Throw the GM a curveball and see if he can catch.

Sometimes,as I know myself from my past 2nd Edition gaming, the players can take the best made plans of the GM and turn them upside down without even knowing. A good player, and especially a seasoned player will try to listen for the telltale clues that the Gm drops to follow the game. Now obviously we are aware that a good rpg isn't run on rails but its a pointless task and frustrating for the GM if the players purposefully head their characters away from the adventure. A good GM therefore guides the players with story and clues etc and the players try to follow, and so the adventure unfurls.

But now and again the players do something that means everything changes, and this sort of happened this weekend. A momentous weekend where we were able to play 3 days in a row, and all the characters leveled up again, we are now 3rd level groovy!

The characters loose their gear to another group of adventurers - in fact they were level 0 wanting to become adventurers and were entirely clueless. We met them via a random encounter roll and decided to give them a lift in our boat down to the next town. On the way we got into an 'altercation' with two wyverns and while we were on land the other group escaped in our boat with most of our characters gear.

Well they didn't get too far and we caught up with them and found out that they had sold all our belongings - we got most of the cost back by re-trading what they had bought ( all of it was useless tat no good to us). Now remember this all started form a random encounter and us roleplaying out the situation and then reacting to the outcome. So it was not a main story plot. What was going to be part of the main story plot was a local murder of a priest by a herbalist - who just happened to have been sold a very important item of ours by the level 0 adventurers. So nicely woven in by the GM, simple and effective.
Unfortunately one of our players characters decided it would be best if his fighter had to prove a point that we couldn't be trifled with and killed one of the other party. Which then lead to the inevitable silencing of the rest of them. This then lead to their bodies being unceremoniously stuffed into barrels and us sailing down stream to dispose of them.

Now our GM did a very good job of weaving this into the main plot and we did get away with it, but there was still the risk of us still being discovered, and so we decided to leave town. Now it was the  intention that we would investigate the priests murder and therefore be in town much longer and no doubt unearth some other interesting things relevant to the main quest. All this had to be changed as we were clearly not going to hang around.

There was nothing that the GM could have done to stop this without making it too obvious we were being railroaded. The death of the other adventurer group was a bit of a mistake, the player sort of realized what he had done just a little to late and the resultant 'disaster' actually was played out very well. We managed to recover from it without too much of an issue but it sort of made it impossible for the party to hang around the town. Oh and did I mention that we killed the herbalist too? That happened sort of by accident.

So much for the in town adventure section. Our GM has been trying to give us (and its a good way to try out the #next rules) a good range of areas to play in. Abandoned dungeon, snowy mountain wilderness, fog bound river, busy merchant town and mysterious forest have been covered up till now.

The town adventure being cut short we did have the option of heading down stream to the next mote of civilization but we instead headed straight into the trees, so again preventing the GM the opportunity for urban encounters.

The game still worked out well in my opinion, though the GM wasn't as keen on how the story had unfurled. Possibly because we had cut out a chunk in a way not expected. But that's the fun of an open world and
we got another step closer to our final adventure goal.