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I'm having some friends over for a first time pathfinder event. One of them was having trouble coming up with a backstory so my wife suggested to look through the factions for insight.
Long story short, the story he came up with was "while I was out tending the fields, bandits, probably agents of the sczarni razed/murdered/destroyed the town and then I went off to become a pathfinder (and joined the silver crusade)."
Obviously there's more to it and he had it down more elegantly than that, but that's the gist of it. I don't know enough about the setting to know if this is something the Sczarni would do. I always thought of them as more of pickpockets and fences--the kind that would scatter when the lights turned on.
So if this is something they would do, then totally fine. If not, suggest to me some other group that I can have him substitute instead of the Sczarni.
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I really can't imagine this working. The Sczarni are, from my relatively limited understanding, much more subtle than that. Assassination is definitely in their realm, but not murder. The Aspis Consortium (sort of the Society's evil counterpart, who show up fairly often over the seasons), might be a better bet.
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Pish and tosh. The Sczarni are naught but a nice family of businessmen and women. It's a bad rap but I suppose being successful makes for a lot of jealous folks spreading harmful rumors.
The Aspis? Bunch of murdering bastards. Wouldn't put razing towns past them, if they thought it would bring them power or wealth.
-sharra
As far as I'm aware, Sczarni have two operating principles:
1) You can't continue getting profits from a dead man
2) Never do something that makes the finger clearly point to you
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Everyone keeps saying the Aspis would do this, but I can't quite see that, either. More likely than the Sczarni, but that's not how I picture the Aspis. They're more the "start a war so we can sell weapons to both sides" types than the "murder everyone just to take their stuff" types. Now murdering a specific target, I can see, but not a whole village. But I could say the same about the Sczarni.
If you're going to do a completely destroyed town back story, better to make it unassociated bandits, or pick a nasty race like orcs that are known for that sort of thing. I would say goblins, but they're too incompetent to take out a whole town. Orcs could actually pull it off.
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Rule of Fear says the Sczarni rarely harm a person and prefer to teach them "lessons" - lessons like "If a deal seems too good to be true it probably is" or "If you buy a diamond from a fellow on a street you probably won't get your money's worth".
While this might only apply to Ustalav's sczarni, that's how I like to display them - people with no respect for the law who like to exploit the dupability of others, but usually not violent or mean-spirited or even evil. Which slaughtering a whole village would be.
Now, they MIGHT resort to such a thing if the village did overreact (hang a few sczarnis because of minor crimes), but I still think it's unlikely.
The Aspis on the other hand - I could see them do it, but not just because they want money out of them. But it's something they might do if the stakes are really high - maybe a farmer found a very powerful artifact and they don't want anyone to know so they let his whole family "disappear". Though things like this should be very, very rare.
