The Gaming Den

So I've been running an Exalted campaign for a while, and I've hit a bit of a snag. First some background:

It's set in the west. There are three regional powers that matter: Coral, Skullstone, and the Neck. The Neck doesn't actually interact with anything.

Coral is roughly a renaissance Italian city writ large, with piracy. They elect a tyrant at an interval of "whenever they feel like," based mostly on his ability to do public works out of pocket. Slavery is legal, though basically on the Roman model. The last tyrant was wildly popular, stepped down and wants peace. The current tyrant wants war, but could be overthrown at any time. They have a hojillion privateers, and another hojillion triremes.

Skullstone is MA Ermor. They have a whole religion/society about ghosts being superior to the living, and if you do enough good for society in life, you get to be a ghost and continue doing good afterwards. They have lots of zombie labor. They are ruled by their very own undead Jesus figure, who is secretly super-evil. Part of his evil plot is a crime-free, post scarcity society though, so it's hard to get too worked up unless you hate zombies (one of my players hates zombies). They secretly employ the evil Justice League and secretly have hundreds of ironclads with cannon.

My players have "Muddy Reefs", a tiny Tortuga between these three powers. They want to start a war between Coral and Skullstone. Their skills include "sailing about" and "indiscriminate slaughter".

What scenario can I present them with that lets them succeed?

Go Princess Bride on them. Kidnap a Skullstone princess and make it look like Coral dude it.

Any sort of discrete diplomatic meeting between Coral and Skullstone which they can:
A) sail to, and;
B) indiscriminately slaughter the entire participants of.

From there, they can play stage the scene and make it look like diplomatic relations broke down and they murder-stabbed one another. Take the ships and some of the bodies with you to make it look like one side had survivors and ran off with the ships.

Also, yeah. Any variation of this, where the PC's go to one, screw things up, and blame it on the other guy, like Magnum's. Sailing not essential; combine with walking, horseback-riding, and flying machines as you see fit.

Even if one faction knows it was the PC's, unless they can provide evidence to the other faction it won't really help them. Who wouldn't offer up a random scapegoat to avoid war? So unless the PC's leave witnesses/evidence for both factions to figure out it was them, it works. And if they only leave one faction with witness, then they end up with one enemy and the other faction might still declare war. If both figure out the trick, then they are fubared and have two enemies who will probably jointly crush them.

John Magnum wrote:Go Princess Bride on them. Kidnap a Skullstone princess and make it look like Coral dude it.

That's sort of the problem. I can think of a dozen different ways to get them to go to war. My players are pretty well stuck on punching whatever they see first, which is not really compatible with subtlety.

@DSM
That could work well. Thanks.

fectin wrote:

John Magnum wrote:Go Princess Bride on them. Kidnap a Skullstone princess and make it look like Coral dude it.

That's sort of the problem. I can think of a dozen different ways to get them to go to war. My players are pretty well stuck on punching whatever they see first, which is not really compatible with subtlety.

@DSM
That could work well. Thanks.

Have them capture a princess on the way from one power to another to help reinforce peace through marriage. Or something like that.

It seems like to me though an entire culture that wants to die would be fairly willing to go to war. It shouldn't take much.

Have them forge evidence of a sinister cult/coup/whatever in Skullstone threatening Coral and alert Coral. Depending on the current diplo status, they might either initiate peaceful diplomatic action (hey Skullstone, there are cultists/conspirators in your territory, maybe do something about them?) which the PCs can then sabotage or do something hostile outright Or, you know, both. As a bonus, when Coral investigate the lead, they find some shit that the PCs did NOT plant.

Personally, I'd just assassinate the pro-war tyrant and watch the pot boil.

No, you want to assassinate the anti-war former tyrant. That way it looks like Skullstone is unreasonable and murderous instead of simply feeling threatened.

Though really, any "NO WITNESSES!" attack should suffice if both sides are feeling threatened enough.

So, all of these suggestions are good. My problem is getting them set up. So far, this party has picked an entirely new direction to run each session. Along the way, they decide to fight someone. These decions are not real predictable; a bit back I mentioned a boarding action in the distance as background, and they came about and killed everyone on both ships.

Their plan to start a war was to dress in Coral uniforms and raid outlying Skullstone villages. That would have worked fine, but then they felt bad about the raiding and abandoned it after burning a church.

So, I'm not just looking for ways to start a war, I'm looking for situations I can put the party in where their core coompetencies (random, indiscriminate slaughter) will start a war between two third parties.

Fectin wrote:Their plan to start a war was to dress in Coral uniforms and raid outlying Skullstone villages. That would have worked fine, but then they felt bad about the raiding and abandoned it after burning a church.

This seems kind of silly when they want to start a war that would inevitably cause the deaths of untold thousands.

Is their goal the war or is the war a means to something else? I'm kind of thinking that it's the former, which does make this very tricky...

fectin wrote:So, I'm not just looking for ways to start a war, I'm looking for situations I can put the party in where their core coompetencies (random, indiscriminate slaughter) will start a war between two third parties.

Make nth in line to the throne run away and secretly become a mighty pirate because of daddy issues or something. Then hire the PCs to stop him in the name of the other faction.

Make it be like "The Usual Suspects" where the larger gambit is someone else's, and the PCs are roped into it by dint of participation in a smaller gambit.

EDIT: Just noticed I am "Knight-Baron" now. For someone who hardly ever games, I'm amazed I've posted so much. Guess I just love you guys!

fectin wrote: So, I'm not just looking for ways to start a war, I'm looking for situations I can put the party in where their core coompetencies (random, indiscriminate slaughter) will start a war between two third parties.

Have someone one side hire the PCs to go do ... something on the other side. (Make sure it's something non-diplomatic, because otherwise they might think they weren't actually supposed to kill something and might not do so, but also make sure it's not overtly murderous.)

When they inevitably start randomly and indiscriminately slaughtering people, have the side being slaughtered decide that, since they're agents of the other side, shit is now officially ON. Done.