Zombra
An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
I want your ideas!
I'm planning to run a single story P&P game with a couple friends of mine modeled on Red Harvest, or if you haven't read that, then Yojimbo, or if you haven't seen that, then Fistful of Dollars. Basically the PCs are in an isolated town with a delicate power balance, and they wreck the balance and everyone ends up killing each other.
My intent is to have a substantial roster of NPCs, all of whom have various secrets and levers the PCs can pull to trigger events and turn them against one another. I am looking for ideas for characters and most importantly relationships, secrets, and hidden motivations that can be brought to light and spark conflicts. I figure we have some creative people here, maybe it would be fun for you to throw out some ideas.
Example: some years ago, the local police chief once framed a prominent citizen's brother for murder in order to protect the real killer. At the time everyone believed the frame, but if the citizen found out the truth, he would use his influence in town to take revenge on the chief. Perhaps the real killer would want to stop the PCs from revealing the truth, or would want to silence the citizen after he found out, or take out the chief for failing to hide the evidence.
Or an idea could be a lot simpler, like a brother who is resentful of the local pimp who turned his sister to prostitution, and has been waiting for a chance to take a crack at him.
I just want to get a lot of ideas so I can have a long list of characters available to pit against each other, to give the PCs plenty of opportunities to incite mayhem. I can't promise to use every idea, but anything will help. Also note that I don't mind ripping off the classics.
The setting is a military base and fuel mining colony during a cold war with an alien race. (The colony is all-human, maybe some robots, but no aliens.) The power groups are: (1) the military, (2) the civilian police force, (3) the wealthy corporate mining concern, (4) the local criminals who provide the vice network for the entertainment of the other three groups: gambling, drugs, prostitution, etc. All of these groups are corrupt to some degree and all have internal conflict as well as potential conflicts with each other. The closest thing to a "good" group will be the military - or at least the PCs won't want to leave the military base a smoking crater, because without the military the aliens will invade - but taking out their corrupt leadership will still be a good thing.
Not sure how the PCs will be initially involved yet - perhaps they will be military sent to investigate something only to find out about widespread corruption, then resolve to clean up the town by any means - or maybe they'll be private investigators hired to research something fairly innocuous, but their very presence lights the powder keg and then they decide to stick around and make sure it explodes the right way. I have yet to have that meeting with the players to decide.
tl;dr:
What are some cool characters to have on a space colony, that can be manipulated into attacking other characters for hidden or obvious reasons? Why haven't they done anything before now? What are good levers the PCs can pull to spur action?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Here's hoping there are some good "bored at work" idea men out there. Induldge yourselves. Also, if you know of any good sourcebooks for this kind of thing, let me know.
I'm planning to run a single story P&P game with a couple friends of mine modeled on Red Harvest, or if you haven't read that, then Yojimbo, or if you haven't seen that, then Fistful of Dollars. Basically the PCs are in an isolated town with a delicate power balance, and they wreck the balance and everyone ends up killing each other.
My intent is to have a substantial roster of NPCs, all of whom have various secrets and levers the PCs can pull to trigger events and turn them against one another. I am looking for ideas for characters and most importantly relationships, secrets, and hidden motivations that can be brought to light and spark conflicts. I figure we have some creative people here, maybe it would be fun for you to throw out some ideas.
Example: some years ago, the local police chief once framed a prominent citizen's brother for murder in order to protect the real killer. At the time everyone believed the frame, but if the citizen found out the truth, he would use his influence in town to take revenge on the chief. Perhaps the real killer would want to stop the PCs from revealing the truth, or would want to silence the citizen after he found out, or take out the chief for failing to hide the evidence.
Or an idea could be a lot simpler, like a brother who is resentful of the local pimp who turned his sister to prostitution, and has been waiting for a chance to take a crack at him.
I just want to get a lot of ideas so I can have a long list of characters available to pit against each other, to give the PCs plenty of opportunities to incite mayhem. I can't promise to use every idea, but anything will help. Also note that I don't mind ripping off the classics.
The setting is a military base and fuel mining colony during a cold war with an alien race. (The colony is all-human, maybe some robots, but no aliens.) The power groups are: (1) the military, (2) the civilian police force, (3) the wealthy corporate mining concern, (4) the local criminals who provide the vice network for the entertainment of the other three groups: gambling, drugs, prostitution, etc. All of these groups are corrupt to some degree and all have internal conflict as well as potential conflicts with each other. The closest thing to a "good" group will be the military - or at least the PCs won't want to leave the military base a smoking crater, because without the military the aliens will invade - but taking out their corrupt leadership will still be a good thing.
Not sure how the PCs will be initially involved yet - perhaps they will be military sent to investigate something only to find out about widespread corruption, then resolve to clean up the town by any means - or maybe they'll be private investigators hired to research something fairly innocuous, but their very presence lights the powder keg and then they decide to stick around and make sure it explodes the right way. I have yet to have that meeting with the players to decide.
tl;dr:
What are some cool characters to have on a space colony, that can be manipulated into attacking other characters for hidden or obvious reasons? Why haven't they done anything before now? What are good levers the PCs can pull to spur action?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Here's hoping there are some good "bored at work" idea men out there. Induldge yourselves. Also, if you know of any good sourcebooks for this kind of thing, let me know.