversions feel meaningful. Everything we know about the movie puts the solution to this story up in the stars, but our characters fall in the opposite direction, to the surface world below New York City. When your players do this, you can put some physical challenges to force them to get through in order to get back to where they started, but the problem is that story-wise, this can feel like a cul-de-sac that lead to nothing. Worse, it can make the world feel unalive, if the players know there is nothing interesting in an area, and you do nothing to divest them of that notion.

Now, one thing you can do is put things the characters might want, money, weapons, characters. I did this in a lot of ways, and they gained a really good character in Ka'el out of this. But I want any area the players visit to have possible story threads, not just resources to be mined.

The example I'm pointing to is the hints of there being this hermit "Solon", living somewhere on the surface, who has knowledge of the divine language. If they had gone down this path, there would be all sorts of interesting things to see. But I want the appeal of these side-paths to be carefully balanced, so the players are intrigued, but not lead by the hand. I want the players thinking as their characters, asking what is more advantageous to their survival, not as players wondering what the DM wants them to do.

The key to this is always world building. Think outside what the movie tells us. The movie gives us the lore the Mondashawans want the humans to know. But what else might be out there.