CapnZapp
Legend
The Agents of Edgewood campaign got me thinking. How would I personally do a campaign starring a group of city watchmen in a large fantasy city?
Please note this isn't posted in the Pathfinder subforum. It isn't related to, or intended as a comment on, Paizo's adventure path. These are my own general ideas for themes in a decidedly different city watch campaign.
I'm envisioning a teeming metropolis rank with poverty and desperation, where corruption and villainy rages. Drugs, prostitution, violence and racketeering are just about the only viable means of surviving if you don't belong to the privileged few. Your species or ancestry defines the impression you give others. Gangs recruit mostly only from "their own", and squabble incessantly over territory and perceived slights. The most prominent exceptions are the churches, temples, monasteries and other "houses of worship", religious organizations that accept you regardless of the length of your ears, tail and horns, or whether your skin is scaly or not. Other than that, they act just like the other forms of organized crime, however, with the goddess of love running the temple prostitutes and the god of indulgence controlling the influx of opium as two examples. Humans default to the privileged classes - noble ladies, watch commanders, rich people are likely human. Following in the footsteps of the great Dragon Age game, elves run powerful forest nations, but in this city, elves are consigned to ghettos. Halflings are infamously insular people that simply doesn't talk to the law. Goblins make everybody else nervous, breeding rapidly and taking over block after block. Gnomes have no sense of community, but make for dreaded assassins and internal affairs detectives. Dwarves are few but relatively rich and well-connected, making them fearsome opponents. Maybe.
Likely scenarios would revolve around making busts, talking to informants, dealing with gangsters, catch (or at least kill) murderers and cultists, and so on. Even helping the "innocents", the "citizens" once in a while! The focus would, as appropriate for D&D, lie on action. Sherlocking clues is all good and well, but that's not the main focus. What is a focus is the consequences of making choices. I'm not talking simplistic stuff like losing your good alignment for doing "bad" stuff. I'm talking having to live with the consequences of taking the easy way out - bribes, deals, looking the other way. On the other hand, if you never cut corners, skip protocol or rough up suspects, you won't get results fast enough for your superiors. All this is intended to have consequences down the line.
Alignment: In order to not get the players stuck on debating whether an act is good or evil, every natural creature (humans, animals, monsters) registers as neutral in alignment. Another change is that the aligned damage of outsiders (angels, demons etc) hurt every natural being equally. The intended result is that player characters and NPCs are just "neutral". They don't take aligned damage from each other, but they all take aligned damage equally from outsiders. Undead, demons and angels suffer aligned damage as per the normal rules, however.
Luxury: Another rule suggestion regards temptation. Okay, so the naive suggestion would be for characters to desire gold for personal gain. But mixing in regular gold (for purchasing magical upgrades) with money needed for greasing noblemen, maintaining expensive mistresses and so on doesn't work well in the context of D&D. So I'm thinking something different, yet rather simple. Each level you get a luxury point. Spend this on anything you can think of, that fits your character: gambling debts, watch commanders and gang leaders in your pocket, For example, a level 7 character might have put 2 points in "impressive home" and 5 points into "gambling debts with the Dwarf mob". Another character might instead spend 3 points on "Charlize the Courtesan" and 4 points on "favors with the commander of East Quadrant". The purpose would be signal to your games master (me) what kinds of trouble you want your character to fall into. That is, these points are meant to be opportunities for stories. Not liabilities. In other words, you'll get into trouble either way, but if you refuse to spend luxury points you simply don't get any say into what kinds!
Leads: to maintain momentum, you generate leads simply from skills such as as Gang Lore, Vice Lore, Street Lore. (If you have suggestions for more like these, I would love to hear about them! ) A good skill check roll might mean you can move directly to the bust stage of a case. Otherwise you might have to work your way through a series of clues, talking to pimps, witnesses, and gang members. The point is; the skills lead you to the trail of bread crumbs, somewhere along the line. What you do with that information is then up to you. Do you bust everyone according to what crimes they have committed (and you can prove)? Or do you trade favors to get you where you need to be?
Store credit: If players feel the regular notion where heroes loot their fallen enemies to purchase their magic weaponry, not to mention keeping "grease money" separate from gold per level, "store credit" is an alternative. Under this alternative, you can either turn in found money and items into evidence or you can keep it for yourself, granting you luxury points. Either way, making busts and solving cases gets you store credit, so instead of using regular gold to buy magic items, you requisition them from Watch HQ. The reason for jumping through these hoops is that in a regular D&D campaign, players wouldn't want to spend money on luxuries when they could instead spend them on magical plusses. But since temptation is a key theme in this campaign, gold for items needs to be siloed separately from "wealth". And to that end, store credit allows the campaign to have the watchmen act more like real law enforcement, that isn't simply stealing from the population. They CAN pilfer stuff, but for story reasons (luxury points) rather than +1 swords. Stealing for story reasons is a choice. Taking gold for power upgrades is not.
Other possible issues to be discussed:
Species or Ancestry: To most citizens, all they see is that you're a cop and that you're a elf or dwarf or goblin. The city watch certainly can use members of the downtrodden races, both to reach out to the respective communities, but also to gain opportunities for undercover work that's closed off to human cops. So you should definitely not feel constrained to play a human (though recruiting NPCs to go undercover obviously remains an alternative). On the other hand, playing an exotic or rare race (Dragonborn? Leshy?) mostly makes it harder for me to involve you in the city's social fabrics; that you lose opportunities for roleplaying (even if only getting insults hurled at you). Therefore, choosing a species or ancestry that plays a large role in the city's politics and crime is strongly encouraged. Obviously you can work with your GM to ensure your choice is adequately represented, as long as you don't choose anything too esoteric.
Relatives: You are encouraged to make up friends, relatives and others you rely on in your private life. Why? Because stories about YOUR kidnapped wife, or YOUR uncle deep in debt with the Half-Orcs, are much more compelling than just some random housewife getting snatched up from the street, or some random old geezer not having the money to pay back his loan once the extortionate interest is added in!
Gender and Strength: While mechanical penalties to Strength are deeply unpopular among gamers today, there needs imo to be at least a minimal nod to the very real physical disparity between the sexes. How else explain prostitutes staying with their pimps (and why aren't there female pimps keeping their male hos in an iron grip), or that cases of domestic violence are more often about beaten wives than husbands? Right now, I'm going with zero mechanical changes, instead simply asking my players with female characters to avoid just three build choices most strongly associated with size and brawn: two-handed weapons, grappling and bend bars/lift gates. All other aspects of the game are entirely fine, including creating a strength-based fighter and weapons master that's great at climbing, swimming and whatever else Athletics is used for. In this campaign, WPCs leave the wrestling of perps and the kicking of doors to their male colleagues, but do everything else just as well, if not better.
Non-Lethal Damage: The choice to bring in perps alive should imo be a meaningful choice. To that end, I'm leaning towards only allowing specific damage types (blunt, cold, mental) to work for purposes of the game's non-lethal damage rule. Fire and slashing damage simply cannot make enemies drop without killing them.
Intelligence and Skills: while the focus won't be on making Sherlock skill checks, the issue remains - is Intelligence as an ability valuable enough by the regular rules for non-wizardy characters? Maybe you gain not just one more skill for each point of Int modifier, but one Lore skill (see Leads above) per point as well?
tl;dr: envision the tv series The Shield and its Strike Team as an open-ended fantasy campaign.
Please note this isn't posted in the Pathfinder subforum. It isn't related to, or intended as a comment on, Paizo's adventure path. These are my own general ideas for themes in a decidedly different city watch campaign.
I'm envisioning a teeming metropolis rank with poverty and desperation, where corruption and villainy rages. Drugs, prostitution, violence and racketeering are just about the only viable means of surviving if you don't belong to the privileged few. Your species or ancestry defines the impression you give others. Gangs recruit mostly only from "their own", and squabble incessantly over territory and perceived slights. The most prominent exceptions are the churches, temples, monasteries and other "houses of worship", religious organizations that accept you regardless of the length of your ears, tail and horns, or whether your skin is scaly or not. Other than that, they act just like the other forms of organized crime, however, with the goddess of love running the temple prostitutes and the god of indulgence controlling the influx of opium as two examples. Humans default to the privileged classes - noble ladies, watch commanders, rich people are likely human. Following in the footsteps of the great Dragon Age game, elves run powerful forest nations, but in this city, elves are consigned to ghettos. Halflings are infamously insular people that simply doesn't talk to the law. Goblins make everybody else nervous, breeding rapidly and taking over block after block. Gnomes have no sense of community, but make for dreaded assassins and internal affairs detectives. Dwarves are few but relatively rich and well-connected, making them fearsome opponents. Maybe.
Likely scenarios would revolve around making busts, talking to informants, dealing with gangsters, catch (or at least kill) murderers and cultists, and so on. Even helping the "innocents", the "citizens" once in a while! The focus would, as appropriate for D&D, lie on action. Sherlocking clues is all good and well, but that's not the main focus. What is a focus is the consequences of making choices. I'm not talking simplistic stuff like losing your good alignment for doing "bad" stuff. I'm talking having to live with the consequences of taking the easy way out - bribes, deals, looking the other way. On the other hand, if you never cut corners, skip protocol or rough up suspects, you won't get results fast enough for your superiors. All this is intended to have consequences down the line.
Alignment: In order to not get the players stuck on debating whether an act is good or evil, every natural creature (humans, animals, monsters) registers as neutral in alignment. Another change is that the aligned damage of outsiders (angels, demons etc) hurt every natural being equally. The intended result is that player characters and NPCs are just "neutral". They don't take aligned damage from each other, but they all take aligned damage equally from outsiders. Undead, demons and angels suffer aligned damage as per the normal rules, however.
Luxury: Another rule suggestion regards temptation. Okay, so the naive suggestion would be for characters to desire gold for personal gain. But mixing in regular gold (for purchasing magical upgrades) with money needed for greasing noblemen, maintaining expensive mistresses and so on doesn't work well in the context of D&D. So I'm thinking something different, yet rather simple. Each level you get a luxury point. Spend this on anything you can think of, that fits your character: gambling debts, watch commanders and gang leaders in your pocket, For example, a level 7 character might have put 2 points in "impressive home" and 5 points into "gambling debts with the Dwarf mob". Another character might instead spend 3 points on "Charlize the Courtesan" and 4 points on "favors with the commander of East Quadrant". The purpose would be signal to your games master (me) what kinds of trouble you want your character to fall into. That is, these points are meant to be opportunities for stories. Not liabilities. In other words, you'll get into trouble either way, but if you refuse to spend luxury points you simply don't get any say into what kinds!
Leads: to maintain momentum, you generate leads simply from skills such as as Gang Lore, Vice Lore, Street Lore. (If you have suggestions for more like these, I would love to hear about them!
) A good skill check roll might mean you can move directly to the bust stage of a case. Otherwise you might have to work your way through a series of clues, talking to pimps, witnesses, and gang members. The point is; the skills lead you to the trail of bread crumbs, somewhere along the line. What you do with that information is then up to you. Do you bust everyone according to what crimes they have committed (and you can prove)? Or do you trade favors to get you where you need to be?Store credit: If players feel the regular notion where heroes loot their fallen enemies to purchase their magic weaponry, not to mention keeping "grease money" separate from gold per level, "store credit" is an alternative. Under this alternative, you can either turn in found money and items into evidence or you can keep it for yourself, granting you luxury points. Either way, making busts and solving cases gets you store credit, so instead of using regular gold to buy magic items, you requisition them from Watch HQ. The reason for jumping through these hoops is that in a regular D&D campaign, players wouldn't want to spend money on luxuries when they could instead spend them on magical plusses. But since temptation is a key theme in this campaign, gold for items needs to be siloed separately from "wealth". And to that end, store credit allows the campaign to have the watchmen act more like real law enforcement, that isn't simply stealing from the population. They CAN pilfer stuff, but for story reasons (luxury points) rather than +1 swords. Stealing for story reasons is a choice. Taking gold for power upgrades is not.
Other possible issues to be discussed:
Species or Ancestry: To most citizens, all they see is that you're a cop and that you're a elf or dwarf or goblin. The city watch certainly can use members of the downtrodden races, both to reach out to the respective communities, but also to gain opportunities for undercover work that's closed off to human cops. So you should definitely not feel constrained to play a human (though recruiting NPCs to go undercover obviously remains an alternative). On the other hand, playing an exotic or rare race (Dragonborn? Leshy?) mostly makes it harder for me to involve you in the city's social fabrics; that you lose opportunities for roleplaying (even if only getting insults hurled at you). Therefore, choosing a species or ancestry that plays a large role in the city's politics and crime is strongly encouraged. Obviously you can work with your GM to ensure your choice is adequately represented, as long as you don't choose anything too esoteric.
Relatives: You are encouraged to make up friends, relatives and others you rely on in your private life. Why? Because stories about YOUR kidnapped wife, or YOUR uncle deep in debt with the Half-Orcs, are much more compelling than just some random housewife getting snatched up from the street, or some random old geezer not having the money to pay back his loan once the extortionate interest is added in!
Gender and Strength: While mechanical penalties to Strength are deeply unpopular among gamers today, there needs imo to be at least a minimal nod to the very real physical disparity between the sexes. How else explain prostitutes staying with their pimps (and why aren't there female pimps keeping their male hos in an iron grip), or that cases of domestic violence are more often about beaten wives than husbands? Right now, I'm going with zero mechanical changes, instead simply asking my players with female characters to avoid just three build choices most strongly associated with size and brawn: two-handed weapons, grappling and bend bars/lift gates. All other aspects of the game are entirely fine, including creating a strength-based fighter and weapons master that's great at climbing, swimming and whatever else Athletics is used for. In this campaign, WPCs leave the wrestling of perps and the kicking of doors to their male colleagues, but do everything else just as well, if not better.
Non-Lethal Damage: The choice to bring in perps alive should imo be a meaningful choice. To that end, I'm leaning towards only allowing specific damage types (blunt, cold, mental) to work for purposes of the game's non-lethal damage rule. Fire and slashing damage simply cannot make enemies drop without killing them.
Intelligence and Skills: while the focus won't be on making Sherlock skill checks, the issue remains - is Intelligence as an ability valuable enough by the regular rules for non-wizardy characters? Maybe you gain not just one more skill for each point of Int modifier, but one Lore skill (see Leads above) per point as well?
tl;dr: envision the tv series The Shield and its Strike Team as an open-ended fantasy campaign.
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