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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 3899173" data-attributes="member: 9254">IMC, which is now on year 6 I think, I have a politically influenced campaign with apolitical characters.  I added some politics in the beginning.  Not a lot, mainly at the level of the local minor nobility.  IMO, the minor barons, knights, and thanes are pretty visible and accessible.  Counts, Marquis and above not so much.  I didn't swat them over the head, but I did make the hobbies, preferences and personalities of the lordlings relevant to the campaign and the PCs.  ("Oooh, you found a nifty lute there.  Baron Chevis' youngest son styles himself a bard.  Bet he'd buy it off ya.")They irritated one noble, who irritated them back.  Nothing huge, no threats, just stuff like waiting as long as he could get away with before dealing with paperwork, or approving construction and the like.  It was enough for them to realize that if a minor Baron could make their life more difficult that they should either cultivate noble allies or do their best to avoid being visible to the nobility.  (The one noble still dislikes them but realizes that they have such favor with the king that he just avoids them as much as possible.  He grudgingly admits that they are good at bringing mayhem to evil-doers, but they still have no standing to criticize his art collection.)With a bard and a few ambitious players, they had to cultivate allies.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.  Some allies were good in the short term but proved to be more harm than good.  Sometimes they regret the association but others, like the undead paladin, get the party's full support no matter how much easier things would be if they cut him loose.  They routinely have dinner with dukes and have met the sovereigns of half a dozen nations.  They count wizards, white and black, in their circle of contacts.  (One white wizard finds them too haphazard and generally dislikes them, while the black archmage finds them entertaining but is himself too "pragmatic" for the party to completely trust).  There characters aren't schemers and they really don't have a great desire to take over countries.  Mainly they act as Gordian Knot Cutters.  Their contacts, many of which who are schemers, help them identify all the existing Gordian Knots and the people entangled in them.  Sometimes they decide that leaving the Knot is better than the alternative.They will, quite soon, be starting an intracontinental war.  Possibly intercontinental if they get assistance from some foreign allies.  They have avoided doing so until they could be sure they wouldn't just be plunging the entire region into a dark age.  Now, well, it's still a likelihood but they've decided that failing to start the war would probably cause a dark age. More appropriately, enough highly knowledgeable sources have all said that a dark age is somewhere between possible and probable under the current path of events that they feel much more comfortable about taking action.On the flip side, a region currently dominated but a triumvirate of greater undead has been left alone.  The region is in a "warped zone" where the wildlife is horribly lethal.  The populace is beat down and pretty much unarmed, leaving the undead forces as the only barrier to the fauna.  Without some means of protecting the populace, toppling the triumvirate would be a death sentence for several thousand elves.  It's one of the party's worst nightmares; creating a forest of horrible monsters filled with the ruins of a once-proud civililzation.  And that's why most adventurers at high level hesitate to get into politics.  Screw up a dungeon crawl at low levels and the worst that happens is someone has to finish it for you.  Screw up political intrigue and you can turn an entire region into a CR7 dungeon crawl.</blockquote>

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