How to Choose Your Enemies

When you need to create an organization, especially an organization that will function as a “permanent enemy”, start with just a general concept.  Pick something that appeals to you, because you don’t want to use something over and over if you hate it.  (One shot organizations can be things that don’t appeal to you, but nothing with longevity.)  The big concept should be easy enough:  a military, a school, a guild, a cult, a tribe, a cartel, whatever.  Now, what are the divisions within that organization, and what are the divisions within the divisions.  The bigger the organization, the more divisions there will be.

Example:  A modern military might have an air force, an army, a navy with or without marines, and a coast guard.  Within each of these groups are units which have component units within them, down to the squad level.  A fantasy military might separate the army from the cavalry from the militia.  The army might have archers and footmen, while the cavalry has heavy horse and patrollers (skirmishers).

Try to keep it real.  A terrorist organization that can field hundreds of planes and tanks would not be allowed to exist within the boundaries of a major country, unless the country was supporting that terrorist organization.  A cartel that ran sixty ships and forty caravans would likely be the most powerful economic organization in the world.  They would not operate in secret.  Of course, these are just games, but you don’t want your players to completely check their brains at the door.

How is the group of player characters going to butt heads with the organization?  This is where you can plan strategy.  Let’s go to an example:  The organization is a slave cartel, standard fantasy enemy.  But the leader of the slave cartel is a dragon who secretly runs the organization through intermediaries.  (The dragon is also crazy, which adds flavor later.)  She (the dragon) is a mage and has been teaching a group of treacherous dark elves some of her ancient magics.  This cadre forms her personal bodyguard, though in the right circumstances they would happily betray her.  So much for the headquarters.

The organization has two distinct limbs, plus ancillary organizations.  The one side of the cartel is the slavers selling slaves in markets where slavery is acceptable.  This is actually a fairly legitimate business, though they do rely on powerful bounty hunters/slave catchers.  This organization is mainly made up of warrior types, though few of them are straight melee types - more range and non-lethal types.  The other side of the organization is made up of pirates that raid the coastlines, burning villages and capturing peasants as slaves.  These pirates are more frequently rogue types.  They rely on their fearsome reputations and the fact that no one really knows that their raids are cover for capturing slaves.

OK - does this make sense?  An organization that actively sells slaves being supplied by a “brother” organization that captures slaves illegally overseen by a dragon ready to take action against anyone messing with her subsidiaries.  Seems believable in a fantasy setting.  You also have humans (the pirates), just about any race (the slavers), dark elves and a dragon.  Seemingly a good mix.  If the pirates capture someone, and a party needs to rescue them, they will have to fight the pirates and force them to tell who they gave the slave to.  Then the party goes and fights the slavers, only to find that the dragon is either coming after them for revenge or the dragon chose to take that slave as her own.  That should be at least three good solid missions, all from one organization.  Later on, after the party defeats the dragon, any dark elf mages that escaped might be able to rebuild the organization, allowing the party to go after them again. 

It might be cool to have the new head of the organization known as “the dragon” because she skinned the last head and now uses her hide as armor.  That way as the party begins to investigate, they will think the head of the organization is the same dragon (or a child or something) and will be unprepared to fight a powerful dark elf mage.

An organization does not need to be made of completely different entities as described in this example, but different can make things more exciting.  If all members of an organization are exactly the same, things can get dull quickly, and the players can come up with ways to defeat them more quickly.  Sometimes a little bit of different can be all that’s necessary.  Let’s take an evil snake cult example, another standard in fantasy games.  In one town, the cult is completely underground, both literally and figuratively.  They operate in secret and meet in secret.  The party will need to investigate to find them and then attack.  In the next town, the cult is seen as a perfectly normal religion and they meet openly, but keep their sinister side hidden.  Here, the party knows where the enemy is, but they cannot outright attack for fear of coming under fire from the legitimate factions in the town.  In the third town, the snake cult controls the town, so the characters will be outlaws if they are detected.  Now the characters need to operate as the secret organization in hopes of getting past the snake cult guards.  In each of these cases, the snake cult operatives will likely be very similar, but their public presence is completely different, making for three distinctive missions.

This is after all the main reason to use an organization - to link missions.  If the missions are linked, you only need to motivate the characters once, plus it adds a sense of continuity to the campaign.  Hopefully it will help you as well, because if the organization makes sense to you, you will have an easier time of developing it.