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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5576553" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not really, no.The PC sided with (former) enemies who murdered another PC. (The player of that other PC was happy enough for his PC to be killed - for various reasons to do with scrying mechanics in Rolemaster the PC in question wasn't working out very well, and a new PC was desired.)A country already riven by conflict was unified, to an extent, under the rule of an ancient and recently freed Archlich (Vecna). (This campaign occured in the early-to-mid-90s, when the main source on Vecna was the 1st ed DMG.)I won't explore the comparison to 20th century Fascism because of board rules. Given that it was a fantasy game, comparisons to pre-modern political movements are probably more apposite. And because it was a fantasy game, comparisons to other works of fiction are probably more apposite. It's a while since I've seen the movie Hero, but as I remember it, it presents the question of unification versus freedom, in the context of classical China, as a compelling one for a modern audience. Of course, I wouldn't say that my game was in the same league as that movie as a creative work!Some complexities in fantasy fiction in determining the moral worth of various forms of government are that (i) non-democratic government forms are taken for granted as legitimate and even desirable (see eg The Return of the King), and (ii) the deliberate killing of large numbers of sentient beings on pretty flimsy grounds is taken for granted as legitimate and even desirable (see eg The Return of the King - when Mordor collapses no prisoners are taken!). When Vecna takes over the government of a collapsing kingdom, it's not clear that government is a lot less democratic, nor that the actual death rate goes up.In part because of these complexities, my game didn't focus on these sorts of issues, so much as on the effects of the change of government on the wizard's guild and the PCs' home city, as I described upthread. As is often the case in fantasy literature, the fate of these more local communities serves as a sort of proxy for the wider moral progress (or decline) of society. (There is also a similarity between these bracketings and the bracketings of larger scale politics in most superhero comices.)Well, I put "bad guys" in inverted commas. The NPCs in question went from being the PCs' enemies to their allies (if not friends).Again, board rules put limits on this sort of discussion. But "enslave your fellow man" is your interpolation - I didn't say that, and that is not what happened - and the question of the proper attitude of a politician to violence (and the PCs in this game were, among other things, politicians) is a complicated one. (I'm thinking particularly of Machiavelli's The Prince, Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation, and Michael Walzer's work on "dirty hands".) The game in question explored the question (among other things). In the real world, then, the morality of the use of political violence is something that is interesting and much-discussed (even here in Australia I note that it was a recurring theme in discussions of the Bush presidency, and continues to be discussed in relation to the Obama presidency). I have my own views on the matter, but won't express them here. But I certainly think it's a reasonable topic for investigation via fictional works, be they excellent movies (Hero) or much more pedestrian RPGs (the campaign I've been describing).</blockquote>

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