I know I said I was going to do an installment on retainers and recruitment this time but I’m fickle and have decided instead to discuss churches.

Churches are fantastic venues for political campaigns. They are relatively self-contained hierarchies with potential conflicts both within and without. If you set it up properly then problems and story arcs practically write themselves. I’m going to spend a few articles on this topic as I think this is a great example of how to weave political intrigues into a campaign.

Church of the Dead

One advantage of running green campaigns and recycling concepts is that the concepts become richer over time as you add more layers every campaign. This is true of my Church of the Dead that I have used numerous times, primarily for fantasy campaigns. I have hundreds of pages of notes and scores of adventure/scene ideas I can borrow from, plus I know the material very well so I can adapt to whatever the players do without much difficulty. Now this doesn’t mean my Church of the Dead is a brilliantly creative concept. It’s solid and works - that should be your standard. The reason I’m bringing this up is because if some point as a GM you introduce an institution that clicks with your players don’t hesitate to recycle it in some fashion.

The goal with institutions, like a church, that the PCs will be significantly interacting with, is that it must catch their imagination and yet be understandable. In other words it must be evocative and intuitive. My Church of the Dead is what you might expect for an institution responsible for the handling of the dead and shepherding of souls to their appropriate afterlife (metaphysical specifics vary by the setting). There are lots of dark, gothic temple complexes, mystical ceremonies, complex bureaucracy and hierarchy with plenty of political intrigue, and by appearances a rather stuffy and conservative priesthood. Priests of the Church of the Dead, called Demarches, have to deal with burial ceremonies, estate management, grief counseling, and if the setting is more fantastical, then perhaps putting to rest undead. It’s a wealthy and powerful church and its priests have a lot of influence in the world; after all, everyone dies eventually. This is a politically rich environment - lots of secrets, intrigues, and rivalries all wrapped up with the moral and philosophical conflicts hardwired to its fundamental nature.

Political Structure

Within my Church of the Dead, there is a rigid hierarchy of ranks from novices at the bottom all the way up to the Grand Demarche who presides over the faith. There are sacred orders, professional guilds, and secret societies with their own hierarchies. There are also legislative bodies of senior priests at the diocese and highest levels of the church. Priests will often be filling multiple roles, perhaps they preside over a local cemetery of little importance but they are also a senior member of the Sacred Order of Embalmer; this complicates the political dynamic. You don’t need to detail all of this just a few points and then flesh out as you go, keeping in mind you want to set up political synergies. Sometimes these are potential conflicts, other times they are potential allies. If one of your PCs is a priest and really is into estate management then give them an invitation to join the regional court within the Church that deals with more complex cases in this area. What you want to do is to set up a network of opportunities for the PC to explore the Church and in the process generate adventures.

Political Conflicts

Conflicts are good and ideally you want them relatively balanced or slightly weighted against the PCs. Most political conflicts are between traditionalists and reformers. Traditionalist want to maintain the status quo more or less while reformers want to make change, sometimes massive change. This can go a lot of ways. For example, let’s say the traditional position of the Church is anti-undead and the reform position is that undead could be used for security and cheap labor. Or let’s say the traditional position is if you don’t pay you don’t get all the sacred protections on your corpse and the reform position is everyone should get sacred protections to prevent the rise of undead. There’s nothing to stop you from going both ways at one. The traditionalists might be moderates and pulling them in two opposing directions are two sects of reformers. Generally, most political conflicts come down to disputes over the allocation of resources due to different philosophical priorities. You know your setting and with a little imagination you can come up with some really interesting conflicts that might really challenge the PCs as to which direction, if any, they will support. You just need to ask yourself this question: what do the priests argue about behind closed doors?

Once you have an idea of the political conflicts you need NPCs to represent those conflicts. If your campaign is taking place in a small town on the edge of nowhere, you don’t need to detail the high priests who are in political conflict thousands of miles away. You need to focus on the immediate. If the PCs are tied in some fashion to a local crypt complex that one of the PCs is managing then maybe it’s a neighboring monastery and rival crypt complex in another nearby town where the political conflicts come from. Of course, sometimes political conflicts are more about resources than ideology. Perhaps the rival crypt complex is run by a priest who is pretty much in doctrinal and political agreement with the PC priest yet the two of them are competing for the bodies of the wealthy as that’s where the gold is to support their facilities. This is a great political conflict, especially since the two competing priests might have the same allies and supporters making the whole thing very awkward for everyone. A good institution for roleplaying games should be malleable so you can adapt it to your needs.

This brings me to an important point: you don’t want your institution to be off-putting to your PCs if you want them interacting with it. There has to be good with bad so the PCs will invest into the institution. The good might be the promise of power and wealth, but it has to be there. A villainous institution that is opposed to your PCs can be as nasty as you want, but what you’re trying to do here is create something your PCs want to interact with. If you’re lucky they might get ambitious and want to some day run the show.

Doctrinal Disputes

Politics influence doctrine and this is another way to articulate differences. Consider these two examples:

Cremation: In settings with undead I always have a doctrinal dispute over cremation. The Church makes more money off traditional burials while cremation eliminates potential corpses that can be raised as undead. Imagine a situation where the local church leadership forbids cremation during a period of an undead infestation both to not signal weakness and to keep revenue coming in.

Resurrection: In one D&D campaign I made it a doctrinal position of the Church that demarches shouldn’t cast resurrection spells. They had the spells and could cast them but they weren’t supposed to save in very special circumstances. Enemies of a PC demarche brutally assassinated her ward/assistant. It was a great bit of roleplaying by the PC demarche over whether to cast the spell or not. There were political considerations in both directions but purely on theological grounds she decided not to raise her dead ward/assistant.

This is enough for now and it’s all over the place so I will probably spend next month expanding upon this, perhaps with a more detailed example. Or I might switch back to recruiting NPCs…like I said I’m fickle.