D&D 5E Looking for some help with a custom campaign

[Dark_T_Zeratul]

Alright, so I'm prepping an epilogue of sorts for my current campaign, largely to wrap up one particular PC's story arc. It's going to start with an investigative section, but being as I don't have a huge amount of experience doing this I've hit a few snags in terms of the details.

So the backstory of this PC is that he was, essentially, a cop who placed the law above all else in a society where the nobles are generally considered untouchable. Through his actions, he got a noble arrested. A couple months later, his family was murdered and the noble's sigil was very obviously left at the scene. The PC felt that the authorities were turning a blind eye to the murders, and left to gather strength to someday bring the noble to justice himself.

Now, in reality, the noble was actually framed for the murders by a different noble as part of a much larger plan that my players are going to find themselves embroiled in. The true villain's goal was to, indirectly through a variety of intermediaries that couldn't easily be traced back to him, gain control of the other noble's business.

Here, however, is where I'm stuck:

• Firstly, since the player didn't specify it in his backstory, what crime the noble was actually arrested for. It should be something serious enough for the authorities to have to act on the evidence, but inconsequential enough that there's still resentment against the PC for calling him on it.
• Secondly, how the villain would get his rival's business despite it appearing to the PC that the murders were being overlooked. The transfer has to be legitimate, even though that legitimacy is predicated on a lie. Obviously, of course, it's being transferred to one of the villain's underlings, rather than the villain himself, to put enough layers between them that he has plausible deniability for his scheme. The one requirement here is that the noble from the PC's backstory has to survive, and while he's highly suspicious of the circumstances he is still unaware of the schemes that resulted in his downfall.

Fortunately, the PC has been absent for several years. There's plenty of time for the villain to have worked through the system without the PC having been around for it.

I'm sure I'll think of some other hiccups as well, but right now these are the two big ones.

 

[Herosmith14]

1, blackmail and/or human trafficking. Serious, but in a society that this seems to be, not serious enough to qualify a swing in public opinion.

2. Multiple options. One is he set up someone to receive business if *cough cough when cough cough* the noblebis killed, i.e. By PC revenge. Another is to frame noble for more crimes and get his stuff liquidated so he can have underling buy.

I would suggest the first option 2. Or at least incorporate PC somehow into villain's plot. Make this even more personal. Make PC feel like an unwitting pawn that'll do some of the dirty work without even knowing.


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[Dark_T_Zeratul]

I like the human trafficking angle for part 1. Makes him clearly a bad guy, but is something that could easily be sort of an open secret among other nobles while also being impossible to ignore by the authorities if it's made public.

As for the business transfer, the noble needs to not be dead for the villain to acquire his business. The villain's concern with the PC at the time was largely trying to get rid of an incorruptible cop who could potentially blow open his own schemes the way he did the noble engaged in human trafficking.