I'm about to start a new Pathfinder campaign, setting it in the Judges' Guild Wilderlands. While deciding what to include in the game, I considered setting an adventure near the village of Lightelf (described in Spies of Lightelf), a largely-gnomish community with some serious issues.
Unfortunately, the local gnomes and their human associates are not a nice bunch. Many are chaotic and evil, while others are barely neutral. Their loyalties seldom stretch further than their own households and they apparently switch allegiances with every change in the political wind. I picture the place as "The Gnomes of Twin Peaks", with seething corruption and treachery held in check only by their awareness that exposing such would be "bad for business". I don't see the community as the sort of wild and wooly anarchy typical of traditionally sinister races, instead picturing a sort of superficial respectablity. They keep their wicked side well hidden.
How would you picture this area? How does a community filled with self-centered evil remain intact?
By the way you put it, it sounds like everyone in the village has sort of a "nuclear option" with everybody else.
Everybody has something on everybody else and are willing to use that information to ruin somebody pending that they are so fed up with the way things are that they dont mind getting shot down in return.
Its just that, up untill now, nobody has been willing to take the risk of destroying somebody else politically, mentally, physically, etc... because they are all to scared that they will in turn get ruined as well.
It sounds like a fun little town that you could get some realy good role playing in. Hope it goes well!
|
This is a bomb waiting to go off area. The charg is primed the fuse is in just no one wants to hold the tindertwig. the thing with societes is that the can teeter on the brink for ever becaus as evil and silfish as people ( gnomes halflings ect..)can be. there is a comon sence awareness that keeps them from utterly desroying the things that keep there day to day lives going. that and that alone is the glue that holds that comunitie together.
This is a bomb waiting to go off area. The charg is primed the fuse is in just no one wants to hold the tindertwig. the thing with societes is that the can teeter on the brink for ever becaus as evil and silfish as people ( gnomes halflings ect..)can be. there is a comon sence awareness that keeps them from utterly desroying the things that keep there day to day lives going. that and that alone is the glue that holds that comunitie together.
I do like how literally you took my nuclear option XD