A whole fantasy story I have in my head with all the things in place like plot, character building, storyline and such. My problem is that the motive has huge flaws: Basicly there is a curse roaming the lands killing people. The characters find a spellbook with a lot of missing pages (pages are hidden by goblins) with in it a page of a bit of information about the curse. It is going to be a trilogy with all parts having it's own quest, but the curse is the long term problem to be solved. The book was my idea to give them a reason to search the lands (enter dungeons and such) to find the missing pieces. But I came acros some problems which I cannot find a solution for, which have made me writeblock for like a year now. 1. Why would they spend the time to actually find every page in the book? Pages that may be helpfull for information in what the bad guys are up to, but in exception of a few single pages completely useless for the characters. 2. How would they actually know where to find all the pages? I can hint them here and there with a psychic or something, but I find that solution a bit weak. And since the goblins were meant to make the pages untracable, it would be unbelievable that the party just know where to find the pages. I hope some of you can help me find a solution for this gap. Maybe by throwing the book idea all together, looking for artifacts or something. But important for what I wanted to use the book for were the key components of; 1. Giving the party a reason to enter dungeons and solve some puzzles. 2. Keep the readers interested by hinting to other parts of the trilogy 3. Give a continuous reminder of the main quest for the main character.. the curse. Ideas?
My off-the-cuff response would be to ditch the idea of missing spellbook pages altogether. Why would the bad guys keep the pages if they contained the architecture of their own demise? Wouldn't they just destroy the whole spell book and declare victory? There's a million other things your party can search for in dungeons. Pieces of a magic weapon, runes that seem innocuous on their own but are deadly in combination, etc. As for how the adventures know where to find them, well, how to adventures know where to find anything? Treasure maps, ancient legends, shamans and wise-folks, visions, demonic voices whispering in the dark.... It's fantasy. As far as the (object to defeat curse) and the (way to find object) are concerned, you have plenty of options.
Alternatively, if you want to keep the book........ The book is blank, created by your psychic, who only has to appear once to set them off on their first quest. He has hidden the final page of each chapter and only by completing the chapter does the text appear, giving its vital information to defeating the curse and helpfully setting out a clue to the whereabouts of the last page to the next chapter. Thereby allowing you to build towards the ultimate quest to complete the book and uncover the necessary weapon. Sorted. Or you could explore the various other options as mentioned above. It's your world. You make the rules. They don't need to apply outside your fantasy so long as they make sense within it.
Maybe they get ahold of one of the goblins and beat him up until he revels what was done with all the pages, and maybe he even becomes an ally in gathering them up and all the magic tasks. Maybe an only half-willing ally, think Gollum in LoTR. Or maybe he experiences something that makes him actually side with them, some insurrection among the goblins or something, and now he's really on the side of the good guys.
What if they manage to get information from the goblins in where one of the pages is left behind. Then that page contains information of how they can make/find an artifact which traces pages that are nearby (like the goblin sword lighting up from Lotr). In the original idea the book was indestructable btw, thats why they needed to hide the pages and couldn't simply set the book on fire.
1. the pages could be linked magically to the goblins, so the MC realizes that finding one will make her find the other; 2. when reading a non-fiction book, for how well conclusions are explained, to understand how the author got to the conclusions you still need to read the preceding chapters to understand the whole the process. Meaning that even if the MC needs only a few pages, she still needs to read the rest to understand how to use those few pages (the ones that contain the needed information); 3. a psychic could set off the initial search by directing the MC to a quest--inside a dungeon or else--once the MC has solved that quest, pages appear magically in the book unlocked, listing another quest that can unlock more pages. It doesn't have to be "go on a quest", it could also be a question to a problem that leads them to a location where there is a dungeon, etc. For instance the new pages might lead the MC to a village. In the village there is an unrelated problem, for instance a ghost in a dungeon, and the MC offers to figure out what the ghost is, and at the end she realizes the ghost problem also answered some missing piece in the pages, so new pages appear; [I wrote this and then realized @B.E. Nugent suggested something similar ] it is a magical world, so you can be creative about the process of finding things--the MC doesn't need to go around physically looking for the pages like one would in a messy room. At least this is what I imagined you were thinking and finding problems with. Well, this is where I generally have issues in creating my magical worlds
