Wednesday 6 May 2015

The voting day of your setting

Elections! Voting! How much does this kind of thing happen in game settings? If political change happens it tends to be a big deal, as it should be if the game gives it due focus. A change that makes less of a difference might be interesting background for a few sessions.

Dunkelzahn the celebrity dragon becoming President in Shadowrun and promptly being assassinated was a big enough deal to get two books, despite his replacing a President who hadn’t really been established beforehand and being replaced by, er, someone once he was gone.

The practicalities of campaigning can bring in adventure hooks as well. The Dunkelzahn campaign produced a book of adventures loosely to closely connected to electioneering, candidates in danger and the like. Aberrant Worldwide Phase I covers an election in a post-superhuman-singularity world with superhuman candidates and super-genius manipulations of polls, and advice on how to run the adventure if a player character becomes a candidate. A PC becoming President would change the game immensely even if it doesn’t change the setting all that much...

Of course, RPGs work around coups more than elections, if only because you can have a coup any day of the year...

4 comments:

  1. I've had PCs get involved in politics in games before. They tend to make it much, much worse. Like that time they managed to turn Golem Ghandi into Golem Stalin after talking at him.

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    1. Why does this not surprise me...? :)

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    2. They're PCs they often make everything much worse.

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    3. Yes! This is why so many NPCs try to kill them on sight!

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