"What type of adventures for high status PCs?" Topic

King-Emperor Thandak felt some trepidation on leaving his capital. The goblin tribes on the northern border hadclashed with the patrols already. This early in the year, that could only be a prelude to war. His brother, Duke Velinax had openly refused this year's tribute, and such defiance to the crown could not be countenanced. Then, there was also plague in the southern port cities. He must get the temples on that quickly, or many lives and a whole year's trade could be lost.

Still, the king had been drinking in the Wretching Lamprey Tavern that morning, when a guy had walked in the door selling a treasure map to the local 3rd level dungeon, and one did have to keep one's priorities in order…

***

Obviously, the motivation for an apprentice wizard or a down-on-his-luck mercenary to go adventuring is going to be very different from that of a high level political figure. This was a problem I often ran into in Birthright, and now I am running into it again in Star Prince and Wizard Prince.

Obviously, half the fun of any rpg is plain, old fashioned adventuring, but how do you realistically get the king to go dungeon crawling when affairs of state are pressing at hand?

Others may have found different solutions to the problem, but it seems to me that a ruler will go adventuring only when it is forced upon him. He already HAS great wealth, power, etc. Why go crawling around in unlikely dungeons when you don't have to.

So, the adventures tend to take the following forms:

-nobles on their way to a galactic conference have their ship malfunction near the frontier of known space, and their lifeboat crashes on a planet full of hostile life forms.

-Count Eblezen the Magnificent awakens to find half his household staff murdered, and goes chasing guild assassins through his castle armed with enchanted sword and dressed in his bedroom slippers.

-and then, of course, there's always the kidnapped wife/lover/child.

Basically, where low status adventurers are concerned, they seek out the adventure, and where lords and emperors areconcerned, the adventure has to come to them.

Your thoughts?

How about the dungeon being the only way out for the king's besieged army?

Or a giant dragon ambushes the royal caravan, and carries off the tax money to its lair.

Or the princess wants kobold à la crème for supper.

The baddies know something *embarrassing* to the gentry in question. Time for the dagger before dawn treatment.

we did a cool game that involved court intrigues. It was no dungeon crawl. We rolled about three d20's all night. But it was a blast. We had two DMs, me and my buddy, and 5 PCs. It was the best game of D&D I have ever played. We split them off into groups, everyone was suspicious of each other and so on. They finally figured out what was going on at the end.

1) Recovering some relic needed to unite the kingdom or vanquish a mythic foe that has just returned

2) Getting same relic/weapon before the pretender to the throne gets it

3) Being two places at once: The usurper has raised an army backed by foreign troops and threatens your northern border hoping to distract the sovereign into heading north while the usurper's force seizes the capitol from the south. If the Royalists go south, they will be trapped between two strong forces which will be numerically superior. A small team of high-level adventurers can stealthily slip into the southern stronghold while the Royal forces march north with an illusion of the monarch. A forgotten dungeon leads to the catacombs under the traitor's city and the tunnels will deliver the adventurers straight to the heart of his citadel.

Wyatt

The games you play may already deal with this, but take a look at the Minimus RPG (free!) and see how it deals with establishing networks of relationships and goals. Practically drives the action without the need for the GM to do much …

The King is the usurper and the righteous heir is held cruelly in the deepest dungeons.

I think the main thing is not to try to have the high-level lord characters go dungeon crawling except for once is a blue moon, using a hook already mentioned. Focus on military actions, court intrigue, etc. If the players need to have a dungeon crawl itch scratched, let the PCs' children (or younger siblings) do it, with the PCs providing some background support.

"kobold à la crème"? Well… they do things differently in Nilsonland, don't they?

I agree that higher level characters are more suited to things like military campaigns, court intrigue, and such. I also agree that sometimes a good old dungeon crawl/ hack and slash is what's needed to shake off the cob webs. It is easy to slip one into a larger adventure as a one off thing.

Example of one I used:

Characters were on military campaign, and the forces were split to catch the bad guys as they escaped; in a hammer and anvil move. The characters party led a force on a hook through a remote mountain pass. They were attacked by some xenophobic Giants and took refuge in an abandoned monastery. Things started going bump in the night (I borrowed liberally from Evil Dead) and the characters ended up rooting out a necromancer leading a warren of Ghouls, while the rest of the troop fended off the Giants.

In the course of 2-3 game nights the players can go from gaming political intrigue to being a speck in a mass battle to a simple dungeon crawl.

Do you mean high level or high status or both?

High status: Diplomacy is BORING! I want to go out and hit something, dammit.

Hitting something can just be diplomacy carried out by other means.

Particularly if you are Neotacha…

Neotacha, I love you, but High level diplomacy is fun!

Have you ever played the Diplomacy board game? The negotiation period alone is pricleless, but when it finally hits the point that you successfully stab another player in the back? It's priceless.

Now, multiply that by the fun of doing it to somebody who painfully struggled up from first level over three years, and you may just have put the guy into therapy.

That is priceless BEYOND priceless.

Maybe the king just happens to like dungeoncrawling? It might be a popular form of recreation for nobles, like hunting was in medieval Europe.

Or he could be doing it for the money. Feudal incomes could be unstable, and recovering some great treasure could be just what he needs to pay his soldier̈́'s wages for the next campaign.

how do you realistically get the king to go dungeon crawling when affairs of state are pressing at hand?

That seems like a pretty good reason to me.
The king may simply want to go adventuring. Especially in fantasy games, the King almost always got to be king by being a warrior of some sort first. That sort of man may perfer straight combat to annual rainfall reports or choosing the color of new drapes.

In fact, a King like that would make an excellent hook. "The King That Can't be Found" campaign, where the king simply won't stay put and adventurers are constantly being sent to bring him back.

Read some of the later Conan timeline (yes, even the pastiches) and King Kull.

Then, read "The Unbeheaded King" by de Camp.

Also find the ongoing bit of keyboard diarhea from George R.R. Martin. Lots of nobles running around.

Odysseus was a king, and look where that got him.

While hardly a normal fantasy setting, Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber" are all about a royal family.

Several chunks of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni cycle deal directly with nobles and royals.

In a more comedic vein, several of Bob Asprin's Aahz & Skeeve books deal with reigning over a kingdom.

I now have this mental image of Henry VIII and Francis I vanishing from the Field of Cloth of Gold. Because TWO kings on a dungeon crawl is way more fun than just one. And it's diplomacy too….