Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6593878" data-attributes="member: 6787650">That's basically what I meant by "find scarred victims but never witness anything." Actually they did find one lady early on who'd been used by neogi to power a lifejammer, and she'd (probably) lost her family and everyone she knew to those same neogi.That approach is limited, though. BTW, I didn't mean literally censor things by saying "bleep", but more the general idea that "you spend an hour hiding in the rocks observing the orc warcamp, and hearing the sounds of unspeakable cruelty and orcs glorying in pain and degradation on their captives. At the end of that hour you have gathered valuable operational intelligence, and you could gather more, but every instant you spend listening to those cries drives you closer to wracking sorrow or even madness. Do you retreat or take action?" Describe the gist but not the details. I think the gist is important though, to make it emotionally clear that mercy to the orcs is not a mercy to the larger world, and that even well-roleplayed PCs should expeditiously remove them from the Prime Material plane instead of trying to be humane. D&D is a game of solving problems through direct application of violence, and that works best in a dark and gritty world where horrible things happen and someone needs to stop them.Again, my campaign has lots of BBEGs bouncing around plotting against each other, and I'm still trying to figure out ways to make my PCs realize that all of them are bad, even the ones they are temporarily working with. (E.g. they negotiated with the vampire necromancer, and he ended up offering them an alliance against the 8000-strong hobgoblin army... and he is a very effective ally and will eliminate large portions of the hobgoblin army, unless the Red Dragon ambushes him first. But he will do so by infiltrating the camp, charming hobgoblins and turning them into vampire spawns, so if the PCs let their ally do his thing they will soon find that their kingdom has been overthrown by an insane vampiric warlord with thousands of vampire spawn minions... and I need a way to make it clear that this putative ally of theirs is truly baaaad news, not a morally ambiguous antihero.)</blockquote>

Verification