Alright currently I am running a campaign in a setting very reminiscent of ancient India with lots of psionics thrown in.
Currently the players are investigating an evil tiefling priestess who helped to orchestrate an attack on their employer, a wizard (swami) member of the brahmin caste. Within the next few sessions they are going to be moving on to the capital of the empire they are currently residents in where I plan on having them quickly drawn into the complex political landscape.
This is where I come up at a loss. So far the campaign has been great and all the players are having a lot of fun. However, I am not sure I can manage such a complex political environment plausibly while still maintaining everyone's fun. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could do this?
For the record I am using Dynasties and Demagouges to good effect, but its campaign suggestions have not been as useful as I would have liked in actually managing a poltical campaign such as this. It provides the tools and gives lots of good advice, but not enough for this.
If it helps at all, this is what the group is playing: (You can probably ignore this and just answer the main question if you don't want to read all of this)
A dwarven male psychic warrior who is part of an anarchist group who wishes to pull down the Empire and abolish the caste system. His old mentor was an infernalist with ties to the asuras (demon gods), and was breeding half-fiends to help aid him in the overthrow of the existing order. He thinks the anarchist group (and his mentor) are moving too slow though and wants to destroy it all. Quickly. He is working with the group in order to feel out members of the brahmin caste in the capital who might be amiable to switching sides. Oh, and to kill the emperor if he thinks he can get away with it.
A human female telepath raised in the casteless, Tibetan-style kingdom who ran away because of her disagreements with the monks who raised her and her sister (see below). She serves as a speaker for the brahmin (she has mad social skillz) though he has ulterior motives. Basically he is planning on using her to gain information about her homeland so his boss, the minister who advises the emperor on foreign affairs, can successfully invade the country. They have correctly determined her loyalty to her homeland is shaky and they plan on introducing her to wealth and (limited) political power in order to gain her loyalty for themselves. She is important because she is one of the few outsiders to have ever been raised there and they see her as a potential source for valuable info. Any info she doesn't have they can send her back into the country to get.
A tiefling female monk raised in the same place as the previous psion. She was raised in the same monastaries as her sister, but she was adopted by them and trained in the monastic arts in order to teach her discipline to restrain her fiendish heritage. The telepath took things the wrong way and became jealous of her sister and resentful of their trainers. She still loves her sister though. When the psion ran away from home, the monk followed her. The brahmin and the minister are both aware of the tiefling's heritage and through a series of compled divinations have determined that the tiefling is a tiefling because she was infused by the blood of an entrapped demon queen while being born within the mountains of the Tibet-style kingdom. The brahmin, who is an alienist lich in disguise, is planning on using her to release the Demon Queen because of the weakening of reality her presence would cause.
I am playing with ideas about with the idea that the tiefling and the psion are in fact reincarnations of each other. Which would sort of work as I am going with a cyclic time-reference rather than a linear.
The fourth PC is a human, barbarian foreigner, wizard. He has been sent by his master to study under the brahmin and is seeking to work out an integrated theory of magic based on combining arcane magic and psionics. Last session he encountered an aged dwarf who claimed to be from a future and told him that it was pointless to follow his current path as it would leave him dissatisfied (cause magic and psionics aren't different manifestations of the same force), that whatever he did he must never, ever let the two sisters return to their homeland, that he must give a crystal to the dwarf in ten years if catastrophic events didn't happen, and that eventually he would start undergoing some changes to his being. When this happened he could either embrace the changes and all that entails, give up magic, or travel to the Temple of Inverted Ascension and learn a way to mater the changes before they mastered him. To find the way to the Temple he would need to ask the dwarf when the wizard met him.
What the dwarf was refering to is the fact that IMC arcane and divine magic are in fact conduited from the Far Realms and steady usage eventually causes a character to mutate and slowly go mad. Only through intense meditation and an infrequent usage of magic are the most powerful of spellcasters able to prevent themselves from becoming monstrous beings suffused with Far Realms energy. A few embrace these changes and enter the Far Realms, while others seek to master these changes becoming Alienists. If the PC wizard goes to the Temple he will encounter an Alienist who offer to train him in the arts...
The last PC is a human member of a lower caste. He is geased to serve the brahmin and is quite unwillingly involved in that. Otherwise he doesn't have anything particularly complex involved with him at this point.
For supplements I am using:
Malhavoc Press's Mindscapes, BoEM 1, BoEM 2, and the Event Books.
Atlas Games' Dynasties and Demagouges
WotC's PHB, DMG, MM, Psionic's Handbook, BoVD, MM2, and FF, plus a smattering of other books.
I also plan to add in Green Ronin's Avatar's HB when I get the money, and Mindscapes, and their Psionic Monster books when they come out...
Currently the players are investigating an evil tiefling priestess who helped to orchestrate an attack on their employer, a wizard (swami) member of the brahmin caste. Within the next few sessions they are going to be moving on to the capital of the empire they are currently residents in where I plan on having them quickly drawn into the complex political landscape.
This is where I come up at a loss. So far the campaign has been great and all the players are having a lot of fun. However, I am not sure I can manage such a complex political environment plausibly while still maintaining everyone's fun. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could do this?
For the record I am using Dynasties and Demagouges to good effect, but its campaign suggestions have not been as useful as I would have liked in actually managing a poltical campaign such as this. It provides the tools and gives lots of good advice, but not enough for this.
If it helps at all, this is what the group is playing: (You can probably ignore this and just answer the main question if you don't want to read all of this)
A dwarven male psychic warrior who is part of an anarchist group who wishes to pull down the Empire and abolish the caste system. His old mentor was an infernalist with ties to the asuras (demon gods), and was breeding half-fiends to help aid him in the overthrow of the existing order. He thinks the anarchist group (and his mentor) are moving too slow though and wants to destroy it all. Quickly. He is working with the group in order to feel out members of the brahmin caste in the capital who might be amiable to switching sides. Oh, and to kill the emperor if he thinks he can get away with it.
A human female telepath raised in the casteless, Tibetan-style kingdom who ran away because of her disagreements with the monks who raised her and her sister (see below). She serves as a speaker for the brahmin (she has mad social skillz) though he has ulterior motives. Basically he is planning on using her to gain information about her homeland so his boss, the minister who advises the emperor on foreign affairs, can successfully invade the country. They have correctly determined her loyalty to her homeland is shaky and they plan on introducing her to wealth and (limited) political power in order to gain her loyalty for themselves. She is important because she is one of the few outsiders to have ever been raised there and they see her as a potential source for valuable info. Any info she doesn't have they can send her back into the country to get.
A tiefling female monk raised in the same place as the previous psion. She was raised in the same monastaries as her sister, but she was adopted by them and trained in the monastic arts in order to teach her discipline to restrain her fiendish heritage. The telepath took things the wrong way and became jealous of her sister and resentful of their trainers. She still loves her sister though. When the psion ran away from home, the monk followed her. The brahmin and the minister are both aware of the tiefling's heritage and through a series of compled divinations have determined that the tiefling is a tiefling because she was infused by the blood of an entrapped demon queen while being born within the mountains of the Tibet-style kingdom. The brahmin, who is an alienist lich in disguise, is planning on using her to release the Demon Queen because of the weakening of reality her presence would cause.
I am playing with ideas about with the idea that the tiefling and the psion are in fact reincarnations of each other. Which would sort of work as I am going with a cyclic time-reference rather than a linear.
The fourth PC is a human, barbarian foreigner, wizard. He has been sent by his master to study under the brahmin and is seeking to work out an integrated theory of magic based on combining arcane magic and psionics. Last session he encountered an aged dwarf who claimed to be from a future and told him that it was pointless to follow his current path as it would leave him dissatisfied (cause magic and psionics aren't different manifestations of the same force), that whatever he did he must never, ever let the two sisters return to their homeland, that he must give a crystal to the dwarf in ten years if catastrophic events didn't happen, and that eventually he would start undergoing some changes to his being. When this happened he could either embrace the changes and all that entails, give up magic, or travel to the Temple of Inverted Ascension and learn a way to mater the changes before they mastered him. To find the way to the Temple he would need to ask the dwarf when the wizard met him.
What the dwarf was refering to is the fact that IMC arcane and divine magic are in fact conduited from the Far Realms and steady usage eventually causes a character to mutate and slowly go mad. Only through intense meditation and an infrequent usage of magic are the most powerful of spellcasters able to prevent themselves from becoming monstrous beings suffused with Far Realms energy. A few embrace these changes and enter the Far Realms, while others seek to master these changes becoming Alienists. If the PC wizard goes to the Temple he will encounter an Alienist who offer to train him in the arts...
The last PC is a human member of a lower caste. He is geased to serve the brahmin and is quite unwillingly involved in that. Otherwise he doesn't have anything particularly complex involved with him at this point.
For supplements I am using:
Malhavoc Press's Mindscapes, BoEM 1, BoEM 2, and the Event Books.
Atlas Games' Dynasties and Demagouges
WotC's PHB, DMG, MM, Psionic's Handbook, BoVD, MM2, and FF, plus a smattering of other books.
I also plan to add in Green Ronin's Avatar's HB when I get the money, and Mindscapes, and their Psionic Monster books when they come out...
