From Dave Blake
The PCs have fought their way past deadly monsters, navigated through boobytrapped catacombs, and outsmarted fiendish puzzles. The final confrontation with the evil necro-medusa is at hand! The kidnapped Princess McGuffin, the only one who can summon the great Solar Phoenix to rid the world of the undead plague, lies in chains atop a grotesque stone altar. Spells and arrows fly overhead while the fighters dash forward with weapons drawn. The rough battleplan made in the previous room is abandoned almost immediately as a hoard of troll skeletons descends upon the party. The heroes frantically scramble for anything that might give them an advantage, and in a desperate gamble to take out the leader before she can slip away in the confusion of the fight, the wizard flings his most powerful fireball at the necro-medusa where she stands atop the evil altar…next to the captive princess.
Stunned silence descends on the game table as everyone realizes what just happened.
It happens to every DM at least once. The players get a little over-enthusiastic or a little too careless, or maybe you just weren’t prepared for anyone to roll two critical fails in a row. Now the unique McGuffin that was the whole point of the quest is lost/destroyed/dead. It’d be one thing if the PCs fought and died heroically in a climactic last stand. That’s still the kind of thing everybody will remember with at least a little fondness and probably a wistful, “If only we could have lasted one more round!” But to lose the final fight before it even begins? That’s a letdown for everyone, to say nothing of the countless hours of worldbuilding and planning you, the DM, just watched go up in smoke.
Don’t panic. It’s not the end of the world just because the heroes failed to save it. In fact, it’s more likely the players will be the ones who are panicking. Take a breath and relax. Give them a chance to discuss their options and what they’re going to do now that their quest is FUBAR. You never know, they might even be able to come up with a way to salvage the situation all on their own. Failing that though, it’s up to you to come up with some new paths forward to keep the game going.
Once you’ve got a chance to get back in your own creative headspace, it’s time for some serious retooling of the campaign world. It’s true, you pitched the McGuffin as the one and only solution to the current crisis, without which all are doomed. But now that it’s gone, you’ll have to work out in what direction you want the campaign to go from here.
The following scenarios are possible ways for DMs to deal with broken/lost/dead McGuffins. They try to spin the players’ game-breaking mistake into just a normal mistake that will require more time and effort from which the PCs can recover.
Plan A – Fix the McGuffin
Fixing the damage is the easiest and most straightforward solution. Can the McGuffin be fixed/resurrected? Once fixed, would it still have its world-saving powers?
Because of the extreme uniqueness of the McGuffin, just being able to put it back together might not be a plausible solution. So what would it take to fix it in the right way? The players would have to find a true master craftsman/wizard/priest to be able to repair the McGuffin in a manner that would also restore its world-saving ability. The master will likely need the PCs to find special materials or tools, or for them to take him to a certain location to perform the work. They might even inform the PCs that one master is not enough, and send them to find and bring back other masters to help.
Plan B – Get a new McGuffin
The McGuffin is irrevocably broken, lost, or dead. It might have been unique in its world-saving ability, but are there other ways to save the world? Is the power itself truly gone, or is it only the way to access it that has been lost?
The McGuffin might have been the best, most surefire way to save the world, but there must be others, right? There could be minor McGuffins, less powerful and/or less accessible than the one the PCs lost. They might have additional requirements or restrictions, or simply be unreliable. Nobody thought to mention them because they believed that the True McGuffin was all they would need.
Alternatively, it could be that the McGuffin was only the focal point of the world-saving power. Now that it’s gone, the power could have shifted and found a new focal point. It probably won’t be easy for the PCs to find, let alone get access to it, but it’s out there somewhere.
Plan C – Save the world manually
The Auto-world-saver is out of order, which means the PCs are just going to have to get in there and save the world themselves. What would it take to save the world without the McGuffin? Armies? Magic? Gods? How will they get them?
It might have seemed hopeless without the McGuffin to fix everything, but maybe not. Alliances can be made and armies can be raised in a hurry when countries are faced with destruction. There could be untapped sources of magical power strong enough to hold off the end long enough to give the good guys the time they need to solve the problem. Someone might have to go speak to the gods directly to plead for intervention. McGuffin-less, the PCs must do the legwork themselves to secure these resources.
Plan D – The world ends
Without the McGuffin, the world as the PCs know it ends. But what happens after that? How permanent is the new world?
Admittedly, this is the most labor-intensive plan for the DM. They will have to effectively make a whole new campaign world to replace the old one, and work with the PCs to find what their place in this new world will be. It could be a life as outlaws under the new regime, or a daily fight for survival in a ruined world where only the dead walk. It may have been impossible to save the whole world without the McGuffin, but there could be communities or enclaves that were able to at least save themselves by resisting or fleeing.
It’s also possible that whatever happened to destroy the world is something that could one day be reversed, or destroyed in turn. The McGuffin to save the world might be lost, but the McGuffin to restore the world is still out there if the PCs can find it!
Of course, all this assumes that you want to continue your campaign in hopes of finding a more satisfying conclusion. It’s entirely possible that your players ignored every sign that they were toying with disaster and responded to every “Are you sure?” with a definite “Heck yeah!” After all that, you might find that an ignominious end is the most satisfying conclusion of all. In which case, by all means, feel free to sit back and smile your DM smile and describe the consequences of their actions as they all come crashing down.
Dave has been an avid TTRPG player and DM for the better part of his life. There are few things in life that give him more joy than sitting around a table with several friends, just being creative at each other for hours on end.
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