Campaign Spin-Up V - adding tension to your campaign location

Taking the challenge of Beginnings for the January 2023 RPG Blog Carnival from Of Dice and Dragons I want to talk about stacking gunpowder in the corners of a setting. For more on what this means see Wandering Gamist "Gisli's Saga and Boot Hill" on how one could set up a powderkeg for a campaign location.

I am testing this during the spin-up of a West Marches style campaign dubbed 'Southern Reaches' - set to the south of my existing Home Campaign. The original process is from Boot Hill and while I don't want to mimic the 'everything one step from murder' of that campaign I think we do want to bake in factions, goals and stakes folk might have. Somewhere I heard 'the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small' - even if we are looking for a generally non-lethal setting, one where the locals have views that the players might upset is better (for a sandbox) than 'dedicated villain'.

Back to our source: "what makes for good intrigue in a tabletop game?
- There must be many diverse agendas and moving parts to navigate.
- Players should know they should step carefully and never be certain how well they’re succeeding.
- They must feel the consequences of failure, but also that these fates are fair and not arbitrary."

From efforts so far using 'Downtime as Worldbuilding', map-reading and randomly generated city aspects and map elements we have a start on what this region is, and from the test of Deck of Worlds we have a few local elements.

The Boot Hill example is a 'high potential' unstable equilibrium - the slightest disruption and it is all going to turn into gunsmoke and arson. I think what I want for this game is a slightly more buried set of problems, ones that the locals will get sore about but not that will get people knifed in their sleep (not as a first response, in any case). From our Session Zero we have identified that the players want to start off operating out of a tavern on the edge of a wilderness, being a band of Merry Men. As the players will be newcomers to the locality, I am going to set things up as they were the day before they arrived and then let the consequences of the players actions domino from there.

So I need to comb through what has been generated and see how it all gels together. This could be seen as 'emergent faction building' from the world-building stages so far.

The things I want to establish are:
- Big personalities that get talked about locally - the power players small folk curse for their taxes or toast to their health.
- Agents of some of the big organisations - the faces the players will actually see.
- Some local players in the town of Balronco.

Sweeping up all the rumours and elements so far we see three major 'power players' - the Sineyama mages who nominally rule the realm, the High Church in Hluthodore and the Count of Ulhoralo, lord of the locality. Between these three we have a more-or-less sharp elbowed jockeying for prestige and position with the Count trying to stave off the interfering Clergy and Mages. For most of the small-folk of the realm this is 'elephants fight and the grass gets trampled' stuff - should representatives of any of them show up in town they will become the de-facto boss of Balronco for as long as they are there. I have the big-picture and local objectives for each of these well resources factions which may or may not become relevant as and when they turn up in town.

What is known to all is the big drivers for the powers - that the Mages rule the realm and are mostly motivated by recovery and mastery of the lore of the elves, and view all ruins and old treasures as theirs first. The Count is mostly concerned with his independence and getting his cut of anything going on in his realm. The High Church is known for a tendency to turn up and do things or demand things be done at the will of one the gods of the pantheon and woe betide anyone who defies them or does not move fast enough in obeying them. Each can be helpful when you have a problem that falls in their area of interest but mostly the small-folk see them as more trouble than they are worth and the less they have to deal with any of them, the better.

Next we have the groups among the small-folk themselves - the Swamp Mining Guild and the smugglers. These have parallel but separate concerns and mostly do not interfere with one another but both avoid contact with the power players where possible - to dodge either taxes or arrests. Beneath that there are two splinters, the Sages and the Hunters who exist but have little influence.

Blocking out these factions, I swept up any identified personalities from the Downtime workflow into one of these, then chucked in anyone else who had cropped up in prep so far - whoever was in charge of the monastery in the Greater Forest of Leng, the outcasts of the Delta of Feathers, the personages of Dotheas - the master criminal, the guard captain, the high sheriff, etc. Obvious cues like there being major jousting at Dotheas got a representative (one of the Church Knights)

From there factions with no obvious local leader got one of randomly rolled ancestry where it was not obvious (the head of the fly-ling smugglers is a fly-ling) which lead to the tax master of Balronco turning out to be a slothling. Suddenly this all makes sense - we are looking at a post-fall of the Empire land, obviously the books are absolutely creaking under ludicrous taxes and laws from a thousand years of elven domination and Balronco has been strangled by this. The Swamp Miners are just about able to work around this as long as noone looks too closely, the locals rely on the smugglers to make any sort of living.

Now we have our set up for a Merry Men campaign - the overly rigid enforcement of unworkable laws from Dotheas is making everyone cross. Balronco has long seen its glory days pass (when the water level was lower) and is currently surviving as a stub riddled with smugglers. The authorities in the province see Balronco as irrelevant and in fact "sent to Balronco" or "Balronco-ed" is the phrase for putting something or someone where it can do no harm, despite their incompetence.

So in Balronco we have a town where the 'legal' authorities were bad when they got here and are now demoralised on top of that. The Swamp Guilders diligently work to observe the byzantine laws where they can and the smugglers circumvent them where they must.

Putting these all together on a grid and asking how each of the factions sees the others we get some amusing breaks - the power players all see the Guilders as good honest subjects of the realm while the Guilders themselves want nothing to do with the power players. Green is 'positively inclined', yellow is neutral, orange is 'negatively inclined'.

Knowing what faction an NPC belongs to I can use that along with a reaction roll to figure out what any given NPC motivations is going to be - I have written about this before.

Here we have our gunpowder - on the maps there are three heavy hitting authorities that could turn up at any time and ruin things but for as long as Balronco remains a disreputable fly-spec all will be well - so long as no one should do anything to draw attention to the place. Our newly arrived band of Merry Men will find potential here to either do very well or find themselves in lots of trouble.

None of the locals want them drawing attention to Balronco but anything interesting the party finds may well draw the attention of the power players; this is without their past sins catching up to them and drawing attention that way. It shall be interesting to see what approach they take and how the locals react.

This will serve me well - breaking it back down into parts to get here we:
1. Created a map (randomly generated using Azgaars)
2. Randomly generated city aspect to populate our sand-box realm
3. Held a session zero to find out what the players wanted - to be based in a tavern on a trade route but relatively out in the wilderness
4. Identified a campaign start point, then zoomed in and blocked out the local region (used Deck of Worlds for this)
5. Built out campaign background using the Downtime in Zyan workflow around experts, skills and knowledge

The steps we worked through here to 'add gunpowder' were:
6. Swept up all the groups identified in and around our start region, ranked them by influence
7. Slotted anyone identified in worldbuilding so far into a faction (Regional leaders, Agents of big organisations)
8. Spotted any of the factions missing local players and added them
9. Looked at how this all fitted together and grouped the factions into 'regional powers' and 'locals'
10. Grid them all up and think about what they think of one another.

I note on reflection the one big thing I am missing here are the sea-powers since this is a coastal realm, we have a big port up the river, and there are a couple of aquatic species lurking about - both land-walking like fishlings and tritons and fully sea-dwelling like sahuagin and merfolk. Lastly, I will want to do a sweep of monsters dwelling locally to see if any are the type that would care to interfere in the affairs of small-folk. I can run with what I have but I think layering in these two extra steps will be handy to know who else might have fingers in the pie and to build out rumour tables.