Recently, I have acquired Ultimate Intrigue. And I motherfluffing LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Best book ever. But praising the Paizo creative team is not the reason I'm here.
Rather, after running countless hack 'n' slash campaigns that quickly dropped off due to lack of player interest, and one Kingmaker campaign that the players enjoyed the tribal politics of the Stolen Lands before they started hating the actual kingdom building part, I'm looking to make an Ultimate Intrigue game, as it outlined in the book's games and themes section.
Here's the basic premise: The players are all fledgling members of a noble house in a massive medieval megacity a la Ravinca. A civil war is brewing between the Celestial Court (a lot more like Bayonetta angels than anything else) and the common folk, headed by a extremist, some say terrorist, group named the Hellfire Collective. In the chaos of a Hellfire Collective attack, the PCs are bumped up to the leadership of their house, with only a few retainers remaining. The PCs can either pursue revenge and side with the Court, recognize the need for rebellion and join the Collective, or forge their own destiny, while desperately rebuilding their house before the coming storm.
That's the basic premise. I'm looking for help fleshing it out. Here's some basic setting stuff: There are thirteen noble houses that rule the city, but answer directly to the Celestial Court. It works rather like feudalism: the fiefs of each individual house are left largely untouched as long as they obey Court laws, and they are expected to lend support to the fight against the actual forces of Hell whenever the Court asks. There are also a number of guilds and trade consortiums that operate across districts. Fleshing out the houses and the guilds would be a great help. The main theme of the game is Order vs. Chaos, in the same vein as Continuum if you've watched it. Essentially, although the Collective's actions are extreme, brutal, and violent, they are the only viable option against the the totalitarian Celestial Court. The game is going to be about two thirds social, and one third combat.
Races: Only humans, really. The Celestials are really powerful, and the Abyssals are more like Lovecraftian abominations that real demons.
Magic: Rather than divine, arcane, and psychic, there is Obliteration (arcane), Celestial (divine), and Warp (psychic). Obliteration is a roiling mass of energy and hate that warps and twists those who use it, in both mental and physical ways. Celestial, as much as the Celestials would like to suppress this information, does not come from the Empyreal King, but rather from personal willpower, belief, and pureness of heart (either way). Warp comes from the collective mental power of the entire plane, and extensive use of it can bring powerful Nightmares birthed from the fear of the user into the world.
Celestials: The Celestials are fighting a losing war agains the Abyssals. They truly believe that they are doing the right thing by "protecting" the humans, and hope to buy enough time to build the Destiny Engine, which will purify everything with Celestial energy-think Synthesis from ME3,
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I'd strongly advise not having either of the main factions be clearly the ones to kill large numbers of people the PCs care about. That sorta forces the PCs to side with the other one, which rather defeats the point in many ways.
I'd have it be a splinter-faction repudiated by the Hellfire Collective, and probablyy then executed en masse by the main Collective as 'traitors to the cause'.
That makes the whole situation way more ambiguous, which is much more appropriate for an intrigue-heavy game. If you want to give the PCs closure, have the actual mastermind behind the attack be the only member of the splinter-faction to escape and let them hunt him down...but the point is to make it so that one of the PCs can easily say 'The Hellfire Collective is responsible for the death of our mother!' and another can say back 'No, they avenged her death.' and have neither necessarily be wholly wrong.
Shades of grey are really good for intrigue games.
Aside from that, sounds mostly good...though there's a weird lack of symmetry in the magic, with Celestial magic not having a downside while the other two kinds are actively badfor everyone and should never be used. Which is weird and imbalanced, IMO. If you want magic to be bad and something people should never use (on a macro scale)...then do that, but do it in general, not with specific kinds.
I'm also not clear what the Celestial/Abyssal conflict really adds to anything here. Do you want this to be political, or saving the world from supernatural evil? Because when PCs discover the latter, politics tends to fall by the wayside entirely as they literally try to save the world. And that doesn't seem like what you're aiming for here.
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Cool idea, and glad you loved Intrigue! To build off some of your and DMW's ideas, it might be interesting if the highest-ranking members of the PCs' house were actually thinking of defecting to the Hellfire Collective and an extremist member of the Celestial Court killed them and framed the Collective, hoping this would generate a new regime in the house that was strongly anti-Hellfire Collective. Alternatively, this is a lie and the Collective killed them, but the Collective claims it to be true. So the Collective denies the attack either way, and the PCs have a mystery on their hands from the start.
@DMW: Yeah, that's a better idea about the Hellfire Collective. It definitely makes things a lot more grey for the PCs, which helps them make their own decisions. As for Celestial, I had trouble thinking of an obvious disadvantage. However, I realized I was thinking about it the wrong way: since Celestial is the "good feelings" magic, it didn't make sense for its negative aspect to be overtly antagonistic. Rather, the sense of euphoria it imparts is dangerously addictive for both the user and the target if the caster draws too deep on their inner willpower. Addicts will often seek to hurt themselves in horrific ways to get another high, and symptoms are a bit-more-than-healthy golden glow, and blindingly bright teeth. As for the Abyssals vs. Celestials conflict, it'll mostly be happening in the background. Occasionally, the wards will break and Abyssals will flood the city, making a great distraction and excuse for all sort of clandestine deeds... or the PCs can break them themselves in order to make the timing more convenient.
I don't particularly like Vancian casting, and the downsides of magic are my answer to it. The amount of spells a character normally gets a day is their "safe" amount-how much they can go to before things start to spiral out of control. However, they can go beyond this limit by taking d6 in damage equal to the level of the spell they're casting squared. If they make the high Will Save DC, then they take half damage and they don't bring on any ill effects. If not... well, those side effects are there for a reason.
@Mark: Thanks for stopping by! That's a great idea, and I think I'll combine that with DMW's idea, and have the Hellfire Collective's extremist branch be officially denounced, but unofficially supported.
Another thing I'm grappling with is how to make the Celestial Court more sympathetic. As I said, they believe that they're protecting humanity from the Abyssals, but have gone a bit too far. But other than that, how can I make them seem like a viable option for the city's future?
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I guess it all depends on your nuance. From your description in this thread, other than telling us directly that they've gone too far (which their own propaganda isn't going to support in-world, and they likely control the education of young nobles and therefore the initial impressions the PCs are likely to have a young nobles), there isn't a clear sense that the Court is unsympathetic. You could borrow from real-world regimes that tighten their power due to fear of an outside threat and have them play up the danger of those Abyssals and the amount that the Abyssal threat would escalate if they didn't keep fighting it and maintain power. Maybe a secret faction of the Court intentionally makes sure there's a controlled Abyssal incursion every once in a while to remind people of the danger the Abyssals represent. Bonus points if the controlled incursion happens in a place where it takes out high-priority Collective targets, as the Court doesn't even come out looking suspicious for that with the right spin of "Of course the incursion happened near a Collective compound; we keep saying that the Collective are undermining our efforts and strengthening the Abyssals!"
I guess it all depends on your nuance. From your description in this thread, other than telling us directly that they've gone too far (which their own propaganda isn't going to support in-world, and they likely control the education of young nobles and therefore the initial impressions the PCs are likely to have a young nobles), there isn't a clear sense that the Court is unsympathetic. You could borrow from real-world regimes that tighten their power due to fear of an outside threat and have them play up the danger of those Abyssals and the amount that the Abyssal threat would escalate if they didn't keep fighting it and maintain power. Maybe a secret faction of the Court intentionally makes sure there's a controlled Abyssal incursion every once in a while to remind people of the danger the Abyssals represent. Bonus points if the controlled incursion happens in a place where it takes out high-priority Collective targets, as the Court doesn't even come out looking suspicious for that with the right spin of "Of course the incursion happened near a Collective compound; we keep saying that the Collective are undermining our efforts and strengthening the Abyssals!"
Again, thanks for the great ideas, Mark! Here's how the Celestials began to slide off of the slippery slope: It all started with a fairly mild case of Big Brother: the Celestial Court began to use advanced scrying magic to spy on all of its citizens. Now this alone isn't a cause for alarm-after all, what government doesn't do that? However, they were horrified at seeing the violence and depravity that ran rampant in the slums of the city. They began to crack down. Hard. They swept the slums, executing every person engaged in crime, from mob bosses to petty pickpockets. This caused the expected uproar, but many of the noble houses threatened to withdraw support if they kept it up, since they had their fingers in that particular pie. Rather than do this, the Court decided on a compromise with the houses: in exchange for letting them continue to crack down on the slums, the Court would lend support and the same tactics to finding dissidents and executing them. At first, this meant true Obliteration-throwing anarchists. As the Celestial Court grew more used to this extremist view, they started to expand-anybody who even uttered a word of dissent was at the very least imprisoned. Commoners and nobles alike began to visit black markets to buy Warp charms to avoid the constant surveillance, leading to another crime wave. When this wave was quashed, the damage was done to the ethics of the Court. They coldly determined that omnipresent surveillance would lead to greater crime, they disabled the program. This, in many ways, was worse, and now they simply kidnapped anyone that their informants told them was guilty, and even if they were found innocent, they were forever scarred by the tortures they were subjected to. However, this program keeps instability at a minimum, allowing more resources to be dedicated to fighting the Abyssals. This method also captures many legitimate criminals and people who would do harm, although capital punishment is always deemed necessary.
That idea about the secret faction is a great one. That way, both factions have dirty little secrets.