{"id":570,"date":"2017-10-13T00:04:04","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T00:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/campaign-design-walk-through-9-conflict\/"},"modified":"2024-01-15T15:26:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-15T21:26:26","slug":"campaign-design-walk-through-9-conflict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/campaign-design-walk-through-9-conflict\/","title":{"rendered":"Campaign Design Walk-Through 9: Conflict!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before we get into the next section of Guardians of Shymeria campaign design, I realized that I\u2019ve been missing an important game-specific trait. Since characters become Guardians as recognition for an act of great heroism, it would probably be nice to know what the characters did to get noticed by the Guardians. So I\u2019m going to be adding a \u201cHeroic Deed\u201d trait to Character Concept. At first I thought about putting it somewhere on the story info side of the character sheet but (1) it\u2019s kind of a sub-trait of Backstory and (2) I can think of a lot of cases where it makes sense for a character to get a Concept Bump based on the heroic act that got him an invitation to the order (especially if the deed involved a still-active villain or faction).<\/p>\n

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Speaking of villains and factions, we\u2019ve built up a nice little diorama of Shymeria so far, but we need one more ingredient to make it a place where the characters can have adventures: conflict. While adventures are packed with their own conflicts (Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Self, Man vs. Spiked Pit Trap, or whatever), they also tend to happen when more long-running conflicts come to a head. Right now, we\u2019re mostly concerned with that second group. It\u2019s time to look at the things we\u2019ve already created and figure out where the tensions are and how these tensions might manifest themselves in ways that the characters could get mixed up in. We\u2019re not so much looking for specific quests or missions as situations that could lead to quests and missions.<\/p>\n

The Big Conflict<\/h1>\n

Most stories (and RPGs) have one big conflict, usually built into the premise of the game, that generates many of the the smaller conflicts that the characters face: the threat posed by a villainous spy organization, survival in a\u00a0 world overrun by zombies, or the eternal battle between monsters who want to peacefully coexist in a dungeon and lunatics who want to kill them and take their stuff. Sometimes this big conflict is something that can be defeated (the enemy spy organization can be crushed), sometimes it\u2019s eternal (those monsters aren\u2019t going to kill themselves and loot their own bodies), and sometimes it\u2019s somewhere in between (humanity might eventually beat back the zombie threat, but it could take generations).<\/p>\n

In Guardians of Shymeria, the big conflict is basically the Guardians\u2019 mission statement: there are threats to Shymeria, and it\u2019s up the Guardians to defeat them. This is an eternal conflict (there will always be threats), but over the course of the campaign it the conflict will manifest as a specific threat (Bloodgrave the Demon King) that can and must be defeated; if Bloodgrave wins, there won\u2019t be an Shymeria left to protect. Early in the game, the threat of Bloodgrave will be mostly theoretical, with the heroes dealing with more run-of-the-mill threats like marauding monsters or Skeletor-like villains orchestrating their schemes-of-the-week. By the end of the first season, though, it should be clear that Bloodgrave is finally moving against the rest of the world. Depending on how quickly things escalate from there, this could lead into a period of intelligence and resource gathering with minor skirmishes in the Scarred Lands or directly into an all-out war between Good and Evil. By default, the end of the war is also the end of the campaign, but if players want to keep going the game could shift to rebuilding or (if Bloodgrave wins) freeing Shymeria from enemy control.<\/p>\n

Character-driven Conflicts<\/h1>\n

Hopefully at least some of your characters have built-in story hooks, so make sure to take a look at the PCs, talk to the players, and look for conflicts that the player have set up for their characters, then work out what you need to make those conflicts play out in the game. Looking at our Sample of Play Theater characters, we can find a few character-driven conflicts:<\/p>\n