Unlocking psychological warfare
What if your players develop – or unleash – their creative and sinister side?
What if they don’t want to invade the kobold dens outside of town and kill all the grubby lizards? If they wanted to try a different approach, what then?
Psychological warfare helped the Mongols conquer Asia and the Allies win WW2. It’s a powerful weapon in your arsenal.
How do you do it in D&D?
Intimidation rolls…
A few charm-based spells…
… in other words, a few rolls of the dice and barely any roleplaying.
That makes sense – in order to deploy psychological weapons against the kobolds, the kobolds would need to have psyches. They’d need to be more than stat blocks with simple behaviours.
In a classic dungeon crawl, the inhabitants are standing around in their appointed rooms, waiting for the PCs to show up. There’s not a lot you could do to psyche those out.
With Footprints, though, it fleshes them out into living, realistic societies.
Psychological warfare could be as simple as cutting off their food and water supplies. It could be as complex as a series of operations designed to make them question their faith, their leaders or their neighbours.
It can work, if and only if the kobolds have infrastructure and a society.
What’s that?
Too much work?
Bah.
Have a skim through Footprints and you’ll see how easy it is to make enemies that breathe: