Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett
Can I run a campaign in which the PCs are the allies and champions of an NPC wizard who is striving to regain her throne? Or won't players cope with playing the second fiddle? Can I make ally/champion a first-string position without making the wizard unattractively weak?
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Generally, I donīt see why not. Campaigns in which PCs run errands or solve quests for powerful NPCs are commonplace, after all. In your case, that is in a campaign of displacing PC groups into radically strange environments, it might be hard to create enough motivation for them to actually do so, e.g. railroad them into your intended campaign framework. Either the NPC is established in a convincingly positive way and his opponent in a negative way, which would still leave the PCs the freedom to simply wander way to do other things, or they have but no choice to join one fraction, because their very survival is at stake. Can you count on the players cooperation if you present them the obviously intended way for the camapign to go ?
By the way,
Wizard ? Is this another term for the old engineer caste or where does magic come in ?
Apart from Burroughs, do you know Moorcocks Kane Of Old Mars series, an homage to the former ? From these books I remember a nice gadet, a kind of autofac, which simply produces plastic parts to the specifications of the operator, which in turn allows the main character to do all kinds of interesting engineering feats, without being too powerful, since it is plastic, after all (no guns, no combustion engines, for example).