CRIME SPREES

Even the most powerful villain is beatable when the PCs know without a doubt that he is the foe. But what happens when the perpetrators are multitudinous and largely unconnected? What if the true foe is a trend or prevailing attitude in the city at large? Catching a clever serial killer might be diffi cult (see Mysteries, below), but at least the problem is solved when he’s fi nally brought to justice. With crime sprees, the PCs can quickly come to feel as if they’re drowning in problems. The DM won’t want his players feeling as though there’s nothing they can do but grind through each petty criminal, one at a time, in a vain attempt to stem the tide of a larger social calamity. As such, the best bet is to establish a root cause for the crime spree—a person or event to which the bulk of the recent rash of crimes can be traced. If a particular event is to blame, such as the imprisonment of a local crime boss or the assassination of the local sheriff, then the ultimate solution to the problem should lie in rectifying the event in question.

If the crime spree began after the jailing of an influential criminal figure, the PCs might be put in the intriguing position of having to negotiate with him through the bars of his prison cell. Crime sprees of any length or “efficiency” are usually the result of coordinated efforts, and it could fall to the PCs to determine who is leading the criminal charge in the boss’ absence. If the spree is bad enough, and the local law enforcement clearly in over their heads, the PCs might have to do the crime lord a favor of some kind, in exchange for his promise to rein in his thugs and return some law and order to the beleaguered city. Since this is ultimately just a patch (and doesn’t feel particularly heroic in any event), the PCs will still be faced with the root of the problem: a crime lord rules the city, not the local officials.

Some root events just can’t be rectified. If the cause of the current crime spree was the death of a local leader, whether criminal or otherwise, then nothing short of the resurrection of that leader will constitute a true rectification (and even if some local high priest was willing to do such a thing, it would again be just a patch, not a solution to the real problem). Trickier still, what if the root cause turns out to be the passing of a new tariff on a particular set of goods or services? In these situations, the PCs will likely have to resort to putting away their swords and spells and pulling out their thinking caps. Finding a good solution to a complex problem means doing some homework and asking some tough questions. Are the crimes the result of resentment among the poor, or are they the handiwork of a network of career criminals? And if the latter is true, are they doing so under someone’s orders, or specifically because nobody is left to rein them in? Only by finding the answers to the tough questions can the PCs arrive at a solution.