Some campaign advice?

[halfdragon62]

Hi, I'm running an Eberron campaign for my group, and I have a clear idea of who my BBEG is. I plan for this guy to a thorn in my group's side sporadically throughout the campaign, particularly as a villain who likes to mess with the characters' heads, both in terms of creating a bit of horror, and in presenting the players with difficult moral dilemmas.

I already have some pretty good ideas for some challenging moral dilemmas, but I will need more: I'm looking for the sort of dilemmas that the players may discuss later on in their own time and ask: "Did we really do the right thing back there?" Ideally, the dilemmas would force the players to try and decide what choice is the lesser of two evils: Either choice has positives and negatives, and the players need to decide the outcome based on their own moral beliefs. it shouldn't be a case of "good vs evil" or "law vs Chaos", but more like "Rights of the few or Needs of the many?" or "Do we subvert a people's beliefs or genocide them because robbing them of their free will is worse?".

Any suggestions?

[DabblerWizard]

Moral dilemmas are very interesting, philosophically speaking.

In that scenario, you are forced to choose between options where none of the choices are pleasant or good.

Here's a website with a couple interesting examples based on a text on moral philosophy: http://www.friesian.com/valley/dilemmas.htm

[Kylarra]

Make sure that your group is aware that shades of grey is the style of campaign that you're playing.

[Venerable]

My group faced one of these recently in our Eberron campaign. We pursued a high-value hostile NPC to one of Arcanix's magical colleges. Atop the college was a magical gate, primed to activate, upon which was a large pile of bombs. The target NPC started the bombs' countdown and made for a nearby waiting airship. We had to make a choice: did we (A) pursue our NPC target, or (B) try to defuse the bombs?

We didn't know where the gate led, but we did know that the NPC's goal was to restart the Last War.

It was a nice "your agenda vs. the bigger picture" dilemma.

[To everyone's surprise, we managed to both defuse the bombs and capture the NPC, but we split the party in the process.]

[herrhauptmann]

Read a comic recently where a villain did something quite like this.
He himself wasn't powerful, but he knew the weakness of almost every hero, and had a series of gadgets that would help him in pretty much every respect.

His plan was something about locking the homecities of the heros away in time, and it had already been enacted by the time they found him (took some heavy losses catching him too).
Good news bad news time: his plan to lock the cities away in time failed, but the device was doing a good job of wrecking the cities anyway. The heroes could keep trying to disarm the devices, but generally a failed attempt resulted in even more damage to the city, and usually incapacitated whoever just attempted it.
So they had a choice, release him and he'd disarm the devices, or hold onto him at the cost of all they hold dear.