🔥 Infernal Bureaucracy

SET 4: Corruption and Influence

Where Decline Becomes Policy

Set 4 explores corruption not as a sudden collapse or moral failing, but as an administrative process — gradual, rationalized, and often seen as functional within the system.
Here, corruption begins as acceptable exceptions, adapts to oversight, resists purification efforts, and eventually redefines what the system considers normal, efficient, or successful.
This set reveals that Hell does not need to destroy institutions.

It merely degrades them — just enough to keep them running, so they continue to justify their own existence.

📌 Narrative Focus

Corruption as policy drift, not criminal deviation
Normalization of decay as institutional strategy
Resistance that has administrative cost
Reforms that become mechanisms of deeper control
Systems that operate while losing integrity

This set is not about obvious villains or overt evil.

It’s about functional decay and the invisible mechanisms that sustain it.

🗂️ Included Tables (7 × d100)

1️⃣ Type of Corruption

From nepotism and data manipulation to procedural dilution, performance inflation, and spiritual rot.

2️⃣ Target of Corruption

Which part of the system is compromised — departments, doctrines, individuals, contracts, audits, or ideals.

3️⃣ Consequence of Corruption

Gradual impacts on processes, metrics, relationships, decision-making, and institutional memory.

4️⃣ Method of Purification / Exorcism

Bureaucratic rituals, symbolic reforms, scapegoating procedures, or audits — often ineffective or counterproductive.

5️⃣ Resistance to Corruption

Real attempts to restore integrity — from whistleblowers to rogue clerks — each with political and institutional consequences.

6️⃣ Corruption Twist

How the corruption adapts, migrates, or reveals a deeper layer — becoming harder to isolate or expunge.

7️⃣ Final Consequence

How the system responds: normalization, absorption, or collapse disguised as efficiency.

🎲 How to Use This Set

To design institutional decay arcs
To replace clear moral struggles with ambiguous systemic failures
To challenge players with complex dilemmas rather than simple enemies
Perfect for campaigns centered on political intrigue, long-form corruption, or bureaucratic horror
Works well as active threat or background erosion

Use these tables not to punish, but to show how corruption becomes part of the machine.