Well, one of my loves are small trivial historical anecdotes, and currently I remember one that might start a small campaign.
One of those Roman writers - think it was Tacitus or Suetonius, cannot remember which one - who tried to amass as much discrediting stories about the Bad Emperors (Nero, Caligula etc) told the following one:
The Bad Emperor in question exhausted his finances by his decadent
living, so regularly he had to auction
off valuable stuff that no longer amused him to get
money. At one of these occasions an old Senator
who sat in audience just to watch fell asleep, and on
the BE's orders the auctioneer counted every nod
from the poor old fart as a bid; when he woke up he
found he had bought a bunch of professional
gladiators for the price of about everything he owned.
Well, the historian never told us what happened to the Senator after that, but if you want to play a swordyandsorcerous campaign in Lunar Empire, the whole thing could start with such an event at a slave auction - it need not be the Emperor who is in desperate need of cash. Anyway, this cranky old rock-conservative suddenly has suddenly no property to speak of to his name, except for a bunch of slave gladiators (or other specialist slaves) - the PC's. For some reason he cannot sell them off at any reasonable rate - perhaps he had to buy them at ten times their market value. So what else to do than to start renting them out to people who need armed men and women for rather delicate missions? Just like any payshield campaign, with the important exception that the PC's employer is constantly swaying between the need for funds and his views on How to Do Things, which are not necessarily practical in these circumstances - he might even have Yelmic geases preventing him from letting his underlings do certain things, since doing these things would make him a 'bad leader', and Yelmics are supposed to be 'good leaders', though not necessarily nice ones.
The PC's could come from anywhere, really. If you want to increase the humorous aspect of the already somewhat absurd idea, each player has to come up with a good reason why no one in his right mind would buy his PC...
And remember that the Senator (or rather, his equivalent - any old Yelmic gent will do) has ample reasons to hate the rich guy in the Bad Emperor role - and so may the characters (he might not have been a nice master, being based on Nero/Caligula and all). Voila - instant Campaign Enemy!
==
'The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea,
In a beautiful, pea-green boat...'
>From 'The Owl and the Pussycat' by Edward Lear
Erik Sieurin
Did you think I would reveal things about myself in this .sig?
HA!
sieurin_at_yahoo.com
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