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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kabouter Games" data-source="post: 7056431" data-attributes="member: 6788812">First, I think it pays to study up on boom towns. At least scratch the surface of the sociology, history, and economics of them. Then discard the boring stuff and hook into what you think will play dramatically at your table. Look for the friction.Wikipedia tells us:One obvious, if mundane, area of friction is if your characters - essentially the moneyed interests who started the boom - failed to provide sufficient infrastructure. You've already spotted that with your shantytown and lack of housing. What's happened to housing prices? If your boom town holds true, inflation should be out of control. There should be friction between the locals and the newcomers. There should be a supply of locals who correctly lay the blame for the whole situation at the feet of your characters. Locals who are faced with paying 5gp for what used to be a 2sp loaf of bread. Immigrants who are faced with 10gp a day to live in a tent. People who "owe their soul to the company store" and feel hard done by.Whenever boom-town populations rapidly expand, predatory characters emerge. You've spotted that, too. Con men, grifters, I'm sure you've made room for all of them. (Don't forget to have people blame the characters for failing to protect them from that, too!) Here's another NPC in that vein: The labor agitator. A radical free-thinker who advocates common ownership of everything, what Marx referred to as 'primitive communism,' with universal suffrage, equality before the law, rank and title null and void, the eradication of private property. That kind of chap. CHA 20, of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Someone who makes people doubt that the characters should be in a position of power in their society, that's the key. Why should we be workin' twelve hours a day, buildin' them a great big house, when we ain't got nothin' but a shack to live in? That's a different kind of villain. Do they crush the nascent socialist movement with an iron fist, like Cromwell did the Diggers and Levellers? After all, it's not as though that villain is obviously an evil entity which must be slain. He's not evil, he's different.* Indeed, if a considerable proportion of the population in their area of interest is under the influence of a social agitator, they can't just clamp down too hard, not without unpredictable results from the rest of the demographic. They're not Thayans. Are they? Do they care? If that's not enough complication, throw in a religious agitator. A revival preacher, kind of thing. Canonically, the pantheon of Faerûn has changed in the last few years. That gives an excuse for a charlatan faith healer to swoop in to a struggling, leaderless community and make a killing duping the rubes. Connect his movement with the nascent socialists if you like.What about the other power- and stake-holders in the area? You said they have a 10% interest in the Mine. What of the other 80%? What do they think about how the characters are letting control slip in their demesne, their absentee lordship? Bam. Trifecta.That's what I'd do - throw social unrest at the characters. They're aristocracy now, or at least gentry; they're significant landowners. That requires a certain amount of noblesse oblige from them which the common folk with see withheld at peril. They waved their hands at the place, set a bunch of things in motion which haven't necessarily had positive outcomes, then just poof! Disappeared! Now they're back. Some people will expect them to fix it. Other people will wonder why they're butting in, haven't they done enough?Anyway. You set up a GREAT story opportunity here. I hope you have many hours of fun playing through it!Cheers,Bob<a href="http://www.r-p-davis.com" target="_blank">www.r-p-davis.com</a>* I did a panel at a con years ago where George RR Martin and I led a discussion of what makes a monster. It was fascinating. Evil only sometimes enters into it. Take Frankenstein's Monster; it was not inherently evil, and indeed had no evil intent at first, but it was still monstrous, because it was different.</blockquote>

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