GUILD/ORGANIZATION CONFLICT

Given their importance within and infl uence on the urban landscape, it is inevitable that the city’s various power groups will come into confl ict sooner or later. If the DM decides to focus some or all of his city-based campaign on such confl ict, two questions must be answered before he even thinks about putting pen to paper. The first question is, “What is the scope of the conflict?” Even if the DM opts to restrict himself to the options provided in Chapter Three, that still provides him with nearly two dozen different groups (and even that’s only painting in the broadest of strokes). Does he intend to plunge the city into an all-out guild war, with each guild working actively and aggressively to dismantle the infrastructure of the others? If so, he again needs to find a root cause.

More often than not, the most effective approach is to just pick two guilds or organizations in particular, and make the decision to set the two at odds with one another. This is easiest to do with predominantly evil or criminal groups, such as the slavers guild and the thieves guild, who usually don’t need much of a reason to engage in protracted confl ict with other organizations. Just as simple and effective, however, is the advancement of hostilities between two existing rival organizations. Since many organizations revolve around a particular agenda or ideology—especially political and religious groups—it’s usually just a simple matter of coming up with an incident or event from which the new spate of hostilities can stem.

It’s important to remember that part of defining scope is setting the parameters of the conflict. Once the groups and the causes of the confl ict have been established, the DM needs to determine just how those parties are conflicting. Do they strike at one another socially, at high society events and the like, in an attempt to weaken their opponents’ credibility or image? Or are their salvos more directly political in nature, with each group attempting to secure the support of local political fi gures, or even other prominent organizations, in its bid for supremacy? If the DM decides that the confl icting parties have fallen to violence, he must decide when and why the confl ict turned bloody, as well as what sort of shape that violence takes. Do the rivals send assassins to one another’s homes, or are large-scale battles taking place in the streets in broad daylight? The DM needn’t establish every single detail ahead of time, but knowing how things came to be is instrumental in telling the story.

The second and perhaps most important question the DM needs to answer before embarking on a campaign or campaign arc of this nature is how to get the PCs involved. Even if the PCs are good-aligned defenders of the city, the matter of how they come to know and become involved with a particular confl ict will color the scope and tone of their involvement. If the DM is using the systems outlined in this book as the model for his urban campaign, it is highly likely that the PCs will belong to at least one house, guild, or organization themselves, or at a bare minimum, will at least have contacts within similar groups. If this is the case, how will the PCs feel about a confl ict between the two (or more) groups in question? If one of the characters is a member of one of the confl icting groups, it creates a seamless way to get the group involved but invites a host of new questions—some of which might prove challenging to answer. And if the DM wants to really shake things up, he can establish a confl ict between groups who each have representation within the player characters, thus forcing the characters to work out the confl ict among themselves before attempting to address it in their respective groups at large.