Need help managing a feature for my campaign

So I’m running a high seas adventure so there are towns ruled by governors who make taxes.  How do I make the party revolt and overthrow/make a powerful side enemy. (Thinking of making high taxes)

I dont think taxes is going to be enough.

Taxes might be bad enough in one small rown to overthrow the leaders. But an entire campaign of fighting high taxes is going to get old for the players.

You might want to check out Ghosts of Saltmarsh. One of the Saltmarsh councilmembers is crooked, part of a smuggling operation. Which gives the players golas for the first levels. But the peoblems evolve and become more problematic as the party levels up. There are pirates to fight, an invasion from the south, every couple levels has new rhreats.

Well.

If you want it to center heavy around taxes, you'd need to vary why the taxes are bad - not just them being high, but sometimes completely unwarranted, or on a super-commonplace item the PCs often need to pay for! If you want adventurers to hate taxes, tax them! Most will eventually get tired of trying to just stop high taxes that only affect other people.

As SunIsGettingRealLow mentioned, taxes alone might not be enough to keep the players interested the whole time; although that greatly depends on the length of your campaign, how invested your players are in the world, whether they're power-gamers or roleplayers, etc. One potential thing that would tie into it but provide more variety is if you add another faction or two reacting to the taxes, but in a way the players find distasteful/wrong.

Or you could play into the competitiveness most players have and throw in another small group revolting that refuses to work with the players and accuses them of being supportive of everything going on. Nothing will motivate a competitive player more than having someone else do what they feel like they're supposed to do - and then insult them.

Hope this helps!

It’s more of a side thing adjacent to the main plot https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/dungeon-masters-only/237848-need-a-bit-of-campaign-help

Quote from cl0ud_stalker_234 >>

It’s more of a side thing adjacent to the main plot https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/dungeon-masters-only/237848-need-a-bit-of-campaign-help

 

 Oh, all right, I'll look through what's been said and see if I've got anything to add.

It’s Lord thunderfarts thing by the way

Quote from cl0ud_stalker_234 >>

It’s Lord thunderfarts thing by the way

 Another DDB user, I'm guessing?

Yes his response 

Oh, I see, I hadn't been looking at the usernames.

...I also maybe didn't notice that there was a second possible arc besides the kraken. It's almost like I read 'kraken' and went "OH MY GOODNESS YES THAT'S A FUN IDEA".

First, I would try to avoid the mentality of "how do I make" the party do anything, and think about it more in the lines of "how do I encourage" the party to take a course of action.  The former is more antagonistic mindset and can often lead to some conflict if the players do not want to take the directed course of action.  Recognizing that the goal is encouragement tends to be better for planning and prep, and for handling the inevitable unexpected.

Generally speaking, there are two ways you can encourage your players.  All of them will be heavily dependent on your group.

The first is to play to the individual players.  For something like this, if you know your individual players have very defined political views, creating an NPC that is antagonistic to those views is going to encourage the player at the player-level to dislike that NPC and want to see them gone.  Classic examples are going to be exploiting their population, political violence, using misinformation, etc.  Anything that you have heard one of your players rant about in the real world would be a good thing to use here.

The second is to play to the characters themselves.  If someone's backstory says their character had a bad run in with, say, a slaver, then maybe the government is involved in the slave trade and profits off of it.  Individual things like this can push the characters to act in a way that feels more organic than simply targeting folks at the player-level.  However, it also requires a group that roleplays their specific characters and will act in accordance with how their character might. 

In either way, you also want to engage in "show not tell" narratives to your players.  It is not enough for the DM to say "here is a bunch of bad things, go stop it" - you want to show the actual effects of those bad things to tug on empathy both at the player and character level.  

Applying your example of "high taxes", I think that is something most folks generally dislike - though you need to show those taxes are not being used for a greater good.  To that end, I would hit a few points.  Show that the taxes are higher than the population can support (ex. the lord is taking more share of a farmer's grain than leaves the farmer able to survive the winter easily) and that the funds are being spent on something that, ideally, would be a negative to one or more of the characters based on those character's stories.  That gives you something relatable in the real world (high taxes), something that shows a negative effect on others (showing the farmer's pain and fear for the future, not simply telling about high taxes), and gives the characters an individual reason to dislike what is going on (however the money is being spent that angers one or more players).