Slipstream – Mythic style prep for the new session

In Mythic we would call these open threads. I like to call them leading questions, any one of which can act as the Inciting Incident for the coming chapter.

• Is the play successfully transcribed and does it reach the theatrical market? Given that the Stygians put the information straight into Parnassos’ and Danton’s mind, it is safe to assume that the words stuck. It is also probably safe to assume that they could influence the minds of printer/publishers and even producers. So the play gets out there.
• On which planets is the play performed?
• Does this spark the kind of insurrectionist feelings we had hoped for?
• Is the voice of Basilike recognised in the play?
• Is some action taken against Basilike and/or Zeebor if his hand is recognised?
• Was Deyvour invited to assist the Imperial Secret Police with their enquiries?
• Did he survive this treatment?
• Since Dr Baffle does not exist, but it is impossible to prove a negative (that he does not exist), has the Imperial Secret Service drawn any erroneous conclusions? Where has this led?
• Has the Imperial sniffing around Mechanos and Krieg stimulated any response from the locals?
• Has Chilax managed to avoid the stink created by Deyvour’s potential, possible, collusion with the revolutionaries?
• Has Chilax been promotred or demoted in power?
• Has it become personal for Chilax, since she hates to be made a fool of?
• Have Parnassos and Danton outlived their usefulness to the rebellion?
• Does the shipment of dark matter make it to Mechanos unmollested?

With all of this known we can move into the next chapter.

• Given that Anathraxa, her legions, and her secret police are not idiots, what actions do the Imperials undertake to squash what looks like a widespread insurrection?

Slipstream – story prep and house cleaning

Here is a list of the people so far encountered in the Slipstream story-jamming mini campaign.

At left, a typical control room of one of the rocketships of the pirates of Vitin.

• Magdelene – Pirate captain of Vitin. Magdelene has sufficient power to send spies out into Slipstream and enact plots. He/she(?) is clearly in contact with revolutionaries on Levitos. Relationship to other pirate captains unknown.
• Parnassos – ace rocketship pilot and senior officer for Magdelene. Cool headed and reliable, Parnassos has sufficient wisdom for use in under-cover operations and is instrumental in developing a cover story to mask the developments on Levitos.
• Danton – superior car driver and gunfighter, he is Parnassos’ partner in the cloak and dagger operation. He lacks Parnassos’ level-headedness and is prone to whimsical thoughts and has been seen to fall prey to mind probes.
• Anathraxa – tyrannical queen of Slipstream. All people quail under her rule, though open rebellion is just an excuse to be extermined by her forces. Very few have ever seen her in the flesh and lived.
• Dr Baffle – a fabricated personality, invented by Parnassos and Danton (or perhaps by puppet masters somewhere else?) to be a man-who-never-was and a focus for false information. The doctor is supposedly a master of long range mind-control over robots, and is implicated in in a plot to cause massive disruption on Mechanos.
• Deyvour – a spy for Anathraxa from the planet Anarch, where he would surely be a shunned traitor as that planet has suffered greatly under Anathraxa. Deyvour has been framed by Parnassos and Danton into carrying false information concerning the hunted Dr Baffle.
• Chilax – Secret Service agent for Anathraxa. Chilax is beautiful, smart and ruthless. She trusts no one and has everyone, including her own agent Deyvour, followed. Whatever happens, it is certain that Chilax has some knowledge of it, and has counter plans in action.
• Sinon – an information broker on the planet Barter. Sinon knows everything, or knows how to find it out. He buys and sells information without preference. Though he is not an agent of Anathraxa, he supplies anything he finds to Chilax for a handsome price.
• Basilike – deposed ruler-in-exile. He and his race had been thought extermined by Anathraxa. But he lives in secret captivity on the planet Zeebor. It is uncertain whether he has the brains or talent for high government. He spends his time writing stage plays parodying Anathraxa’s rule that are never published or performed. However, Parnassos and Danton have plagiarised one of his works and have had it secretly reproduced.
• Six Stygian Elders – perceived and communicated with but only barely seen, the Elders of Stygia guided Parnassos and Danton to Basilike. Apart from this mind journey their motives remain mysterious.
• Unnamed thugs and cassino operators on Barter.

Incongruous characters – a failure to get on board

In the old days when I actually used to take part in and GM conventional role-playing games I recall coming up against a bizarre event. This almost always occured at the start of a campaign set up, or change of setting. No matter how much the GM of the moment would describe the coming setting, or provide background material and books of art to illustrate what the cultural, technological and historical basis for the game was, there would always be someone who would choose to be a character that could not possibly exist there and/or call themselves something that was glaringly incongruous.

It seems I am not alone in finding this strange phenomenon. As I was reminiscing about Runequest I went surfing, as you do, and found a lovely site that a GM had obviously put a lot of work into. The games sounded as if they were fun, though I noted the sad comment that no game had happened for 158 days. This pricks my heart in sympathy – there is nothing worse than having a labour of love, as an RPG campaign is, just wither away through lack of interest/committment/availability.  

Runequest is clearly designed to be viewed through a bronze-age, heroic classical Greek lens. The original sources all confirmed this. The art of the site in question really hammered it home.

I looked at the character lists. There were characters named Alansar, Cleombrotus and Darkos. These seemed within the general mood. Then, sure enough, I found one called Grant McKielsen. Very Greek. Very bronze age.

It reminded me immediately of the time I tried to start a similar bronze age camapign. I layed out books of Greek architecture and art, described the fashion and weapons of the time, brushed over the stories of the Illiad. Then I invited the players to think about the characters whey might want to portray in this setting. Most got it straight away. We discussed hoplites, senators, physician/philosophers, and priestesses. All seemed to be going well.

Then one of the players declared that he wanted to be a bard. With a lute. And a big floppy hat with a feather in it. Armed with a rapier.

I can still hear the crickets and see the tumbleweed around the table as the rest of us digested this information.

What is the psychology at work here? Conceit (didn’t hear a word anyone esle said – too busy being a hero in their own mind), misguided sense of humor (see, it doesn’t fit, that breaks the suspension of disbelief, cause we’re not really heros, we’re just playing a game. Get it?), ignorance (back in the ancient days, like before flat screen TV everyone blah blah blah sword, last movie I saw), or something else?

Comments?

Fragment profile – Koldos

Koldos (Low tech) is a fragment gripped in a perpetual ice age. The original world was a lush forest, but since the calamity it has frozen into a perpetual Arctic. The native Koldosites build their cities over geothermal springs. Without this source of heat, the fragment would quickly become uninhabitable. Blizzards and crevasses make surface travel dangerous.

The Koldosites are a blue-skinned humanoid race who survive by hunting the local seals which fish the freezing oceans. When not out hunting, the Koldosites retire to their cities, warmed by deep geothermal activity. Cities have been established over volcanic geysers, using the hydroelectric power and thermal energy to maintain the environment. In this environment the Koldosites are a social and gregarious race, unlike their default behaviour when traversing the surface in the almost perpetual blizzards.

Visitors to the cities report a welcoming, socialist economy, but also remark upon the cloying humid atmosphere, ripe with the perfume of so many human and animal bodies admixed with the numerous cooking fires. Diversions and entertainments such as games of skill and chance, races and contests of man and beast, along with public and impromptu recitations and musical performances are common. Vices such as prostitution are unknown as the Koldosites, both male and female, whilst fastidious in tracing lineage and united in their admiration for the family, are quite promiscuous. Theft is unknown as most property is communally held and any private property is typically imbued with personal significance. For example, a person may have a noteworthy item of clothing or a knife, but that item would have been gifted by a relative, or be a family heirloom, or be something that was made specifically for that person. Therefore any thief could never use it anyway.

Industry is largely reduced to craftsmanship, the original planet of Koldos was significantly more advanced and the elders relate the tale of the passage through the black hole and how this has rendered their world the place it is today. Many large machines, such as lathes and arc furnaces have survived and are still in use. Their limited number and the need to keep them running has been one of the main drivers in the development of their communal economy.

Koldosites have not fallen so far into ignorance that they have forgotten technology. Their education system reinforces the loss, and reminds them to be alert for the opportunities for trade with fragments that have retained more. Remnants of the Koldosites’ technology still lie locked beneath the glaciers, trapped there when Koldos was dragged through the Ice Field after ejection from the Black Hole.

The harsh environment has also fostered a cultural feeling of self-reliance, and so self-confidence. Anathraxa demands food from the Koldosites, a commodity grown with incredible ingenuity in hydroponic gardens, and one which the natives are hardly spare. She also demands sulfurous minerals, which are in extreme short supply on the fragment. When these tributes cannot be met, and even if they can, Anathraxa’s Handmaidens take men. It is quite probable that the sacrificed men are happy enough to ‘go out with a bang’, but the ecological and economic pressure this puts on the remainder of the Koldosite race has fostered a deep and growing sense of resentment. There are rumours that secretly imported technology is being used to drill tunnels through the ice to the old cities in the hope of finding weapons and manufacturing technology.

*************

The Koldosite figures are from Eureka, from their Inuit range.

Anubis Studios – Alive?!

A Yahoo group has been set up to talk about the games that will be coming out of Anubis Studios. This will give the players and testers the chance to voice their concerns in a single forum and get corrections and additions address.

Great days.

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/anubis_studios/

Hân campaign map redrawn

HÂN – campaign update

It is one of those campaigns that I come back to every now and then with a wistful attitude. There is every chance that it will never be played, but the material is there. Call it a pet project.

Here is a Mind Map I made of some of the material.

Ornithopter – Planet Asturias

Greg and I had a Mythic session the other night set in the Ornithopter setting. The strangest thing happened: we had characters, we had background, but no action developed. Instead we ended up describing a society. No ‘adventure’ occurred – or at least not much. It was more like developing a big picture in which adventures could occur. It informed me, at least, what kinds of societies are possible in the Imperial system of Ornithopter. Here is the record of that finding.

Asturias has a Plutocratic government and a Stasi style internal security system. Every citizen is employed in some way to spy on everyone they come in contact with. There are a half dozen richest men who rule the planet. It is a class conscious society, based entirely on wealth. Tax is of paramount interest to the authorities.

Built on the ruins of an earlier civilisation, there is a known tourist trade in travelling to the sites of religious ceremony. These cults are long extinct, but the architecture attracts tourists.

Our protagonists were an Elderly Shopkeeper (a tour guide operator who runs trips to the old sites) and a Fanatic Civilian who was an under cover Imperial geologist – both of these from Üne. The geologist, we discovered, had found a deposit of Jacobite, a valuable mineral.

Jacobite, we discovered, is something the Imperial government routinely claims the rights to. The local government was therefore keen to keep the find secret so that it could exploit it themselves: wealth being the only driver for these people.

The problem for an adventure would have been how to get to the spaceport and exit with the information given that everyone was a spy and every conversation was being monitored. However, by this time we were probably too tired – or plastered – to dig into a actual character-driven game.

Key Mythic and Brewer’s rolls and the interpretations we came up with:

What is the prevailing feeling of this society? Mythic – Spy. The Innocent. The government is security conscious to the extent that it has become corrupt and invasive. It uses civilians to spy on each other.

What is the driving nature of the government? Brewers – Fee Penny (debt). The goverment is driven by money. It is a Plutocracy (government by the wealthy). Therefore all the spying that is going on is all about making sure that the classes stay in their place and that taxes and fees are paid in full. All trades must bve declared to the government. There is no such thing as private enterprise for the mass of citizens – they are all ‘employees’.

Do the protagonists support the government? Given the pervasive system, very likely. Mythic – No. So our protagonists are opposed to the government, or more acuaretly we can say that they are conscious of the government’s actions and disapprove, where most people in most systems just accept that things are ‘normal’. So our protagonists have a secret that they are keeping from the government.

Without a roll we proposed that the shopkeeper was a tour operator, or travel agent, offering trips to  ancient religious sites in remote locations (like Angkor Wat). The other guy was a geologist who had gone on one of these tours and has discovered a mineral deposit. Opening Brewer’s at random we found the name of the mineral was Jacobite.

Is the second man an agent of an off-world interest? Mythic – Emphatic Yes. This left no doubt: he was an Imperial agent. This explained his fanaticism.

What was the conenction between the geologist and the tour operator? Why would the tour operator choose to defy the goverment, and why would the geologist stop to help him? We thought to ask Mythic: Is the geologist the tour operator’s son? Mythic – Emphatic no. We concluded, after a lot of backstory discussion, that the geologist was a friend of the tour operator’s son who had left to join the Imperial service. However the son was killed in action and had placed the obligation on his friend (the geologist) to protect his father. So that was the connection, the loop was closed.

Having fully understood the circumstances and set the scene (a three hour discovery process), we declared that the pair were headed for the spaceport, false papers in hand.

What are the conditions the pair find at the space port? Mythic – Carry. Victory.

And at about that point we were exhausted and the story seemed to close itself. We could have gone through the minutiae of handing passports to officials, but decided not to. The primary goal of describing a new place had been done. So we closed this story, and started a new one. But that can be another blog entry.

Mythic Hân – map update

I felt the need to cartographise. Here is an update to the geography of the Empire, continuing the policy of making the representation abstract. This time I have included the idea of Judicial Circuits: those regions that are under Imperial Administration and can expect a high ranked Judge and other administrative staff to be active in running the areas.

In a nutshell: each province has its own Governor. This may be an appointee from the capitol, or it may be some local king or warlord. Groups of provinces are joined together in a Judicial Circuit and a Judge is appointed to this next higher level of command. His job is to tour his provinces and act as a ‘High Court’ for any matters of law or policy that cannot be handled at Provincial Government level.

However, not every ‘province’ is a Province of the Empire. Some remain outside of Imperial law for various reasons – which we will find out during play.

So far we have only explored province 01, Parangaricutiro.

From Mythic: is this a province contained within an active Judicial Circuit? Somewhat Likely; 78, No.

This is consistent with our finding in play that no Governor was in place, which was why the demon prince was attempting to achieve some legitimacy. However, after I had rolled I realised the question was ambiguous. What did I mean by ‘active’. I decided that province is a Province – since this is consistent with what we found in play – but that there is something not only wrong with the Provincial Government, but with the Judicial Circuit as well.

Has a Judge been assigned to the Circuit that Parangaricutiro belongs to? Very Likely; 39, Yes.

So there’s a new thread: what is the reason for the Judge of that Circuit being so lax? Why had the region not been visited for so long? Why had he not appointed a Governor?

Mythic Ravenloft – time to get back to work

There has been a long pause in this story while I have been bringing other writing and gaming elements forward. I am now starting to think about this story again and I wonder what has brought it back to the surface.

The odd conclusion I am coming to is that it has to do with the weather. Ravenloft is a winter story – the way I am telling it. As the days became longer here I could think of nothing to say. Summer in Australia is about long long days and hot hot temperatures, interspersed with the odd thunderstorm and imperilled with bushfire. Hardly the kind of inspiration I need for a story about snow and ice, and Vampires,  zombies, and loves lost…

But now the threat of fire is receeding, and the mornings are darker. It’s still pleasantly warm, humid even. All the indications are that it will not be a particularly severe winter. Still, I am anticipating that the reduced light and the morning fog will get me thinking black thoughts again.

Now to get the juices flowing. First: I need to reacquaint myself with the characters, and I need to appreciate what important thing has just happened (in the last scene) .

In true Mythic style, I rolled against my tailor made Mythic Focus chart and found ‘Remote Event’.

Next entry: what Remote Event pushes the characters into action?