I believe we should draw a distinction between the two different types of thread missions: the ones to
acquire a thread item, and the ones to
unlock key knowledges.
It makes sense to me that acquiring the thread item should be a legendary experience. RAW, however, key knowledges could have been unlocked during downtime, as all they take is Item History and Research. By requiring a mission for each, we have already added a layer of difficulty/complication. I do not believe that finding the answers to key knowledges needs to be made any more difficult than that.
Our current restrictions on thread items include:
- When you can get them and how many you can have. We require players to earn threadcount by going on missions.
- What the item is/can do. Players can exert some degree of control over this through Research, which for most characters is a significant cost in silver.
- The rate at which the item's threads can be unlocked and woven. We have already said that dedicated missions are required for each key knowledge; it cannot be tacked on to someone else's mission. The real-world exigencies of scheduling make this more of a delay than it looks on paper. Heartscry, for example, acquired the Emerald Crown of Enoi Gaen in A Recipe for Destruction, which was the tenth mission we ran; the first key knowledge I unlocked for any item was twelve missions later, and the first key knowledge for that particular item won't be until tomorrow, which will be the 24th mission run on Eastmarches. This delay was most definitely not because Heartscry didn't have enough legend points to weave the threads, but rather that other people had missions they wanted to do which filled up the schedule.
I feel like this topic came up because the mission I did to find the key knowledge for Heartscry's Novice-tier thread item was a 3A; Heartscry was, at the time, a 4th Circle character. I also titled the mission
Living the Cliche, with the answer to the key knowledge discovered off-screen. Is it possible that these things were as influential in making it feel trivial as the difficulty of the mission? (It's worth mentioning that the mission was not easy for our group - there was a while with the t'skrang pirates that I seriously thought we were going to party wipe!)
This brings me back to the difference between acquiring a thread item and finding the answer to a key knowledge. Acquiring a thread item usually has the sort of hook that is interesting to everyone, but for the most part the key knowledge missions have been "looking for a journal". At worst they've been like
Mavarre's Mansion, where the hook really wasn't interesting to anyone other than T'rask. If what we want is to make thread items feel special, I feel like a better place to start would be concentrating on making the missions related to them more interesting and more relevant.
The GMs know the story of an item, to greater or lesser degree. Perhaps when unlocking thread knowledges, the player should say to a GM, "I want a mission to answer this question," and the GM should come up with the hook, with the intention of making the mission interesting and engaging, but most importantly
relating to the history of the item. If the thread item is front and center for the mission rather than, "Oh, and you also find a journal with the answer you want," they should feel more special and less trivial.
Thus far, I think
Crystals of Caldor has been the most interesting and successful key knowledge mission, and
Twin Troubles the most interesting and successful thread item acquisition mission. Perhaps looking at what made our favourite missions so good would help us figure out what needs to be done to bring up the quality of the others?