I think this is the right place for the topic, but I’m running a quarantine game over Roll20, we’ve had 2ish sessions so far, but they were a brief session zero over discord, and then the second was an intro to BW on Roll20 + more complete character introductions + the beginnings of the adventure.
The setting is pretty standard fantasy fair, with a Capital City served by many noble houses, 7 of which hold council and 1 of which is king (very GoT). The Big Picture is set around political intrigue, and the immediate Situation is that there’s a land trade deal to the north, where the dwarves are giving up some unexploited, gold-rich mountain to the human lands in order to gain a seat on the council (making 8 members, an even number, meaning tied votes can happen and whatnot). The party has been set forth to finalize this trade deal, along with representatives from each house, each trying to maximize what their house (and the humans more generally) get out of it. There’s an obviously “bad/evil” house that the players are (rightfully) leery of and I expect the game to move in that direction (of “dealing with evil house”) as the representative of that house (the eldest son, secret half dark elf) does bad stuff TM during the negotiations.
My issue with this as it stands right now is that the group is really eclectic, coming from different castes, races, and settings, and we’re having hard time creating beliefs that can be challenged.
- We have a human scribe/scholar type who’s being sent to record the whole deal
- the advisor/hand of the king
- the brother and main representatives of one of the ruling noble houses (originally his bastard squire, but we moved him to a side 1-on-1 game as his long term goals of becoming the greatest swordsman ever really didn’t fit with where the game was going)
- a greedy dwarf who wants to get the trade deal as favorable as possible for the dwarves
- hippie Elf type who wants to prevent the whole deal from happening because of river pollution and whatnot (or else find some other way of protecting the sacred river).
Obviously, there’s plenty of room for conflict between characters, but we’re having a hard time writing beliefs that are tied to the situation immediately enough in order to make it work. My main thought here was to type up the actual text of the trade deal as it stands, and then have a set of duel of wits both between the players and relevant NPCs to work out the exact wording of who gets what from this deal, and the beliefs can be directly tied to that. I’m also worried about the scribe/scholar character, who isn’t directly powerful enough in the setting to really do much it seems, at least for this adventure (she could definitely be of more help during an “end/weaken the evil house” campaign), because I’m having trouble writing challenging beliefs for her. Also
Would it be possible at all to post each character and their beliefs and get some help untangling this mess? I feel like I’m so close to having this game get off the ground, but just need to get this final (very important) piece in place to really make it tick.