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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7559329" data-attributes="member: 4937">Good advice.I dispute the claim that this is a good man.  He may be a practical man.  He may have something that looks like a good intention and he may not be self-interested, but I have a hard time assigning "good" to the behavior of spreading disease to the poor parts of town.  The alignment descriptor I'd associate with that behavior is 'lawful evil', an alignment associated with "pruning away the weak to protect the strong".   This is someone who wants what is 'best' for 'the people', but what he thinks is best for them is for them to be hardened against attack and invulnerable to their enemies by any means possible.  That is 'lawful evil' in a nut shell.  So presumably this is the sort of figure who, despite his loyalty, can get in conflict with his sovereign because the sovereign 'foolishly' believes in things like "the sanctity of human life" and the "natural rights of people".  His master is just too soft.That must be a severe nuisance that it is takes the Royal Family out of commission sufficiently that the Vizier is now the defacto head of the city for any extended period.  It has to be a bit more crippling than the common cold.  What are the symptoms of the disease and how can it have crippling symptoms and not be 'deadly'.   For example, if it is simply crippling, it still could kill shut ins and elderly that have no one to care for them, simply by dehydration and the like.  The vizier may not have intended to go so far as murder, but its an obvious potential outcome and he's more than willing to keep murdering to cover up his crime.  Again, this doesn't sound like "a good man".Overall, I really like your setup, but the main problem I foresee in this is it is not at all clear what the PC's are supposed to do.  Like your tier 4 villain is the 'conquering army'.  What is their role in stopping that and why?  Are they the sort of characters where someone would be inclined to say, "I'd pit you against an army."   Are they likely to have enough leverage to change the outcome of battles?  Honestly, since the main plot line just involves deceptions, the PC's could conceivably with some luck wrap up Tier 1 through Tier 3 in a session or two just by talking.   Or more immediately, why do they care about the city having a thief problem?  How and why is this going to manifest itself to them?  Or if the Vizier's apprentice is confronted by the PCs, why would he not simply shrug and say, "So what?  I was following orders.  You are the ones that decided to be vigilantes and started all these problems.  None of those kids needed to die.  You are the ones that killed them.  How am I the bad guy in this?  Stop poking your nose in things  that aren't your affair.  What right have you to know the affairs of the city anyway?"  And if he does that, what's the PC's supposed to do, murder the apprentice?  "We'll tell." doesn't have to strike the Apprentice as a real threat.  "So what.  Go tell.  They'll just throw you in the dungeons for meddling in things that aren't your affair.  Now go away, I have a siege to prepare for."   What happens when the king gets over his cold?  Why can't a cleric just come over and heal the king, seeing as this is an emergency.  Why should the king be disabled at all - plenty of monarchs have ruled from their bed chamber and held court from there.  And if the king isn't disabled, what sort of confrontation are they really going to have with the Vizier?  Why would the royal gaurds be more loyal to the Vizier than the King?  Why should the King ever trust the players?  It's not really clear to me that there is a path between A and B.   Maybe you don't need to know exactly how the players are going to get between A and B, but if you set up a story without a clear path forward for characters in the position and with the relationships that the PC's have, what you risk is creating a story where the PC's aren't actually the protagonists in the story and the really interesting interactions and important interactions happen between NPCs.  Or why would the party necessarily realize that the tier 4 villain is the teir 4 villain.  What happens if they decide to go out to the enemy army as their first action?For this sort of setup, it's really important to have PC's that have buy in to the plot, but as the plot has already started the PC's have probably been conceived in very generic terms with no useful relationships (unless we are getting really lucky).Some of your clues are awesome.  Some of the clues like, "a book on Famous Diseases has been checked out of the library by the Vizier", require such extraordinary leaps of intuition by the PC's, that without clues leading to those clues I doubt they'd ever be found.</blockquote>

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