Casting Shadows

This week’s seed is for All for One: Regime Diabolique and puts the characters’ commitment to the King to the test as they are called upon to choose between their duty, and what is right.

The Seed

In pursuit of an enemy of the state (a person who has earned the true enmity of the characters) the musketeers stumble across a heinous crime in action and are forced to decide on the spot which wrong to right.

Planting the Seed

To till the soil of adventure and bring this particular seed to fruition, the characters will need to have developed a strong and adversarial relationship with a villain or villainous group whose interests often lie in opposition to the King, and whose abilities reflect the characters’ own. They should truly love to hate each other. In a tense scene where the party is pursuing this adversary through crowded streets with much athleticism and wild antics, a new duty literally crosses their path.

As the chase heats up, moving from the area surrounding the Bastille toward the Markets, obstacles in the form of people, carts, goods and the like tax the pursued and pursuers equally, building the excitement of the chase to a great height, when suddenly, a woman carrying a baby with two small children in tow cuts between them in obvious fear of her life – chased by cruel-faced cut-throats.

What will they do?

The details

The adversary they are initially pursuing can be getting away with whatever your story requires, but dashing from their march toward interment in the Bastille might be a nice way to go. The pursuit should be heated and both sides would be out for the others’ blood if the need for escape (whatever it might be) were not pressing the villains so~

If the villains escape, they will once again pose a threat to the King, the King’s Musketeers, and the safety and sanctity of all France!

The woman and her children look to be of noble birth, or at least a position of service to a noble, and are in obvious fear for their lives from the group of cruel-faced, armed brigands following close on their heels. No true hero could look on that face and not intervene… but…  the hated enemy will get away!

The cruel-faced villains in pursuit of the woman and her children are a murder squad hired and sent out to silence both the mother and older children, and to retrieve the baby. Their orders are to stop at nothing, but they are neither stupid nor in this for loyalty. If they are outmatched they make a last-ditch effort to snatch the baby and run, leading the characters into a tale of sexual enslavement and a despicable man’s desperate search for a male heir.

If characters do not intervene, the woman and her babes will surely die.

What’s going on

All manner of things relating to your campaign at large might be going on with the requisite recurring villain so we will leave those elements in your capable hands. For the woman though… there may be much to tell and even more to imply.

The woman, known only as Marie, has been kept as a brood mare by a disturbed and vile little man known to his guards secretly as Chevalier Mauviette, who has been unable to sire a proper heir – or truth be told – any children at all, with his wife or other mistresses. Marie has blessed him with 2 girls and now, 1 boy, but recently the little lord has learned that none of them are his. In a rage, he tried to kill them all, but she threw him down a flight of stairs, and made her escape. Further enraged, when his head stopped spinning, he set his pet thugs on her, and so our story begins.

Mauviette is of course frightfully important to various concerns and cliques at Court, and even somewhat to the Cardinal, but a manly man he is not. He is a regular informant and keeps a large squad of lower-class men on his pay roll to keep him rich in gossip and salacious rumors. They respect his money, but not him. That said, the money is very, very good.

Opposing him socially or physically will be risky and complicated.

Implementation

No matter what the players choose to do there are many opportunities for adventure here. If they leave Marie to her fate, Mauviette may still wonder if the characters heard or were told anything. Worse, public opinion from witnesses may begin to work against the group, lowering reputation and affecting the outlook of followers and allies.

If they do stop to help, they are effectively choosing to fight two enemies at once. The plots and plans of each enemy will be difficult to discern from each other, and their lack of focus may cause them to make themselves vulnerable to one opponent or the other.

If they split their forces in the market and try to accomplish both missions, they are likely to face an early and humiliating defeat from the now numerically superior forces on each side, and be forced to rally heroically against both to achieve their ends…!

En Garde!

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