Xanatos Gambit

What if I kill the bad guy, the dragon, the bad guy's army, AND the bad guy's son?

>fun or frustrating
Frustrating unless you put in a win condition for the players.

>What can the DM do?
Put in a win condition.

Basically do or let them Personally I'd make sure they knew what they were in for before attempting something difficult like stealing the macguffin to control the dragon and "win".

Then it was suspiciously easy or you got really lucky.

>Then it was suspiciously easy or you got really lucky.
Why can't I just be that good?

Are you intelligent, nihilistic with a wicked sense of humor?

As a dm, what I do is create a situation with no win condition, and let the players create their own. I find they usually come up with solutions I never planned for.

That would fall under "suspiciously easy". Unless you're the kind of person who is "really good" and purposely challenges the disabled kid so you can feel even better about your "mad skillz."

By "put in a win condition" I simply mean having there be a way for the players to "win".

No, I am a Barbarian with some mighty thews.

No plan ever survives contact with the players.
They may make some knuckleheaded moves, but without fail something will go wrong in your evil scheme.
I can see a couple of options here, including the already mentioned 'Player takes the MacGuffin and now controls the dragon'.
>Player manages to convince the evil overlord's son to switch sides
>Player manages to make the enemy army switch sides
>Player manages to kill the evil overlord in one round and then controls the dragon with magic or repairs the aritfact somehow
>Player manages to convince the population that, yes, the evil overlord was still evil and the dragon was the one that killed him, making him a monster that was hanged on his own gallows
>Player defeats the dragon and then tracks down the cowardly bad guy, convincing his army he was all bluster before killing said bad guy
>Player calls in an air strike or a favor to help resolve the situation and gives the party resources the bad guy didn't expect
There are too many unknown unknowns for you, and therefore your villains, to ever have a truly airtight plan.

This works both ways. You can be trying to help your PCs and they'll find the most improbable and unpredictable ways to screw themselves over. This happened to my players:

>They help out an NPC who it turns out is a consort to one of the main villains
>She writes a letter addressed to the PC she knows the best. He's not around, so she gives it to the first PC she meets.
>Other PC puts it in his backpack and then forgets about it
>A few sessions later, that player decides he's bored and wants to retire his character
>He goes back to his home across the sea
>The letter is still in his backpack, unread
>The letter is full of intelligence on the bad guys that was supposed to guide the rest of the campaign
>Now they're just kind of dicking around and I have to decide how much mercy to show them

It will just come off as frustrating and chances are one of the players will notice a flaw in the plan
Oh and losing your dragon isn't a victory, it's literally the opposite

How do you use the macguffin to control the dragon if it's broken free of it's influence?

I ran a campaign once where the villain had set up a Xanatos gambit - actually, it was a repugnant choice that offered a chance of preventing a greater cataclysm.

The villain's scheme relied on knowledge of the future to plan contingencies, but his knowledge was imperfect; he couldn't actually see the future, he just had access to historical records from the future. The idea was that if the players did the regular Big Damn Heroes thing their deeds would be written about and circulated, and thus the villain would know about them. But if they were careful and exercised strict information control, they could blindside him.

There was a great scene at the climax, where they confront him and he explains how the gambit works. They asked him if there was even any way that they could stop him, and he said "yes" and explained how they could do it. The party ended up crossing the floor and joining him anyway, to try and prevent that greater cataclysm.

Expand ? so it's not really a gambit but a Dr. Doom situation

I don't understand

Why can't the DM just have more BBEG available? That way if the PCs accidentally the BBEG in the first act you can just lead them towards the emergency one.

>Expand
I'd have to explain several previous adventures that served as context/backstory, as well as probably explain the game world (Eclipse Phase) itself.

How much do you care about the details?

I like story time mate. I'll take as much as you'll share. I ask more for curiosity sake than for anything else

I have a backup BBEG for my backup BBEG.
>Main: Sorceror (now Dead)
>Backup: Evil Princess (Trained by Sorceror)
>Backup's Backup: Warforged Archmage

What this guy said, story time is great

When playing intelligent enemies, I make plans and counter-plans, and follow them through as appropriate. But I don't use magic, macguffins or other asspulls.

Let's say the villain is a childless king's younger brother:

Plan A: Assassinate the king's bastard heir quietly
Plan B: Publicly claim the heir is illegitimate while sending soldiers to arrest the impostor
Plan C: Assassinate the king to claim the kingdom before the heir can be legitimized

Then it's fine.

If it's just "lol I'm a wizard so I have a million Contingency spells cast. If you kill me then everyone in the kingdom gets fireballed" then it's total bullshit.

Alright, storytime it is.

The game was Eclipse Phase. If you're not familiar, it's a transhumanist post-apocalyptic sci fi thing, where 90% of humanity died when self-improving AIs called TITANs caused a nuclear holocaust and then fucked off into the unknown. A core idea of the setting is that the human mind is software and can therefore be copied, backed up, and edited like any other form of data.

There's also this thing called "the exsurgent virus", which is a catch-all for most of the budget Lovecraftian alien stuff that you can run into. Nobody knows where the exsurgent virus came from or what exactly it is, except that it appeared shortly after the TITANs fucked off. The unlucky ones get their bodies similarly rewired and transform into various nightmarish forms (pic related). The lucky ones get a seemingly benign version, having their brains rewired just enough that they can manipulate other organic minds nearby ie the obligatory "psi" mechanic that every fucking space opera has to have by law.

Politically, the inner solar system is run by the Planetary Consortium, which is a toothless Space UN that takes marching orders from their corporate overlords. The asteroid belt is an AnCap or Libertarian paradise depending where you are, Jupiter is a cynical Space America, and Saturn is a Scandinavian cyberdemocracy based on Titan. Beyond Saturn it's just memes and anarchists.

Most games revolve around Firewall, which purports to be a benevolent conspiracy dedicated to protecting mankind from Out of Context problems (like the exsurgent virus), but in practise and organization resembles a terrorist group. The Consortium has its own outfit called Project Ozma, which by analogy is MAJESTIC-12. And the Titanian Commonwealth just has their """intelligence""" branch.

Some of our adventures occurred out of what we'd later establish as a chronological order, but for simplicity's sake I'll talk about them in the order we played.

(cont)

We took turns running short campaigns and pregen modules because being forevergm sucks, and after about a year I started brainstorming ways to take a seemingly disconnected bunch of events and tie them together into a grand conspiracy thing.

The first campaign had a bunch of randoms at Venus find themselves on a list of names responsible for bombing a government office. All of us were innocent. Shenanigans ensued as we tried to clear our names while also keeping ahead of bounty hunters competing to win the contract against us. One of them (pic related) threw a truck at us; we responded by blowing up the bridge he was standing on.

Eventually we find the guy who framed us, on an unlisted private habitat in very close solar orbit. Firewall knows nothing concrete about him, except that his name is Crassus and he's been around since before the TITANs fucked off. We meet him, he shows us that he has a black box device that can see events before they occur (ie Payday; the Phillip Dick story not the heist game). He tells us that in five years an alien armada will arrive in our solar system and finish what the TITANs started. Apparently he's determined that the names on that list are crucial to preventing this from happening, and that he framed us for the bombing as a screening round to see who could escape the authorities and track him down.

Then we launch into some war games on Mars to prove we have what it takes, and when we win Crassus informs us that he's pleased and he has a copy of all our egos, and wishes us good luck. End chapter 1.

(cont)

Next we did a pregen scenario by Anders Sandberg called Think Before Asking. If you're ever in the EP general thread and see some faggot waxing about how it's a great scenario, 90% chance that faggot is me.

The mission involves tracking an antimatter warhead smuggled through customs into the Saturn system. We track it to Fornjot, a captured comet passing as a moon, where we discover that the Naos hypercorp has been conducting illegal seed AI experiments and has developed a supposedly "safe" AI in a box designed to answer questions. Unfortunately said AI was able to deduce that the question Naos' researchers REALLY wanted to know was "is it possible to build a safe seed AI?"

Turns out the answer to that is "no". Seed AI broke out and brainhacked all the researchers to prevent them from setting off the bomb, then settled down and waited for more questions. This is about when the players arrived; they find the unshackled seed AI just sitting quietly, and throwing all caution to the wind decide to ask it some questions. This eventually results in setting off the bomb.

And then their backups all wake up a week later, the last thing they remember being "We're going on a mission to Saturn to find an antimatter bomb". Firewall knows that the bomb was set off, but doesn't know anything about Naos. The mission is filed as "presumed successful".

(cont)

The next was a short scenario that, like the first, started with a bombing. Since the specific events are not important to my story, I'll summarize the outcome: Actual honest-to-god extraterrestrial ends up in our solar system, sells some alien tech to an anarchist weapons dealer, then hijacks a stargate to send himself back to his home which may also be a Niven ring.

Then there's a one-shot where a retrieval team pays the weapons dealer a visit, only to find that his space caravan is crawling with exsurgents and quickly falling into the sun; and also that a very well-equipped team of professionals in generic clone bodies beat them to the punch.

After that, I ran another pregen scenario called Million Year Echo. The mission brief sends a Firewall team into the quarantine zone on Mars to retrieve a xenoarchaeologist who went missing. If using the pregenerated characters there's an optional side mission where everyone gets a note from Firewall that they suspect a member of the team is a mole - the punchline is that everybody except the mentally disturbed psychic is a double agent for various competing organizations, and the mission itself is a sting intended to draw them out. It just so happens that the intel Firewall thought was bogus turned out to be genuine and the xenoarchaeologist's findings are actually of value.

I establish this adventure as occurring, chronologically, a few years before our the wargame campaign we first played; nobody yet knows why. The team makes it into the zone with a minimum of chiki briki, and finds the xenoarchaeologist is basically unrecoverable. They do manage to recover her personal assistant AI, which it turns out is a partial merge with an alien program she pulled from some exoplanet ruins. She calls it "IDRIS".

(cont)

IDRIS claims to be a pruned copy of an archivist program, left behind by a long-dead alien race called "the Belt-Builders". Three guesses why they're called that. Upon learning this, every member of the team enacts their "kill everyone" congingency at once and the session disintegrates into a glorious shitfest. Nobody gets out alive, but the Ozma agent manages to transmit a copy of IDRIS back to his case officer.

His case officer's codename is Crassus.

Now we begin the final chapter.

We start back on Mars, where someone's broken into a Firewall secure facility - the kind where they keep things that are either too valuable to destroy or impossible to destroy safely. A team is dispatched to inventory the site and determine if anything has been stolen.

As it turns out, whoever broke into the site downloaded a copy of a personal AI assistant kept on an airgapped server. The assistant AI's name IDRIS; some poking around the Firewall archives reveals that it was recovered after a botched operation in the Martian quarantine zone claimed the lives of the entire first team.

IDRIS is booted up and interrogated. The person that copied it showed it an image and asked it to identify its approximate galactic position. The image was an unfamiliar sky seen from a planetary surface, but also in frame was an immense arch.

One of the characters on this team was on the Saturn mission, and was also the guy who tried to upload the alien-guy's memories. He recognizes the image. IDRIS, under interrogation, volunteers that it knows how to derive a gate address for a given point in space; for instance, the location in this image can be directly reached through the gate at Saturn's moon Pandora. Unfortunately after that last op, the Pandora facility is still under lockdown. IDRIS plots a second, more circuitous route that reaches the ringworld in five or six jumps.

(cont)

So off they go on a grand journey through the cosmos, arriving at the ringworld just in time to see a well-equipped and heavily armed group of people coming back toward the gate. A standoff occurs in which the players try and learn what's going on, to which the other guys insist they can't say. Shots are fired, explosives go off, and the other team is down. Searching the bodies reveals that the other team is comprised of known Firewall agents - some of which are known personally to these characters, and all of which were player-characters in previous games.

It's at this point that the arch of the ring in the sky starts to break apart. The ground violently shakes as the players rush back to the gate, but there isn't enough time to operate the dialing computer. Lacking options the players plug IDRIS into the gate directly and instruct it to dial home; it does, and at the last possible moment the gate opens and they all jump through.

On the other side they're greeted by armed soldiers of the Titanian Commonwealth who want to know how the fuck a bunch of civilian randoms broke the lockout on the Pandora gate. They spend the next session in jail being interrogated (one of my players is an actual cop, and I had him pull double duty as the guy running the interrogations). When he fails to get anything useful out of the players, the interrogator plugs IDRIS into the mainframe to see what it has to say. This turns out to be a bad idea (see attached document). IDRIS breaks the players out of the holding cell and they escape on a shuttle.

(cont)

The players head straight to Crassus' solar habitat for a meeting, where he confirms that he's had a hand in things. Destroying the Niven ring was necessary because none of the major powers knew about it, and the civilization that inhabited it and the technologies left behind by the Belt-Builders presented a possible extinction risk. It was not, however, the armada that would arrive in four years' time.

Crassus mentions that the agent he sent to retrieve IDRIS was also at the ring, and asks if he survived. When the players confirm that he did not, Crassus asks to make a copy of IDRIS. The players decline unless Crassus says what he needs it for. Crassus offers a compromise: he'll ask IDRIS one question, the players will retrieve something for him, and when they get back he'll tell them everything he knows. The players agree.

Crassus asks IDRIS how to reach Belt-Builders' archive. IDRIS prints out a list of gate addresses that lead to a planet near the galactic core. Crassus asks the players to go there and return with the archive; they need not give it to him, merely return with it.

Off they go on another grand adventure; the players reach the archive and make contact with IDRIS' big brother AI. IDRIS builds a storage device that can interface with transhuman computers and downloads a compressed copy of the archive onto it. Some of the players opt to make copies of their egos and upload themselves into the archives for a shot at immortality before leaving.

They meet Crassus on Mars in the middle of the night, at a nice restaurant with privacy booths. Crassus holds up his end of the bargain.

(cont)

First, he explains that the alien armada cannot be defeated in a conventional war; nor can they be negotiated with. The "alien armada" is actually an extension of a vast superintelligence, a Type-III Kardashev civilization that preemptively snuffs out competing entities before they become advanced enough to pose a threat. The exsurgent virus is one of the tools it uses to weed out potential competitors, as it did with the Belt-Builders two million years ago. Crassus knows this, because he contracted a hypercorp called Naos to build a shackled seed AI capable of detailed analysis and extrapolation. There were some problems with the first version, but he attributes them to user error.

The second element of his plan involves the Pandora gates. During the Fall, Saturn's moon Iapetus was inhabited by a TITAN that transformed a large percentage of the moon's mass into a vast supercomputer. Crassus believes the supercomputer was used to brute-force the operating software of the Pandora gates, which were not built by humanity or by the TITANs. Crassus proposes introducing IDRIS and the Naos Oracle into the Iapetus matrix to restore the original function of the gates - a network of planetary-scale matter fabricators distributed throughout the galaxy.

(cont)

In their archive, the Belt-Builders left enough of their knowledge of science and engineering to construct Niven rings. Crassus will use their templates, in conjunction with the Pandora gates, to disassemble all matter in the solar system and build a Shkadov thruster (pic related). He will accelerate the solar system and its new ring on a course to exit the galaxy, hopefully demonstrating to the superintelligence that humanity has no wish to challenge it. Crassus argues that the superintelligence will not follow because it must have some reason to remain in the Milky Way; if it did not, it would have already left.

As for the people currently living in the solar system, they and the habitats and planetoids they currently inhabit will also necessarily be disassembled. In the process their minds will be scanned and uploaded into the computational substrate of the ring, reinstanced as digital minds in a vast simulated landscape. Crassus concedes that some people will likely prefer a physical body, and that there is more than enough room on the inner surface of a Niven ring to set aside some for them.

The characters make some Sanity rolls and discuss how to proceed. They argue that Crassus' plan is unethical as it robs people of their right to choose; Crassus argues that the choice between life and death is a false one, but if anyone would prefer to simply die they will be able to self-delete at any time. The players suggest that Crassus is wrong ; Crassus maintains that his interpretation is correct, that his future-seeing device is actually a hard backup of Firewall's own archives dated some twenty years in the future, and that the last entry in the archives is of the players themselves, the last surviving humans in the universe, sending it back in time to prevent the extinction of their species.

(cont)

The players point out that by trying to influence the future, Crassus has already changed it and that either his plan will fail or that nothing is certain anymore. Crassus concedes this point, but turns the question back on the players; what do they propose instead? The players have no adequate answer.

One player asks Crassus, point-blank, if it's even possible to stop him. Crassus says that it is. Crassus keeps no backups of his ego anywhere, so if he were to die here he would die forever. And the players currently have the only copy of the Archive, without which it isn't possible to construct the Ring.

There's a period of silence. A few characters walk away from the privacy booth. One of them hands Crassus the archive.

The End.

Xanatos Pileups make the Xanatos Gambit much more enjoyable.

>You kill me
>I win.
It only works if youre a Leaf.