D&D Police Drama

[JohnRTroy]

Gygax wrote three novels featuring Magister Setne Imhotep, which were all reprinted by Paizo these last few years. It could be good inspiration how a mage might be a detective.

One thing to remember though is that watch or police in a classic fantasy world are not like Modern Cops--for instance there is not usually such a thing as "gun control", as every gentry usually can walk around with a weapon, even free peasants might have daggers. And civil rights might be a lot more restricted. A lot of police also doubled as espionage. Not to mention how magic might affect investigations.

 

[The_Fan]

I think you should have a campaign arc drawn up first. Unless your city is a planar metropolis, there has to be something big going down, otherwise your characters will start to feel like big fish in a small pond by mid-paragon. After a while, regular humanoid criminals start to dry up and you need to be looking at something big behind everything.

Just as an idea, you could say that the Heroic third is primarily about simple investigation. Dealing with small, local threats, perhaps building up to something bigger like a serial killer or crime lord (or the two working together).

For the Paragon arc, you start dealing more with the larger forces at work in the city. Maybe some officials are in league with a Drow enclave, or perhaps mind flayers and other agberrants are infiltrating the city with their thralls. However, there's a larger goal behind this, but what?

For the Epic arc, now your characters are demigods, spirits incarnate, etc. But they're still tied to this one city. It has to be something big and potentially world-shattering for it to retain their interest, and by level 30 needs to really go out with a bang. Really, just pick something level 31+. As an example, maybe Torog is trying to pull the city into his realm in the Underdark, just having the whole thing collapsing and falling through miles of earth into his realm. Everything up until this point has been with the intent of waking the Tarrasque, which has been sleeping under the city, and when awakened the whole city will fall down into the hole it vacated digging upward. So now your former simple policemen have to fight the Tarrasque and the King that Crawls. For the ultimate irony worthy of Terry Pratchett...they should end the campaign by arresting him.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is a great opportunity to turn things upside down. The players are in a position to enforce the laws of the land now. Perhaps a good first session would be about tracking down a group of adventurers who think they are above the law and loot the city's sacred tombs. This kind of role reversal can be lots of fun. The adventurers don't need to be evil, just a typical low level adventuring party looking for excitement and treasure (and ignoring laws that stand in the way).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

First of all, Reno 911 is hilarious, and suggesting that was a really good idea.

Second, the role-reversal idea is pretty good too. With the PCs cast as "The Man," you open all kinds of interesting storylines. In a sense, like the skateboarders harried by cops on a daily basis, or even moreso like the UrbEx fad thats going around, the PCs would be running off "those meddling kids" (TMK) from time to time. And, as typical PCs do, when TMK find something better left unfound and start a domino effect of events, its up to the PCs to clean things up.