Hello There!
In a game I run the players are going to be in a city that I would describe as lawful evil, without trying to look that way to the outside world. They are an insular set of kingdoms, each has what it does best, and they only survive by trading with the other l/e kingdoms what they need. The major kingdom is run by the king, and all other smaller kingdoms pay tribute to him. They run off of a system of debt that is so bad that the people are no better than slaves, working forever to pay off a debt that just keeps growing. The upperclass is extremely wealthy. There really isn;t a middle class.
The party is in a mountain kingdom, and their major export is ore, minerals, etc. They are a walled kingdom and run off of the same system factory towns do, not paying their populace in gold but rather in notes that can only be used within their town. When people turn the age of majority, they sign contracts for the debt they have incurred thus far in life, and have to start to work to pay it off. The contracts I am thinking will go back to devils or vampires somehow (devils obviously the soul is the collateral, vampires if they default they become blood slaves). But this would not be obvious in the contracts.
I was thinking this could be a fun/frustrating town. They are starting here at level one and their birth days are coming up where they will be liable for their debt. I am thinking they might want to find work, or try to escape, etc.
How would some of you run/play here? I don't want them to start off knowing how evil the city is, but rather have it be a pleasant surprise later.
I was thinking of starting with demon cults, because though evil is fine, chaos is not here. It also gives the impression the city is fighting evil?
There are also stories of night demons that come out at night only, and no one survives them (or so it's said). The nearest town is 2 days away, so running is not really an option. The town uses fear tactics heavily to isolate its people.
How to you see the PCs beating the system? What makes them different than all the other slave-laborers who fall victim to the system and never escape?
I think this is really the central question. I think your premises can form a foundation for a setting but you should think about how exactly the PCs fit into it. If you're going to run a tight setting you have to make sure you have all your bases covered. Such as:
The party is in a mountain kingdom, and their major export is ore, minerals, etc.
There are also stories of night demons that come out at night only, and no one survives them (or so it's said).
If no one survives the night demons, then how does the kingdom export anything? You'll need to know the answer these kinds of questions otherwise your setting is going to feel unrealistic and forced.
Good luck.
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So - basically the whole kingdom is set up like the worst possible version of an old school company town. (the propaganda against it bad rather than even the probably historical bad)
Curious - why does the kingdom even go to that much trouble? Why not just go with serf rules of workers tied to the land (mines in this case) instead of keeping track of debts etc? Keeping track of all that debt etc. is a lot of work.
Charon - I would suspect the "debt" is calculated purely by age. Once someone is able to find employment, their debt can be tracked, but even then it's merely an arbitrary number, adjusted to always be higher than an individual can afford to pay.
I do see Charon's point, though. There's really no need to dangle a carrot in front of someone when it's easier to just crush any hope of escape from their fate. The generations of children who've been born into the lower class would be given no reason to believe they could do anything but follow their parent's footsteps, never to see anything beyond the walls. Hell, they may not even know a "beyond the walls" exists. It's not so difficult to do in a situation where the upper and lower classes are so divided. Perhaps the only hope people could cling to might be the possibility of becoming wealthy enough to attain upper class status.
There's a few ways this could be played, though. For example, if you like the idea of keeping people working for credits and hoping for some way out, you could have a "freedom" lottery. Lowclassers could purchase lottery tickets for some relatively high cost (encouraging them to work harder, earn more money so they can buy more tickets), and one is chosen on a monthly basis. As far as the lowclassers know, the winner is sent to the upper echelon where they spend the rest of their days, or possibly even allowed to leave the kingdom. In reality, this is how they choose the next individual to be sacrificed to whatever gods they worship, or how the vampires decide who their next meal will be, or some other such grisly fate. If you'd rather keep hope a dead concept in this kingdom, the purpose of the lottery could be made completely transparent, although a "greater good" spin would be put on it by those in power. A player in this situation might be a recent winner of the lottery who escapes and tries to spread the truth to the other lowclassers, or possibly an upper class citizen who disagrees with how things are done and chooses to help the winner be the first to truly escape.
Another idea plays with that "beyond the walls" concept I mentioned above. The lowclassers could have been lead to believe that there is literally nothing outside the kingdom. They mine, but for all they know the ore and coal they dig up is all used by the upper class. A player here may have discovered some old books that detail parts of the world they've never seen or caught a less-than-discrete upper class citizen talking about exports to another country, and this is the spark that leads them to believe maybe the world is much bigger than they expected, and maybe there's something better for them out there. Or they may have fallen into a train car that was just leaving for an export and found themselves stranded in a foreign place they never even knew existed. Something like that would be fun to play too, because all the culture and world experience the PC would have is what they know from the kingdom, so literally everything is new, amazing, frightening, alien.
Sounds like you've already got a pretty good start on the Lawful Evil dystopian city and even whole kingdom. Conceptually, it isn't too complicated at all, although it may be quite a bit of work to set up. Actually sounds lIke Company Towns in the United States in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and what this country wIll probably look lIke again in a few more years or decades. For extra flavor, add in frequent state/company-sponsored cheerleading drives like in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a frequent threat that is real but highly distorted by the rulers, and perhaps even facilitated by them . . . In a way to keep the masses under control while provide the rulers with plausible deniability and not interfering too much with their own business, of course. The "Night Demons" sound like a good start -- somehow, they conveniently don't impact too much of the rulers' business, although they are willing to sacrifice a few of their lesser business partners for publicity purposes, conveniently happening to be the ones who didn't pay their protection money or started to get too big for their britches in some other way . . . And who says that the "Night Demons" are even Demons at all, or that they can ONLY come out at night -- it may just be that during the day, they are doing . . . Something else. Of course, in a society like that, people end up disappearing (think of a more regimented version of Argentina during the Dirty War) . . . And that provides a potential way to get the PCs involved, if they start putting two and two together with respect to the disappearances. If you need an excuse for the PCs to have arms legitimately, have them start out as police (the regular police, NOT the secret police that do the disappearances -- the existence of the secret police would be known to them and to just about everybody else, but they would be kept ignorant of the true workings of the secret police and fed the same propaganda as the rest of the common people about the necessity for the secret police and their secrecy).
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If you DO want to keep the whole 'company town' thing going - I'd suggest having the king/nobility not be a part of it. They are basically figureheads - the guild leaders are the ones who control the city by keeping everyone else (including the king/nobility) deeply in debt. And since they are actually the ones who directly pay the military, the soldiers are loyal to them rather than the king.
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The capitol and districts of the Hunger Games series might be a good inspiration.
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I'm in a similar predicament: my PCs are about to try making their way across a Drow nation in the underdark, and they're going to have to spend some time in Drow towns and cities during their journey. I'm still trying to figure out how to portray that civilization in a way that that makes sense without them getting instantly killed.
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I'm in a similar predicament: my PCs are about to try making their way across a Drow nation in the underdark, and they're going to have to spend some time in Drow towns and cities during their journey. I'm still trying to figure out how to portray that civilization in a way that that makes sense without them getting instantly killed.
Are they going to get magically blended in such as in BGII?
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I'm in a similar predicament: my PCs are about to try making their way across a Drow nation in the underdark, and they're going to have to spend some time in Drow towns and cities during their journey. I'm still trying to figure out how to portray that civilization in a way that that makes sense without them getting instantly killed.One thing to note about Drow society which is fun, in Drow society they dont have bartering or even set prices. When one person wants to buy something from another, the stronger one sets the price and the weaker one accepts it. If the weaker one doesn't like the price, the stronger one either refuses to budge on the issue or kills the person, depending on the circumstance. So if the PCs go to a shop, have the prices for things be outlandishly high and then have a Priestess come in and just take a set of Platemail for like 30 gold or something.
Better yet, have the merchant start to say something like "I wont be able to make another one at that price", something reasonable and have her kill him. That way they will understand the way things work here.
I don't think even Drow society could work like that for long - it'd collapse. Remember - while Lloth is CE, the Drow themselves are mostly NE.
For one thing - does the priestess in your case know which house the merchant is a part of? She could easily start a war over it.
Besides - I think that the Drow are like the Spartans were - they don't have mundane tradesmen/craftsmen/merchants of their own. (magical crafters - sure) They're virtually all just badass warriors/wizards/priestesses who get their wealth through slave labor.
But if it's a slave merchant - then they're DEFINITELY owned by a Drow house. So - the priestess wouldn't be stealing from a merchant at all - she'd be stealing from a high priestess.
For more on Golarion Drow, you can look at Second Darkness, also the new Darklands book has a whole new section on Drow society.
CE is Might = Right, but that just means that you are very aware of just how mighty your are. If you overestimate, you die.
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And actually, Drow are also CE, I dont know where you get that theyre mostly NE
From the 3.5 Monster Manual - D&D Wiki
Drow, 1st-Level Warrior
Size/Type:
Medium Humanoid (Elf)Hit Dice:
1d8 (4 hp)Initiative:
+1Speed:
30 ft. (6 squares)Armor Class:
16 (+1 Dex, +4 chain shirt, +1 light shield), touch 11, flat-footed 15Base Attack/Grapple:
+1/+2Attack:
Rapier +3 melee (1d6+1/18–20) or hand crossbow +2 ranged (1d4/19–20)Full Attack:
Rapier +3 melee (1d6+1/18–20) or hand crossbow +2 ranged (1d4/19–20)Space/Reach:
5 ft./5 ft.Special Attacks:
Poison, spell-like abilitiesSpecial Qualities:
Drow traits, spell resistance 12Saves:
Fort +2, Ref +1, Will –1*Abilities:
Str 13, Dex 13, Con 10, Int 12, Wis 9, Cha 10Skills:
Hide +0, Listen +2, Search +4, Spot +3Feats:
Weapon Focus (rapier)Environment:
UndergroundOrganization:
Squad (2–4), patrol (5–8 plus 2 2nd-level sergeants and 1 leader of 3rd–6th level), or band (20–50 plus 10% noncombatants plus 1 2nd-level sergeant per 5 adults, 2d4 6th-level lieutenants, and 1d4 9th-level captains)Challenge Rating:
1 (see text)Treasure:
StandardAlignment:
Usually neutral evilAdvancement:
By character classLevel Adjustment:
+2
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The way I'm setting them up in my campaign is that they have a number of clans/houses who are all at each others' throats, but all of them are dominated by the Cult of Lolth and have to curry favor with the Cult. The economy is based entirely on slave labor and slaves are actually one of a few a forms of currency. The Cult demands a steady flow of slaves to sacrifice to their demon-goddess. I also imagine that the whole nation is rife with secret societies and weird cults, which could work to the PCs advantage.
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The economy is based entirely on slave labor and slaves are actually one of a few a forms of currency.
Wouldn't mithril & adamantine be valuable as currency simply for their use to craft into weapons/armor? They might not have stamped coinage, but they would still trade in small bars of the stuff since it can be transported/kept on your person. They might just have to use scales for any trade, and be careful of impurities. (That's where the idea for coins came from - it was the gov. getting involved to standardize weight/purity of metals to simplify trade.)
OK, I am seriously loving some of these great ideas to put a little terror in a game.
The difference between terror and horror: Terror is that slow skin crawling sensation that something has been watching you and picking off your friends even though you haven't seen anything and Horror is OH MY GOD IT ATE TED'S HEAD!
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A Lawful-Evil city with monsters that come out at night, and devil contracts, and nobody has mentioned Westcrown from Council of Thieves?
I could have sworn somebody did, but a search for the text turns up nothing. Maybe I got this thread confused with another ongoing thread. Anyway, having seen (although not actually been in) a Council of Thieves PbP all the way through, I'd say yes, this is a good example. And I'll say again that Council of Thieves seems much underrated on these boards.