More Than Dice

The night is darkest just before the dawn. In my current Star Wars campaign, set in the Old Republic, the Sith army led by Exar Kun has sacked Coruscant… If you could have seen the look on my player’s faces when that news came over the telescreen, you would have laughed maniacally along with me.

I can't see a thing in this helmet

This event got me thinking. All of the best campaigns I’ve put together have included the triumph of evil over good in the early stages of the story. Call it a trite tactic, but it’s tried and true that without some mayhem the heroism is lost. Classics such as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars both utilize this tactic and it is the hopelessness and desperation of such a campaign that will really hold your player’s interest.

The real question, however, is not whether or not this is a good tactic but how to do it. If you are too gentle, your game feels like a sandbox with little urgency and anxiety. If you are too  heavy handed then the party feels that no matter what they do, darkness continues to spread. Also,  coming from my own experience both as a player and as a DM, if you are blasting away cities, planets, and armies with a casual flick of your wrist the party will assume that they are not the ones who should be handling the problem. In an earlier Star Wars game I over emphasized certain powerful canon villains which gave my players the expectation that the opposed canon characters would take care of them.

One technique to spread the dominion of evil is to destroy something that the party takes for granted. In my case, Coruscant. The party had taken several jobs from there and had taken the stability of the republic for granted. And why not? The Sith War had largely ignored the core planets up until this point. By taking Coruscant I upped the threat level on the larger story line. The Sith War became less something in the background of their activities and more a source of fear and genuine worry.

The second and perhaps more dangerous way to spread the dominion of evil is to kill off characters. The choice to kill a player as opposed to an NPC is between you and your party, but taking away any character that they have come to depend upon or who is a central figure in the setting will cause your players to scramble.

After the session mentioned above, the players mentioned a higher degree of satisfaction and interest in the game. Why? Maybe because they weren’t fighting small level conflicts against evil, now they felt like the universe needed them. That is the point of plunging the world into darkness and having the villains win in the early stages of the story, to make the party feel like they are changing the world not just making money.

-Gestalt Gamer (Dan)