I've been a player in a 6-month CtL campaign, and I'm currently co-DMing one, so, as you can see, there are plenty of possibilities to use CtL in a campaign setting.
I'll try to adress your various points one by one (although maybe not necessarly in order) :
- How to link the characters :
- A first good method is to have them be of the same court, or the same two courts. This way, you have a starting point to tie some of your characters together, and to introduce court-related plot points. Having some cours where your characters are not is also important : this way, there are things that your players don't know, and that is really important for you, as it allows you to use these other courts to scheme the way you want. If one of your characters don't want to be in one of the courts you need, you can have him be from a foreign court (eg : in a setting using the Seasonal Courts, have him be a Chinese businessman from the North Court, trying to implant a branch of its company here), or even be Courtless.
- Furthermore, remember the motley mechanic is here to help you. I'll address some good campaign starters in following points, but as soon as you sense you have a group dynamic, you can try to orient your players to form a motley, maybe even share a Hollow. If you make good use of pledges, they can simply be linked by a motley pledge, and have to follow the group because they swore to protect their friends.
- Threats to start a campaign with :
- You do not need your full meta-plot ready in the first sessions. In the campaigns I played (again, this is a purely empirical point of view, I do not affirm it's the best), the first scenario followed a simple rule : take some characters, put all of them in deep trouble, and watch how they have to form a group to get out of it. In the campaign I played, we found ourselves with a ODed changeling on our arms, and we had to find how to prove it wasn't our fault before his Summer friends come and break our knees in tiny little pieces. In the one I'm DMing, the players (without knowing each other before) all experienced the same nightmare (a bad trip from a Dream-Poisoned human), and had to understand why they were all here, and who was this guy that seemed in all that pain.
- Campaign ideas :
- In the previous point, I showed you how you could start your campaign with a simple plot. From here, you just need to watch your players, and see what kind of meta-plot would be good for them. They directly go to their courts, and try to charm their ways out of it ? Make a political campaign, with intrigues interacting directly with their lives. In my first campaign, we started at one-mantle-dot in the court, and finished with one in our group as Autumn Queen. This is just an example, but you get the point : see what they want to do, and use it to choose where you want to go.
- Furthermore, as said in the Storytelling part of the core book, CtL is more or less a fairy tale. Yes, a sad one, a dark one, one made of darkness and broken dreams. But the thing to remember here is that the global plot may be one of the fairy tale : kill the traitor, save the girl, things like that. CtL provides plenty of possible enemies apart from the Faes : hobs, Loyalists, Privateers, Bridge-Burners, or maybe just crazy humans.
- Character development :
- What's great in CtL is that it's a game that allows you to combine the two : a meta-plot, with great enemies to fight and things to understand, and a deep RP environment to build your characters. I'll even say that the meta-plot is kind of second here : with all they've been through, for me, the main part of playing CtL is watching how the players try to regain their life back, or create a new one. It can be anything : for example, in the campaign I played, even if the meta-plot was that we were trying to destroy a fae-touched drug ring of Loyalists, my character, on his side, became a country-famed juggler, and created its own show, and even his own kind of art, influenced by Faerie magic. And, frankly, that was the thing that marked the most
To finish, I'd advise you to read the books (all of them, if you can), as they are full of good ideas.
(nota bene : I'm not an English native, so please excuse the eventual errors. And if you need any more info, feel free to ask :))
So first of all, I really like this idea. I tried it once or twice a long time ago and I'm still fantasizing about it. With that out of the way, let's move to my 2 cents.
Make the NPCs well-rounded characters
These NPCs aren't just some recurring characters, not to mention some one-time ones. They're gonna be with the party for a very long time. Whole adventures, actually, which is quite a lot. This means that they should be really well rounded. Your players should get to the point of distinguishing between them after just a few words, especially when the NPCs are the ones who spark the conversation.
More than that, though, they should be more than cardstock characters. You want them to express feelings, you want them to have goals, and you want them to react. Otherwise, your players will have hard time connecting with them, and this is far less good. As a rule of thumb, make them round and distinguishable from each other. A wizard is different from a fighter, true, but we want a greater difference. The prince will have hard time adjusting to the wilderness and to the bugs in his bed. The merchant will always stop to collect the better loot so she'll be able to earn much from those bargains. Classes are a dirty way to distinguish, but they're better when accompanied by some other traits.
Don't let them speak right one after the other
The players aren't coming for the game as an audience for a theater, they're here to play, and hearing NPCs talk with each other is far less fun. If you must make them speak between themselves, make it as quickly as you can and immediately move on. If you can narrate the conversation instead ("they're talking about what happened, Elsa thinks that they should go east and Hans thinks that they should go west…"), it is far far better.
Give the players the center stage
The players and their characters are the real stars of the campaign. The NPCs are extras, and should always be seen like for you that when you're playing them. If they're far cooler than the PCs, or if they have much more screen time, something is off with your campaign. It's better to not have the NPCs with the group than to let them illuminate and shadow the PCs.
They're not all knowing
Think for yourself what is more important, a character who knows everything or a character who knows only part of them. For me, it is the latter. That comes from one simple thing: There's no drama when everyone knows everything (it is not entirely true, but that's for another time). Make them say sometimes stupid or idiotic things, make them come to wrong conclusions, let them make mistakes. They're not a kind of supernatural deity who knows everything, but humanoids who are as humane as the characters, and they should be played this way.
Make them important for the story
They should always be important to the overall story, in one way or another. In one of my more successful D&D campaigns, the characters had to escort a princess to a neighboring kingdom through the forests. Having to keep her safe from one hand, and dealing with all of her complaints from the other one made the game so much richer. They don't have to be important to each and every one of the scenes, but they should always be important for the overall story. Otherwise, the characters may just leave them to rot one day, when things will turn the wrong way.
And an end
Hope I succeeded with helping you a little bit.
Best Answer
Plot Issues
1. Play out the sidequests anyway in the back burner
In a way this feels like a Shadowrun situation, and quite frankly if the players are chasing their own (maybe literal) ghosts, the factions are going to hire someone available to do it. Let the party handle their own stuff and a rival party gets the job. You can resolve the quest any way you feel appropriate for where the plot will develop, but now the players need to fight for their reputations. The next player plot hook could be buried in the rival groups.
2. Why not mix it up?
If the party is supposed to be a group of characters with high impact on their world, there is a way to make the character plots intercede with the core plots, even if they happen just a little off kilter from what you need to accomplish like the job is straightforward but Bob's old nemesis just can't see it go well, or George's scorned love demands a favor in exchange for forgiveness, or Nell's long lost sister might be in the mark faction's castle/town/whatever. While they may seem very divergent, the plot device has a setting for looping things together in the strangest of ways such that they all become related and keep the party together.
3. PC the NPC / NPC the PC
Do you have a specific way you want the quests to go? Follow one of the players on their sidequest (and anyone else with reason to be involved) and pre-gen NPCs for the rest of the characters to play - including a core enough personality to keep them involved. Meanwhile, the party does their quest. It might not be the smoothest accomplishment but it would then be up to you as the DM for embellishments but do reward the core party with the quest items for the players performing well in the side arc. This also gives you play room for fuzzy memory parts that you need to ad hoc or retcon.
4. Save this campaign for later
If the players are giving you enough plot to run a full game, it may mean that you should save this campaign for when you have a more attentive party - especially one where you can tell the players what they're in for to make characters in reaction to it. This is my least favorite idea but if they have these in depth characters that run parallel to the world you're running, it may be worth considering.
Motivation Issues
I'm hoping these are not the CN players who just enjoy what I call the Video Game Experience. To me, the Video Game Experience is that to the player, anything in the environment they can interact with needs to be important, monsters are just experience, and the plot itself doesn't necessarily need to matter if they get the levels and the loot. In this case they are almost turning themselves into NPCs if their actions really have nothing to do with the party.
It may be worthwhile to sit down with them to explain that these characters need a few tweaks to make the game harmonic. While a character can be selfish, the fact is that it's hard to run a full party with the truly self indulgent within it. Tell them that they can keep their characters, perhaps even as they are but the player becomes responsible at least up front with why the character is with the group. After encountering a situations where the characters don't mesh or the lone wolf amidst the team, DMs in my area have started telling people that even if they make characters on their own, it's up to them to make party cohesion work. Sometimes it doesn't matter and the DM holds the leash for some major plot hook, but the fact is that in the seemingly sandbox world you have, the party dynamic is player driven.