Mage Guild Mastermind Survives Pirate Haven
How does a mere mage survive in the world’s most infamous pirate’s den? And how does a leader of mages protect himself from the incredible powers his followers might weild against him?
Here are a few of my thought processes behind a faction in my new D&D campaign. I thought you might be interested in some of the ideas. Comments and ideas of your own are welcome in the comments section.
A note to my players: spoilers follow, please stop reading.
My group soon begins playing the Pathfinder RPG in a new campaign with first level characters. The campaign is still in the early stages of planning – it doesn’t even have a name yet – but a few things are developing.
Order of Cyphers
One such thing is the local mage’s guild, The Order of Cyphers. I’m using Riddleport as the primary setting: a pirate town being slowly gentrified by an influx of scholars and merchants. I’m changing a lot of Paizo’s Riddleport, and that includes the mage’s guild.
The Order of Cyphers is named after a massive stone arch that spans the entrance to the city’s harbour. The arch is covered in ancient glyphs that no one can decode. Many think great and possibly terrible knowledge lies behind the glyphs, thus attracting magi from around the world to study and try to understand the tantalizing runes.
Syzzinar the Schemer
The enigmatic Syzzinar leads the guild and he is the most powerful of the eight crime lords who rule Riddleport, under the Overlord. None of the other faction bosses realize Syzzinar’s power, which is the way the near-epic magus wants it.
Syzzinar came to Riddleport as a prisoner nearly 100 years ago. His useful magic skills kept him in chains for a decade. Finally he gained the acumen necessary to slay his captain and sink his boat. He did this just as the ship was out of the harbour and out of sight of Riddleport. He flew back to the town under disguise and started a new life.
Crowdsourcing research
He began by studying the runes on the arch, certain some magical revelation lay behind the strange shapes. After 20 years he gave up and developed a new strategy. 100 heads are better than one, right?
Syzzinar started spreading rumours of wild and incredible knowledge that lay encoded in the runes. Riddleport at that time was infamous for being purely a pirate haven and a deadly place if you did not follow the way of the sea. Woven into his rumours was news of a new scholar’s guild that offered food, lodging, and most important, protection to all who came to study the arch. Even the name of the guild was designed to lure mages – the Order of Cyphers.
As magi warily trickled in from nearby cities, Syzzinar met each visitor with an invitation to join the Order, the only safe place in the city for the learned. The annual dues were steep, but magi come by coin easily.
Handling the Overlord like a frog in hot water
The crafty mage guild leader approached the Overlord in those long-gone days with hefty portions of guild fees collected to keep the guild safe from powerful pirate captains and their crews. Syzzinar knew the guild’s power would grow over time, and indeed it did, which allowed him to slowly cut back payments and keep more for himself. Overlords over the years were hesitant to anger a guild of wizards and settled for a slight reduction every couple of years. Just as a frog in slowly heated water will not hop out and will boil to death, so too did Overlords back away from confrontation and let Syzzinar gain ever increasing power and boons.
Keeping the mages distracted and under his control
With the problem of protection from pirates dealt with, Syzzinar set about tackling another tricky issue. How does one keep control of a group of mages, who if they joined together could easily wrest control from him at any time? Even in those early days, the leader recognized this grave threat to his position.
His solution was the Cypher Gate – the stone arch with the glyphs. By attracting only those magi interested in peaceful study and investigation he could keep them protected – and distracted. Alpha types were rooted out and their bodies thrown into the harbour. Syzzinar successfully deflected blame of these murders to one pirate captain or another, and in more recent years, to one crime lord or another. This further kept his flock docile and appreciative of The Order’s protection.
A quiet life of crime and politics
During the past eighty years, Syzzinar has followed all research very carefully. Spies make certain members do not keep secrets for long. He sits back and lets his members do all the pondering, reading, experimentation, and theorizing. He knows his unwitting 100+ member research group will soon unlock the riddle of the Cyphergate, and he’ll be there to seize the answer and get all its power for himself.
Meantime, he leads a quiet life of crime, leveraging the magic abiliites of guild members to offer services to Riddleport’s citizens as well as extort information and wealth from the minions of the other seven crime lords.
The Overlord bides and plots
The Overlord is scared of The Order, but he does not have enough power to intervene directly, nor can he coerce any of the other crime lords to act against the smug magi leader. Something must be done though, and soon, before Syzzinar is in such a position to sieze the title of Overlord for himself.
Thoughts? Comments? One thing I’m noodling on is that aside from his troublesome start, Syzzinar has not had much conflict in the past 80 years. His story needs some setbacks, and perhaps an arch nemesis.
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November 18th, 2009 at 8:25 am
Maybe you can leave it the way it is, with everything going his way for the past 80 years. That just means he will have grown comfortable and overconfident being at the top for so long and will drop his guard enough for someone to land a decent blow. Perhaps a rival crime lord who employs the PC’s!
November 18th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Nice one, Robert. He’ll be more used to dealing with pirates than meddling PCs.
.-= Johnn´s last blog ..Issue 469 – Your Teacher Was Right – How To Create Adventures With The 6 W’s =-.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Nice work. Syzzinar’s penchant for weeding out alpha mages lends itself to a plot device rather nicely … if the guild is, by design, comprised primarily or more erudite wizards, then on a whole it isn’t going to be ready for military action if it was suddenly threatened by a significant outside force.
All of which would be highly obvious to a secret underground group of seperatist mages actively working against Syzzinar’s designs. Maybe it’s lead by one of the ousted alpha’s who was thought to be killed off … maybe it’s lead by a non-mage relative of a deceased alpha. Regardless, it has a bone to grind with the Syzzinar, and it knows more of the guild’s inner workings than Syzzinar is comfortable with.
This group may not be significant enough a force to oppose Syzzinar directly, but what it if learned of (one of) the Cyphergate’s secrets before the guild did? What if it could use this secret against the guild? Such undermining tactics are bread and butter for such groups …
November 18th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I really love this idea — it’s very clever and a great plot. But then you finish with, maybe he needs an arch nemesis. Really? An *arch* nemesis, i.e. someone else who wants his arched Cypher gate?
Either you have gone to truly extraordinary lengths to reach that punchline, or it was just a beautiful accident. Either way — I’m impressed! :)
Honestly, I think it’s a great story. I think it does need some more tension though. Perhaps the gang of 100 are actually going to unlock the secret, but that secret will expose something from Syzzinar’s past. Perhaps he has a ‘missing glyph’ or other hidden glyph key which is necessary to interpret the arch, which someone else uncovers or steals from under his watchful eye. The Syzzinar will need to stretch himself to track down whoever has stolen it and then recover the missing key, before the Overlord does.?
November 18th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Firstly, there’s a logic flaw in one section of your reasoning: Having the pirates/crime lords blamed for eliminating those he considers a potential threat would argue the ineffectiveness of the Guild’s protection, not send the remainder scurrying back into the fold.
Solving this means adding a whole new chapter or three to your plots, which can easily encompass your desire for setbacks to Syzzinar’s career. What he needs to do to achieve the stated outcome is to present trumped-up charges of violating the Guild’s rules that lead to the withdrawing of Guild Protections, THEN he can kill them and blame one of the other Powers within the city.
Perhaps, if he had secretly infiltrated the command infrastructure of one of these other Powers, even on a limited basis, he could actually have that Power act on his behalf without even realising it at the time.
But a better solution would be to contrive an atmosphere of low-level hostility between the Guild and those other forces. Using illusions and enchantments, he could convince the Captains that they were under perpetual assault from inimical Powers from the far side of the gate that have been released by the Guild’s efforts. If Syzzinar can also convince them that the only hope of ever ending this threat is the Guild, a love-hate relationship with the Guild will emerge, and (within a generation or so) become entrenched. When the guild’s protections are withdrawn, this atmosphere would make the unprotected guild member a target for all the accumulated resentment, and the other factions of Riverport would actually do the eliminating, thus keeping Syzzinar’s hands pristine.
Under these circumstances, each of the Pirate Captains would seek to add a mage to their staffs; in some (even most) cases, these would be drawn from the Guild (giving Syzzinar unwitting spies within the ranks of his enemies/pawns), but some would not, and those would be protected by the political influance of their boss and not the Guild. A few of these might be mages that Syzzinar would not consider dangerous, but a few would be genuine dangers to the exposure of his entire plot.
Maintaining a level of security would therefore mean using lies, innuendo, and deception to turn the other Captains against a danger – something that’s hit-and-miss at the best of times. At the same time, those Captains who can be counted on only to get agressive when Syzzinar presents them with an opportunity should be surrepticiously maintained and strengthened, lest they be replaced by someone less tractable or less cowed. In effect, this means that Syzzinar would need to actively work to keep his enemies strong (but not too strong) – a difficult balance to achieve.
This would mean that Syzzinar has to work a lot harder to maintain his position, and would certainly not have it all his own way through the years, creating a vulnerability that the writeup you’ve provided is lacking.
Further, with the dirty work being done by someone else, there is also a much greater chance of a screw-up, someone believed killed as a threat who actually survives, mimicks Syzzinar’s actions by assuming a false identity, and begins orchestrating a threat to everything Syzzinar has built up (a significant rival). If (when?) Syzzinar discovers this threat, he will have to put everything on the line to end it – without blowing his cover (placing him at a significant disadvantage).
All this brings me to my next question – how will any PC mages fit into the plot? You will get quite different campaigns if a PC mage is another ‘survivor’, or is a member of the Guild, or is part of the rival’s power structure. The last means that much of what you’ve written here would be known to the mage, the first would make the unmasking and downfall of Syzzinar a major ambition of the campaign. The middle option has the benefit of surprise (and can always be turned into the first with a botched assassination at some point in play).
Finally, you will need (if you havn’t already) to decide exactly what the Cypher Gate is. It would make for a great finish to the campaign for it to open, but in the meantime, its true nature should manifest, however subtly. You can’t have 100+ mages researching something for 80 years without a few clues emerging…
November 19th, 2009 at 3:18 am
Perhaps your “near-epic” Guild Master is a little too invulnerable? You could give the players a better chance of succes by deciding he has an internal limitation (psychological or arcane) that he has been struggling against over the last 80-100 years. Perhaps the solution to this is the secret he’s hoping to wrest from the arch? If he’s had little opposition for the last eighty years he’s probably bored out of his skull and inventing his own (not *too* powerful) ennemies to slay just to keep the ennui-dragons at bay and his skills up to par(he could be the players secret sponsor *and* their ultimate enemy, just for his training purposes). He gets to maintain his intrigue skills while they get trained up to a level which then gives him a decent workout slaying them. Players may even hear dire tales of a previous group in the exact same situation/intrigue.
N.B. “Being unable to prevent” an alpha-rival or two being slain every few years wouldn’t be a credibility-killer either, if he can point out a vastly higher death-toll in other organisations/neighbourhoods.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:42 am
I’m very curious to know what the arch’s letters actually mean. It’d be entertaining to have them be something entirely different than even Syzzinar suspects.
The next step in his story being well-discussed, here, the next thing to naturally consider is what happens – to the guild, to the pirates, even to the arch – once the secret is discovered.
(Also: I agree with Loz’ nota bene. Real-life examples abound.)
November 20th, 2009 at 9:27 am
@Mike: “he could convince the Captains that they were under perpetual assault from inimical Powers from the far side of the gate that have been released by the Guild’s efforts.” I’m going to explore this further. Awesome idea.
I’m going to scoop most of your other ideas too!
The gate is tricky because the campaign we’re ending right now is all about closing a gate to the Shadowfell the PCs let happen in adventure #1. Two campaigns about gates would be repetitive.
When I flesh out the other factions, though, there should be enough other hooks so it isn’t perceived this new campaign revolves around another gate, and the gate is just another source of adventure.
Thanks for the comments and ideas, Mike.
I need to scoot right now, but the others who have commented have great stuff I’m going to sccop as well. I’ll reply again here later on.
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:19 am
Honestly, I wouldn’t have the arch be a gate. Far too predictable. Instead, have it be something like the key to a magical defense system that protected an ancient town built on this spot (and which the arch is the only surviving monument of). It requires a Prefect, anointed in the ancient fashion, to activate it. Of course, Prefects no longer exist, but a few mages do know the ancient rituals for anointing one. If Syzzinar can get himself anointed, he can quickly move to Overlord. And, the mages also unlock a new and different paradigm for how magic works, that allows them to tap into all kinds of previously unfathomable ancient works.
So, why is Syzzinar not Overlord now? What does the current Overlord, or the other crime lords, have that he doesn’t? A couple possible answers:
First, Syzzinar is as careless with coin as the other magi, and he doesn’t manage the actual business of his Guild well. He trades favors and secrets well, but not coin and goods.
Second, Syzzinar is notoriously smug about the supremacy of magic. To the point that he totally fails to notice that his “charmed” chambermaid is being blackmailed into spying on him, despite considering him her “best friend.” He consistently underestimates his mundane competition, and as such his personal household is riddled with spies and his schemes out in the city are often foiled because he can’t generate the same fear the other lords do.
Third, Syzzinar has no ships of his own, so the core economy of piracy is beyond him. He has to make do by skimming off others. This costs him respect, especially as filling his ranks with effete scholars instead of useful war wizards and sea witches doesn’t win him any points.
Fourth, Syzzinar has no respect for the local church, and more than once has been overheard making blasphemous or heretical comments in public. This turns the common man against him, and gives his enemies ample fodder to paint him as consorting with devils.
Individually, none of those are enough to significantly cripple his power. But, together, they mean that he is never on very firm footing when dealing with matters that can’t be solved with a simple spell. Fortunately, his general intelligence and ruthlessness are often enough to make up the gap. But the other lords are well aware that the gap is there, and do their best to exploit it.
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..Day 8 – The Journey Home =-.
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:47 am
Some great ideas there, Lugh, and some excellent points about Syzzinar’s flaws and how they could be exploited.
January 29th, 2010 at 12:49 am
Nice web site man, picked up some nuggets here…can’t wait for Cataclysm, I found a rumor that it’s being coming out November 2010, though with Blizzard you can never tell :/
November 13th, 2013 at 11:01 am
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