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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old One" data-source="post: 2458406" data-attributes="member: 83">Riggs,A couple of random thoughts...My favorite saying as a DM is "Wheels within wheels within wheels".  Deception and misdirection are two huge factors in the BC universe, especially for a Taken that has recently escaped the Lady's clutches and is intent on building its own kingdom in the East, so I am going to posit a different angle on this.The initial employer of the Company is an old merchant concern that has fallen on hard times.  The recent return of a prodigal son has re-energized the trading coster and it sets about re-establishing old trade routes and engaging merchantile rivals in small, back-alley wars through the cities of the East.  This would be perfect for small unit actions - guarding caravans, bullying unwilling merchants, etc.  I kinde of liken it to Merchantile Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries...Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Venice, Siena all duking it out.  This of course, leads to lots of employment opporunities for mercs.The real set-up, however, is that the Taken has run across an ancient manuscript that describes an ancient weapon/foozle/whatever that was broken up by the Lords of Light (a cabal of sorta good wizards) long ago and secreted/incorporated into a number of mundage objects (works d' art, furniture, the heriditary crown of the merchant king of Ade, that type of thing).The merchant house is the cover for the Taken to start recovering and assembling said artifact.  Initially, the missions will be fairly mundane, allowing the PCs to get their feet wet in the BCCS world...but as time goes on, they will start running across other power groups looking for/fighting over the same seemingly mundane items.This is where you bring in the wizard and agents...he/she knows about the Taken (but not the artifact) and will try to capture the Taken to fuel his/her own rise to the 4th magnitude.  You can have a doomsday cult and/or "good cult" that finds out about the Taken and is determined to bring about their own apocalypse or thwart the Taken (and since the Company is working for the Taken...they are fair game).  You can make the "good" cult nice and honorable, so killing them sets up a nice moral dilmemma.As the Taken starts to assemble more parts of the artifact, the typical meglomania starts to take over and the Company/employer relation begins to change.  A nice twist might be for the Company leadership to discover the truth and try to defect with the company to a rival merchant house/city.This, of course, leads to a bad end for the Captain/Lieutenant (who, of course, didn't tell the rest of the Company why they were defecting) at the hands of the Taken's other agents.  Of course, they make it look like a rival merchant house set the Company up...to keep focus off the Taken.  Clues to the defection might be in the Annals, which are stolen by Taken agents.If you really want to muck things up...have the Lady be perfectly aware of what is going on (she planted the manuscript, let the Taken escape and has been following the progress through a mole in the company ranks).  She will let the Taken assemble most of the weapon and then either show up to take it or send another Taken to retrieve it.Wheels within wheels within wheels...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />!~ OO</blockquote>

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