Soon™ I'll be embarking on a new Edge of the Empire style campaign. The general overplot is that the PCs will be a mercenary crew working for a shadowy underworld boss. The boss has a Count of Monte Cristo revenge thing going on. In Phase 1 of the campaign, he wants to hurt his enemies - not necessarily outright murder them, though. He wants them to suffer; he wants them to lose everything as he has. His enemies are other powerful underworld types and powerful political types.

So I'm looking for some non-evil, non-assassiny/murdery story ideas. A few ideas I have already are...

Casino heist

Asset destruction

Ship theft

Intelligence gathering

Character assassination

What else can we throw into the mix? Also, in your opinion, what is the sustainability of this sort of campaign? (The PCs work for a boss as opposed to working for themselves.)

Blackmail - Have the team follow the target to get dirt on him that their boss can use against him. Especially if it's something that he can turn other associates against the target with like if he's stealing from them.

Have one of the PCs seduce his wife and convince her to leave him. This option could be very dangerous for the PC

Actually, a nice touch would be to have the target destroy his own assets and resources. Plant some evidence and convince the target that his lieutenants are disloyal, and he will space his own men.

Those are great suggestions and definitely added to my list.

One thing I think is worth pointing out / warning = you'll need to get some indirect evidence in front of the players as to why they should feel justified totally destroying the target.

If they can only rely on the mission giver's word, they may end up thinking the punishment is worse than the crime.

So drop evidence (either direct face contact, overheard convos, untold stories, etc) to make the players think "we ought to take this guy out even if we weren't paid." ... even if they don't say that out loud, it's important to eliminate the chance that your players start questioning the mission giver once they see the target suffer. lol

I'd add to that that said evidence could be faked. Potentially, the BBEG is the client who has been stringing them along, lying to them, when it is really just a quest for personal power and he's been using them to take out rivals, as opposed to the revenge scheme it was pitched as.

5 minutes ago, thinkbomb said:

One thing I think is worth pointing out / warning = you'll need to get some indirect evidence in front of the players as to why they should feel justified totally destroying the target.

If they can only rely on the mission giver's word, they may end up thinking the punishment is worse than the crime.

So drop evidence (either direct face contact, overheard convos, untold stories, etc) to make the players think "we ought to take this guy out even if we weren't paid." ... even if they don't say that out loud, it's important to eliminate the chance that your players start questioning the mission giver once they see the target suffer. lol

Or maybe the absolute reverse of this should apply.

Why not test the moral compass of your players?

You could slowly reveal over the course of a few missions that the target does not deserve this revenge.

That could prove far more interesting.

2 minutes ago, Stethemessiah said:

Or maybe the absolute reverse of this should apply.

Why not test the moral compass of your players?

You could slowly reveal over the course of a few missions that the target does not deserve this revenge.

That could prove far more interesting.

devil's advocate = setting a precedent of players no longer trusting any of your PCs when you need them to. What works in stories can have negative impacts in games.

... example: using several Dopplegangers (or several Klawdite shapeshifters) in a campaign run where everyone could be anyone. The paranoia can be pure bliss to watch, but at the start of the next story you're going to have to 4th wall break and tell the players "THERE'S NO MORE KLAWDITES, STOP SHOOTING EVERYONE IN THE FOOT TO SEE IF THEY BLEED GREEN"

14 minutes ago, thinkbomb said:

devil's advocate = setting a precedent of players no longer trusting any of your PCs when you need them to. What works in stories can have negative impacts in games.

... example: using several Dopplegangers (or several Klawdite shapeshifters) in a campaign run where everyone could be anyone. The paranoia can be pure bliss to watch, but at the start of the next story you're going to have to 4th wall break and tell the players "THERE'S NO MORE KLAWDITES, STOP SHOOTING EVERYONE IN THE FOOT TO SEE IF THEY BLEED GREEN"

A way to counter that is to simply have a variety of trust-worthy NPCs, so that when you throw a traitor at them, it carries just that much more weight. Warning signs along the way, suggesting that the traitor might actually be a traitor rather than just having a big reveal that comes out of nowhere, would probably also help to negate the negatives.

These last few posts reflect what I was thinking of for phase ii of the campaign. More and more the PCs learn that their shadowy boss has not been as forthcoming as he was appearing to be. He is inciting war.

Now he wants the PCs to do more horrible things, testing their moral compass. Will they continue? Will they try to switch sides?