Tag: fantasy

Smuggling has a long history, and a lot of it is not exactly what you would expect. While now smuggling might make you think of drugs or people, smuggling has generally been a means to avoid taxation rather than a prohibition—though Canadian breweries and distilleries made a mint through smuggling during the US Prohibition-era, when alcohol was banned. Did the tea smugglers or the salt smugglers of the day face a criminal underworld like those that inhabit the drug smuggling world of today? Almost certainly. These were not cooking enthusiasts who just wanted to get ingredients to their favourite chefs! Smugglers did undertake some jobs we might think of as humanitarian—and some probably still do—but they were in it for the money, and not looking to better humanity.

But that would make a boring story.

No one’s entirely good and no one’s entirely bad, and sometimes, bad people do good things. Usually, we’re all just normal people with failings who make mistakes. Sometimes we talk about redemption—but what are we redeeming? Most religions accept that people won’t be able to live up the tenets.

And it’s just fun sometimes to subvert expectations. The hero isn’t an anti-hero, just a person who made a mistake. This isn’t redemption, they’re not a bad person trying to atone, they’re just a person who can’t ignore suffering when they have the means to alleviate it.

This one is more of a one-page component of an adventure than the adventure itself. This is an answer to the issue of PCs finding information. Sometimes, it’s just as easy to hand it over—have one of the PCs with the proper build know the information. Sometimes, it can be fun to breakdown how and where they get that information. For me, when it comes to ancient or otherwise forgotten knowledge, I force them to do what I did for so much of my time in university: do a little research!

Story

In search of forgotten or obscure knowledge, the PCs seek out an archive that they know to have ancient sources—tomes and scrolls and maybe cuneiform tablets. The knowledge of which archive to visit and where that archive can be found might be it’s own little adventure following a similar path.

The Rings of Power introduced something that had been part of a Middle-Earth campaign I ran back in high school based on information from The Lord of the Rings’ appendices and The Silmarillion—there were five Istari, and the two Blue Istari disappeared into Rhun. I can’t remember much more than that, but in that campaign, the two Blue Istari returned, one taking Dol Guldor in Mirkwood and the other re-claiming Minas Morgul in Mordor at a time when the Reunited Kingdom was eating itself alive due to dynastic politics. So, this adventure is going to mimic that first adventure way back before even the first Lord of the Rings movies, when all we had was Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and Rankin Bass’ Return of the King.

I’m thinking that the dying empire and the necromancer who is at the heart of this one-pager have a long history. In my thinking, the empire is the second rising of an ancient polity, and it had gained dominance after battling with an upstart kingdom led by a powerful enemy known as The Necromancer. Well, the emperors called them a necromancer, but they were more of a sorcerer. The emperor brought together a coalition of powerful nations under its leadership, defeated the sorcerer’s kingdom, and then forced itself on the coalition as a kind of overlord. That was two hundred years ago. The empire is falling apart as this story begins.

This is kind of a mystery, and much of it is finding more clues to the identity of The Necromancer at the centre of it. As the one-pager is intended for inspiration and outline rather than details, anyone running this scenario would probably add more clues than are mentioned.

In most adventures that I’ve written, the PCs are able to gain a direct victory—overpowering the opposition through physical, mental, or social means—but it’s always interesting to change it up and present them with a problem that the direct approach can’t solve. That’s what it’s like when you are the smartest or the strongest in the room. That led me to think about a situation ’s what it’s like for a real underdog. In our world—and, to be honest, historically—that’s been the fate of displaced persons. This isn’t the first time the subject informed my RPG writing.  I had plans to write on the fate of a particularly famous group of likely displaced people during the Late Bronze Age collapse—Sagas of the Sea Peoples got recycled as the Sword’s Edge adventure Poles of Power. This one-pager is still a kind of a power fantasy—it’s a lot cleaner and removed from real suffering than most refugee situations—but it presents a situation the PCs can’t punch their way out of.

Story

The PCs control Sanctuary—this could be a tavern and inn, it could be a quarter of a city, or it might even be a city or town itself—that sits between two opposing powers. It is the only safety for the refugees from the war. The PCs can’t openly use violence as the opposing armies have escalation dominance—they can bring far more force to bear on Sanctuary than the PCs can even hope to oppose. As the war is coming to a close, both armies seek battlefield victories to improve their positions and the polity’s negotiation position. The PCs need to protect Sanctuary and the refugees finding shelter until peace or at least stability arrives.

One-pagers are a kind of adventure prep that I use which I outlined in an older post over at Sword’s Edge. Basically, because I am very comfortable with improv gaming, I usually work from a very basic adventure outline and do everything else on the fly.

Below is a one-pager based on the movie Uprising, which I reviewed at Sword’s Edge. There are no NPCs/challenges/obstacles statted out—no mechanical opponents presented—so you might need to cook some of those up if you use this. The ideas are there. Run with them.

Story

The PCs are bandits that have formed into an irregular force protecting the local communities from the depredations of the armies fighting the wars—whether those are the nominal “lords” of the land or the armies invading that territory. They haven’t been especially cruel to the villagers, but they are criminals, and their raids have likely created hardship for the local population. They will face both violent encounters with the contending armies, but also interpersonal challenges in finding peace and mutual support with the villages they are now protecting.