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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 6172788" data-attributes="member: 463">I definitely don't think that long-term games require Good-aligned PCs, and I agree that swords & sorcery genre is very often 'grey on black', with amoral protagonists vs extremely evil antagonists.I think the issue I'm grappling with is the trouble I've had trying to run substantial long-term campaigns in swords & sorcery settings like Hyborea, the Wilderlands or the Young Kingdoms, and why that might be so. Often these settings lack an overarching conflict, but that's clearly not the case in Elric's Young Kingdoms with its Law vs Chaos. I have a feeling it may be something to do with the NPCs and PC/NPC relations. In Good vs Evil fantasy (eg Star Wars) most NPCs are good guys, bad guys, or a small number of amoral rogues. I find it easy to create sympathetic and engaging 'good' NPCs who the players enjoy engaging with, want to help, etc. In swords & sorcery genre most NPCs are basically selfish, out for themselves, with a smaller number of truly evil antagonists. I guess I find this sort of setting harder to run on a long-term basis, and harder to give the players reason to engage with it. If most people are pretty scummy, why bother helping them? I guess it works if you think of it more as a self-consciously 'criminals' campaign like Grand Theft Auto, and I think such crime fiction was a big influence on RE Howard's Conan especially. But again I'm not sure this is something I or most players are looking for on a long term basis. I enjoy 'serial' swords & sorcery fiction (I'm currently reading the pseudonymous Richard Kirk's 'Raven' series, which is badly written but great fun) and I'd like to be able to do something more like that in a future D&D campaign. I think I don't quite have the hang of how to do that yet, though. I ran a 20-session Wilderlands 4e campaign that was fairly satisfying (as a tragic drama), but it had a clear hero-dies terminus, with no real means or desire to continue beyond that.</blockquote>

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