Campaign Setup - The Price

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Price" would make a pretty good set-up for a campaign. I feel confident saying that because apparently the makers of Star Trek thought so too. This episode is a microcosm of the set-up that became the entire series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and a single unanswered question left lingering at the end of the episode is enough to launch a second entire series in Star Trek: Voyager.

In terms of ideas that have generative power, "The Price" might be the most fecund forty-five minutes of television ever put on the air.
 
 

 
You might not realize it if you watch the episode, because it appears to be all about a love triangle between Riker, Troi, and a boyfriend-of-the-week character named Ral. Ral is a freelance negotiator, and like Troi, he has empathic abilities that let him sense other people's emotions, and also like Troi, he uses his abilities to do better at his job. The character story here is all about Riker proving to himself that he can do Troi's new boyfriend's job better than he can, and Troi proving to herself that she uses her psychic powers more ethically than Ral does, and also kind of about Riker and Troi reaffirming that even though they're not dating right now, they still like each other better than either of them likes anyone else.

So that's whatever, but it's these negotiations, and what they're all negotiating for that are campaign gold. Because at it's heart, what you have here is a great prize that is controlled by a weak faction, three stronger factions competing to win an alliance with the weaklings and control of the prize, and the weak faction themselves trying to maintain some semblance of autonomy in the face of the others' territorial ambitions.

And just like in Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeoneque's recent post about using Dune as a campaign set-up, "The Price" presents a situation that you could reskin to match whatever campaign aesthetic you favor.


So the key elements of this set-up are:
 

 
The great prize - A location of great power to whoever controls it. In "The Price" it's the Barzan Wormhole, an unstable gateway to the far side of the galaxy. In Deep Space Nine, it's the Bajoran Wormhole, which is a stable gateway to the far side of the galaxy.

The prize can be anything valuable enough to be worth fighting over, and too tied to it's location to be feasibly relocated, so it could be an oasis, or an oil well, or the sole planetary source of Spice. Although I will note that if you want planar travel in your campaign, the precedent is already there.
 
 

 
The weak faction - The people indigenous to the place where the great prize is located. Notably, when I say that they're weak, I mean that they're too weak to militarily defend the prize from anyone who wants to take it by force, and too weak to economically exploit the prize for their own benefit. So they're in the market for a benefactor. It's sort of a shotgun marriage though, because they have to choose one of the stronger factions, because they'll invaded if they don't pick, and would probably be decimated if the stronger factions fought a war with each other over control of the prize.

In "The Price" the weak faction is the Barzans, an alien-of-the-week faction we've never heard of before and will never hear of again. In Deep Space Nine, it's the Bajorans, who we actually have heard of before, and who, you know, stick around for the entire series. The Bajorans are a pretty religious people. They have a theocratic government, believe in the importance of revelation and personal experiences with the divine, they oppose secular education and other non-religious public institutions, and oh yeah, their key representative on the show, "our hero," is a former terrorist who loves to tell stories about her "good old days" of waging terror. (The show plays a bit differently today than it did back before September 2001, is what I'm saying.)

Anyway, your weak faction can be deferential or defiant, but what's important is that they seemingly cannot hold onto the great prize without picking one of the stronger factions as an ally. They aren't exactly the protagonists of either show, but this faction wouldn't be a bad choice for your player characters to belong to. They're the belle of the ball, they have their pick of the litter, and who knows, maybe they can figure out a way to refuse all three suitors, or arrange shared custody, or find some other way to subvert the restrictions of the scenario to achieve a better outcome for their faction.
 
 

The distant empire - One of the strong factions, arguably the strongest of the three, but the great prize is at the very edge of their territory, and they're stretched a bit thin out here. So while they might win hands down closer to home, here they're forced to compete on much more even footing. The distance involved might be one of the only reasons why the weak faction isn't already a part of the empire, in fact. They represent the promise of civilization and the threat of assimilation. If the weak faction picks this ally, they'll be welcomed into the local pinnacle of culture and refinement, but at the potential cost of being forced to give up their cultural distinctiveness.

In both "The Price" and Deep Space Nine, this role is played by The Federation, who are the protagonists and "good guys" of both series. You could follow that lead and assign your player characters to this role. If your players take on the part of any of the stronger factions, the campaign becomes a mission to perform tasks that will impress the weak faction, and do espionage to subvert the other two strong factions. Part of me feels like the weak faction deserves to be given the agentic role in the campaign, but there might be more for your players to do if they're the ones wooing rather than the ones being wooed.

A key creative task here is to decide on some kind of incompatibility between the empire and the weak faction. Because they're the strongest, because they come bearing all the wonders and comforts of civilization, because they're offering equal-status membership alongside the other nations in their union, this faction seems to be making an offer that there's no good reason to refuse. So you need to make sure there is a good reason. In "The Price" it's not really clear, we've never met the Barzans before, and their ambassador just seems kind of wishy-washy. In Deep Space Nine, the Bajorans are religious where the Federation is secular, they worship "Prophets" that the Feds see as "wormhole aliens," and they just recently managed to kick out the previous occupying conqueror (via the aforementioned campaign of terror), which makes independence seem much more attractive than membership. In your campaign, the weaker faction might not want to give up their gods or their language, they might believe in different economic  or political arrangements, they might have different perspectives on gender or sexuality, or they might be a society of fish-people unsure about joining an empire of land-dwelling mammal-peoples. Or maybe they're more like the Roman Empire and "membership" isn't going to be on anything like equal standing. Whatever works for you.
 
 

 
The merchants - A second strong faction, they have a plan to use the prize to make money, and they're willing to cut the weak faction in for a small slice of the pie if they're granted control. Both the other two strong factions mostly seem to want to prevent each other from getting ahold of the prize, the empire might have some noble-sounding but probably-slow-moving plans to use it for the betterment of all humanity, but only the merchants really have a plan to really do something with the prize, and that something is going to make everyone involved very quickly very rich.

In "The Price" and Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi take on the role of the merchants. In "The Price" they aren't chosen pretty much just because they're the "bad guys" of the episode. In Deep Space Nine, they actually do get the chance to launch trading expeditions through the wormhole, and make a lot of money for themselves and the Bajorans when they do so, although later there are consequences.

The merchants offer the most economic benefit for the prize, but otherwise occupy a kind of middle-ground between the empire and the conquerors. They don't want a political union at all, just a contract that apparently maintains the weak faction's sovereignty and autonomy. Like the empire, they're offering a kind of equality, although they also inspire a kind of queasy feeling that things won't really be as equal as you're being promised. There's a sense that, like the conquerors, they're going to move in an make themselves at home. The real threat of the merchants is the threat of unrestrained capitalism, and all the ills that can accompany it - pollution and environmental destruction, the landscape is changed beyond recognition, foreign workers who speak a new language and practice new customs, foreign soldiers who commit crimes and behave as though they're above your laws, entertainments that you consider "vice" spring up to service the outsiders and some of your people get a taste for them, an influx of cash transforms your society by rewarding some of your people while impoverishing others, a simple increase in population and traffic turns your town into a city, you can't go "home" because that no longer exists.
 
 

The conquerors - The final strong faction. In "The Price" this part is played by the Chrysalians, another alien-of-the-week we've never seen before and will never see again. The Chrysalians are a bit of a cypher. We know they hired Troi's boyfriend-of-the-week to negotiate for them ... aaand that's about it. In Deep Space Nine, we get the Cardassians, a species of fascist reptile-people whose government appears to be modeled after 1984. They previously occupied Bajor and subjugated the Bajoran people, but never did much of anything with the prize while they held it. The threat of retaliation by the other two strong factions is the only thing preventing them from trying to reinvade.

Because of the major differences between the Chrysalians and the Cardassians, there's no single strong precedent for this faction, although since I named them "the conquerors" you can guess which model I recommend. I will say though, that I think this set-up will work better if they have a reputation for being conquerors elsewhere, but haven't actually the former occupying army who used to have their boots pressed against the weak faction's neck. There's not really much temptation to make an alliance with the conquerors if they previously conquered you - although it does pile on the pressure to ally with one of the other two.

The Chrysalian option makes this faction kind of a wildcard. Their promise and peril could be pretty much anything you want. If you do model them after the Cardasians, I would say that their promise is protection. They have a strong military and will use it to defend you. No one else is going to be allowed to hurt you anymore. The peril is that these people are unrepentant autocrats and their government is a tyranny. Before the ink is even dry on your agreement, you won't be allowed to say anything critical of the conquerors, and if you ever feel like the deal has been altered, you'd better pray they don't alter it further. While the empire and the merchants are both likely to seem a bit libertine compared to the weak faction, the conqueror's laws are going to be more restrictive, and probably something the weak faction enjoys is going to be made illegal. The conquerors also don't really want to use the great prize, they just want to have it, and to make sure no else has it.
 
 

 
That's the main set-up, and as I said, it should work with whatever genre reskin you wanted to put over it. The campaign starts with the courtship with all the counter-espionage and corporate intrigue between strong factions you desire, in due course, the weak faction makes the decision and picks a partner. How they choose probably ultimately depends on what they want - do they want culture? do they want money? do they want to be powerful, or to feel protected by someone powerful? This alliance will be tested, and might endure, or it might fail, leading to a new alliance. The losing factions might attempt to seize the prize directly. And of course, the happy couple will want to use the prize to accomplish a goal.

You could also add a few extra complications if you wanted. The space station Deep Space Nine becomes the fortress. It turns out that to control the great prize, you really need to control the fortress. Long-term, holding the fort requires being on friendly terms with the natives of the weak faction, but short-term anything is possible. The Klingons could serve as the mercenary army. They're ostensibly allied with the empire, but a new warlord might give up fighting for pay and start fighting for conquest and/or the joy of fighting. They have a decent shot to capture the fortress no matter who's holding it, and the opportunity to recapture it might tip the balance of power. The Romulans could serve as the royal spies. A highly trained group of infiltrators and saboteurs, they're on friendly terms with the conquerors, but as with the mercenaries, their loyalties could shift.

And finally, there's my favorite faction, and a key reason to make the great prize a portal to somewhere - the people from the other side. These could be djinn- and ifriti-people who live at the bottom of the oasis, archaean natives of the deep hot biosphere at the bottom of the oil well, or my personal favorite, extra-planar entities from the other dimension the portal links to. Because the wonderful thing about making the prize a portal is that you get to go to the other side and see what's over there. It also means that the people from the other side can come to you, which is also exciting. In Deep Space Nine the people from the other side start out as just another faction, and eventually grow into an unstoppable army who seem impossible to defeat. They don't have to be that way in your campaign though. They just have to be interesting enough make the possibility of planar travel seem tempting rather than forbidding.
 
 

 
Planar travel, incidentally, is the answer to that lingering question, I mentioned in the very beginning, when I said that "The Price" also inspired Star Trek: Voyager. The Federation and the Ferengi both send crewed shuttlecrafts through the Barzan Wormhole to the far side of the galaxy. The far end of the wormhole turns out to be unstable, and the Feds barely make it back through in time. The Ferengi miss their chance, and are forced to try getting home the long way, a trip that will take 70 years at top speed. "What if a Federation crew got trapped by a one-way wormhole?" is the question that becomes Voyager.

I started thinking about campaign set-ups after reading Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque's post about a faction-heavy set-up. Jack's two most recent publications, The Liberation of Wormwood and Dirge of Urazya are also campaign set-ups. Evlyn at Le Chaudron Chromatique has also written quite a few of these. Because what occurred to me is that a campaign set-up is different from a campaign setting. It's the same way that character motivations are different from character occupations.

A campaign setting is a world where adventures can take place. It's a lot of fun to imagine what those worlds might be like. But there's something missing when all you have is a campaign setting, and that missing piece will leave you saying "it's a nice place to visit, but I don't know what you'd do there." A campaign setting, by itself, is not enough. You don't just need characters, and a world, you need characters who have a place in the world and a goal that sends them out into it. Without that, all you have is a travel guide. The same setting, incidentally, can probably host many different campaigns, which are made different by their differing set-ups.