Police-Work for Player Characters

[Laurellien]

In a campaign that I am running (Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting, Rise of the Runelords), the PCs might be deputised by the local sheriff in Sandpoint.

What sort of low-level encounters could I run for them to do as normal (or seemingly normal) police work?

A few ideas (cribbed from the film Hot Fuzz) so far:

- A local farmer has been clipping hedges that don't belong to him and the PCs are asked to talk to him. He explains that he only clipped the other farmer's hedge because it tried to eat his wife (it is actually an assassin vine).

- A message comes in from a farmer who is worried because one of his swans has escaped. The swan is a half-dragon and can breathe fire (or maybe acid, if it's a descendant of Black Fang).

- A bunch of youngsters keep getting drunk and causing trouble. A mischevious goblin or gremlin is spiking their apple juice.

- A young Sczarni vagaband steals a pack of biscuits from the trading post. It's actually two goblins in a trenchcoat.


Any other ideas?

[Mastikator]

Sandpoint is a small port city, so I'm thinking organized crime smuggling contraband, the players stumble into more than they bargained for when they investigate a murder mystery. The victim was a witness and was planning on telling the sheriff.

Wait, you wanted low level encounters, police work involves many different kinds of things. Sometimes you're breaking up a fight, sometimes you're chasing down a thief, sometimes you're investigating a crime scene, sometimes you're just doing nothing.

To be honest with you this almost feels like downtime, the PCs should go on adventure and make a difference, solving the case of the stolen biscuits doesn't feel like adventure. But I have some ideas:

- break up a street fight, a fey has "inspired" the two combatants to fight each other
- catch criminals who escaped jail, a ghost has been letting them out as revenge against the sheriff
- sahuagin has stolen a bunch of stuff from the docks
- break up a domestic dispute, the couple are an elf and a dwarf who are racist against each other
- prevent a stalker from stalking a citizen, the stalker is the undead revenant ex boyfriend
- somebody has been littering large rocks on the streets, at night a failed wizard has been trying and failing to conjure an earth elemental
- protect an orc family from persecution, they are outcasts from the orc community but have trouble fitting in to the human world
- a person has gone missing, actually they were once a dog that was polymorphed into a person and the spell ended, the dog now lives with the family of the missing person (even showed up on the same day the person went missing!)

[Catullus64]

A note on the above: all four are examples of routine law enforcement tasks which turn out to have a fantasy twist. Unless you're going for a very high-magic, high-weirdness setting, I would consider having at least half of these encounters simply be what they seem on the surface, with no supernatural twist, to keep it more impactful when real monsters and magic do show up.Perhaps some should seem supernatural but are in fact mundane.

Breaking up a tavern brawl could be a fun twist on a genre staple.

Collecting taxes and rents was a big part of historical, medieval sheriffs' jobs. Perhaps a series of encounters with people who are behind on payment, with varying degrees of sympathetic reasons.

To steal a few more ideas from media, a thief is hiding out in a barn, with a child hostage, requiring cunning or stealth to take out before he can harm the child. (Seven Samurai)

A local family's dead grandfather rises from the grave one night, knocks on the door of his son's house, and demands to be fed. This keeps happening night after night, and the dead man has such a huge appetite that he threatens to eat their larder bare. Some way must be found to get him to rest. (King of Dragon Pass)

A teenage girl is found dead; her mother accuses another woman of poisoning her, since both of their daughters were rivals for the hand of one of the young men in the village. Upon investigation, the young woman died of a fairly mundane illness. (The Banner Saga)

[KorvinStarmast]

- break up a domestic dispute, the couple are an elf and a dwarf who are racist against each other Then how are they a couple in the first place? This one makes no sense. (Some of your others, however, I am stealing for future use).

[Wintermoot]

Then how are they a couple in the first place? This one makes no sense. (Some of your others, however, I am stealing for future use).

Oh, I know plenty of couples In RL that hate each other but are still couples. Sounds plausible to me.

[Mastikator]

Oh, I know plenty of couples In RL that hate each other but are still couples. Sounds plausible to me.

Don't overthink it. It's just a little funny low level on encounters while the players get ready for the campaign.

[Vogie]

I actually have a giant collection of these - I have a bunch slowly accumulating for a campaign I've tentatively called "WOMP Rats", which are the Rats, or rookies, of the Watchful Order of Magists & Protectors, which I have combined with the Waterdeep City Guard to a sort of emulation of all of our modern-day emergency services combined.

There was inspired by the ABC TV show, The Rookie, starring Nathan Fillion as a ex-contractor who is LA's oldest rookie after a midlife crisis, combined with the pilot for the unaired TV show 17th Precinct, starring many of the cast of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, as a modern-style police procedural in a world where magic was cultivated, instead of science. It's still available in various corners of the internet, and is really solid, although it wasn't ever picked up. In WOMP Rats, the players are rookies in the magic police - the lowest on the totem pole, receiving the worst assignments, and never getting any of the credit. It also gets players to think about how they want to approach things when killing things isn't something they want to do. It also keeps the scope of the adventure sizes down - you don't need to save the world, you must just make a difference here.

There are tons of media that you can grab inspiration from. I like the Rookie, because the main characters don't have any power in the early episodes, even as police officers, and they are finding out first hand the cracks in the system. Yes, there are murders, domestic assault, crooked cops, drug trade, natural disasters, terrorists, bank robberies and the like that you'd expect, but there is also just entire episodes that are just people being dumb, or how awful it is when a political figure comes to town.

However, it's not only just cops in WOMP - it also acts as the fire department, paramedics, and other emergency services - thus, for inspiration, you can grab plots from medical dramas like Chicago Med & New Amsterdam, Fire department shows like 911 and Station 19, and finally both rescue shows and 'vigilante pseudo-cop' shows like SkyMed and The Sentinel the like. You can also include some CSI-like elements from the approx 1 bazillion crime scene shows - one of the things that I loved about 17th Precinct was that their CSI involved having the necromancer show up and ask the victims some questions about their murder. I've also used some scifi-future shows for inspiration, such as Altered Carbon, Fringe, Person of Interest and the first season of The Expanse, because the veil between "magic" and "super high tech" is very thin.

Keith Baker (best known as the creator of Eberron setting) came out with a d20 supplement called Crime and Punishment back in the day (3.5e IIRC) which is also really good for conversion or inspiration. I know the Cypher System has a First Responders supplement that I haven't picked up but intend to. Icewinddale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and the second chapter of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist are also filled with little encounters that can be used for this sort of thing.

Anyway, some encounters I've either used in various one-shots, or have in the tank:


A robbery at a general store goes south and then something explodes
Patrolling the market district, having to deescalate merchant disputes and deal with protestors reacting to something that happened outside the city.
Sent to stake out a warehouse at night with suspected ties to criminal activity in the warehouse district. They see something, engage, and the warehouse is set on fire - now they have a completely different problem
A plague ship comes into the harbor
Having to check the registrations of merchant carts on the way into the cities
An elderly ancient dragon (or other appropriate kaiju-sized creature) died mid-flight over the city, crashing down and taking out several occupied buildings
Fishermen come in saying there's a massive ship that is sinking right out over horizon.
There's a massive celebration being planned. While the parade is going, wild animals from the carnival escape and are running around the city
Known disturbers of the peace need to be evicted
There is a famine or locust swarm that hit local farmland and tensions are high as the food supplies dwindle.
The vagrant population seems to be disappearing
The local Judge's son is kidnapped
Something alights between two families with a long-running feud and brawls ensue all over the city
A bunch of bodies wash up on the beach
There's a wandering self-described prophet that is stirring up trouble.
The city experiences a massive natural disaster - a hurricane, blizzard, tidal wave, or something of that scope.

[KorvinStarmast]

For what it's worth:
What you propose is a bit more like "Private Eye" or "Private Detective" work along the lines of The Rockford Files or Moonlighting TV shows, or any number of Raymond Chandler novels, or even Rick Riordan's San Antonio based Private Detective stories (https://www.goodreads.com/series/41197-tres-navarre)that he wrote (his Private Eye practiced tai chi) before his Percy Jackson stories took off.

[gbaji]

For what it's worth:
What you propose is a bit more like "Private Eye" or "Private Detective" work along the lines of The Rockford Files or Moonlighting TV shows, or any number of Raymond Chandler novels, or even Rick Riordan's San Antonio based Private Detective stories (https://www.goodreads.com/series/41197-tres-navarre)that he wrote (his Private Eye practiced tai chi) before his Percy Jackson stories took off.

Yup. I do tend to think those may be more interesting adventures anyway though. I'll also point out that assuming this is a fantasy/medieval setting, the "police" dont tend to do the same kinds of things that modern police may get called for. I guess you can include stuff like that for the fun of it, but typically in settings like that you'll have personal guards, who are hired to protect specific people's property and selves, and "town guards" who are basically patrol around just keeping an eye on things in town, guard specific access points, break up fights, enforcing the law when asked to by their superiors (ie: "gather X men and go to Y location to arrest <whomever>), etc, then yeah... maybe something like the investigators/sheriffs/whatever, who maybe have a broader manadate. It's generally the latter group that's likely to be the most interesting and might actually be traveling around, looking into "odd occurrances", tracking down bandits, theives, etc.

But yeah, the sky's the limit in terms of investigator activities. And it's not a bad hook to use to get folks into some fun/interesting adventures. We use something similar in my game, for this exact reason. And we also have a sort of adventurers guild thing as well, which is sometimes tapped for assisting with things that maybe are a bit too difficult/advanced/legally-questionable, but that may come along anyway. Which allows junior characters to potentially start out working as some sort of investigator/sheriffs-deputy roaming around digging into local trouble, and then that becomes an introduction to folks in said guild, which then allows for an advancement path to there if they wish. Otherwise, if you use this approach and stick with it, it's hard to justify characters going on any "out of town/kingdom" adventures.

I recently ran a scenario where there was a violent brother on brother attack. They investigated, and discovered that there was a pattern of such attacks, occuring in different towns throughout the kingdom, going back decades at least. Over time (and with a fair amount of investigation) they discovered that all of these people had a common ancsestor that ran back to the current ruling family of a nearby (and someone evil/enemy) kingdom. That family had a curse placed on it centuries ago, which affects all generations since, causing the older brother to become suspicious of and homicidal towards the younger, right about the age of 25 or so.. Some moved over time out of that kingdom and settled in the one the PCs are in, names changed over time, etc, and that's where they got to where they are. Which set up a great backstory, given there was currently a conflict in that kingdom, in which the elder brother has recently risen to rule, but a couple decades previously, he and his brother had a falling out (older one tried to kill the younger one, and the adventurers of the time got involved in the middle). In current day, the younger is leading a small but growing rebellion against his brother, and the PCs are broadly supportive of this. The whole "blood curse" they discovered was relevant because one of their characters actually married the younger brother, and they have children, two of whom are brothers, and the older of which is... well... right about 24 years old.

So a minor random act of violence lead them to a centuries old curse and a desperate need to find a way to break it. Not every minor event and encounter needs to lead to something bigger, of course. But it's fun to occasionally have that be the case. Players do tend to like that sort of thing.

[hewhosaysfish]

A local man is concerned that one of the gargoyles on the church near his home is actually a capital-G Gargoyle. He reports seeing it come down from the roof on misty evenings. He is sure that it stalks the churchyard at night. He is worried that it has seen him watching it; he is worried it has started watching him.
His friends and neighbours don't share his certainty. They don't look up at the church roof very much, but it seems to have the same number of gargoyles as ever. They certainly haven't seen any move.

The man has been harassing the priest about the "need" to "do something" about the "monster". He has tried to reassure the man as much has he can but has contacted the sheriff after catching the man trying to scale the church building in search of "proof".

Is the man delusional?
Has something dangerous moved into the town?
Will the priest be annoyed when the PCs inevitably climb up on his roof and smash all the statues, because of course that's what the PCs will do?

https://i.imgur.com/bUmX1Mt.gif

[KorvinStarmast]

Is the man delusional?
Has something dangerous moved into the town?
Will the priest be annoyed when the PCs inevitably climb up on his roof and smash all the statues, because of course that's what the PCs will do?
Stakeout is how you investigate this - the trick is to catch the gargoyle (or something) fluttering down off of the roof, but some players won't want to play in that mode. (In D&D 5e, if one of the PCs has find familiar, then the familiar (raven, piegon, etc) can perch on the roof or on various gargoyle statues and alert the player to movement ...)

[Beelzebub1111]

If you want Standard police beat stuff, remember the old tv show "Cops":

Confronting loiterers who are DEFINITELY dealing illegal substances. When confronted: two of them bolt, one complies (But will sneak off if all the players are distracted without dealing with him), and the other resists arrest. This forces your players to split up and deal with these threats in ways that they will have to answer to their chief about their methods later. Especially when hot pursuit involves over fences, up rooftops, through the window of a brothel, down a fire escape and through the middle of a children's playground.

Make a real mess of it that the entire thing turns into a clusterfluff and work in some property damage as well as ordinary folks getting in the way.

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Get sent to a domestic disturbance and have to parse out what's going on in the whole situation and make a decision on the outcome. Both of them are throwing accusations that are true events mixed in with lies and exaggerations to try and get the other person arrested.

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Two neighbors come to blows over the druid's pet boar taking a crap on the other guy's lawn. So not only do you have to deal with a pair of angry guys with a long history of grudges you also have to deal with a barely tame boar.

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Your goal with these shouldn't be to frustrate your players, but to exhaust them. So whatever the real threat that shows up is, they are going into it like Roger Murtaugh instead of Riggs.

[Laurellien]

Thank you for the suggestions guys, these are really helpful.

I really like the single-encounter stuff, as this is essentially meant to pad about a week or two of game time for the characters at most.

For anybody else looking for inspiration on this in the future, I would recommend watching the following:

Hot Fuzz - a brilliant police comedy film

Scot Squad - an excellent BBC comedy series following the supposed exploits of ordinary Scottish police officers.

[Witty Username]

How large is the area your dealing with? Missing persons reports as I understand a big chuck of real cop stuff.

The Thin Blue Line is another good BBC one.

[Beelzebub1111]

Hot Fuzz - a brilliant police comedy film

Scot Squad - an excellent BBC comedy series following the supposed exploits of ordinary Scottish police officers.

If comedies are on the table you can't do much better than Reno 911. Magnifies the ridiculous crap that is also somehow also routine cop stuff.

[Mastikator]

Wellington Paranormal is also a great source of inspiration for magical, silly cop hijinks.
Cops are sent out to deal with a too loud house? House is possessed by ghosts partying.

[tomandtish]

Then how are they a couple in the first place? This one makes no sense. (Some of your others, however, I am stealing for future use).


Oh, I know plenty of couples In RL that hate each other but are still couples. Sounds plausible to me.

Given that they are members of longer lived races, it's not totally unreasonable that they were much more compatible a few centuries ago but one or both have changed enough that they aren't. As Winrtermoot said this happens to plenty of couples as time passes. It's probably more likely that one of them became racist. Dwarf's complaining about damn Drow became complaining about damn elves, and the elf has had enough.

[KorvinStarmast]

Given that they are members of longer lived races, it's not totally unreasonable that they were much more compatible a few centuries ago but one or both have changed enough that they aren't. As Winrtermoot said this happens to plenty of couples as time passes. It's probably more likely that one of them became racist. Dwarf's complaining about damn Drow became complaining about damn elves, and the elf has had enough. That's the part I find less likely, given the long association. The "we get on each other's nerves" is certainly a thing with couples who have been married for a long time.
But never mind, this is a bit of a derail.

[NeptunianOM]

I would just look up episode descriptions from old Police shows, fantasize them and copy/paste the plot. :smallcool:

Like:

- "A PC's ex is back on the scene, but little does he know that she's involved with fur thieves and is using him to help them plan their next heist."
- "Some murder victims turn out to be killers freed on technicalities, but the PCs have to decide if vigilantes or crooked cops are the murderers."
- "The PCs help to recover a statue of Desna that was stolen from a church."
- "The PCs are given dog animal companions so they can sniff out illegal pesh."
- "The PCs track down a forgery suspect who has been brainwashed by her friends."

[Witty Username]

Cadfael is another idea mine, it is a dark ages mystery TV series, less police more detective work in a setting appropriate way.

[KorvinStarmast]

Cadfael is another idea mine, it is a dark ages mystery TV series, less police more detective work in a setting appropriate way. Wait a sec, Brother Cadfael? Weren't those short stories or novellas? (Vague memory of reading one or two some years back).

[Catullus64]

Wait a sec, Brother Cadfael? Weren't those short stories or novellas? (Vague memory of reading one or two some years back).

There was a TV series starring Derek Jacobi. First two and a half seasons are good, then the writing seriously declines.

[Witty Username]

Yeah, I only found out about the written version last night, a quick check to Wikipedia to make sure I spelled things correctly.

[RedMage125]

Wellington Paranormal is also a great source of inspiration for magical, silly cop hijinks.
Cops are sent out to deal with a too loud house? House is possessed by ghosts partying.

I'm sonpleased to see someone else who knows about this show. I love it.

It's also inspired a few ideas I've got for an Investigative campaign I'm working on (set in Eberron).

[rel]

It's D&D, so the PC's should go into a dungeon at some point because that's where the system excels.

Here are a few good reasons for the PC's to find themselves searching 10 by 10 rooms to punch monsters far from the prying eyes of the real law who might want to keep any loot the PC's find as evidence.

-find the smugglers operating out of the sewers
-raid the creepy cult house that's started radiating weird magic
-rescue some students who went missing in the extensive cellars of the local wizard school
-rescue some town guards who went missing while on patrol near some condemned buildings used by a criminal gang.
-raid a corrupt nobles estate before they can destroy the evidence of their wrong doing
-the dead have grown unquiet in the catacombs below the local temple. Pacify them and figure out what's getting them so riled up.