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by a god?

Did it just last one adventure? or a whole campaign?
how did it end? did they trick him or negotiate for their freedom? fight him directly? Wait until he got bored and moved on? Other?

Or was it a powerful Alien Intelligence? Or a regular intelligence that got really motivated about blackmail?
Or how about a powerful psyonic in a town with no psi-defenses? A person like that would really mess things up until a hero came along.

A sampling of levels of manipulation(Arbitrary scaling)
-Tier 1: Street Con----Street Waif or bar bum spinning tales, damsel in distress with a tale of woe, codger with a treasure map.
-Tier 2: Local Puppetmaster-----Psychic, mind-mage, local criminal boss, slaver
-Tier 3: Big Brother----Chi-town PsychOps, Republicans, Archie-3, Splugorth Minion, Mindwerks
-Tier 4: High Mindscrew--- High-rank Infernals, Thraxus, demigods, Mechanoids, Splugorth
-Tier 5: God-level--- Alien Intelligence, Pantheon, Cosmic Forge, Thoth.

DAMMIT TAALISMN!
Why is it you always have an answer to my question before I even ask it??

I had a group that were manipulated by the minion of a god but not by the god themself.

Had a group in Silvereno that was trying to figure out a connection between the Vampires in the town and the Mining shaft where people would disappear and was closed (the connection was that the vamps there were minions of the VI that was under the control of Camazotz and that there was a Portal in the mine that would open to his domain once a year on the same day. He wanted to take over the silver mines as a way to get material to make weapons to subjugate the other vampire kingdoms). The problem was that they did not know how to actually kill Vampires so that they would stay dead. This was because I ruled that the Demon and Monster Lore skill was not good enough to know the specifics, just the general lore (which was mostly from old stories and movies originally) so they would stake a vampire and it would appear to be dead but would come back when the stake was removed. They reached out via short range radio to if anyone had knowledge of how to actually kill a vamp. They were contacted by a person who said he was a vampire hunter and that he could teach them, and he came and did so. What they did not know was that he was actually a Shifter who had made a pact with Camazotz in the hopes of one day being made into a Master Vampire and had sacrificed his family to him as tribute for that goal. He got the group to go down into the Mine shaft and there he use his ability to re-open the last portal that opened there to send them away so that they would stop being a problem. It turned out that the last portal to open down there went to the Dark Millennium Tree in the Black Forest.

Shorty Lickens wrote:DAMMIT TAALISMN!
Why is it you always have an answer to my question before I even ask it??

The techniques used to anticipate you are difficult, expensive, and they admittedly take a toll on sanity....

[sarcasm] is there ever a campaign where the pc's aren't being manipulated by the GM [/sarcasm]

with that aside there is a difference being manipulated and being railroaded

I figure that characters are almost always going to be manipulated at least a little bit, the better question is are they being manipulated under false pretenses

IE if someone offers you some payment to do something then they are argueably being manipulated

if someone is told that they will be paid to do X but they are being sent into an ambush to be killed or enslaved and their gear stolen and any survivors sold into slavery, or executed/sacrificed