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Yora
2016-06-15, 10:07 AM
It's me again. With another one of these threads. But as long as I keep getting such many good replies to these questions I'll keep making them. :smallwink:

I've been thinking about running fantasy campaigns that have more depths and complexity than the average treasure haul for quite a while. Something where the choices the players have to make are tougher and the outcome more meaningful. I think there's a certain style of fantasy fiction that I realy like to adapt, but it's often not quite so easy to nail down which specific works fit into it or not. So instead of a list of inspirational works, I give you a list of heroes. I hope at least some are recognizable to most people.


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Now the choice of characters is always decision of the players, but I want to create a campaign that enables heroes like these to really shine. A while back I found a great post that really matches my own goals and priorities very closely. So instead of mumbling something hazy together I'll just be quoting it.


Here is the default plotline of most heroic fantasy narratives:

'One day, the Forces of Darkness found a big stick. They used the stick to beat everyone up! It was terrible! So the Forces of Light had to go on an Epic Quest to find an even bigger stick, which they used to beat the Forces of Darkness back down again. Then everyone lived happily ever after, except the Forces of Darkness, who had all been beaten to death. The end.'

Might makes right. The good guys don't win because they're good; they win because they are able to attain a greater capacity for acts of spectacular mass violence than their enemies. The world remains shackled to a treadmill of violence. Viewed with even the slightest cynicism, the whole narrative starts to look deeply suspect, the kind of story that victorious empires always tell about their origins: 'Of course we're the good guys! We won, didn't we?' This is probably one reason why world-weary amorality is so common in OSR fantasy games; strip away the genre conventions and it's easy to see the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness as little more than two interchangeable warbands, flailing away at one another with whatever physical and rhetorical weaponry happens to come to hand.

Romantic fantasy narratives, by contrast, are usually built around defeating evil by means other than overwhelming lethal force. Consider a story like Ghibli's Spirited Away. Chihiro is thrown into a supernatural world dominated by cruelty and injustice, but she doesn't defeat it by hoarding magical power-ups until she's strong enough to punch Yubaba in the face. She wins because she's brave and clever and empathic enough to make friends and build alliances, and at the end of the day her courage and emotional intelligence prove to be more than a match for Yubaba's evil sorcery. By the end, when she leaves Yubaba's realm, everyone is cheering for her - even the frog- and slug-people who have been making her life a misery since she arrived. She has changed her world for the better. She didn't even have to beat anyone to death along the way.

Full text (http://udan-adan.blogspot.de/2015/07/on-romantic-fantasy-and-osr-d.html)

Romantic Fantasy is not a widely established term and was created for the types of novels that inspired the RPG Blue Rose. For that context it's quite a clever turn, but the ideas quoted above also work for a much wider type of environments than the medieval western European courts that are evoked by the term Romantic. And after some talk with various people (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?783847) "Hope & Heroism" emerged as a well received descriptor for this style in a wider context.
I am thinking of it as kind of "Sword & Sorcery with ideals and mercy". Someone once described Sword & Sorcery as a genre in which "nobody has any thought about being socially constructive", which I find very fitting. But why not, actually? It certainly leads to a very different tone, but I think it's a concept that sounds just as interesting.

I think it also might have a wider appeal with people who are not generally interested in playing games about dungeon crawling and dragon slaying. In university I had several female friends who were generally interested in fantasy but didn't really care about that dungeon crawling stuff, and I stopped being hyped by it a long time ago as well.
I can think of several works that hit that tone I am after, but those are all linear plotted things. Princess Mononoke, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Rune Soldier, Seirei no Moribito, Avatar, The Witcher (particularly the main plot of the third game), Ico, Mass Effect, and Metal Gear Solid (mainly 1 and 3) are the main ones that come to my mind.

What are the main qualities I am looking for:
The goal is not to destroy evil, but to restore peace and order.
The root of major conflicts are social issues and not just one evil madman who has to be killed or imprisoned and then everything will be fine again.
The players should try to gain some understanding what motivates their opponents to do bad things and seek to find the real source of the conflict.
Negotiating is almost always an option and often a good one.
A strong supernatural presence. Characters do not normally have great magic powers (this affects the choice of the game system) but there are many magical creatures and phenomena at work in the world.
It's not going to be an easy or pleasant ride. Overcoming the evil means confronting it close up and endure its horrors.

How could you set up such a campaign? I think it would have to be only very minimally scripted as I think it's important to have the players make the choices how to deal with their antagonists. And most importantly, live with the consequences. One of the things I always consider a letdown with mainstream fantasy is that all problems seem to disappear when the villain is killed and nobody really considers what would happen next to all the people affected by the changes the heroes made.
Someone suggested somewhere (and I really can't remember where) to split the villains in thre groups: Those who really don't want to be evil but are being forced, those who are evil now but can be redeemed, and those who are plain old pure evil and can't be reasoned with. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me, especially when the players can't tell which type any given antagonist is until they closely interact with them for a while.

Frozen_Feet
2016-06-15, 02:53 PM
There are two things that're hinted at but not directly stated in your list:

1) villains have to be sad or.mad rather than bad.
2) Players have to actually understand and empathize with this.

I've tried, multiple times, to play villains and monsters with "soft" motivations which could be influenced by kind words... only to have this fall flat because one or more players fail to grok it because they're too busy being hateful and vindictive.

If you want a story where, say, a murderer is redeemed through love & kindness, the players have to actually believe a murderer can be redeemed by love & kindness, and to a degree, they have to be capable of such love and kindness.

At the same time, every villain with "hard" motivations undermines the genre. If you put an honest-to-god sociopath in romantic fantasy, then you can be sure the game eventually becomes about stopping that sociopath because the dynamic of negotiation and trust cannot exist with obvious traitors running aloof.

Democratus
2016-06-15, 03:07 PM
There are two things that're hinted at but not directly stated in your list:

1) villains have to be sad or.mad rather than bad.
2) Players have to actually understand and empathize with this.

I like this. I would add a 3rd point.

3) This understanding and empathy - not violent conflict - is the key to lasting and true victory.

Yora
2016-06-15, 03:28 PM
Though that also has the risk that it ends up with nobody being really bad and everything is just an unfortunate misunderstanding. I think you need to have both. Some enemies you can find ways to work with and some who just won't be moved by any kind of information.

Though I agree to get players to think outside the box of standard action hero thinking, surprising betrayals should be kept extremely rare. When the players genuinely trust a former adversary who vows to have changed his ways, revealing him to have lied the whole time just won't do any good for the campaign.
You can still have betrayal, and perhaps even should on occasion, but it should mostly come from people who the players never considered trustworthy in the first place. If an NPC is a secret villain and the players completely miss that, build up to it with clues that put his loyalty in doubt before he stabs them into the back. When the players get betrayed it should feel like they had willingly engaged in a gamble and went ahead in the knowledge that it might be a trap. But a betrayal thay nobody saw coming would be particularly unfair and harmful in such a campaign.

I think on method to get the players to negotiate is to put them into situation where they don't really have a choice. For example when they encounter an antagonist whose guards hopelessly outnumber them but he will let them leave if they don't start a fight.
Or make it so that allies or superiors of the PCs tell them that they don't want the antagonist harmed for whatever reason. Hostages are another option.
Another good situation is when the guards of a villain either clearly don't know that their boss is doing something evil or they are clearly being forced to help. Players will be much less inclined to fight things out when they are confronted by guards who don't look like plundering brigands. It also helps a lot when the guards command them to surrender and be taken to the person in charge, assuming that person is not a person they already knows wants them dead.

GorinichSerpant
2016-06-15, 09:24 PM
In Apocalypse World there is the concept of sof moves and hard moves. An example of a soft move is a cutthroat pointing a knife at you while a hard move is a knife placed into your gut. The rules state that for the GM to do a hard move there must first be a soft move to set it up. You can have rocks fall to kill everyone but only if it's already established that the mines are experiencing an earthquake and the players are given the opportunity to react to that. The point I'm getting to is that this mechanic would be something useful to include when considering betrayal in a Hope and Heroism game. Also a different way of putting it is that it's more important for the betrayl to be inevitable then sudden.

Yora
2016-06-16, 04:13 AM
That's certainly a good principle to follow.

I am currently considering creating some kind of alignment system with several heroic codes of honor. In the d20 Conan game, characters with a honor code get a +3 bonus to Will saves but lose it when they break the rules by which they mean to live.
Letting players pick from five or six codes that each provide a different benefit could be quite interesting. They would all have to be compatible so there won't be any situations where the PCs can't stick together, but having it so that sometimes different party members have different priorities could be very interesting.

SilverLeaf167
2016-06-16, 06:48 AM
In my current campaign (actually the one in my sig, shameless plug) the PCs are your usual ragtag band of misfits that's hired for some mercenary work by the local authorities. However, as the plot thickens and they get sent after the local lord's enemies, they end up getting swept up into the struggle between two rather ambiguous sides. They actually become double agents of sorts, but neither side seems very trustworthy, and either or both might be lying outright. While they're more than happy to reap the rewards for their work, when both of their bosses ask them to fetch a powerful and potentially destructive artifact, they start to think it might be best to keep it for themselves instead.

Man, that sounds like an ad.

Either way, though this is the first time that I've tried something like this, it really didn't take a lot more than... well, writing it like that. Avoiding black-and-white morality in general makes it pretty easy to set the scene for player agency, negotiation and such. The environment causing these problems is inherently flawed, and the players realize it. When everyone involved has clear-cut political goals (as opposed to "destroy everyone" vs. "maintain righteous peace") but with wide implications and possible hidden agendas, I'd say players have remarkably little trouble adapting: realizing that blindly following orders and solving every obstacle with combat isn't always the right answer. At least, that's how it went with mine.

Apologies if I misunderstood the point of the thread: "moral ambiguity", "wide implications" and "complicated problems" were the main issues I could gather. The bottom line of my point is that a great way to open up the players for alternative solutions is to make them doubt the large picture ahead of time. If they have even a little roleplaying spirit in them, they'll probably be less willing to kill someone who might be misled or even in the right, or for the sake of someone they believe is deceiving them.

Yora
2016-06-16, 08:34 AM
I feel there is little that would encourage the players to becomes heroes instead of bandits with just those parameters in place.

mikeejimbo
2016-06-16, 08:58 AM
I feel there is little that would encourage the players to becomes heroes instead of bandits with just those parameters in place.

Some of it is just going to be the players themselves.

I wanted to run a game where the world was cynical and jaded, heroes were rare and rarely effective, and being good got you chewed up and spit out. Definitely gray and gray morality. Despite that, I wanted the players to try being good anyway, fighting the quixotic uphill battle that would lead to their end, but an end they could feel at peace with.

My players weren't interested so I changed it to destroying the soul of an ancient necromancer.

SilverLeaf167
2016-06-16, 08:58 AM
Well, that's a good point. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the characters in question are (mostly) Good anyway, and the players are (strangely enough) actually willing to follow their alignments in terms of roleplay. They acknowledge that the world is flawed (though not to grimdark levels or anything, more like "realistic") but try to do some good within that framework. That's why they're wondering what to do with the artifact, which could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.

On the other hand, I'd say that applies to any campaign. If any given party isn't Good and interested in being heroic for its own sake, whatever the setting may be, they need some other personal reason to care about the problem. A "heroic" fantasy assumes the characters to be, well, heroic. An Evil party would obviously have a very different approach to any plot you throw at them, if they decide to fight it in the first place (to protect their own interests or something).

EDIT: mikeejimbo put it pretty well. The players are a vital part of whatever mood you want to create.

Red Fel
2016-06-16, 11:04 AM
What are the main qualities I am looking for:
The goal is not to destroy evil, but to restore peace and order.
The root of major conflicts are social issues and not just one evil madman who has to be killed or imprisoned and then everything will be fine again.
The players should try to gain some understanding what motivates their opponents to do bad things and seek to find the real source of the conflict.
Negotiating is almost always an option and often a good one.
A strong supernatural presence. Characters do not normally have great magic powers (this affects the choice of the game system) but there are many magical creatures and phenomena at work in the world.
It's not going to be an easy or pleasant ride. Overcoming the evil means confronting it close up and endure its horrors.

How could you set up such a campaign? I think it would have to be only very minimally scripted as I think it's important to have the players make the choices how to deal with their antagonists. And most importantly, live with the consequences. One of the things I always consider a letdown with mainstream fantasy is that all problems seem to disappear when the villain is killed and nobody really considers what would happen next to all the people affected by the changes the heroes made.
Someone suggested somewhere (and I really can't remember where) to split the villains in thre groups: Those who really don't want to be evil but are being forced, those who are evil now but can be redeemed, and those who are plain old pure evil and can't be reasoned with. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me, especially when the players can't tell which type any given antagonist is until they closely interact with them for a while.

Several observations.

First, the stakes have to be high. Now, that doesn't mean global-cataclysm high. In Sen to Chihiro, the stakes were Chihiro's own freedom, as well as that of her family. For Chihiro, the stakes could not have been higher. In a campaign with an antagonist - note that I say antagonist, not villain, for reasons I'll get into - who ought to be defeated by non-bigger-stick means, the stakes need to be high enough that for the PCs to not choose violence should be the cause of some tension. It's easy to choose violence, especially when the stakes are high - that's why it's so important to make the decision meaningful by increasing the tension. With no tension, it's just shrug, "Sure, let's talk him down, I guess."

Second, violence has to be an option. I know it seems contradictory, but in order for the "I choose hope" option to be meaningful, it must be an actual choice. Here is an illustration.

In the anime version of Soul Eater, the Kishin Asura is basically unstoppable. It radiates an aura of insanity, and is in turn fueled by the madness of others. It withstands endless abuse, until it is confronted by the protagonist, Maka, who refuses to be afraid. Her bravery causes Asura's own insanity to manifest, and he becomes pathologically terrified of her, ultimately withdrawing into himself and becoming vulnerable.

And then she punches him. But up until that point, she wins through nonviolence. Great, right?

Well, not entirely. It feels kind of anticlimactic. Her nonviolence isn't really a choice; it's just the only option left after everything else has failed.
The point is, for a nonviolent solution to be meaningful, it can't be the last effort after all others have failed. At that point, nonviolence is the "bigger stick," the secret kryptonite that is the antagonist's secret and sole weakness. And that feels cheap.

Third, the antagonist. Yes, you can have a villain, but really what you need is an antagonist, irrespective of whether they are truly evil. I'm going to echo Frozen Feet here - the antagonist needs to be a complete, fleshed-out person, a comprehensible and sympathetic figure with clear goals, dreams, and hurts. The nonviolent method would be to address their humanity, their goals, their hurts; to assuage their fears, console their shame, inspire their hope, offer them alternatives. Sometimes, that means the antagonist isn't really a villain at all, just someone whose trajectory is in opposition to the PCs'.

Fourth, the players. I say players, not PCs, because this depends entirely on the people at the table. If the players aren't prepared to confront the BBEG as a person instead of as a combat encounter, this entire exercise is a waste. Expectation is frequently one of the biggest disconnects between players and GMs. That's why it's so important to emphasize, in advance of the game, that the NPCs in this game are all people, with hopes and dreams and fears and vices. To make clear to the players that combat is always an option, but rarely a necessity. And if, and only if, the players are on board with this notion, the game could go well.

Now, you say you think it should be "minimally scripted." I agree in part and disagree in part. A lot of the story itself will be highly improvised - PCs being PCs, NPCs being people too. But a lot of it should also be scripted - you need to have a firm grasp of the motivations and personality of every major NPC, and many of the minor ones. Going back to Sen to Chihiro, think of how many characters had few or no lines, or appeared in only a couple of scenes - and yet they were still fleshed-out figures with motivations. Simple motivations, perhaps, but clear ones. That puts a lot of preparation burden on the GM, because it can be hard to create complete people out of the ether on the fly.

As for the idea of splitting your villains, I can get behind that, but I wouldn't be quite so explicit. I don't think you need to make them wear name tags or anything. One type can work with another type, and you see that a lot in Shounen. (Interestingly, you also see a lot of redemption in Shounen, albeit usually after violence. Consider, for example, the oft-referred-to "Therapy no Jutsu" in Naruto, which is when he beats someone up and they become friends, or "befriending" in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which takes the form of orbital cannon bombardment. The latter is Seinen, but the premise is still there.)

It's frequently pretty easy to see whether a character is (1) doing evil because they're being paid to, like pretty much any mercenary in any medium; (2) doing evil because they're forced to, in which case they'll either be mind-controlled zombies or constantly apologizing; (3) doing evil because they're convinced it's right, in which case they'll probably pontificate or spout exclamations like "You just don't understand;" and (4) straight-up monsters, who should be the rarity, should not be the final boss, and will generally give themselves away with mad grinning, cackling, slavering, or licking objects covered in blood. But one of these can easily be employed by another. (See, e.g., Final Fantasy V's GILGAMESH, who is generally fun and funny and almost a decent guy, and his employer, Exdeath, who as the name suggests is an irredeemable monstrosity.)

So, no, I don't think splitting them up into groups - these are the bad guys who need saving, those are the bad guys who need persuading, and this is the monster who needs killing - is productive. I think mixing them all in makes for a more compelling narrative. A perfect illustration is in Magic Knight Rayearth.


In the anime, Sol Zagato is the High Priest of Cephiro, having captured Princess Emeraude, whom the protagonists must defeat. Along the way they face Alcyone, who will fight to the death to serve Zagato because she loves him unrequitedly. (She is presented as tragic, but ultimately irredeemable.) They also face Ascot, a young boy whose only friends are the monsters he summons, who serves Zagato because only Zagato would allow him to keep his monster-friends. (He serves Zagato out of gratitude.) Caldina is a dancer-slash-assassin who mostly works for the paycheck, and to watch out for Ascot, whom she sees as something of a little brother. And because she has a thing for Lafarga. Lafarga is a loyal swordsman in service to Emeraude who has been brainwashed and robbed of his free will. Inouva was a magical spirit, a gift from Emeraude to Zagato, who serves his master because he understands the pain that Zagato suffers.

Zagato himself is only a villain because of what his actions did. The world of Cephiro is maintained by the constant prayer and servitude of Emeraude; Zagato, having fallen in love with Emeraude, takes her away from her life of prayer so that she can be free, resulting in cataclysm. Zagato is doing everything, forsaking his duties, all out of love for Emeraude. Love which she actually returns, but cannot acknowledge because of her responsibilities. When the protagonists finally defeat Zagato, the terrible truth is revealed, and Emeraude herself becomes their final enemy, a wrathful godlike woman who can unmake the world with her indomitable will, yet only wishes to be reunited with her beloved in death.

Of the antagonists, only Alcyone, Inouva, Zagato, and Emeraude are killed. Alcyone, because she would rather die than fail the man she loves (and because her unrequited love is torture); Inouva, because his only dream is for his master to succeed; Zagato, because he would give anything to see Emeraude free; and Emeraude, both to save the world and to be reunited with her beloved. The rest are redeemed, rescued, or simply unemployed.

Yes, this storyline ends with the main antagonist(s) being killed to save the world. But the emotional impact comes from how the main characters react - they become desperate to find some way other than violence to resolve this, and are heartbroken when they realize that only death will grant the antagonists peace.
My point is, it's possible to mix these groups together, even to include violence as an option (in some cases, a necessary option), and still have a powerful story that makes you want to use nonviolent means.

Yora
2016-06-16, 11:56 AM
You certainly need good preparation with the antagonists. A script for the plot would mostly get in the way, but each of the major NPCs needs to be programmed with well thought through behavior patterns. You don't know what scenes the players will get into throughout the adventures, but you need to know how the antagonists will react to anything the players might do when they meet. This is more like preparing a set of contingencies for each main NPC and less like preparing a series of events that will happen.

Coming up with some rules and archetypes for antagonists might be almost as important as it is for the PCs. Such a campaign requires complex and prominent villains. Orcs and bandits of the week won't do here.

Some great antagonists that come to my mind are Ashram and Pirotess from Record of Lodoss War. Ashram in particular is absolutely menacing at first as a bishonen Darth Vader but ends up being critical to prevent total disaster in the end.
One of the greatest fantasy characters I've ever seen is the Bloody Baron from The Wicher 3. He is just such a horrible person but at the same time such a nice and fun guy. I still have no idea how they did that. (I think partly because the possibility to remove him and his men would only make everything worse for everyone, and also because he knows how messed up his whole warlord career is.)

Different topic: I think one important step to pick methods and incentives is to start with what kinds of behaviors and actions the game is meant to encourage. I found this very useful when creating rules to encourage Sword & Sorcery style characters last year.

So let's see...

Come to the rescue of people in danger.
Put the wellbeing of others first.
Intervene when witnessing injustice happening.
Be an example to others.
Try to help people dealing with hardship.

Considering these things, I think giving XP for completing goals might not be a good approach. This encourages being sensible and cautious, which isn't exactly in line with these goals entirely. The Sword & Sorcery game Atlantis has a cool rule where players get XP for attempting impressive stunts. Regardless of success or failure. Which I think is wonderful for that genre. It encourages players to try cool stunts as often as possible, even when not particularly necessary. This might work here very well too.
I think heroes should not be rewarded for success but for giving it everything they have. In the words of Julio Scoundrel: "It doesn't matter if you win or lose, as long as you look really cool doing it." For heroes who are meant to be examples for other, having tried is the thing that matters most.

You might actually still give XP for encounters. But instead of giving the XP for every encounter that is overcome, the players get rewarded for every encounter they take on that serves to protect or rescue someone. The players automatically get full XP, regardless of how the encounter end. They might win a fight or lose a fight, or persuade their opponents to leave, or even accept that their bluff had been called and they have to leave without success. XP are given for getting involved. Once they get into a confrontation they have to deal with whatever consequences come from it. If they are unable to rescue someone the only penalty is that the enemies now know about them and don't fear them and that their reputation suffers. In theory players could constantly start looking for fights and the back off to get easy XP but their reputation will very quickly suffer very badly.
And if there is one weakness of players greater than greed, it is pride. :smallamused:

SilverLeaf167
2016-06-16, 12:22 PM
Okay, I definitely missed what you were going for at first. I didn't realize the importance of, well, Hope & Heroism in your concept. I somehow thought they were something you were actually trying to sort of subvert (yes, my logic confused myself as well), but now I think I get it.

Your ideas on granting experience definitely sound fitting here. Honestly, I've abandoned D&D's vanilla experience rules so long ago I didn't even think of them. Your basic logic is sound: players will do things that grant them experience. Period. Granting experience for something thus encourages players to do it. :smalltongue: Of course, being too strict about what counts as "heroic" might end up making them halfway suicidal, but it shouldn't be too hard to find some sort of balance.

Since we're already using games like The Witcher and Mass Effect as examples, I'd say one pretty vital thing is gratitude. Sure, the actual authorities and powers-that-be might be ignorant, apathetic or even resentful of the party's efforts to improve the world, probably stepping on their toes at some point, but a heroic party is likely to end up helping a lot of "regular" people big and small. From the farmer to the guildmaster, these rescued people should be willing to help the party in some way, and the DM should make sure to include situations where supporters and contacts like them could come in useful (and cultivate this mindset in the players, of course). Maybe the populace of a town they saved is willing to rally behind them or hide them in an emergency. Maybe the merchant can deliver some unique wares. Maybe even the local thieves can provide critical intel.

This is more a matter of roleplay than of mechanics, but a (successful) heroic party should definitely get the impression that they're helping people in need and said people really appreciate it. Some NPCs might even make a point of mentioning that they owe the party a favor. There's no need to plan all these potential helpers ahead of time, but everyone around the table should be willing to improvise. To avoid the impression of a deus ex machina or just railroading, it's best for the party to be the ones asking for help, but the DM should definitely be willing to bust out a Big Damn Heroes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BigDamnHeroes) moment when appropriate.

Yora
2016-06-16, 02:27 PM
Okay, I definitely missed what you were going for at first. I didn't realize the importance of, well, Hope & Heroism in your concept. I somehow thought they were something you were actually trying to sort of subvert (yes, my logic confused myself as well), but now I think I get it.

I am already a step ahead. I am subverting the subversion. :smallbiggrin:

As I see it, somewhere in the 80s people got fed up with treasure hunting and dungeon crawling and do more stuff like what was popular in fantasy novels at the time. Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and that stuff, which I think D&D (and now Pathfinder) has been sticking to to this day. Then around 2009 this OSR thing got really going by people who couldn't stand this goody two shoes world saving stuff and went to overhaul the old dungeon crawl stuff to bring it up to modern standards of quality. And now I am having enough of all that grim and bleak dark gonzo stuff and trying to get the heroic ideals back in. But this time better!
I still can't stand Dragonlance and lost all interest in Forgotten Realms. That's not what I want to do again. There's a lot to learn from the big and mid-range OSR creators, but I think as a whole they overshot in purging fantasy RPGs of juvenile idealism. To have "real good" you need "real evil", but I feel that the pursuit to get a less cartoonish evil into games led to good being mostly forgotten. Blue Rose and it's Romantic Fantasy style was one attempt, but it seems in 2005 the world was not yet ready for this. People already seem much more interested about it's relaunch now. I am eagerly awaiting what they are doing, but I don't expect that it will be matching my tastes closely enough for me to just play that.
I am more interested in Sword & Sorcery that has the anti-heroes replaced with plain heroes. Like The Witcher. (If only the games had avoided these huge hordes of faceless bandits and undead.)

Making friends and allies is certainly a big deal. I think one way to make it more visible to the players would be to frequently reuse NPCs that the players spared and have them be helpful much more often than looking for revenge. If they parted as being simply on opposing sides but not deeply ideologically in conflict, they could easily find themselves on the same side later when facing a new common enemy.
Or alternatively they might encounter enemy commanders who are much more open to negotiation because the players had been allies with them in the past.
But even beyond that, allies should be extremely useful. Not necessarily to provide manpower, but also to provide information or get the players in contact with other helpful people. You probably can get away with a good amount of deus ex machina if you have an old friend as the facilitator of these unlikely coincidences. Nothing coincidental when the players know why someone would arrange these things to help them.

I also have to get back to Red Fel's post again. Once I started thinking about antagonists I realized that I really don't have any clear idea yet what kinds of opponents the player's would face. I've been thinking a lot about what they are meant to fight for, but not really what they fight against. I can think of a number of great antagonists that I like, but don't really have any criteria which ones would be appropriate for such a campaign. I'll have to give this a few days of thought.

Red Fel
2016-06-16, 02:41 PM
I also have to get back to Red Fel's post again. Once I started thinking about antagonists I realized that I really don't have any clear idea yet what kinds of opponents the player's would face. I've been thinking a lot about what they are meant to fight for, but not really what they fight against. I can think of a number of great antagonists that I like, but don't really have any criteria which ones would be appropriate for such a campaign. I'll have to give this a few days of thought.

The trick to a likeable, or at least relateable or sympathetic, antagonist is to ask a simple question: Why? Look at what the antagonist is doing and ask, why? Then do it again, and again, like a thoroughly irritating two year-old, until you reach the very deepest core of the character's motivation. Usually that can be summed up in one word.

Fear. Hatred. Revenge. Despair. Determination. Necessity. Love. Loneliness.

Once you find that core, you start eliminating the layers between the outermost and the core. Not to make the character shallow, but to make their motivations just a bit more apparent with a bit of digging.

That wizard who wants to enslave the Goddess and remake the world? That's because he can't forgive a world in which his friend's sacrifice was considered a noble necessity. That executive willing to experiment on innocents, meddle in dark magics, and manipulate heroes and world leaders? He wants immortality for himself and his family, to be able to spend forever with the people he loves. That dark warrior pledged to the service of a demon? He just wants to learn its secrets and grow in power until he can destroy it once and for all. That animated suit of armor? He's actually a horrible serial killer, there's pretty much nothing deep to it.

When those motivations get closer to the surface, they become easier for the players to see, and easier for the PCs to engage with. And you can do that for just about anyone, from the lowest-ranking minions to the BBEGs themselves.

Trekkin
2016-06-17, 01:37 AM
I've actually run a game something like this once, mostly by accident, in Way of the Wicked. One session the PCs, evil cultists of Asmodeus all, were murdering their way onto the throne; the next, they were concocting schemes to keep it. Schemes which revolved around honest attempts at diplomacy and improving their kingdom for the benefit of their citizenry. I threw enemies at them by the score; they kept calmly negotiating with them until I couldn't find a reason for them to still be hostile. It's happening again in my current campaign, with a different group and no PC-accessible magic. I started out telling them that many enemies would be more receptive to negotiation than the norm. They have yet to inflict a single point of lethal damage, and are now travelling around with a small army of people that were at one time trying to kill them.

So the best advice I can give, and what I'm going to be using to build my next romantic fantasy campaign, is this:

Make the PCs bad and the antagonists worse.

"Bad" can mean many things. Perhaps they're something like smugglers, or confidence tricksters, or engage in some other kind of malum prohibitum scoundrelry, but the central point is that their relationship with society is parasitic rather than symbiotic but they aren't in the habit of being violent or cruel. This serves a triple purpose: on the one hand, they naturally want their host polity to do well, because you can't con people out of what they don't have. On the other, they're a living example that shades of grey exist, so they shouldn't be so quick to classify people as good or evil. On the third, they have a strong incentive to avoid unnecessary recourse to lethal violence: the more damage they do, the greater the efforts at apprehending them, so it gets them thinking in terms of what they want and how they can afford to try getting it.

"Worse" here is even more diffuse than the above, but I mean that you need deliberate, considered, morally objectionable acts on the part of your antagonists -- and acts in service to an ideal that goes beyond the people performing them. Continuing the example from above, perhaps the PCs are increasingly troubled by an overzealous magistrate who, eager to prove his worth to the city, routinely "makes an example" of even minor criminals in Draconian, even sadistic ways. Not only is this a clear threat to the party, it's also built around an idea that's gotten into the city, something like "revenge against crime is more important than justice." Sure, the PCs could kill him...but that would make a martyr of him and gain them nothing but trouble. Their real foe is the idea itself; without the city supporting his actions, our antagonist is nothing but a lunatic demanding that all jaywalkers be stoned to death. Importantly, though, if all their antagonists are simply misunderstanding something or other, their victories may feel deductive rather than redemptive. Villains who don't know the evil they do are one thing; villains who don't care are a more involved prospect and perhaps ultimately a more satisfying redemption story.

Building antagonists around ideas also lets you build in chaff enemies, if you will; not everyone doing bad things is dedicated to the cause, and so the PCs can gradually ablate the blocs opposing them while figuring out how to dismantle them completely. Redeemed lackeys are a good source of information, too, which helps reinforce the idea that this is a clash of communities. As time goes by, of course, you can keep the PCs enmeshed in their role as "defenders from worse than us" until they're just protecting the grateful community from threats within and without, at which point they're anti-heroes in name only. Having the community demonstrate that gratitude is important, as SilverLeaf167 mentioned, even if it's just a throwaway line about random townspeople waving as they pass by.

It's certainly possible to start the PCs as out-and-out heroes, but I find that giving them a little bit of dirt helps keep them from thinking with normal D&D player logic.

Yora
2016-06-17, 04:36 AM
You can certainly motivate selfish characters to act responsible by giving them land and subjects and having them get under attack. Even if the players don't care about the people,they still tend to be fierce in protecting what they consider theirs. I once took over as GM for an evil party for a while and since the last adventure had ended in the castle of a defeated bandit lord I started the next one with local farmers showing up and asking the PCs to take over and protect them from other bandits in return for regular tribute. And the players responded quite well to it. Even a bunch of evil plunderers can be motivated by greed and pride.
That doesn't make them heroic, though. Only focused on doing something constructive. For a campaign about noble heroes everyone should start as noble heroes. Or at least rogues with a strong sense of decency (that will push them into becoming noble heroes in the face of the enemies' actions).

Giving the antagonists motivation is a very important part. But I'd watch out not to give them excuses for any evil deeds they did. Saying a villain was taken as a slave by bandits and then later killed the leader and took over is fine. Letting the villain off the hook and switch to being good because the player's learn that he used to be treated badly doesn't fly with me, though. A villain's background might explain his evil deeds, but does not justify them.
For antagonists to be sympathetic and redeemable, their actions have to be forgivable. Either things that can be fixed or being honest mistakes, or when being under control by an outside force.

Having spend a good time thinking about antagonists, I've realized that their motivations and crimes depend much more on the setting as it's the case for heroes. Their behaviors would be very different in a barbarian setting, a feudal setting, or an urban setting. For heroes there would be little difference, but the things that antgonists do and any good reasons they might have for it depends greatly on the setting. I am not even sure if you can have archetypes for good antagonists that would work well across all settings.

SilverLeaf167
2016-06-17, 04:49 AM
Having spend a good time thinking about antagonists, I've realized that their motivations and crimes depend much more on the setting as it's the case for heroes. Their behaviors would be very different in a barbarian setting, a feudal setting, or an urban setting. For heroes there would be little difference, but the things that antgonists do and any good reasons they might have for it depends greatly on the setting. I am not even sure if you can have archetypes for good antagonists that would work well across all settings.

Well, one relatively universal villain concept would be an extremist villain fighting for the rights of their race/religion/culture/whatever. Tensions between such groups may take different forms in different environments, but they can exist and erupt anywhere. Fantastic Racism is a staple of the genre, after all, and even if it isn't present, there's still plenty of space for disagreement. These groups can be conquered tribes, religious heretics, slum-dwelling elves, simply lower-class citizens or what have you. How many real-world metaphors the DM wants to include is up to them.

Someone lashing out against the (imagined or real) persecution of their people is a concept founded in social issues, great for a sympathetic antagonist and pretty open to negotiation while still allowing them to lapse into outright villainy if needed. Sounds pretty fitting for this style of play, right?

Yora
2016-06-17, 05:27 AM
That's certainly one option. A good example would be
Anders from Dragon Age II.

He decides to start an open war so that his people are forced to kill their enemies in self-defense, now that he proved all their worst fears right. It's for their own good. The war is inevitable and it's better to start it now while they are still strong enough to win. Those pacifist priests meant well by trying to calm both sides, but any delay would only help their enemies to get a bigger advantage. Real shame, really. But they had to go.

One interesting thing I realized is that this form of heroism needs only little changes to make some really good villains. Basically what the heroes are meant to say is "We don't care about the rules, we do thing that is right and establish peace, and anyone who has a problem with that has come around and adopt our views or will have to silently suffer through our new rules."
Heroes are meant to be reasonable and fair and to make a real effort in getting their opponents to come over to their side. But if they don't cooperate willingly they will be forced to do it. Make them a little less fair and less patient with their opponents and you got yourself a nice antagonist. Make them stubborn and you got a good villain.

I like the idea of having antagonists who are unhappy with the state of things and think that someone needs to take charge and put things into order. Whether the other people want to or not. Building and maintaining a new order is expensive and requires taxes and confiscations. Those who resist get punished. It also means you need to have good defenses and control resources, and the people living in those places just have to accept that they will have to be incorporated. If they don't see the necessity they are forced to comply.You won't get anything done if any troublemaker is allowed to get in the way.
Also soldiers need to be fed and I've they leave a trail of debris behind them that's just a fact of war. The alternative is to let the enemies rampage wherever they want and that would be worse. Can't keep a constant watch over all your soldiers and when violent bastards are all you can get for your money (which you confiscated from the population) then there is nothing you can do.

The great thing about such antagonists is that they can be reasonable and willing to make compromises. They have no interest in being Evil and doing Evil things. They are just bussy with important stuff and don't care about the damage left in their wake. Unless someone forces them to care. Heroes can cause them so much trouble that eventually it will be easier and cheaper to change strategy and stop doing the things the heroes object to then trying to repair all the damage they keep doing. The antagonist does not need to be either disposed or reformed, but can sometimes be forced to behave instead. Which then puts the heroes into an interesting position: Will they just say okay, turn around and go home now that the situation has changed from very bad to much less bad?