Adventurers in Charge of a Town

Finishing my "Skull of God" series with a bunch of NPCs so I can pretend it's a coherent setting I could run out of the box.

Imagine a town like the one our old Pathfinder mercs settled in: the temple to the god of commerce had been infiltrated and replaced by clerics of the god of pestilence, the local aristocrats all became undead and trapped in their manor, and the two nearest seaside villages have been demolished by sea people and slavers and plague.

The most influential of the survivors act as an informal city council. They meet once a week in the crumbling temple, whose stony feet hold everything of value left in the town and can only be reached through unassuming alleys and garden paths, as though the neighborhood has turned its back and forgotten it; its seclusion isn't obvious. A strange weather vane - a laser rifle hammered flat - tops its steeple.

The Council

The council sits at a table on a central dais, drinking and playing "Ships and Rats." The game looks something like texas hold'em played with candyland cards and a chutes & ladders board. The stakes are high; board positions each week start out resembling each person's assets in and around the town. They have played for years.

The Knight: a faithful soldier in the old king's favorite battalion, who was rewarded after death by being transformed into a were-mannequin. Maintains fleshy form in public, reverts to mannequin form only to postpone exhaustion or other fleshy ailments. Regularly exchanges letters with former comrades, and his estate is (was) popular with vacationing nobles.

The Headmaster: leader of a large band of warrior ascetics, reputed to be spies and assassins who infiltrate fortresses in teams of two. Took in a whole mess of orphans; is teaching them one or two spells each and then hiring them out on simple chores.

The Djinni: an inept spellcaster who is also the local dentist. She employs graverobbers to get teeth for her public practice, and cadavers for her private practice. Her coupons for spellcasting are the most fungible of goods or favors being gambled, so it doesn't matter that she's the worst player.

Gives No Name: A dapple-skinned gunfighter (an appaloosa unicorn wildshaping as a humanoid) pursuing a vendetta through ghost towns and beneath lost and buried cities. Feuds with gunsmoke hellhounds and has a love-hate relationship with the demon hunters from Rum.

Also: there is a dog. No owner, just shows up for the weekly game and hangs out.

The Gardener: a bent old man who recently retired and cashed out. He tends the sprawling zen-garden-like commons on a hill in the center of town. Secretly a thousand-year-old ironwood treant; he might revert to form to repeat important advice in a more menacing, doom-filled way. (I picture him as hobbit, ent, and nazgul / nazgul-mount all in one.)

I don't think it's unusual for characters to get knighted, capture territory, build a company town, or otherwise become interested in exploiting (or preventing NPCs from exploiting) a fief. When it comes to improving or degrading a fief, I think most game systems ask the GM to invent crisis points, or ask the players to do taxes and accounting, but is there a sandboxier way of planting levers in the geopolitical landscape? Like, say there's a bridge being built or constantly repaired - the foreman could be bribed to make the bridge (im)passable, or the project materials could be stalled or diverted, etc. - that's a lever that affects commerce, labor, and troop movements. I've got the fuzzy notion that a dungeon map could be repurposed as a map of regional "levers," but the concept needs more development - what does it mean to "close the door" on an army? What's the equivalent of caltrops, or a pit trap? Etc.

The following seeds weren't originally conceived as "levers," but maybe they could be viewed in that light.

Goats: until trade picks back up, the council is issuing its own currency - technically tokens of credit - representing goats in the Knight's herd. (The goats are particularly suited for ceremonial uses, and fetch a reliable price at a regional temple.) The goatherds - former highwaymen over whom the Knight holds an unexplained sway - have disguised several goats as guards, and fixed up a dummy goat as an exploding booby trap.

Gibbet Cages: hang at the mouths of important mountain passes and at crossroads in the dead forests. A patient observer may notice that crows visit at regular intervals, and that the skeletons inside whisper to them.

Fashionable Coin Pouches: are made from skate eggs which wash ashore, and are used by everyone of all social and economic stations. The little villages nearby have begun making satchels and courier bags from larger eggs washing up there; it hasn't occurred to them yet to find the size foreboding.

Lesser Shrines: to ill-tempered, spurned or traitorous servants of the gods. With the town's dominant temple gutted twice over, these lesser shrines have become more popular, but are also no longer being tended and the offerings not properly collected; they now attract beggars, cutpurses, and (it's believed) offended spirits.

The Commons: contain a low stone sarcophagus carved with the likeness of a giant, and which contains dried brush which might once have had the shape of a man. When asked, townsfolk (in deep, ominous tones) say only that "the giant is still alive." The central glade is ringed by standing stones, whose polished surfaces reflect the wrong parts of the glade, as well as disjointed pieces of a large rune (which can't otherwise be seen) burnt into the glade. The hill is what remains of a forgotten pyramid, the source of most stone in the town; the sarcophagus conceals its entrance.

I want to make a plot hook for Dog Wick, but I haven't seen the movies, so what am I gonna do here? Townsfolk discover burglars and thugs in shallow, paw-dug graves (maybe Dog Wick responsible, maybe not)? Townsfolk determine that there's no law against making a dog the town sheriff (and the dog is okay with this)? Extra dogs slowly trickle into town, until the town is overrun, and eventually someone sees them hatching from the skate eggs? Something something werewolves?

Also, I wanted an extra council member so the game wouldn't be down to just two or three players if someone failed to show up for a given week, but my other ideas were basically to have lieutenants or assistants to these primary characters sit in. Which works, and is probably even better in terms of not overloading the players with too many new NPCs at once, but... still feels incomplete to me.

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I'm fond of the phrase "you roll your dice, move your mice," and the god's game from Discworld. Not sure if the Texas Hold 'Em / Candyland / Chutes & Ladders combo is original.

Obviously channeling "Fables" with the mannequin, but it's been long enough now since I read it that I feel okay with that. "Dice, Camera, Action" was the more proximate inspiration.

I like introducing half-trained, Harry-Potter-esque child mages as the first rung of hireling spellcasters; non-combatants by contract, but still not exactly safe or unscarred. The novelty of it kinda wore off as the movies got into the child-soldier thing though.

Gunfighter loosely informed by this guy's musings. Alternatively, instead of a Jonah Hex type, could be fun to run as an older, jaded version of the heroine from The Last Unicorn (if you can get over it being a "gritty reboot" cliche).

Pretty sure I got the idea of repurposing the dungeon landscape as political landscape from someone else, but I don't know how directly. May be a while before I happen across it again.

I've now seen two Twitch RPG campaigns use fake livestock to bait a flying monster.

I'm sure other people have done the thing with skate eggs.

Lesser shrines loosely modeled on this.

Concept of a magic diagram hidden in the reflections of multiple stones, which you have to swap around to piece the diagram together, is lifted pretty completely from a discussion on (I think) "Uncle Matt's" channel.