Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 7651651" data-attributes="member: 20323">Mirroring is a great word for it! Sadly, it mostly depends on having players who are more pro-active and willing/able to define their characters (rather than fill in the race and class bubbles and roll for stats). After all, a mirror of a Question Mark is a Question Mark. I say sadly because most of my players over the years seem to be of that variety. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Still I tried to do something that, in retrospect, maps to this idea pretty well. At the outset of a campaign I gave everyone the following ultimatum about character creation: "You all really don't like the Evil Prince in line to inherit the throne, so much so that you'd take some level of action to oppose him." I had my own notes, roughly a 3-pointer, about what the Evil Prince wanted to achieve, but I also tweaked and adjusted based on feedback from the players at the start of the campaign:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Artificer - his uncle was locked in the Prince's dungeon</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Barbarian - her people had been forced out of the kingdom to marginal lands by Prince's army</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Bard - opposed Prince's tyrannies and race discrimination on moral grounds and was fomenting resistance</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Invoker - had a vision that the Prince would cause bad things to happen if he took the throne (I added this)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Paladin - investigating Prince's hiring mercenary monsters (I added this), the same monsters that destroyed his order</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rogue - hated the Prince's right hand man, her wicked rogue mentor</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Swordmage - her parents were betrayed by a sorceress lover/ally of the Prince</li> </ul>This helped me establish that the Prince had military support (redshirts) which he was using in small theatres to control the kingdom and root out "undesirables", as well as a secret dungeon where he was putting dissidents who challenged his right to rule. The Prince was a big flaming racist who wanted a pure human kingdom and was creating racial ghettos and prejudiced weapons-bearing and travel-permit laws; in response a burgeoning resistance was forming. However, because he was still accruing power and didn't have the throne yet, he had resorted to dealing with unsavory types: a master thief to help him with some assassinations, blackmail, and forgery of a will, as well as hobgoblin & bugbear mercenaries to do dark deeds he couldn't command those units of soldiers loyal to him until he took the throne. Finally, the Prince was seeking out his bastard son who he'd learned fulfilled a prophecy of a rebuilt kingdom after a time of strife from his sorceress lover; the Prince himself put little stock in prophecies, rather he intended to leverage his bastard to manipulate the public eye. Et voila! A villain was born who lasted for 10 levels of gaming. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification