Wanted
Framed for crimes they didn’t commit? And by last week’s evil twins no less? The injustice of it all!
I’m a particular fan of this trope. Not necessarily the wanted poster and the mistaken identity, but the sense of a pervasive antagonistic force arrayed against the party (in this case the city watch / mercenary companies / assorted bounty hunters). When you set up this kind of storyline, there’s always some kind of powerful organization or group opposing the Heroes, and they’ll have to band together to survive.
If you’ve ever done an escaped prisoners scenario, soldiers behind enemy lines, or an X-Men type superhero game (those mutant freaks have to be put down!) then you know how useful this kind of antagonist can be. It’s not just that something wants to murder the PCs. If an evil wizard is trying to kill you then you just kill him back, easy-peasy. But when it’s some large and amorphous force—a crime syndicate, the CIA, an entire hobgoblin army—then the PCs are facing more than a monster. They’re suddenly the underdogs fighting insurmountable odds. They’re desperate outcasts in a harsh and malevolent setting. The whole world is arrayed against them, and now they’ve got to defy that world. Sometimes, that is exactly what it takes to turn PCs into heroes.
So how about it? Have you ever joined a gang of thieves trying to stay a step ahead of the watch? A pirate crew sailing against the whole of the royal navy? Perhaps a small band of resistance fighters pitted against a dystopian government? Sound off in the comments, and let’s hear about your favorite “pervasive antagonistic force.”
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
We wound up on the run from the law at the get-go of a campaign. Joined an organization we were pretty sure was a crime syndicate and now we are working to “clear our name” with the military force that has been trying to catch us. We aren’t sure who set us up yet, but we believe it’s at least one of the powers that we are “earning” our freedom through…
So what did that sense of “being hunted” do to the party psychology?
We started becoming less and less concerned with keeping his power in check.
We went from avoiding fights with law enforcement, to non-lethal damage, to lethal damage, to “eliminate all threats”.
After the first few attacks, it’s hard to ignore the dangers of going easy on an enemy that isn’t going easy on you.
In the Pathfinder game I played in, the game mostly took place on airships, flying above a plasma-filled void between floating ‘islands’ of land the size of continents. Land was almost always a hotly contested resource.
There was one group us players affectionately called ‘Sky Nazis.’ They were at one time a fairly peaceful, lawful-focused society that spread the word of their god through missionaries and such. But one day in the past, all the gods fell silent and stopped responding to their followers. At that point, there was a coup in the Sky Nazi leadership, and they began to teach that humans were the superior life, that their god had left because the world was too ‘unclean’ and they began attacking their neighbors, turning nonhumans into corpses or slaves for hard labor, and they had an entire shady arm of the military devoted to hunting down ANYONE who used spiritual powers that didn’t come from their god.
My kobold was a shaman who drew power directly from the Earth and Fire Planes.
This… Put him at odds with them on every possible level. It didn’t help we also had an Aasimar ratfolk, and an Inquisitor Gnoll who was one of the last members of a god of battle’s clergy left alive after their HQ got blasted with a fantasy WMD by the Big Bad of the story.
We were going to have to deal with them at some point in the near future – especially after we got into an air naval battle with a small force of them and hijacked one of their ‘flying cathedral’ airships and added it to our navy. The DM warned us that was VERY likely to get their attention much, much faster, but we did it anyway because we were getting tired of dancing around the issue and we had plans to create something to add to our navy that was going to make us untouchable.
My kobold was going to put gigantic engines on a floating mountain, and turn it into a mobile fortress manned by an army of kobolds and dwarves that followed the will of the elements. And then put a railgun on it big enough to be a credible threat, even to the Big Bad’s super-future-ancient-tech ship with a WMD laser on it.
Unfortunately the game ended due to DM burnout before all of that came to pass, but the SKy Nazis were probably some of the most pervasive enemies we had in that game, and we were wanted criminals in a pretty significant chunk of the planet because they’d taken control of a lot of it.
Sky nazis. I hate these guys.
Please tell me you had an archaeologist bard on the team.
Unfortunately no. We went in blind so didn’t know there’d be Sky Nazis when we made characters. The DM apparently hadn’t anticipated us making an entire group of nonhuman/non-core characters, though. Over time, we had in the group: An elf magus, a kobold gunslinger who later went shaman and was a religious figurehead, a gnoll inquisitor who later became a religious figurehead, an Aasimar ratfolk bard/rogue (Who did have some archeological leanings, if it helps,) an orc fighter, a ‘custom-to-the-setting race that was basically the Novakid from Starbound’ Swashbuckler, a kitsune Titan Mauler Barbarian, and a half-fairy dragon dragonrider (A third party class. The combination sounds like a minmaxer, I know, but they were totally knew to Pathfinder and almost totally new to tabletop RPGs in general, so the DM let them do whatever sounded cool because we didn’t figure they knew enough yet to be dangerous with it.)
If we ever return to the setting, though, I do intend to seriously consider rolling an archeologist JUST so they can drop that line.
I’m currently laying groundwork for a superhero themed 3-shot Pathfinder game. The central story will revolve around a powerful organization that regulates and perpetuates crime and their ongoing conflict with superpowered good guys. (think the Guild from Venture Brothers against the Hero’s Association from One Punch Man.)
The structure will revolve around undercutting the opposed organization by going after some of their key agents, and it all builds up to a major heist by the villians while the heroes try to stop them.
Naturally: I’ll let the players work for either organization.
Everyone gets free levels in Vigilante? Nice.
I’m thinking of giving out a weaker version of Dual Identity, at least. Maybe an alternate bonus if people want to “Tony Stark” it.
I’m going to have fun designing a rival hero/villain team for the party to fight.
The campaign I’m about to start running is going to begin with the PCs in a prison caravan being shipped to certain doom. I call this the Elder Scrolls beginning. They’ve been arrested because the nation they’re in doesn’t like outsiders and decided to crack down about 2 days before the campaign actually starts, so they’re going to be outlaws from the start.
Mostly, it’s a mechanic to get the pack of madmen and holy men and mad holy men to work together long enough to finish Session 1. My group is bad about the whole “collaborative character creation” thing.
If you want a handy resource to draw on for that setup, you might look at the 5e Out of the Abyss path for inspiration. I’m a PC in that one at the moment, and it has a pretty good “fleeing the prison yard” setup to start.
I’m playing in one of those too. I had the brilliant idea to use the shoving mechanic to make our escape the moment the drow came for another NPC prisoner to just shove all the drow off the nearby cliff. It didn’t kill them of course (as there were spiderwebs to fall on), but it bought us enough time to go run off and find our stuff. My character also conveniently knew Feather Fall and used both spell slots to have our party leap off the cliff to safety and book it before the drow had any chance of catching up to us.
And yeah, it really does work pretty well for getting a group together.
Certainly sounds more clever than our “run in a clump into each and every heavily guarded room and then flee before retrieving our stuff” solution. I was proud of cutting the rope bridge while we were being pursued though. I think we dumped a few quaggoths with that maneuver.
Well, yes and no. One of the defining moments of my RPG live was in an RQ campaign, in Glorantha. We were in Notchet, basically the biggest city on one of the two continents in that world. And we joined a criminal gang, more or less willingly, to get some money, and board and lodging. So the GM, bless his evil heart, sends us out on our first mission for the gang. Turns out, that we had to go for some protection money from a shopkeeper. And in his own house to boot. So there we were, all five of us, capable fighters and grizzeld veterans of many fights, in this kitchen of this shopkeeper, where he was sitting at the kitchen table, with his wife and small children. And we had to get the money…. That was when we realised that we were now the bad guys. That we cossed some line somewhere, and that, if we wanted to survive within the gang, we would need to do some ugly stuff…. So we all look at each other, and finally our informal leader says: we took the job, lets get on with it. So he started beating the guy about. I was the second one to start hurting him, and all the rest followed suit.
However, then came another of the defining moments of my RPG live. The wife did not look kindly upon us roughing up her husband, so she took up her rolling pin, and started attacking me. And the GM rolls a crit, when she hits me.. Critical Rolling Pin attack. I’m down for the count. Had a heck of a time living that one down in the rest of the campaign.
And after that, Although we did get the money, if memory serves, we decided that we were not cut out to be criminals, so we attacked the gang HQ, who then sent quite a few assasins after us while we were on Notchet during the rest of the campaign
But what happened to Rolling Pin Wife? Did she go on to become an adventurer? A town guard? Did you return some of your gang HQ loot to the family? I’M INVESTED NOW! I NEED ANSWERS!
I guess that’s the thing about criminal campaigns. We very seldom see the actual “hurting people” part of crime. It gets glossed into a picaresque, and so you never have to make hard decisions. Bless your GM’s evil heart indeed.
As someone who has currently gotten obsessed with Assassin’s Creed, I appreciated this reference
Laurel’s favorite series. She was all kinds of grinning when I handed her this script. 😀
Hmm, I did play a rebel fighter in a dystopian setting a couple of years ago. It was one of those campaigns that sadly ended too soon due to critical player failure, but I did enjoy my character. He was a Zealot Barbarian by class, but by backstory and characterisation he was an upper-middle class city kid, educated as a clerk, who had thrown all that away as young men are wont to do, to join the revolution.
He was a high intelligence, low wisdom character (because I love screwing with stereotypes); he idolised his fellow party members, assuming them all to be much greater heroes than himself since they had all grown up on the rough side of society – though witnessing some of the things slowly disabused him of this notion. Above all he was suicidally prone to mouthing off at figures of The Establishment when they threatened him.
I do recall that, when the party was captured in what turned oit to be the penultimate session, he was the only one to resist arrest, with a rather inappropriate suggestion for the tyrant queen that involved the phrase “bristly balls”. he did have to be raised from the dead after that.
Given the abrupt end of the campaign, I like to imagine that maybe he never was resurrected, actually. He would have been happy to die in such a fashion, a sort of fantasy Che Guevara, talking smack to power to the bitter end.
If you ever want to get back into a “fight the power” game, I’m digging the shit out of this AP. It wouldn’t be too hard to port over to 5e:
https://www.amazon.com/Pathfinder-Adventure-Path-Crimson-Throne/dp/1601258909
Thanks! I’d have to find someone to DM if I want to be a player myself, but it’s worth considering!
Once my superhero team in Mutants and Masterminds had to deal with strong public backlash because someone had fabricated a disastrous explosion that had left a lot of people homeless. The PR damage we sustained was enormous: so the billionaire in the group decided to launch a PR campaign to get us back on track, getting the best lawyers to work on our case (thankfully, his secret identity was as intact as when we started the game) while we all went on a vacation in Africa, where we took a delightful trek through the wilderness, wrestled crocodiles and hippos, almost got sunburnt and put a lot of warlords out of business by crashing their parties with no survivors.
After that we returned and found that public opinion had basically zeroed out for us: the general public was mostly calm (out of sight, out of mind) and we returned to do our superhero thing and rebuilding our rep from scratch.