I'm relatively new to Edge, collecting all of Force and Destiny first. However, as I acquire the many books of Edge, I find myself with ideas percolating through my brain. Recently, a friend and I both had cool hooks for campaigns within a day of each other. He's already starting his game up (on a day I can't make it, sadly), but I am still in the fledgling stage. Here's the hook:

The PCs are all have their assets seized/are blackmailed/had their families kidnapped by a crime boss or other n'er-do-well that they've associated with and can only get themselves clear by doing one "simple" thing: Discover who killed him and why.

This opens up a whole bunch of directions the campaign can go, with many mini-adventures to discover clues or find potential witnesses or suspects. I'm pretty excited about the idea, and I thought I'd float it out here and see what more experienced Edge GMs might have in terms of ideas to make it epic.

4 hours ago, Br'nn said:

The PCs are all have their assets seized/are blackmailed/had their families kidnapped by a crime boss or other n'er-do-well that they've associated with and can only get themselves clear by doing one "simple" thing: Discover who killed him and why.

Wouldn't all the PCs have motive, and hence be suspects themselves? If you're going for suspicious interparty intrigue, in the vein of Clue, it might be interesting?

They might be suspects due to working with him in the past, but my thought was that the work relationship had been relatively harmonious prior to this instance. The idea was more that the PCs were the only people he was sure weren't involved and he needed outsiders that would be motivated to get it done while having no ties to the many potential suspects.

Hmm.. Okay.

Who exactly was murdered, and who is the interested party doing the blackmailing?

Also- family kidnapping is pretty heavy-handed, and will obviously call for revenge, however this plays out otherwise (the relatively harmonious work relationship would be quite over, I'm thinking).

The idea was that he had concerns that there were (many) people after him, so he set up contingencies (the PCs) to make sure that his killer(s) were brought to justice and he was avenged. Yes, family kidnapping, if that was the avenue necessary to encourage participation, is pretty heavy-handed, but he'd be dead, so he wasn't exactly worried about the fallout. The logistics of who actually is holding the blackmail or family would have to be worked out, too, since he obviously trusted very few people to resort to hiring the PCs this way, but that was the direction I was thinking of.

As a contingency set up by himself, this approach makes more sense. With the trust issues, perhaps a droid would be running things behind the scenes (hiring kidnappers, slicers, arranging for the bribery/ coercion of bankers, etc).

The droid could even be his beneficiary? An HRD of himself to assume control? Or contain a partial AI extension of himself? A cyborg with just enough of a remnant of the former boss?

The premise is convoluted, and kidnapping off-screen relatives -- which players might not have known their characters even had, this being Session 1 -- is over the top. Organized crime doesn't work this way, and unless your table has the kind of people who want habanero for their first ever taste of Tex-Mex, you're going to have a lot of knit brows.

Why not weave a mystery from a simple "Who offed the Don?" Kingpin down, outfit in power struggle. Potential allies might threaten out of suspicion; enemies get close. Tons of intrigue and side stories. Urgency comes from X debt owed and X+Y payout early on.

Kidnapping off-screen relatives may be over the top, and a less extreme version could certainly be used that would make more sense. There's also the option of introducing the PCs to the intended victim as a boss in the first scenario or two and then kill him off and proceed to the intended premise.

One of the things about the idea was that I thought that this guy had fingers in lots of pies, including many legal ones. Reading the entry on Baron Kaldo on Centerpoint Station got me thinking that someone like him would provide a lot more potential suspects that just an internal power struggle.

Instead of kidnapping a family and holding them at blaster point (stick) the dead crime lord could offer his enterprises to the PCs provided they can avenge him (carrot). You could go a step further and say the base of operations has shut down completely and the only way to reactivate everything is to input a pass code into the main computer terminal. Unfortunately, the murderer took the code cylinder out of the boss's safe and is waiting for the heat to die down before he reactivates the criminal enterprise in his own image.