WANTED: Dark Secrets

Ah, Thieves World. I know of it but have never read any. It's on the to do list. Also I've seen at least one Thieves World rpg on the shelves recently. MIght have to pop back and see what's in it.

Thanks again guys for all the great ideas. I'm just at the end of a 22 hour shift and will be off to beddy bye now. Between that and time zones I might not respond for a while. But I will look back in with great glee when I can.

BTW: I'm copying and pasting these into a doc with your names attached. So when my players ask "what sick bastard came up with that?" I can tell them.
 

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A butcher, a baker and a candle maker are actually a front for a far too gruesome truth: they are in the business of disposing of bodies for criminals.

The butcher carves up the choice meats and sells them as exotic flesh. The baker grinds the bones down for the bread, and the excess fat is used as tallow in the candlemaker's candles.
 

There must be some non-supernatural secrets too... It's difficult to think of though...

1) A rich merchant wanted to enter the aristocracy, so married a noble's daughter. However, all he could get was an idiotic wife, as the noble gave him (in fact sold him) an almost moron daughter. Nonetheless, through this marriage the merchant is trying to get a nobility title, spending/wasting huge sums of money to influence appropriate people in the highest circles of society. He seems that he could be soon succeeding in this endeavor and become a baronet. However, here is the problem (and thus secret): marrying a noble woman was the first requirement, but he somehow was tricked in marrying this one. He made up his mind about it, but always had to be careful that nobody knew he is married to a stupid and vulgar woman (despite she is of noble birth). So the wife remains hidden in the castle, and sometimes the merchant is obliged to employ an actress to act as if she was his wife (telling the actress some lies to justify it). Would this be discovered, he would be seen so ridiculous, that he would be mocked by all the nobility, and would subsequently lose reputation and thus his business would suffer greatly.

2) Some noble that everybody believes to be rich is not. He doesn't have a gold mine in some distant new-world. Everything about him is fake and false, using forgery and bribery to steal from the state and from whomever would deal with him, etc. Among other swindles, he has drawn a lot of money from the above merchant, and intends to give him a false nobility title. It will look real at first sight, but would reveal a forgery if careful investigation was ever made.

3) Miss Victoria is not a damsel despite successfully pretending the contrary. This is Victor, an homosexual from the gentry, masquerading as a young and pure virgin. He has kept the secret for a long time, and because of his mother who wanted a girl and lied to her husband who incidentally was often away for work, Victor's father himself doesn't know about it!! The problem however, is that Victor's father thinks it's now time to marry his "daughter"...

4) John Sheltrun Junior is an impostor too. As a destitute orphan, he semi-accidentally killed a noble child when he was but 6. The slain child had no longer his parents too, but an old tutor who didn't want to lose his well paid job. So, tutor took the destitute child and raised him as if he was the real John Sheltrun Junior. This required much work to make it so nobody would notice. At first John Sheltrun Junior was said to be extremely ill for longer than a year, after which tutor brought him to a better place far from town, etc. Eventually tutor died and false John (who conveniently forgot his real name) reached adulthood. Now John Sheltrun Junior is in town to reclaim the heritage of the child he killed many years ago, and there is nothing that should prevent it.
 

1) The personal chaplain of the Noble family of a very religious society has lost the favor of his god years ago, but still continues on in his position. The family cannot get rid of him because of the embarrassment and loss of power it would entail.

2) In a Dwarven family, the line has a terrible (for dwarves) curse: They are completely unable to grow beards. In their society, this is a terrible sign of unmanliness and lack of strength. Because of this, they have a long tradition of wearing chainmail veils almost all the time.
 

Turanil said:
3) Miss Victoria is not a damsel despite successfully pretending the contrary. This is Victor, an homosexual from the gentry, masquerading as a young and pure virgin. He has kept the secret for a long time, and because of his mother who wanted a girl and lied to her husband who incidentally was often away for work, Victor's father himself doesn't know about it!! The problem however, is that Victor's father thinks it's now time to marry his "daughter"...
Don't want no more of the Crying Game...
 

The players notice a noblewoman friend of theirs appears in a portrait of another family from a hundred years ago, and then meet her in a completely different place and she doesn't act like she knows them.

They uncover a trove of clockwork pieces, including ones that look like porcelain doll versions of the woman's features
 

EricNoah said:
Sanctuary is the setting of the Thieves' World books; there is at least one RPG treatment as well.
Two - Chaosium in the 80's and the d20 version more recently.


Something more helpful to the thread: Lady Miriam's half-acre rosebush maze is the talk of the entire city, its spectacular blooms remaining through mild winters. Whispers have abounded in the sitting rooms and tea houses for years as jealous noblewomen guess (and in no small part, slander) about her secret. If someone could discover how her roses are tended, it would be worth a small fortune to the right household.

But even more in blackmail. The Lady Miriam purchased the first plantings some years back from a less-than-savory associate of her husband - who enjoys the thrill of owning a few forbidden and sorcerous texts but is too much a coward to read them - and the entirety is a druidic sign of old and fell meaning. It is alive and intelligent after a sense, capable of commanding her through psychoactive scents. In order to bloom so strongly, it demands to be fed, to slash and shred a person and let their blood feed its roots. It has been enough so far for her house guards to kidnap a drunken foreign sailor from the docks every new moon, but the blooms have been wilting early of late and she fears more must be done to get them in proper state for her daughter's wedding next month...
 
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Hmm...

Perhaps an ancestor offered one of his daughters to a Dark Power in exchange for wealth and nobility. The Power raped her soul (leaving the body unscathed) in a dream so she had no concious memory of the horrible ordeal. As a result however, that corruption of the Dark Power manifests itself every x generations in an abomination.
The current lord's son is the abomination.
 

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