Front Help?
The full plotline is this:
The vampire overlord Savanar Blackwing has allied with the great demon Malfegrus in order to bring a permanent night so that the vampires can roam free and feed.
There are also wandering werewolf packs.
I have three dangers so far for the campaign front:
Savanar Blackwing (Lord of the Undead)
*Impending Doom: Sun disappears forever
**Grim Portents: Vampires gain a foothold in the realm; They begin adding to their ranks; A temple for the moon is built; Demons begin appearing; Night falls
Malfegrus (Demonic Prince)
*Impending Doom: The world ends
**Grim Portents (Begin at Demons Appear for Savanar): Souls are harvested; Night falls (same timeline as for Savanar); Vampires are killed; Demons rule
Werewolf Packs (Humanoid Vermin)
*Impending Doom: Humanity is overrun
**Grim Portents: A village is lost; Clans arise; Boundaries are drawn; Humans are hunted for sport; Humans go extinct
I made this completely off of the example provided in the playbook, but it seems like it needs something, any ideas?
Vampires: the first two grim portents are rather vague, and hard to distinguish from each other. What would you show, in game, to represent that those grim portents had occurred?
Related, I like grim portents to be events or specific moments rather than ongoing things. For example, “Vampire nests established in Smalltown, Capitolcity, and Farkeep” is more specific, observable, and actionable than “Vampires gain a foothold in the realm.” Similarly, “Savanar issues edict to vampire bands, urging them to sire new spawn” is a moment in time, a thing that can be observed or heard about and possibly stopped. “They begin adding to their ranks” is pretty nebulous. Why are they doing so? How would the PCs stop it?
Demons: I like the idea of fronts that conflict with each other, and leaving it up to stakes questions as to which ones triumph. But this one feels… I dunno, superfluous? Like, the vampires bringing about endless night and ruling over humanity seems significantly bad that beyond that, I can’t really care very much about “world ends.” Could you dial it back, such that the vampires getting their way still works but the demons also get something that seriously changes the world for the worse, but that doesn’t just make the world gone? Like, maybe if they get their way an ancient demon prince is awakened and it ends up waging war against the vampires? Or a permanent hellmouth opens and half the world is overrun by demons (and the other half is overrun by vampires, and mortals scrape out a living between them).
Werewolves: Right now, they seem like a tack-on danger. Could they have more agency, a goal that’s more interesting (and different than) “hunt humans?” Maybe their goal is to tear down civilization? Or maybe they’re more directly opposed to the vampires & demons, and really don’t want endless night even though it seems like they would, because reasons. But in pursuing their goals (stopping Savanar), they are also setting themselves up to change the world to their liking in a way that totally screws mortality. Like, they’ve got a solution that would awaken the nature itself to tear down and burn out the vampires, but doing so would overrun civilization and send humanity back to the stone age.
Thank you for the feedback, i will update it and post it again to make sure everything looks right 🙂
Well, if the sun disappears, wouldn’t the moon as well? At least, it wouldn’t shine, so that could be one reason the werewolves are opposed to the vampires.