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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9834038" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed.A lot of RPG design and play also inclines towards something other than rising conflict across a moral line. White Plume Mountain (as an example of the dungeon crawl paradigm) is an example; so are the CoC-esque mysteries that I have on my shelf.An interesting example is something like the Lamentations of the Flame Princess module Death Frost Doom. It begins with a NPC who seems to promise rising conflict across a moral line: This adventure module describes the abandoned shrine and burial location of an old death cult which is located on the side of a mountain. . . . Just below the treeline of the mountain lives Zeke Duncaster, and he is a nutty old coot. . . . If anyone draws weapons against him or in any way acts as if they intend to inflict even potentially lethal harm on him, Zeke’s eyes will sharpen and he will say with eerie clarity: “I know what becomes of the souls of men who slay men. Do you?” . . . “When I was a youth, there were evil people that lived up this mountain. Eventually they were driven off, but before then they had killed a lot of people. A lot of them! Buried them up there, without a proper gravesite or nuthin’. Everyone else seemed happy that the bad people were gone but didn’t give a hoot about all the innocent people that had been killed. That’s when I vowed that I would give them all proper headstones so folks could know that they used to all be real people. When I was younger I’d build fancy cairns and statues for ‘em … nowadays I just do headstones, but I’ll be long dead before I ever get to half of ‘em. There are just so many…” He says that the bad men kept a list of their victims, and that list is still found in their old meeting place in the mountains. Duncaster goes up there with a ton of furs and animal blood and copies 100 names at a time. He doesn’t dare take the list (“Everything there is cursed! Cursed, you hear me?”) . . . If the PCs begin to travel up the mountain in his presence, he will at first tell them it’s a bad idea, and then command them to stop, and finally he will attempt to physically restrain them. He will not ever use deadly force, but will attempt to wrestle and hold people until they agree to not go up the mountain. If by some circumstance he watches the PCs depart (he’s tied up, for example, or proven to be physically incapable of restraining everyone after a few tries, or people are willing to drag him up the mountain with them), he will give the classic, “You’re doomed… you’re all doomed!” line.But because of the structure and expectations of play for LotFP, this ends up being a colourful means of backstory exposition, but not more than that. The game only progresses if the players (and their PCs) essentially sideline Zeke and his concerns and passions.Whereas a NPC like Zeke would play a pretty different role - in terms of game play - in something like Prince Valiant, or Stonetop, or (based on my reading and intuitions) Mythic Bastionland.</blockquote>

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