Image via Pixabay.com / martakoton

I’m not sure how I’ll go when it comes time to upload this article; my internet connection (and telephone) are giving me a lot of trouble at the moment. If I have to, I’ll hit an internet cafe tomorrow.

I’m always looking for ways to sneak campaign background and historical information into my adventures so that I don’t have to take time out from those adventures to brief players. This not only increases the level of interest players have in the subject, but also its relevance and verisimilitude (because the event is seen as having had an ongoing impact on the game world).

So, when Blair (my pulp co-GM) mentioned that a guest from India who appeared on a recent current affairs show had (in Blair’s eyes) a manifest prejudice against the British, which biased his answers and the opinions he expressed on the show, and that many others also resented the nation’s colonial history (not entirely without cause, I hasten to admit), my radar went “Ping”.

Grudges as a background delivery vehicle

Old grudges – with or without merit – can serve as an excellent mechanism for game background because what do people typically do when they have a grudge? They broadcast their opinion and the reasons for it to anyone who will listen. The more obsessive will relate virtually every activity they undertake to that grudge.

In the past, I have thought that to be effective, the grudge needed to be activated by the presence of a trigger amongst the PCs or in the circumstances that have led the PCs to interact with the NPC. But in thinking about this article, I have realized that this doesn’t matter – such strongly-held opinions will manifest anyway, given half a chance, and that provides a vector for an NPC to vent an overtly biased perception of the events in question.

If you decide in advance that you are going to employ this delivery mechanism, you can even restrict your campaign notes to a bare mention of the event, its cause, its trigger, its duration, and its outcome, like this:

“World War I: An assassination triggered an unnecessary war which, through a series of treaty ‘dominoes’, eventually involved or affected almost every government on Earth. About four years later, and after the death of over a million combatants, it ended in a negotiated armistice that imposed huge reparations and military restrictions on Germany (even though the Germans weren’t the instigators of the conflict).”

As anyone who knows anything about the “Great War” (and that should be most GMs), that is just about the most superficial recitation of events it’s possible to craft and still use something that reads comfortably as a paragraph. To be more succinct, you need to either leave things out – which is fine – or go beyond the rules of good English into something akin to bullet points:

“World War I: An assassination – treaty ‘dominoes’ – almost every nation on Earth – 4 years – killed over a million – ended by imposing huge reparations and military restrictions on Germany.”

Of course, if you do your writing the way I do, you would have started with those bullet points, using them to structure your narrative and make sure that you left nothing out.

When the time comes – which is either when you have an NPC in need of color or an in-game situation in which the details of the event become relevant – you simply introduce your “Background Delivery System” and have a character (motivated by an old grudge) provide the salient details to the PCs, usually in the form of a complaint about someone or something.

This technique works even if the subject is an event the players have never heard of before, or know of only in passing from a brief mention of the event in campaign or adventure briefing.

Motivating the PCs to seek out an NPC with a grudge

Picture the following scenario: Early in your campaign, your players acquire (either by contrivance or choice) a mission while being given minimal background information, not all of which is necessarily accurate. In the course of the adventure, they encounter several difficulties which could have been avoided or prepared for if they had been given better intelligence (in the military sense of the word). Despite these difficulties, they succeed in their quest/mission, only to discover that they were being used to further an agenda they strongly disapprove of.

It’s a good bet that they will make a solemn vow amongst themselves to never be so used, again.

This is not only a great way to introduce a mastermind villain (as the person manipulating the PCs or as the person in back of them), it’s an object lesson that the players are never likely to forget. Henceforth, when given inadequate intelligence, one of their highest priorities will be to find out more about the situation, preferably before they commit themselves. What’s more, that lesson is almost certain to carry over into other campaigns, especially under the same GM.

So the PCs need to ask someone questions about the situation they are about to become enmeshed in; whoever they ask is either the person with the grudge, or directs the PCs to speak to that person (perhaps with an appropriate warning).

What happens is that Background material becomes a source of roleplay. Your adventures might take a little longer to play out, and your prep might need to be a little more substantial, but (almost?) everyone will have more fun in the process.

A Hidden Assumption To Observe

This scenario implies a hidden assumption – that whatever is in the background material already provided to the PCs is everything they know about the situation in question.

Once you are aware of that situation, you can turn it into another vector for engaging the players with an adventure; all you need do is note some additional briefing information that you can provide when a player asks “What does [my character] know about….”

Providing a teasing tidbit not only tells the player that you have prepared this adventure with these specific PCs in mind,, it tells him or her (through your choice of phrasing) that there is more information to be had if they ask the right person the right question(s).

Tactical intelligence-gathering is often a secondary (and sometimes unrealized) source of gaming pleasure for the combat types who don’t necessarily get off on straight roleplay!

The NPC Conduit

Simply giving an NPC a personality doesn’t guarantee that they will have something to say. Quite often, NPCs are reactive, requiring the PCs to push certain “buttons” to get to the more interesting parts of the NPC. A lot of NPC color is superficial, and can be ignored after it is first noticed. “Every evening at sunset, [NPC] drinks a silent toast to the flag” is a great bit of NPC color – but at any other time of the day, unless someone asks about the practice (having observed it or heard of it as an eccentricity), it might as well not be there.

“Distrusting of Warlocks” is another example – unless the subject somehow comes up, or one of the PCs happens to be a Warlock, or the adventure happens to involve a Warlock somehow, the situation won’t come up and can seem forced if you parade it anyway.

A grudge isn’t like that, in one important respect – it gives the NPC something to talk about. In fact, it does so on every single occasion that the NPC appears. The first time (taking a war grudge as an example), it can be the general information; the next time, a key combatant, or an important battle, or some other NPCs opposing bias, or an official action that is viewed as disrespectful of veterans of the conflict and/or their memories… the list goes on and on.

Or perhaps the NPC lost his job after the manufacturing plant where he was employed was bought by Japanese businessmen – something that happened quite a lot in the 1980s – and consequently the NPC holds a grudge against the Japanese (something else that happened a lot back then). This grudge will manifest every time a Japanese gets mentioned, or is in the news; every time a business gets bought or sold; every time someone loses their job, or gets hired; every time someone retires; every time a trade union does something (even something unrelated) because it was often the unions who were cast in an adversarial role to the new management…. So, this week the character waves a newspaper around and complains, next week he is busy dumping all his crackers in the garbage because the company has just been bought, the time after, he is filling out his tax forms and complaining about big business avoiding their fair share of the tax burden, the week after that he’s celebrating because a Japanese CEO was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the week after that it’s the prominence of Asians at the local high school…. the grudge becomes the NPCs defining characteristic simply because it can manifest in a different way on every separate occasion.

It seems quite clear that a grudge – defined as “a strong emotional response to factual triggers associated with the subject of the grudge, however peripherally” – adds massive amounts of color to an NPC at the same time as giving the NPC role-playable “content” to inject into any encounter.

But a little additional thought and creativity on the GM’s part can substantially enrich the role of the NPC with a grudge; all you need is to make the grudge confer some positive benefit to the character in a social sense. The NPC with a grudge against “the old enemy” can become a spokesman for veterans’ causes, or a ready source of completely unofficial aid to veterans in trouble. You can even use this as
the means to deliver the occasional adventure to the PCs – “I’ve got a buddy in a spot of trouble, and I thought you would be able to help”.

I never give a character a grudge without trying to find some respect in which that grudge can do something positive. Sometimes, the character with the grudge is unaware of the possibility (enabling growth in the character as the game progresses); sometimes he’s unaware of the connection; and sometimes, he knows full well that his grudge is motivating him.

Even a deeply-depressed nihilistic villain who wants to slaughter millions to spare them the pain that he has felt, and who sees everything through this murky web of imminent pain, acquires a richer, deeper characterization, in this way. His goal is to spare people from suffering, and there are all sorts of positive contributions that he can make to society in furtherance of that end with his right hand, even as his left is perpetrating monstrous deeds in the name of that cause.

Beware overuse

If the benefits are so huge, there has to be a temptation to give every NPC a grudge (I’ll deal with PCs and grudges a little later).

Don’t Do It.

Overuse will cause the technique to lose its effectiveness. You need the grudge to stand out, and that means using it only in a carefully-targeted manner. I’m always careful to employ three criteria: One, it has to give the character something interesting to talk about in encounters with the PCs; Two, it has to be logical that someone would have such a grudge, which requires either that the events be recent or that they have some vehicle of perpetuation through the years; Three, the subject has to have relevance to at least one significant adventure; and Four, it has to enrich and make interactive what would otherwise be a dry and stale subject within the campaign Background.

I want to amplify the caveat in item two a little before moving on. But some might take offense over what I have to say on a couple of delicate subjects – so if you find yourself in disagreement with anything in the inset panel below, I would ask that you simply skip to the end of it.

Contrast the US Civil War with Native American relations, in the context of a modern-day grudge. These days, if you were to be holding a grudge about what took place in the Civil War, you would be regarded as a bit of an eccentric if not an out-and-out kook. That’s what makes groups like the KKK such ready targets of ridicule; they seem so out of step, more of a cult than a valid political perspective. This causes them to be underrated as impediments to social progress, cartoon figures to be lampooned, rather than perpetrators of potential domestic terrorism. This is also true of the Taliban, who seek to apply 16th and 17th century social standards to a modern world for reasons of religious indoctrination and the acquisition of political power. Given the date on which this is being written, this point seems especially poignant.

Native Americans, on the other hand, have legitimate reasons to hold grudges today. The history of forcible relocation to reservations and broken treaties is perpetuated to this day by the legacies of those past acts. My own country has its own, not unrelated, problems in this area, though there was never a treaty made with the First Australians, and it is all too easy to understand grudges held over past political and social mistakes – even those made with what the people of the time considered best intentions. Rather than condemning those with such a grudge, we laud and encourage those who rise above them – they are held to a different social standard, in other words.

(For the record, I support recognition and reconciliation; I support and approve of all members of society being given an equal opportunity, with no-one getting unearned special privileges – with “unearned” as a key word – and I support a social safety net to ensure that all members of society receive a minimum standard of safety, security, health, and standard of living. And I support religious freedom, tolerance, and multiculturalism, right up to the point where such support places others at risk of harm, where the need for society to protect itself supersedes those freedoms).

Distortions of history

The benefits to GMs don’t end there. By definition, anyone with a grudge is going to have strong opinions and interpretations of events involving the subject of their grudge. As a general practice, because they have to see all sides of a situation in order to properly roleplay those involved in any faction, GMs tend to adopt a fairly neutral and arms-length position regarding their game histories. This causes an active disconnection between our personal opinions on any subject and the ‘official’ position. Like historians, we adopt an Olympian perspective.

If game history is to be delivered through the lens of of character with a grudge, there is no need to go to such lengths. Prep Research can be sloppier and even contradicted to some extent by subsequent manifestations of the same event. The character is telling a biased, distorted, and myopic version of the story. This is personal to them, somehow.

If you make it clear through their behavior and rhetoric that the NPC is speaking from the perspective of having a grudge, you don’t have to worry about the “other side of the story” (let alone the truth) until the PCs have the opportunity to interact with that “other side” – let the players filter the bias out for themselves, making whatever assumptions or interpretations they find necessary.

Even when the PCs do interact with “The Other Side Of The Story”, don’t make the mistake of making that the “true story”; it should be just as distorted and myopic, at least in critical areas. Only when PCs are in a position to learn the real truth, free of any bias, should that be of concern to the GM.

Most events involving humans don’t have immutable and incontrovertible timelines. Let’s take a hypothetical war between Elves and Dwarves – the Dwarves might date the beginning of the war from the date of Dwarfish incursion into Elvish Territory in response to what they consider lengthy provocations; the Elves might consider this just the overt escalation of a conflict that began when the Dwarves attempted to bargain in bad faith, abrogating or ignoring past treaties, months or even years earlier.

Does a battle begin when a raiding force begins to march, or when that force encounters the defenders of the raid’s target?

It all depends on your perspective. Even something as strongly defined as the Birth of the USA – July 4th of 1776 was when the Declaration Of Independence was signed, but did the revolution actually begin when they started negotiating it, days or weeks earlier?

Two sides to every story

The “winners” write the history? Says who?

Losers perpetuate their own version of events – so long as victory is less than total.

Even if that’s not the case, the experiences of the surviving losers in a conflict will enter the popular zeitgeist of their social group as a subculture within the victorious and dominant society – and, arguably, the social position that results could qualify as the type of “perpetuation” I was discussing above. Certainly, through to the 80s and 90s at the very least, African Americans could cite the long legacy of slavery and oppression as a driving impetus behind the struggle for Civil Rights, which is a profound example of the phenomenon.

It is often helpful to the GM to deliberately stock some part of his campaign with an advocate of “the other side” as soon as he introduces the character with The Grudge. This advocate need not appear at once, and need not appear with the same frequency as the character with The Grudge; his function is simply to remind the players from time-to-time that there is another perspective of perhaps equal validity. Nor does the GM need to worry about this NPCs manifesto until such time as he will appear in-game.

Simply make a note of his existence and pop him into some appropriate scene that seems a little quiet and needs livening up.

Three sides to every story

GMs should also always remember the Vorlon Saying from Babylon 5: There are three sides to every story: Your Side, Their Side, and The Truth. You don’t have to worry about the content of the other two when creating content for the character with The Grudge, but never forget that the other sides are out there. The character with the Grudge should be wrong occasionally, and that error should manifest in the form of trouble for the PCs who rely on his information.

Does anyone really believe that the American Government and Military conducted every single encounter during World War 2 with complete honor and integrity? Or the British? That expediency and internal politics never led to a compromising of principles?

Anyone who knows history, knows better. The incarceration of Japanese Americans is one shameful example, and one that has been demonstrated to have been in error of justice in subsequent years. There are those who still question the need to bomb Nagasaki; in light of what the Americans believed at the time, and of Japanese attempts to negotiate a settlement of the war on their own terms after Hiroshima, I think it can probably be justified, and any taint of lack of necessity counterbalanced by the comedy of errors and misjudgments that turned Pearl Harbor into a sneak attack.

The absence of a victory

I don’t want to belabor the point too much further, so I will simply cite three additional points of contemplation and leave the reader to muse on them for themselves.

• Consider modern US-UK relations – well, those before President Trump and Brexit became somewhat divisive elements in that relationship
  – with the outcome of the American War of Independence, in which Britain accepted that the War could not be won with the resources they had available, given the problems that they faced with their European neighbors of the time. It was that acceptance and a subsequent normalizing of relations that drew a line between that conflict, paving the way for the US to come to the aid of the Allies in the First World War.
• Contrast that with the relationship between India and Britain. The liberties granted to the East India Company were frankly exploitative, aimed at fostering the wealth of the Company at the expense of the locals while promoting the Imperialism of Britain in the era. British control was maintained through force and corruption until those were no longer tenable. That Britain gave much, in cultural and technological terms, to the Indians can’t be disputed; but the behavior of the British at the time can only be justified in the context of the morality of the era, and fails utterly by modern standards. Although grudgingly granted independence during the reformation of Empire into Commonwealth, and despite overtly good relations between the nations since, there are still Indians who hold an anti-British Grudge. This was the attitude expressed that initially inspired this article.
• And then, contrast both with the relations between Northern and Southern Ireland, whose history raises harsh and difficult questions. There were occasions during the twentieth Century when each side of the Northern Irish conflict behaved abominably, prompting the question, how far you entitled to go in abrogating your morality in order to secure “inalienable rights”? And, the inevitable followup question – was anything really gained, or did they simply take turns building a barrier to peaceful resolution of the conflict? I’m sure that if you were to ask, both sides would defend and justify their actions. Ultimately, it was a political process that ended the conflict – and I’m equally sure that there are those on both sides who still bear grudges against the other.

Adventuring Potential

All the benefits of giving an NPC a grudge arise even before we consider the potential for adventures to manifest from the background material in question. That potential takes four forms:

• Legacies,
• Acts Of Revenge,
• Unpopular Histories, and
• Outside Forces & Conspiracies.

Legacies

Somewhere, in a long-forgotten corner of the game world, there is a leftover from a past conflict that poses a threat to the modern world. This could be an unfinished doomsday weapon, or “forbidden” research, or any of half-a-dozen other possibilities. Used sparingly, this plot gimmick never gets tired.

Acts Of Revenge

It’s easy for a Grudge to lead a character to cross a line. Every time a line gets crossed, it gets easier to do so again. Inevitably, in some cases, minor acts of pettiness resulting from a Grudge lead to more substantial acts of revenge, and characters who – due to dissatisfaction with the outcome – want to reignite the old conflict. However justified the dissatisfaction might be, the result is unjustifiable acts of revenge. What’s more, dissatisfaction leaves a character or a population open to exploitation. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the European theater of World War II, when megalomania exploited justifiable dissatisfaction to rebuild national pride into an arrogance that permitted acts of extreme barbarism.

Unpopular Histories

At first glance, it might seem like there is nothing under this heading to really exploit in terms of adventure. Revealing or Discovering an unpopular truth might be intellectually interesting, but it rarely gets the gaming juices really flowing.

Look a little deeper. I dealt with this question in in The Veil of Secrecy: A truth about organizations in games without really digging into the implications.

An organization – be it a business or a government agency or an entire government – does something that they can’t admit to. They now have a secret. To protect that secret, they erect a cover story. In furtherance of that cover story, they do other things that they can’t admit to – bribes, intimidation, ruining reputations, disinformation, perhaps even murder. Now they have another secret to protect – and one with deeper personal ramifications for those involved. Should the secret come under threat, a violent countermeasure is almost inevitably justified in the minds of those involved.

There have been lots of movies and TV shows in which characters come under threat because their activities threaten a secret. Even good people can do so if they judge the myth to be more important than the reality. Threaten to undermine that myth, and you make yourself a target.

Of course, in most such stories, the main protagonists aren’t the ones threatening the secret, they are the ones trying to protect them from those with the secret. Which is generally easier to orchestrate, from a GM’s perspective.

Outside Forces & Conspiracies

Finally, the other side of the coin is also about the exposing of secrets – the discovery that a past conflict was orchestrated for their own purposes by a third party inevitably leads the person making that discovery into a position of hostility toward that third party. Of course, such a secret would not be easily discovered; you would have to be motivated to dig deeply for the breadcrumbs that make it seem like a conspiracy theory. Characters with a grudge are highly motivated….

PC Grudges

With such depth of characterization on offer, it can be a temptation to load one or more PCs down with a grudge. And the dividends are exactly the same as for an NPC.

I urge you to resist such temptation, except under unusual circumstances – not that I have any such in mind, but concede that it’s just possible there could be some.

The first problem with this tactic is that it takes that ?deferable and compromised? background research and makes the deadline immediate and ongoing. Because you will need to keep feeding content to the PC, you actually force the player to cede some measure of his control over his character. At the same time, from an outside perspective, you can give the impression to other players that you are playing favorites. And finally, you run the risk of overuse of the “Grudge” mechanism, something I warned of earlier.

There are simply too many minefields. If you can see a way to circumvent them, then this is worth considering – but that is going to be an isolated case, I think. PCs are better served, most of the time, being the neutral observers caught in the middle, and caring about the things that the player wants them to care about.

Some things are too good to waste on Player Characters. Grudges are one of them.