@BESW So... It'd be less important how something is achieved, as long as it is achieved. It's not about plan A, B or Omega - all of them lead to the same outcome you actually care about, and that is your Grim Portents. The actual plan falls between these steps, to be determined in-game.
For example: The (snake-themed) Chessmaster secretly establishes a snake cult among members of the Wizard's Tower, to make alchemical products which are necessary for other fronts. Later on he plans to expose the cult and discredit the Tower, striking a blow against one of most power oppositions he might face.
However if the cult is exposed early (by the PCs, no doubt), it still discredits the Tower and provides a ready explanation for anyone who notices that a lot of shady stuff going on is snake-themed.
Thus creating a smokescreen for the Chessmaster's existence.
My impression of the portents/dangers/fronts approach is that basically you don't have to sweat the stuff the PCs aren't there for. So you just write "The far outposts go silent" and unless the PCs are involved in the situation, well, that is just what happened.
So, starting from the necessary: One of the PCs is an elf, the younger son of a royal dynasty which overthrew and massacred the previous dynasty some thousand years ago. The current dynasty is cursed: one child of every generation goes mad.
My other player wants to be a lizardfolk. Thus, lizardfolk exist.
Setting: Port city on a small island set in the middle of several major international trading routes. City is independent, carefully neutral, run by a council of merchant lords--mostly human, but expatriate elven houses are gaining influence.
City is built on the ruins of an older city made of stone, which melted like wax in whatever catastrophe destroyed the previous society some 75-ish years ago.
Lizardfolk were the slaves of the previous society, and the only survivors of that catastrophe.
They live in three tribes roughly based on their old slave divisions: warriors, crafters, and farmers.
The tribes each specialize in hunting, crafting, or farming, and share the products of their skills with the other tribes.
Unfortunately the system was recently imbalanced:
The cityfolk drove the hunters away from their hunting grounds into a forbidden area of the swamp where there is no game, and the farmers have fallen under the influence of a highly addictive drug and they've stopped farming. The crafters are now trading their goods with the cityfolk for money to buy food from the city.
The leader of the hunters found an evil magic in the forbidden swamp, and is using it to empower his tribesmen so he can lead them to battle against the cityfolk.
Uh I love it! Evil magic... but they were pushed away from their homes by racists... or speciests for that matter. Why exactly did the city folk drive em away/
@lisardggY He is a member of the current dynasty, while the elves of Knave Port are members of the expatriates who want to see the current dynasty overthrown.
Oh, ok, So theoretically, the lizardfolk might consider an alliance with the royal dynasty in order to weaken the expat elves who are currently forcing them out of their hunting grounds?
Perhaps. Although the expat elves aren't yet the majority power in Knave Port; the human merchant houses have a majority of the Council seats.
The upcoming election might shift the power balance for the first time, though, and all the Houses are manoeuvring to influence the election according to their own agendas.
(I intend to have the election be a potential point of influence for the PCs to control how the story unfolds by controlling who winds up with the power.)
@lisardggY [grin] Teenage rebellion against his family, seeking to learn wizardry, and fearing the family curse of insanity will fall on him.
@Julix That... is an excellent question. The evil magic comes from a dark altar on which a yuan-ti necromancer (the yuan-ti are the fallen society) intended to kill himself in order to become a lich.
However, his brother the King led an army against the necromancer--even among the yuan-ti, necromancy is forbidden--so the necromancer and his priests were slain in the middle of the evil rites of ascendency.
The half-finished rites prevented his soul from going to its rightful punishment in the afterlife, and instead the worms which feasted on his flesh gained his power.
The altar is cursed and empowered by the black rites performed there, and the necromancer has risen as a Worm That Walks.
He was trained in the necromantic arts through dreams sent him by an ancient black dragon who, in the last centuries of his life, sought a pupil to carry on his dark legacy.
The dragon snatched up the brother--the king of the yuan-ti--and half-embedded him, still alive, in the face of a cliff where he was forced to watch as the dragon rained acid upon his city until it melted to slag.
The dragon personally hunted down and killed every yuan-ti on the island who survived the acid rain.
Then, weary and grief-stricken, the blood-soaked dragon retreated to the caves beneath a small island off the shore, where he slept. He sleeps still.
His dreams, miserable and despairing, have twisted that rocky islet into a horrible place of fog and phantoms.
The necromancer, waking decades later as a mass of writhing worms, discovered that his people are dead and gone, their mighty city melted and a human city built on its ashes.
He doesn't know how, or why, it happened. But he has vowed to rebuild his civilization, brick by brick and man by man. And because he was the high priest of his people, with access to dread secrets even before the dragon took him for pupil, he can.
The high priests of the yuan-ti god knew the secrets of alchemical life.
He can brew a substance which is a powerful drug for reptilians, and a horrific poison for most humanoids.
But in humans of pure blood, this substance --if the man is strong of heart and mind-- might not kill. Instead, it changes him, body and soul, into a yuan-ti.
(This is straight out of the 3.5 Serpent Kingdoms content.)
At first he is yuan-ti in soul, but mostly human in body. Subsequent doses make him more and more snake-like.
The wormy necromancer is using this drug to control the farmers among the lizardfolk, disrupting their society.
But he is also secretly turning humans in the city into members of the race to which he once belonged, creating networks of people throughout the city who look human to all but the closest inspection but are totally loyal to the yuan-ti cause and will populate his glorious new civilization.
He's established two major stations for this work: an orphanage and a finishing school for noble young ladies.
Through this method, he's placed loyal young men and women in key positions of commerce and industry... and in a generation or two nearly every noble in the city will have a snakey wife.
Non-humans have no place in his plan, so the necromancer has another plot going on behind the scenes to increase xenophobia among humans and make non-humans increasingly unwelcome in the city.
(The expat elven merchant houses are annoyingly successful at ignoring his efforts.)
The other major leak in his plan is that sometimes the formula neither kills the human nor turns her into a yuan-ti; instead she becomes a hideous mutant freak incapable of intelligible speech. They are not useful as breeding stock to rebuild his civilisation but they have the intelligence and loyalty of a proper yuan-ti.
He's been keeping them in the sewers/catacombs beneath the city, but now dwarven political exiles have taken up residence down there.
The dwarves are controlling the city's infrastructure --water, sewage, gas. They're unionised and are agitating for a chance at getting a seat on the Council.
And since defying the dwarven union means getting your plumbing backed up, they'll probably get what they want.
So keeping a lid on the mutants is increasingly difficult.
The only safe place left is directly underneath the noble district, because the xenophobia plot has succeeded to the point that the Council doesn't want dwarves sneaking around underneath their houses.
...so instead they get mutants sneaking around underneath their houses.
(I love irony.)
Also, can you tell I'm having fun playing up the speciesism?
D&D's diversity --and the fact that every NPC defaults to human despite it-- has always been a point of interest for me.
So here we have a setting where humans are trying to keep human the default in the face of many other species immigrating into their city... but their xenophobia is being orchestrated by a villain who is no longer even a member of his own species, and who is secretly turning the humans into his species.
That's this necromancer's great tragedy: he is rebuilding his people from scratch, re-creating the civilisation he loved... but he's not even a yuan-ti anymore, he's a congregation of worms.
@lisardggY I am assuming that there's at least a little inter-species conflict as a default in this setting, and that the villain is taking advantage of that fact.
But I'm also going out of my way to talk about intra-species conflict, with the elven civil unrest and the dwarven political prisoners, among other things.
I fully expect at least one "Why can't we all just get along" speech somewhere in the campaign.
Let's see. There's some mercenaries/privateers stationed on the off-shore islands, hired by the various mainland nations to bother the shipping lines of other nations whenever there's a conflict between them.
There's a hard-to-get-to lagoon of peaceful locathah on the main island.
At some point I expect they'll get skirmished by a sahuagin scouting party, which if unrebuffed will then bring back a raiding party Viking-style.
I'm not sure if I want to keep that in; at the moment it's not firmly tied to anything else in the story.
Knave Port has an underground bar called Ricky's, run by this guy, which acts as neutral territory for all the criminals of the city.
Hopefully! Although I don't want it to get too complicated, so the humans, elves, and dwarves are the primary players in the city, and guys like Ricky are very unusual.
Basically, almost anything could walk through Knave Port but some will get more hairy eyeball than others.
I don't want to put a solid cap on the races the world has to offer, but I will put a cap on the races with enough presence in Knave Port to be politically significant.
Ricky is individually important: he's one of the only guys in the whole city who knows about the yuan-ti plan but isn't part of it, and while he's not in any position to do much about it himself the PCs may find him an excellent source of information if they convince him of their intentions.
In the original setting, he was a musteval--an angelic being like a leonal or a hound archon, a spy for the higher angels.
I figure if you've got all these fancy races and you don't use 'em, what good are they?
If there are too many races running around, even if they aren't major political players, it makes it less believable to have people struggling for a single-race nation. Just like a multi-deity pantheon doesn't lend itself well to the sort of religious fanaticism that monotheism encourages.
Even the most devout follower of the God of Disease realizes that there is more to life than disease. His deity might be the primary one, but can't exist alone.
Any listing of even the more common fantasy races adds up to more than the ethnic groups and races that made up New York City, and they're far more distinct and different.
The necromancer doesn't need to convince the humans of the city to kick all the non-humans out.
He needs to keep the government of the city human because he can only turn humans into yuan-ti.
Making Knave Port all-human is totally impractical until he's ready for the island to be self-supporting again, because trade with non-humans is what makes the city economically viable.
But he wants economic and governmental control to remain within his influence, and that means a city where humans hold the reins of power.
BESW's Spoil-Lair
BESW's Spoil-Lair