6 thoughts on “How do you end wars?”

  1. Crew could help an ‘aspiring’ leader on the opposite side take control in exchange for a truce.

    A 3rd party recruits the top members of a side and it dissolves due to a lack of leadership.

    A crisis that threatens both sides unites them.

    A duel between champions.

  3. In fictional terms: the Blackstone Outfit ended their war with the Red Sashes by going Hell’s Angels on them – retaliating with such comprehensive levels of violence that the Sashes decided it wasn’t worth their time to piss these psychos off. This had other repercussions, as does everything in BitD, but it stopped the Sashes from pursuing the Outfit. The Sashes were still around, of course, and when the Outfit teamed up with the Lampblacks to finish them off, it was gruesome.

    In game terms: I had already filled a “Red Sashes” clock to represent their willingness to go to war with the Blackstone Outfit. As the Outfit dealt blow after blow to the Sashes’ morale (including, but not limited to, reviving the ghost of their murdered swordmaster and siccing him, at the head of a ghost army, on their compound), I erased wedges of the clock. When the clock was empty, I reset the negative wedges (to -2 or -1, I forget). The Sashes still hated the Outfit, but they didn’t have the will to confront them.

  4. Much the same way you might broker peace between warring factions in real life: either make such a show of overwhelming force that the other side has no choice but to concede or be wiped off the map, or negotiate a temporary cease fire (likely with the use of neutral go-betweens) until the leadership can hammer out some kind of compromise.

    The former is probably mostly handled via scores (steal their supplies/funding sources, assassinate their leaders, wreck up their holdings, etc.), while the latter is probably mostly long-term projects during downtime:maybe one to get an initial cease fire (which probably spawns a countdown clock for someone breaking the truce) and a second for the actual negotiation.

    For the negotiation, there’s a few ways you could handle it: maybe the players agree collectively on what their ideal terms would be and the GM, using the guidelines for effects on p. 10 of the Quickstart, determines whether they’re in a position to get some but not all of their terms (limited effects), what they hoped for (standard effect), or an even bigger concession than they expected. All of those factors could be manipulated by pulling scores: cut off their support from the Bluecoats and their Scale drops, or arrange to have their warmongering boss… ahem… replaced by someone more amenable to peace and you get an edge in Potency.

    Alternately, use concessions as the basis for devil’s bargains or consequences on the downtime negotiation rolls. (“Sure, you can have that extra +1d, but you’ll have to cede control of that drug den on Lookback Street for it” or “While you’re pushing hard on keeping your holdings at the docks, their negotiators manage to trap you into agreeing to giving them a cut of whatever you move through the Port of Doskvol. You wanna resist that?”)

  5. Would it be fair to say that a reduction in animosity from -3 to -1 might also represent a lesser willingness to fight IE negotiations and not necessarily a decreased dislike?

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