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Guran
2014-04-04, 10:30 AM
A few weeks ago I was discussing our current D&D campaigns with one of my best friends. While our campaigns are pretty much always fun, they are always along the same lines of adventuring and saving the world. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but as our group is mostly heavy roleplayers, we wanted to try out something else. And then I got this idea that felt pretty good, yet is pretty difficult to set up. So I would ask all of you for feedback on the idea and hints for different challenges to help me get started, because I'd love Dm'ing this on some sundays if enough players from my group are interested.

The idea is as followed;
The campaign will be set in the capital of a powerful empire that has been ruled by its imperial family for generations. Some emperors were benevolent, some others not so much and yet others didn't do anything remarkable. Ten years before the start of the campaign, the prince and heir to the imperial throne set of for a war campaign in a far away land to bring glory and treasure for his people. What he brought home was not what everyone expected; a bride. A mysterious and exotic girl which he took as his wife. His family protested, but they married anyway. Soon the protests died out though as the curse struck the family. One by one the members of the family died under mysterious circumstances until all of them were gone. The only one left to place herself on the imperial throne was the exotic bride whose beautiful outlook seemed to hide a cold and demonicly childish attitude. Anyone opposing her has been removed from existence. She has placed the empire under very strict laws and rules unchallenged.

The party consists of a small group of nobles (I expect there will be no more then four players attending) who agree that this foreign demon child should be removed from the throne, the empire and preferably life. (The reason why they want her away is entirely up to them).
Too bad for them she is a powerfull sorceress and guarded day and night by her soul sworn who are elite warriors who have sold their souls to the empress. So there is no way they can just walk up to her and ram a piece of metal into her stomach. If they tried that, they would be torn apart and their characters will probably know that. The campaign will revolve around them gaining allies, raising through the ranks, infiltrating in the imperial palace and plotting to bring the empress down.

Most of it will revolve around role playing, while there will be some encounters in the form of assassins or monsters that happen to inhabit a getaway tunnel they try to wade through.

I plan to use the first session to find out what kind of plan they are going to brood on. I've got the idea's for the beginning, but drawing a blank for the possible future events. Like what kind of challenges can I present to the players. What can I throw in so that it doesn't become too much of a response on response game that will wear me out? How can I keep variation in a game like this. What would you do if you were a player or DM in this campaign?

Any feedback is welcome and thanks for reading all of it.

Talos
2014-04-04, 10:52 AM
sounds like alot of fun.

act I could be gaining strength as you said. obviously there are rumors and whispers about her that they hear from time to time. Through gaining power making contacts and greasing the right palms and gaining knowledge about her they could find out that she herself has sold part of her self to some demonic force. as a result she can not be killed outright because part of her "soul " is in some sort of a phylactery.

Act II could be finding out more about how this was done and where and by whom. Thus finding out how to undue it. once they have figured it all out they have to decide what to do about it. in the mean time she finds out about their plans and send her minions to end them with extreme predudice. the twist could be that one of the PC's family members told her minions of their plan thinking he or she was doing the right thing. she uses the family member or who ever as leverage against them.

Act III final showdown between them. do they save the day or do the parrish. She pulls one final surprise on them one that may topple their plans. I.e misread a formula or not saying the incantation right. they find out at the last moment that the family membe ror whom ever has been helping her all along. and thats why the have had such bad luck all along.

just some ideas.....

Red Fel
2014-04-04, 11:07 AM
My first thought is "this sounds like it could be a lot of fun."

My second thought is "this doesn't sound like a fun D&D campaign."

I'll explain. There are settings that are designed around social interactions, intrigue, espionage, suspense, and so forth. D&D isn't one of them. Not only is D&D heavily combat-oriented, but the availability of spells that literally rewrite reality cause any mundane conspiracy, mystery, or plot to unravel. It sounds like the campaign you describe will be extremely combat-light, that in fact engaging in combat would be a liability for the PCs. That's not a D&D campaign, at least not without some serious regulations involved.

I would advise you to look into a high fantasy or low fantasy setting with more socially-oriented than combat-oriented rules for a game like this. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is Ironclaw, but there are others depending on your tastes.

The next thing I notice is the setup. The heir to the throne brings back a mystery bride, she's magical and demonic and everyone dies and now she holds total power. My concern is that this basically has the potential to make her more of a plot device than a character. It's entirely possible, under the description you gave, that the PCs won't be able to do a thing to stop her until you, as the GM, decide that it's time for her to die. It's also possible that you'll give her an irritating situational awareness of the PCs' activities, coupled with a convenient inability to permanently kill them. I'm not saying that you would do these things, but rather that they're very easy pitfalls to encounter when designing a setup like this.

Having a villain whom everyone knows is (1) blatantly evil and (2) incredibly powerful seems to run almost contra to the idea of a political, scheming campaign. Gray, not black and white, is the traditional color pallet for a game of scheming nobles, and pointing a big finger at one character and announcing "This is the bad guy, find a way to kill her" just seems overly simplistic. By contrast, look at Game of Thrones (books or tv show, name your poison) - none of the contenders for the Iron Throne are ideal human beings. They all have flaws, all have blood on their hands. While some are more horrifying than others, there is no clear villain. Everyone is playing off of everyone. Saying that there is one Evil Queen, and a bunch of lesser nobles she has inexplicably not killed off but probably will once she realizes their plans, is a bit morally simplistic for this kind of campaign.

Here's my advice. Keep your setup as is, because it creates a question of legitimacy - this foreign queen has basically replaced the entire royal family. Make her pregnant, because that's her life insurance policy - the people will tolerate her because she holds within her the last scion of the royal line. Make her less obviously evil, don't use words like "soul sworn" - she can be evil, but she doesn't have to be blatant about it.

Start with your PCs. Make sure each one has goals and ambitions. More importantly, make it clear that there are issues of noble legitimacy. Make these issues relevant to each PC. For example, if one of the nobles is a "new money" noble, recently having earned title for service, he might be a bit more receptive to a regime change. An "old money" noble might be more distrusting. A wealthy merchant non-noble might have more interest in maintaining his profits through political stability than in personal power grabs - or he might want to bridge the gap between "wealthy peasant" and "noble".

A game like this requires the PCs to drive the plot. You have to create an elaborate, detailed world, with mercenaries, bandits, rival factions, foreign powers, competitions for honor and natural resources, and so forth. You're trying to create a GM-driven game, in which the ultimate goal is to depose the evil queen. Don't be so upfront with that - let the players figure it out, and decide if they want to depose her or curry favor, or both. Let the players drive the game, let them find their own goals and paths.

And don't be surprised if they climb over one another's corpses to reach the throne.

neonchameleon
2014-04-04, 11:15 AM
My first thought is that D&D is very possibly the last system I'd use for politics. I'd try Smallville (as a first choice), Fate, or even Apocalypse World (AW:TDA if you can get the playtest documents).

Guran
2014-04-04, 12:08 PM
I'll explain. There are settings that are designed around social interactions, intrigue, espionage, suspense, and so forth. D&D isn't one of them. Not only is D&D heavily combat-oriented, but the availability of spells that literally rewrite reality cause any mundane conspiracy, mystery, or plot to unravel. It sounds like the campaign you describe will be extremely combat-light, that in fact engaging in combat would be a liability for the PCs. That's not a D&D campaign, at least not without some serious regulations involved.

I would advise you to look into a high fantasy or low fantasy setting with more socially-oriented than combat-oriented rules for a game like this. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is Ironclaw, but there are others depending on your tastes.
You are 100% correct on this. D&D is not ideal for this kind of campaign. Yet I'd rather not ask people to learn an entire new system, just for a campaign we might play once a month on a sunday, while we are all familiar with D&D and have a ddi account. While some aspects won't be useful, there will be enough we can use. And in the adventurous - weekly - campaign my friend is DM'ing we sometimes have entire sessions without encounters. Sesions that focus heavily on roleplay. Once when we were in a city after we rescued a princess and dealt with the aftermath of the heroic rescue. There was the session in a camp of centaurs where we had to earn every meal and goods by doing something for the tribe. We also spend one session recuperating from a harsch battle (which was mostly an RP encounter). And none of us had any trouble with that at all.



It's entirely possible, under the description you gave, that the PCs won't be able to do a thing to stop her until you, as the GM, decide that it's time for her to die. It's also possible that you'll give her an irritating situational awareness of the PCs' activities, coupled with a convenient inability to permanently kill them. I'm not saying that you would do these things, but rather that they're very easy pitfalls to encounter when designing a setup like this.

She won't have an awareness of the characters intentions, the main idea is that they simply shouldn't be noticed at all, although that might greatly depend on their own choices. The empress won't be like Galbatorix from the inheritance series in the final showdown where the evil king was like; "muahahahaha I know everything! All your plans and efforts were in vain. Muahahaha, I hope the readers are terrified and impressed by me at this point." And I'm also not planning to spare people who somehow blow their cover in front of the empress. Honestly, I'm never trying to kill my players (At least not in the few times I was DM). Yet I never did actively try to keep them alive either. Yet, thanks for the warning.



Here's my advice. Keep your setup as is, because it creates a question of legitimacy - this foreign queen has basically replaced the entire royal family. Make her pregnant, because that's her life insurance policy - the people will tolerate her because she holds within her the last scion of the royal line. Make her less obviously evil, don't use words like "soul sworn" - she can be evil, but she doesn't have to be blatant about it.
Good point. I will tome her down to suspicious rather then overly evil then. Or maybe more towards being a very strict ruler. I'll have to brainstorm on that one.



Start with your PCs. Make sure each one has goals and ambitions. More importantly, make it clear that there are issues of noble legitimacy. Make these issues relevant to each PC. For example, if one of the nobles is a "new money" noble, recently having earned title for service, he might be a bit more receptive to a regime change. An "old money" noble might be more distrusting. A wealthy merchant non-noble might have more interest in maintaining his profits through political stability than in personal power grabs - or he might want to bridge the gap between "wealthy peasant" and "noble".
I'll leave everything concerning character creation in the hands of the players. I don't like to mingle in that. So they'll have to decide their ambitions for themselves, I'm not going to tell them what their ambitions are.



A game like this requires the PCs to drive the plot. You have to create an elaborate, detailed world, with mercenaries, bandits, rival factions, foreign powers, competitions for honor and natural resources, and so forth. You're trying to create a GM-driven game, in which the ultimate goal is to depose the evil queen. Don't be so upfront with that - let the players figure it out, and decide if they want to depose her or curry favor, or both. Let the players drive the game, let them find their own goals and paths.

And don't be surprised if they climb over one another's corpses to reach the throne.

Deposing the queen will be the main focus of the campaign. To be fair, if I joined a game where we had no goal or purpose, I'd rather not join the game. Each his own I guess.
I don't expect them to climb over each others corpses. I once Dm'd a small campaign where the players were pirates and even then they didn't kill eachother. Although they didn't do any attempt to save a player who nearly drowned in an encounter with a sea monster.

Airk
2014-04-04, 12:17 PM
You are 100% correct on this. D&D is not ideal for this kind of campaign. Yet I'd rather not ask people to learn an entire new system, just for a campaign we might play once a month on a sunday, while we are all familiar with D&D and have a ddi account.

This is, honestly, a weak excuse, and one that is, I think, almost exclusively used by D&D players. Here is why it's not a good reason:

#1: Most game systems that are not D&D require about 15 minutes of conversation for people to grasp 90% of what they need to play the game. The other 10% can be figured out in play.
#2: Most game systems that are not D&D do not have significant ability to cripple yourself during character generation, so even if you don't have great rules mastery, your character should still be fun, and will probably do basically what you expected it to.
#3: You are probably underestimating how much a system influences the feel and experience of a game.

Really, there are so many good choices, and most of them will take less time to explain than it does to eat your pizza before the game. You shouldn't look at D&D (Especially 4E, as I infer from your mention of DDI) as in any way being 'typical' in terms of how long it takes to 'learn' a system. And a game that you play only occasionally is PERFECT for trying out a new system.

Seize this opportunity. Try something new. You won't regret it.

Ravens_cry
2014-04-04, 12:38 PM
Eh, a political game is mainly role play, with some other stuff as a change of pace, and you can role play just fine in D&D. Sure, you want to keep things low level, but you can shape the realities around the existence of certain spells. People use speak with dead to interrogate murdered folk? Damn, murderer destroys the head. People use raise dead to raise the king whose death destabilizes the kingdom? Damn, corpse is too mutilated for the spell to function. Using Locate Object to find the MacGuffin? Damn, it's in a lead foil lined box, or no one knows what it looks like accurately enough to use the spell.

HammeredWharf
2014-04-04, 12:38 PM
My thoughts:

1) Diplomacy. Make some clear house rules on how it works, because it will be used often and can't be used by RAW.
2) I'd put more combat in there. D&D isn't particularly good at social encounters, but you can handle them by role-playing. Too bad most of your party's abilities wont matter, then, and you might as well have freeform RP sessions. There's plenty of ways to integrate combat into a political campaign: assassins, duels, secret tunnels, war, random encounters while traveling, ancient crypts that contain knowledge / symbols of power, etc.
3) The queen. Frankly, she sounds like a boring villain. An beautiful evil sorceress and a usurper? Meh. You'll have to give her more character and make it relevant to the political side of the campaign. Why is she evil? Is she redeemable? Why does she want to rule? What's her homeland like? What would she do if the PCs tried to join her? Why do her non-brainwashed allies like her?
4) Alternatively, you could scrap the curse plot and make the campaign about a conspiracy of nobles who hate their returned king because of his "impure" bride and want to get rid of him. Or! The twist could be that they already tried and succeeded, but she was the only one strong-willed enough to survive and is now really, really pissed.

Airk
2014-04-04, 12:57 PM
Eh, a political game is mainly role play, with some other stuff as a change of pace, and you can role play just fine in D&D. Sure, you want to keep things low level, but you can shape the realities around the existence of certain spells. People use speak with dead to interrogate murdered folk? Damn, murderer destroys the head. People use raise dead to raise the king whose death destabilizes the kingdom? Damn, corpse is too mutilated for the spell to function. Using Locate Object to find the MacGuffin? Damn, it's in a lead foil lined box, or no one knows what it looks like accurately enough to use the spell.

But why would you use a system that not only offers no SUPPORT for what you are trying to do, but actually offers a number of features which make it more difficult to do what you are trying to do? (How much do you like having your intrigues spoiled by low level divination magic? Most of them aren't as easy to foil as Locate Object. In fact, what kind of political game centers on finding a MacGuffin?)

Think of it like this. Given the choice between using a tool that is awkward but that you already have, or a tool that actually does what you want it to do, which would you choose? Sure, you can tighten a screw with a butterknife, but maybe it's time for a trip to the hardware store for a screwdriver? It might come in handy in the future. And it'll do a much better, easier job of tightening that screw.

Ravens_cry
2014-04-04, 01:43 PM
A tool you don't know how to use is no use at all, and learning a new system on top of everything else could detract from the fun of the experience. It's more than simply going down to the 'hardware store', it's going down, buying new device you and your compatriots do not know how to use, that works differently from what you already use. Oh, and you probably need multiple copies, as everyone sharing a single copy while trying to learn how to play is also very awkward. Depending on the system you use and everyone's spending ability, that can be a significant budget hit.

Airk
2014-04-04, 02:04 PM
A tool you don't know how to use is no use at all, and learning a new system on top of everything else could detract from the fun of the experience. It's more than simply going down to the 'hardware store', it's going down, buying new device you and your compatriots do not know how to use, that works differently from what you already use. Oh, and you probably need multiple copies, as everyone sharing a single copy while trying to learn how to play is also very awkward. Depending on the system you use and everyone's spending ability, that can be a significant budget hit.

I guess you skipped the part on how simple it is to learn most non D&D game systems.

And many of these things are available digitally, so multiple "copies" isn't an issue. And generally, no, you DON'T need more than one or maybe two copies, because again, most games don't require the amount of sheer lookup that D&D does.

I've played 5 different game systems for the first time in the past year, and only once was there more than one copy of the rules on the table, and never was that a problem.

Trust me. The screwdriver was a really apt metaphor. Good games are easy to learn. and besides. How are you ever going to learn how to use better tools if you flinch at what should be the IDEAL opportunity to try out a new one?

EccentricCircle
2014-04-04, 02:06 PM
Sounds like a great idea for a game I hope that it goes well.
First contrary to many of the posts you should definitely go for the system you want to play. I've run games like this in D&D plenty of times and it'll work just fine. You might not get the most out of your combat abilities, but it will be there for when you need it and what matters is that your having a good time, not that you've picked the game which supports your premise perfectly.

SO... some suggestions!

Have conflict hard baked into the setting.
Political games are by definition all about alliances and allegiances. So i'd start by decided what your factions are. I'd decide in broad strokes what kind of factions you want involved in the situation. Some will probably suggest themselves quite quickly, but it doesn't hurt to have a few wild card type factions in there as well. Make sure that every faction is allied to some and opposed to others, and give them causes which your players can easily get behind or get against.
Remember that politics isn't all about the lords, who controls the army and the watch? What do the thieves guilds think of all this?

Don't flesh everything out straight away
A game like this will work well with a bit of preparation, if you have the time I'd suggest a month of so before hand to talk to your players and have them come up with who and what they want to play. give them your general list of factions and let them tell you which ones they like, and which ones they think that their characters would be involved with or opposed to. And then develop those factions and figure out how you are going to use them in the game. There's no point in producing a full background on every noble house and then having your players ignore half of them. Better to put that effort into detailing the house your players are scions of, and their bitterest rivals.

Work with your players
Get your players to do some of the design work for you, ask them who their characters are, what happened to them in the past, what defines their house, or organization and who their famous ancestors are. take their ideas on board and work them into the landscape of your game.

Shades of grey
Nothing is ever simple in a political game. It helps to come up with a situation where good and evil aren't absolutes, or at least it may not be obvious which side is in the right and which is in the wrong. If you can create conflicts where players don't have a clear idea of which side they should be on, because in some ways both sides are right then it will open the doors to a lot of good role-playing situations.

Plots within plots...
Is the empress really the villain of the piece? maybe she's a front for another faction, or someone is manipulating things from the shadows. Maybe the players are dancing on someones strings from the moment they start their conspiracy, and it will turn out that it was someone they trusted to help them take down the Empress who engineered the death of the previous dynasty in the first place and is now using them to overthrow her in turn. The villain should be the last person the players expect, but it should be someone known to them. It doesn't work if a new character steps out of the shadows at the end, but if the Barman who was spying for them and giving them information from the start turns out to be the big bad, that would be an interesting twist.

I hope some of that helps. Have fun.

Red Fel
2014-04-04, 02:19 PM
You are 100% correct on this. D&D is not ideal for this kind of campaign. Yet I'd rather not ask people to learn an entire new system, just for a campaign we might play once a month on a sunday, while we are all familiar with D&D and have a ddi account. While some aspects won't be useful, there will be enough we can use. And in the adventurous - weekly - campaign my friend is DM'ing we sometimes have entire sessions without encounters. Sesions that focus heavily on roleplay. Once when we were in a city after we rescued a princess and dealt with the aftermath of the heroic rescue. There was the session in a camp of centaurs where we had to earn every meal and goods by doing something for the tribe. We also spend one session recuperating from a harsch battle (which was mostly an RP encounter). And none of us had any trouble with that at all.

I understand your position. Frankly, I think this would be the perfect incentive to try out a new system - and everyone should have more than one in their repertoire - but if you're not interested, you're not interested. If you do want to go with D&D, I'd suggest implementing certain limitations. One option is to do as Raven suggested, and do all the little tricks necessary to make sure that plot-bypassing spells won't work. Another is to run it as an E6 campaign, which puts a cap on power levels. Still another is to explicitly exclude certain classes, spells, or abilities upfront.

I think you're wasting a great opportunity (and excuse) to try something new, but you can pull it off. RP is possible in D&D, and really that's all this is.


She won't have an awareness of the characters intentions, the main idea is that they simply shouldn't be noticed at all, although that might greatly depend on their own choices. The empress won't be like Galbatorix from the inheritance series in the final showdown where the evil king was like; "muahahahaha I know everything! All your plans and efforts were in vain. Muahahaha, I hope the readers are terrified and impressed by me at this point." And I'm also not planning to spare people who somehow blow their cover in front of the empress. Honestly, I'm never trying to kill my players (At least not in the few times I was DM). Yet I never did actively try to keep them alive either. Yet, thanks for the warning.

Good point. I will tome her down to suspicious rather then overly evil then. Or maybe more towards being a very strict ruler. I'll have to brainstorm on that one.

Yeah. The problem with starting a campaign with the BBEG abundantly visible is that the BBEG is abundantly visible. It's like starting the campaign by telling the players the history of the world, in particular concerning a particular location or historic figure. They know that by the end of the campaign they'll have been to that location or met that historic figure. It's kind of making things a bit obvious. My advice would be to raise other concerns - have the queen start as more of a background figure, whose importance becomes more apparent over time. It keeps the players from homing in on their target at first, gives them the chance to develop their own motivations beyond those required by the plot, and keeps you from making her an over-the-top villainess.


I'll leave everything concerning character creation in the hands of the players. I don't like to mingle in that. So they'll have to decide their ambitions for themselves, I'm not going to tell them what their ambitions are.

I didn't mean that you should tell them what their ambitions are. Rather, I suggested (or intended to suggest) that you give them a detailed view of the world, and offer them guidance and suggestions - which they may take or leave - as to their characters' places in it. I don't believe a DM should ever tell the players what their characters want, but letting them know what there is in the world to desire can be very helpful in character creation.


Deposing the queen will be the main focus of the campaign. To be fair, if I joined a game where we had no goal or purpose, I'd rather not join the game. Each his own I guess.

Right. And I agree, there should be some overarching metaplot. But opening with that goal seems dangerous to me. A bit too ambitious. Perhaps, depending on the kinds of characters your players choose, you can start with something smaller, like collecting taxes, or dealing with administrative affairs, or currying favor with the Crown. Over time, the players will realize something is "off" in the Capital, and that will kick off the plot-in-earnest.


I don't expect them to climb over each others corpses. I once Dm'd a small campaign where the players were pirates and even then they didn't kill eachother. Although they didn't do any attempt to save a player who nearly drowned in an encounter with a sea monster.

To be fair, piracy is a collaborative effort. Pirates were among the earliest modern democracies. (Ancient Greece isn't modern, hush.) And living on a ship meant trust, and constant peril. By contrast, courtly intrigue almost demands a certain degree of backstabbing, of a figurative if not literal nature. Again, I'm not saying that your PCs will want to kill one another, or even that you should encourage it; rather, I'm saying that these games tend to be motivated by greed and ambition, and it's appropriate to the setting, albeit potentially adversarial at the table, for PCs to be playing off of one another.

Jornophelanthas
2014-04-05, 07:57 AM
In my opinion, the OP made two conflicting statements. How can you reconcile:

(1) leaving the player characters' ambitions entirely up to the players; and
(2) deciding that the campaign's major focus is on dealing with the empress.

At the very least, you need to tell the players in advance what kind of ambitions they should have. You would not want, for example, one player to have no other ambition than to "kill all orcs", or another to "become the most powerful wizard and not be distracted by petty politics", and yet a third to "see all parts of the world". The players need to know in what direction to think.

---

Another suggestion I have is to start the campaign in an earlier stage. Have the players be favour-curryers for a minor member of the imperial family at the time that the exotic bride is first brought back by the prince. Have them do some espionage / bribing / conspiring in service to their patron, possibly against other imperial family members. Meanwhile, have the imperial family members slowly die off in the background. In fact, the players could witness (or almost-witness) the gruesome death of one royal cousin, at a moment when they are trespassing somewhere for their patron (and nobody expects them to be there).
Their imperial patron should meet with some minor successes due to the players' work, but his/her rise to power would also be sped up by the imperial family's slow extinction. Until the patron him/herself dies of the curse, as one of the last before the exotic bride takes the throne.

A setup like this should ensure a number of things:
1. The players may or may not want to find out how their patron died, and who was behind it.
2. The players will probably be suspicious of the exotic empress.
3. You will not need to tell the players in advance that the imperial family was hit by a curse. Instead, they can draw the conclusion themselves, or hear rumors about a curse grow while the dead pile up.
4. You have the opportunity to flesh out the entire setting and support cast of NPCs (e.g. the captain of the guard, the thieves guild, the merchants guilds, the army generals), and can decide for each of these factions what role they should play. And the players will have already met these NPCs during their early adventures.
5. The players will already have a few levels under their belts, and should have a feel for both their characters' ambitions and the setting (and the extent of their influence).

In conclusion, doing it like this would be a dramatic plot twist that should rope the players into your setting even more.

And as a bonus, you can even decide that the exotic bride is not the real mastermind behind the killings, but seeks to profit from having an empire thrown into her lap anyway. Meanwhile, the real mastermind seeks to take over the empire after the players take out the queen. Unless the players manage to stop him, of course. (This way, the queen is the major villain, but not the most evil one. And you give the players a murder mystery, too, if they choose to see it.)