Needing an idea...

Elenitsa

writing as Marina Costa
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In my story, the town lords are harassing the immigrants from the nearby village, because they want those lands too. They had paid men to sabotage the main characters' horses to make them bad reputation with customers (as they were selling horses and making competition to one of the lords' men), they had put fire to the prairie (to seem a natural fire) to burn their fields and the horses on the pasture (it didn't work as planned, the horses were saved, even if their food for the remaining of the year would be scarce)... what else could they do?
 

dpaterso

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Steal the horses and drive them to a distant market town and sell them there, or run them off so they scatter and run wild and are hard to round up again. Can't run a horse business if you have no horses to sell.

-Derek
 

Jonah Hex

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Two more violent ways: Poison the spring where they drink, or led a masked posse to kill the horses (and the wranglers, too).
 

WildcatJim2112

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Really ratchet up the violence when the subtler efforts don't work - assault the town's people...beat a child...sexually assault (or attempt to) one of the village heroes woman...something to really make the reader hate them.
 

Charke

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They could go over and straight up murder a bunch of people and make it look like the people murdered each other. If they did they homework and found people quarrelling in town it would look even better.
They could even bribe people to start such a fight and then "catch them" and murder them before they could reveal they started it. Been done a thousand times but there it is. Tricking the main character into helping them destroy the land, perhaps by hiring him for something innocent such as making a delivery (of rotten meat) could be a neat twist that puts the main character in trouble with everyone.

- Mark Charke