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 Question regarding Sembia's internal Security

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T O P I C    R E V I E W
Iliphar1 Posted - 04 Jan 2007 : 14:04:04
I'm currenty running the Ravenloft adventure "Hour of the Knive", but placed the adventure into Yhaunn. In FRA I found an entry about Yhaunn'S Deeplurker and made him to be the Villain.

Timeline: shortly before the Return of the Archwizards (Sembia is still on it's peak of glory, so to say)

To summon up the adventure, a Series of Nocturlal Killings occurs every 13 years (for quite some time). To add some more terror into the adventure, everybody, who has meddled into the plans of the "Deep Lurker" in the past has disappeared (Police Investigators, Priests from local temples, Adventures, etc.) and all of their important notes mysteriously disappeared. (My PC Heroes wanted to leave town, after hearing this *rofl*)

I thought, that the horror of these killings is so terrible, that nobody in Yhaunn talks about the killings and tries to deny/ignore them as much as possible. (Like many former Soldiers never speak about their terrible war experiences)

Now my question would be:
These murders wouldn't go unnoticed in Sembia. What would the nation do, to protect it's citizens, even if Yhaunn's city council wouldn't come up with any good ideas/solutions?
Would there be any Secret Police or similar Organisation for internal affairs (like MI6 or CIA), who would enter the scene or would Sembia be too divided, so that the other cities wouldn't mind the whole affair? If yes, who would they be and who would be controlling them?


In my campaign, Sembia goverened very decentralised, but the do have a common army, navy. I think a nation as successful as Sembia must have - at least to some extent - a governemnt, who leads the country, even if the delegate much of it's power to the cities.
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Iliphar1 Posted - 07 Jan 2007 : 21:54:09
I read and loved Paul Kemps books very much (and the Stormweather Hall Books are the reason, why I play in Sembia *g*)

I couln't find much information in them about the internal security.

Thanks a lot for your help, I think, I will include an investigator from one of the major Houses in Yhaunn.
Kajehase Posted - 04 Jan 2007 : 15:59:01
And Paul's latest, Shadowbred, has a few tidbits on how Sembia's internal security-/police-forces function, too.
The Sage Posted - 04 Jan 2007 : 15:05:23
Additionally, a good source for this type of thing would be the "Sembia" series of novels... Halls of Stormweather being a particular example, given the plots of some of the stories included within. As well, Paul Kemp's earlier "Erevis Cale" books.
The Sage Posted - 04 Jan 2007 : 14:51:44
You're unlikely to find anything definitive on this in the Realmslore, mostly because Sembia has been a virtually untouched region of FR throughout most of 1e and 2e and only briefly treated in 3e FR lore. TSR left it as a area for DM's to detail, for the most part.

That being said, Forgotten Realms Adventures does note particular security/guard forces for most of the major cities of Sembia detailed within. These are individual units assigned to the individual cities of Sembia. They are charged with policing the cities themselves and handling basic criminal duties.

Expanding the scope of this, and trying to find a "Secret Police" of Sembia becomes a little more difficult. That's not to say that no such organisation exists, though supporting lore indicates very little. And, given the relative "autonomy" of most of the ruling merchant families of Sembia, I'd imagine most would tend to prefer handling these types of affairs on their own, for the most part, simply because they either have little-to-no faith in the city-based authorities, or merely do not wish for their rivals to learn about what's just happened and then potentially use it against them. The merchant families would likely enlist the aid of privately acquired (so as not to alert the suspicions of rival families) investigator-mages, who use arcane means to study crime scenes and evidence, while hired inquisitor-clerics divine secrets from the dead.

To put it simply, beyond the regular City-Guard forces and city-sponsored militia units charged with policing the streets of Sembian cities, the duty of protecting most of Sembia's citizens, mostly those connected in some way, shape, or form with the ruling merchant houses, likely falls to the individual houses themselves.

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