Quest 12: Hide and Seek: Background:You could
[along another (and yet required) story quest] find a book of secrets that happens to be coded. As soon as you pick it up, you think to yourself, "Hm, I should show this to the Mage's Guild Master. Maybe he'll know of its use." So then you take your
long [yes long, because where you find this random book should be on a quest that has you far away from the Mage's Guild, and it adds gameplay] trip back to the Mage's Guild. You show the Guild Master and he tells you to give him a couple days to try and decipher it.
[In those 'couple of days' you can go and do whatever, but I would imagine to set a timer for about 10 game minutes, or however long your day/night script rolls over.] After a couple days pass by, you return back to the Mage's Guild and speak with its master. He'll tell you that the book is coded in a language that even he can't decipher! But, he does know about a cipher that was written for the language many years ago.
Start of Quest:Part I:The Mage's Guild Master sends you on a quest to find the man that has the cipher for this language.
Part II:You find the man, but he says the cipher was stolen by bandits many many years ago. It could be anywhere?!
[He hints to a few old ruins the bandits used to hide out in.]Part III:Since that man obscurely hinted to some ruins that may have the cipher, you need to go find it. However, he said there were 3 possible ruins. You travel to each ruin and search around, you find a few bandit treasures here and there, but no cipher. At the 3rd and last ruin, you encounter a zombie bandit leader in front of the final chest. You fight the zombie leader and some lackeys and gain access to the chest that contains the cipher.
[For this part of the quest, set up a series of control switches that monitors which of the 3 ruins the character has been to. Have maybe a Treasure chest sitting on like a pedestal at each one so that it looks like, "Hey the cipher could TOTALLY be in this thing," but it's not (at least not the first 2 ruins). So when you open the chest at each one, it turns on a switch that says you've been there and then changes the contents of those similar chests in the other 2 ruins. Then the same thing happens at ruin number 2. At that second ruin, it would turn on a switch that makes the remaining chest at the 3rd ruin be the cipher. ALSO, these ruins should all have zombie bandits, but just normal ones, you fight the leader at the final chest.]Part IV:You take the cipher and return to the Mage's Guild and show the Guild Master. He tells you to wait another couple days.
[In those 'couple of days' you can go and do whatever, but I would imagine to set a timer for about 10 game minutes, or however long your day/night script rolls over.] After a couple more days pass by, you return the Mage's Guild Master and he tells you that the book you found contains the ingredients for a powerful spell that no one has ever mastered.
[ I know, more searching right?] He tells you the ingredients to find and a place where you can find them at.
[You can make up the names of stuff, I suck at name making <3 Name Generators.]Part V:You go and find the ingredients at places the Mage's Guild Master told you about.
[I would imagine you could make the places pretty obscure and possibly describe them by the world map's geography like "Up north by some dead woods and a shore with a lot of rocks." Then the player would try to determine where that is at. (A lot like the chocographs and treasure hunting in FFIX.]Part VI:You return to the Mage's Guild Master with all of the ingredients and he tells you to meet him in the basement of the guild.
[I know it exists! I made it! ] And then he teleports himself down to the basement. You then make your way down there and a small cut scene takes place where the Mage's Guild Master and the woman I have testing 'fire and water' spells in the basement. They talk about this new spell and how awesome it is, maybe it's too dangerous. Should they make it? Well yeah. DUH! It took forever to get the freakin' stuff, so they go and make this spell. Some super cool animations start playing and then you speak with that woman who was testing spells. Or if you talk to the Guild Master there, he just tells you to talk to her to get the spell. She gives you lengthy explanation of how powerful this spell is and to use it carefully and only a Mage in your party can learn it and only ONE character can learn it.
Ending:Someone learns the spell and it's pretty much a 1 - 2 cast kill on any normal monster in endgame
[if you can even cast it 2 times]. Also, it's MP cost should be MASSIVE since it will in turn be a very very powerful spell. You can come up with what ever it does.
Side Notes:This is an endgame quest for the Mage's Guild. Also, this 'book' that will initiate the quest line must be found while on a main story-line quest so that you WILL find this no matter what. Finding it can be at any level of quest. For each part of this chain quest, set level requirements for you party so that they can actually go to these places in the game. For instance, the zombie bandits are a higher level enemy that would definitely own you if you attempted to go there at the beginning of this chain quest. This quest is meant to be a very long quest and shouldn't be completed all at one time, unless the player happens to just wait FOREVER and do it at the last second just to see what they learn. It's just one of those things the player should keep in the back of their mind as they continue playing the game.
P.S. I was totally making this up as I went along.