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Archives of Nethys

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Infinite Worlds / Accord

High Accord

Source Galaxy Exploration Manual pg. 98
High-accord societies and worlds often appear at peace with few disagreements or divisions. Life tends to be stable, if not necessarily pleasant. The great majority of citizens can expect tomorrow to be a great deal like today. Likewise, life tends to be safe; even in the most dystopian regimes, the inherent predictability of life means that it’s easy enough to avoid danger, at least for those who live by any extant social contracts necessary to protect themselves. This relative safety often means that the populace perceives threats to any institutions that maintain the peace—whether those institutions are long-standing peace treaties, shared virtues, or tyrannical guardians—as existential threats to their happiness and safety. Whether these peoples hope to preserve their utopias or fear retribution from an overbearing government, citizens often push back against anything threatening the existing order, especially wandering bands of offworld adventurers.
Not everyone living within a dominant paradigm of a high-accord world agrees with the status quo. Some might have no choice, forced into an outcast state because of their identity. Others make a philosophical choice to stand in opposition to their society, whether out of youthful rebellion or considered judgment. For these people, life in a high-accord society can become singularly unpleasant. Rebels living in more benign societies at the very least find themselves shunned with friends and relatives treating them with puzzled pity. Those in harsher regimes might be harassed, persecuted, imprisoned, or even killed if they refuse to conform. Despite these risks and dangers, almost every high-accord society has some pockets of resistance to the norm.
Some adventurers hailing from high-accord societies seek surrogate relationships to replace the ones they’ve left behind, ranging from intense friendships to vast adoptive families to merciless hierarchies. Other adventurers are the aforementioned misfits, departing when then find they don’t fit their home world’s exacting expectations. Adjusting to the galaxy at large can be a difficult process for refugees from high-accord worlds. What might seem like intolerable rebellion in the stable domain of a high-accord society becomes downright quaint in the chaos of galactic civilization, and few high-accord adventurers have real experience with physical danger before leaving their homes, making traveling the galaxy—especially as an adventurer forging their own path—quite an education.

High-Accord Adventure Hooks

D20Adventure Hook
1Someone plans to assassinate the highest ruler.
2There’s a moral panic about decadent, depraved offworld music.
3Authorities have scapegoated an outsider for a hideous murder.
4 Seditious literature spreads throughout the world, and the state police arrest any who possess copies.
5 A new translation of a society’s founding documents would invalidate centuries of established tradition—if it’s legitimate.
6The government introduces highly-intrusive surveillance technology.
7 Recent warnings of a terrible imminent disaster (invasion, plague, asteroid) are being all but ignored by a complacent population.
8 A senior state official wants help to discreetly bail their child out of prison—and to ensure their permanent record stays clean.
9A political or cultural dissident stows away on the PCs’ starship.
10 A social media fad allows a corporation to subtly control aspects of everyday citizens’ lives.
11 Authorities investigate the import of an offworld foodstuff or medicine that seems to cause discontent in users.
12 A body double for the government’s most controversial leader seeks to betray their former employer.
13 An offworld corporation is hiring outside help to penetrate insular local markets.
14 Certain identifying documents are required to get legitimate work, but one neighborhood is awash in convincing black-market forgeries.
15 A hacker erases the identities of dozens of prominent citizens to bring attention to the government’s mistreatment of a marginalized group.
16 A senior official has died with no clear successor, and the government covers up their death until a suitable successor is produced.
17 Missionaries of a chaotic-aligned deity try to spread a new faith. The government isn’t enthused.
18 A recent discovery proved that a long-dead, important historical or cultural figure wasn’t who they pretended to be.
19 The government commissions offworlders to ferry a dozen prisoners to exile. Most are political dissidents; one is a serial killer.
20 The terms of an ancient treaty keeping a world at peace also require its powers to conquer neighboring systems, which request aid.