can people engage in violence in camp? ie. can members of the throne or Senate be assassinated?
Yes assassination is a thing, but by design is pretty rare and also hard to pull off. There’s a player run militia who will try and track you down and you’re super likely to br executed for your crimes.
The game is all about PvP but more political then daggers in the dark.
yeah I understand that, I was just wondering if an insurgency was viable in empire haha
Yes. It’s very rare but I know a handful of titled positions have been assassinated since events started.
To quote the FAQ:
https://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/empire-wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Is_PvP_murder_allowed.3F
[quote]Is PvP murder allowed?
We are quite explicitly setting out to make assassination as difficult to achieve as possible. The Empire has a legal system, run by NPCs, and it will make all possible effort to identify and execute assassins. Our intention is for the majority of conflict between players to be political and social in nature rather than combat based.
Assassination of characters is still acceptable out-of-character behaviour; what we are doing with the campaign is deliberately making that as difficult as possible for the assassins to get away with, so that it becomes a tool of last resort rather than the simplest way to deal with political enemies.[/quote]
Murder is technically very easy with Empire’s combat rules, most characters don’t wander around Anvil expecting a fight,
Most characters have 2 global hits + armour.
The One Second Rule: “You can only lose one global hit per second from multiple attacks from one enemy”
If you are reduced to zero global hits then you are so badly wounded that you fall over and start dying. You can sense what is happening around you and you can talk or scream but you cannot take any other action.
Execution: “A character who is dying can be executed, killing them immediately. To execute a character you should spend at least five seconds appropriate roleplaying delivering a fatal blow to execute your target and then call EXECUTE”
So, if you get the drop on someone you can most likely drop them before they can even react to what’s happening and Execute them.
And that’s before you bother with using CLEAVE/IMPALE and VENOM fun Assassin’s Gate and Winter Moon apothecary poisons.
The tricky bit is there is no mechanical way of silencing someone in Empire, so whilst murder is easy, getting away with it is far trickier as it’s likely the entire field is alert to a screaming target.
There are also the Voice with the Dead spell and Whispers through the Black Gate for CSI necromancy.
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would be a cool example of dynamic storytelling, no? of course, it would need to be difficult; multiple assassinations an event would not be in the spirit of things haha
It has its place in a PVP game but honestly its a fairly boring option..
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Planned assassination of a character for legitimate reasons is fine (although damn hard to pull off). Randomly murdering someone on their way to the pub is scummy and no fun.
Anvil is meant to be one of the safest places in the Empire; frankly you’ll have a hard time getting away with murder. I’ve played assassins in other LARP systems and the tactics I used there would work, but the legal setup in Empire makes it very hard to kill someone and not get caught.
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Also, you should have a good in-character reason for attempting an assassination . Turning up to an event with the motivation of “hur hur, let’s kill the empress” isn’t really a good justification.
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The real trick is to manoeuvre them into a position where you can get the executed for something like heresy or treason. But that relies on a subtle campaign of political manoeuvring, as getting someone inquisited and then successfully sent down by the magistrates is hard. You need the votes in whatever assembly, you need some sort of evidence and you need to successfully persuade the NPC magistrates that you have a case. Not impossible, but certainly a challenge.
Other possibilities include getting someone killed on the battlefield or on a skirmish, tricky as they’ll be armoured up and have people defending them, but people die on the battlefield all the time. There’s always a chance for a dodgy medic to get to them if they’ve been dropped and “they died before I could save them”. But if I’ve thought of that, other people have to, so again not an easy option.
But killing people is really the final act in any long term conflict, character assassination, curse wars and destroying everything and everyone they love are some fun things to do before you go all DefCon 1 
.
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When you say “insurgency”, what would you be thinking of?
Characters killing other individual characters is possible, but difficult for them to do without the possibility of getting caught, as people mentioned above.
For it to get to the point of, say, a group of characters openly attacking others:
- You’d have to get past the fact that at the moment, Anvil (where the main camps are) is fairly peaceful, violence is an exception rather than the rule, and many people who are armed might default to “stop this murder happening” if they see a murder happening. Unless they actively dislike the person being murdered. In which case…
- There are other ways to get people to stand aside while you take power from someone that don’t involve magistrates finding you guilty of murder and sentencing you to death. Like character assassination, in the sense of spreading things like “because of this Senator’s continuing passionate affair with this Summer eternal, it’s obvious they are putting that ahead of what’s good for the nation”, and pitting public opinion against them. At that point, you don’t need knives, you just need arguments.
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Another thing - death is cheaper in LARP than in life (you have to kit up a new character and deal with not having necessarily finished your character’s story, but there can be a next character). So my take on it is that assassinating a character is somewhat interesting, and at Empire because it’s rare that makes it a bit more interesting, but I wouldn’t go as far as “cool” - I think there needs to be more story there to make it cool.
An example from the Empire background setting is Emperor Nicovar finally dying at the hands of his personal bodyguard, Isaella. That was really interesting storytelling because there was a personal connection there, and also because of how she handled the murder charge (she refused a clemency plea because while she believed it was necessary, she also believed she deserved legal punishment).
So yeah. I think if there’s a story there between the character who’s targeted and those targeting them, that can be interesting and cool, but murder on the field itself isn’t enough to make me think it’s interesting. 
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On the subject of insurgency it’s worth remembering that the player characters represent a tiny fraction (numerically) of the population of the empire. They are the movers and shakers of the world but politically they represent the hundreds of thousands of everyday citizens of the empire in their territories.
So yes, a group of PC’s could in theory storm the senate building, overpower the guards and kill the Throne, but it would be similar to a group of MP’s ambushing the Queen/PM and beating them to death. It wouldn’t get them any power, and would almost certainly lead to their arrest, so the payoff for the attackers is almost nil.
The only way it would achieve anything would be if you managed to get someone into position to be voted in as the new throne, but they’d need to have done a huge amount of political maneuvering before hand and be above suspicion with regards to the murder as well, so all the “insurgents” would need to be ok with sacrificing their lives to further someone else’s political ambitions.
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In storytelling, ends are more interesting than means. Don’t go into the game trying to justify pulling off murders. Go in with a plausible goal and a ruthless determination to see it through. in general, murder’s a crap tool because it makes it clear Someone Wanted Them Dead. At which point, anyone with a motive becomes suspect.
Why would your PC want an insurgency? What are they angry about? Showing up and immediately resorting to violence tells a short and boring story. Nobody understands what happened, as they didn’t see the dissent develop in play. Empire provides a lot of tools to push a controversial agenda, and the rarity of murder means that it’s equally hard for your rivals to silence you. Synod Judgements, Conclave Declarations, Curses, all of these can derail someones’ political goals.
If your PC stabs up their rival, you’ve just removed the source of all your fun arguments. If you defeat their agenda and they have to watch while you wave the trophy in their face, Your PC has won and the ranting from their rival tells everyone just how great your PC is.
Look at what’s happening with Yael. First some preaching, then a growing schism in the Synod, and now there are several thousand people in Reikos wiling to die over it.
https://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/empire-wiki/A_spiritual_prism
It’s not possible in Empire to take over with a coup. You just can’t recruit sufficient force to make it work. Even Yael’s possible private army was under half the size of a standard Imperial one. The ethos of the game is that it’s about politics. Murdering powerful PCs for the sake of it only tells the story of “How Anvil developed a siege mentality and the game got less fun”.
Whereas if you want to play antagonists, you can do so with wild abandon and hide gleefully behind the fact that most PCs are law-abiding citizens who won’t just stab you unless you’re doing crime right now. There are several horrible, controversial PCs on the field who are still not dead, much to the surprise of their players.
We’ve had PCs murder emissaries from the Realms, seduce citizens to False Virtues, drop stacks of subversive literature all over the damn place, curse entire territories because that nation pissed them off, try to bring back slavery…
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