Story help for my campaign, my players stay out.

[Lamoni]

Hello, I am planning my party's next adventure and in my notes it says, "will only give aid if they discredit house X." Now that little phrase sounded fine when I came up with the overall clan relationships a while ago, but now that I need to flesh it out I am stumped as to HOW they can discredit the other clan.

Any ideas? What things can I ask the party to do that would cast shame, dishonor, or whatever else on another clan? Or should I scrap the idea and go with something more direct by asking them to assassinate a particular member?

The only condition is that it is a neutral party, but with one good aligned member. I want them to be tempted by the offer because the aid they can receive would help the party a lot. Assassinating someone they didn't know to be evil would be turned down immediately, so something more subtle that doesn't send up red flags of alignment violation is what I am looking for.

Thanks for any help!

 

[fredramsey]

Please don't include so much detail next time. There's just too much there to wade through.

Uh, is this D&D? L5R? Is it SF, or an Asian setting? What?

Hello, I am planning my party's next adventure and in my notes it says, "will only give aid if they discredit house X." Now that little phrase sounded fine when I came up with the overall clan relationships a while ago, but now that I need to flesh it out I am stumped as to HOW they can discredit the other clan.

Any ideas? What things can I ask the party to do that would cast shame, dishonor, or whatever else on another clan? Or should I scrap the idea and go with something more direct by asking them to assassinate a particular member?

The only condition is that it is a neutral party, but with one good aligned member. I want them to be tempted by the offer because the aid they can receive would help the party a lot. Assassinating someone they didn't know to be evil would be turned down immediately, so something more subtle that doesn't send up red flags of alignment violation is what I am looking for.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Lamoni]

Sorry, this is an Eberron campaign... D&D.
I didn't include too much detail because the PC's are new to this area and I can make almost anything work. The house they need to discredit is a prominent house (house Kundarak), but they don't necessarily have to be good aligned.

If you have any specific questions, I'd be glad to answer them. Did you have any ideas that were conditional on it being an asian setting or L5R? If you did, I am sure I could adapt those ideas to my campaign. Again, what I am looking for isn't a complete adventure, just a few ideas of how you could go about hurting a house's reputation (at least locally).

Edit: Here's some more specific information in case it will help get some creative ideas.
It takes place in the Mror Holds in Eberron. The house that can give aid to the party is House Soldorak, which according to the Eberron campaign setting is wealthy and envies and seeks to discredit house Kundarak.

 

[fredramsey]

I don't remember the house's roles off the top of my head, but isn't Kundarak the banking dwarves?

If so, they could arrange for someone from that house to be caught bribing a city official to influence a vote.

Sharn: City of Towers might help give you some ideas as to the relationships of the nobel houses and how they interact.

 

[Lamoni]

I don't remember the house's roles off the top of my head, but isn't Kundarak the banking dwarves?

If so, they could arrange for someone from that house to be caught bribing a city official to influence a vote.

Sharn: City of Towers might help give you some ideas as to the relationships of the nobel houses and how they interact.

Thanks for the idea, that is great. I might just run with this one.

Now... [thinking to self] should I have them actually catch someone, or just have them stage it. [/thinking off]

 

[Turanil]

You will have to invent something upon which the clan's honor is based, and then the players must find a mean to defile that. some ideas:

-- Clan leader must soon marry with an important person, and for that must have an unblemished virginity, whatever. It just needs to have one of the PCs use magic to impersonate that leader going to shabby brothels and do very questionable things in front of enough witnesses.

-- Clan is supposed to come to aid of X should the need arise, as it is a debt. So PCs arrange for X to have some problem that require the help of said clan. But PC manage to catch the emissary who brings message to clan, and then send back a fake letter saying they will do intervene soon. But then of course clan is not aware of situation and doesn't intervene.

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EDIT: the two precedent posts weren't there when I typed my answer. :\

 

[AuraSeer]

How about this:

House Soldarak owns some powerful magic item that would be helpful to the PCs. House Kundarak is known to desire that item, and has tried to purchase it for large sums of money, but Soldarak refuses to sell. Soldarak plans to make people think Kundarak stole the item.

Sometime tomorrow the item will be transported from one storage vault to another, in a guarded caravan. Soldarak wants the PCs to disguise themselves as Kundarak soldiers, assault the caravan, and steal the item. They are not to kill any of the guards, instead leaving them all alive to serve as witnesses to the "Kundarak" assault.

Kundarak gets blamed for the theft, and your PCs come away with a new magic item.