Hi guys, I've been very interested in the game and have been getting a good handle on the rules - but one thing's been elusive to me, and that's coming up with adequate plots. I should note that I'm usually deathly allergic to PVP in my tabletop - I've walked out of games where PVP arguments between players broke out, and frankly can't stand a lot of passive-aggressive backstabs. This, naturally, makes a game all about espionage and oblique backstabbing a little tough to figure out. I'm at heart hunting ideas for both primary campaigns with an O-12 basis, and secondary associated objectives for the various factions, which might be against other factions but not necessarily against other PCs. Anybody got some good ones?
Just regroup a "Ragtag Band of Misfits" and Veterans of Paradiso that have a FAR more serious "Chip On Their Shoulder" versus the Combined Army than the OTHER Hyperpower Rivals; in this manner when their "Faction Overseer" ask to betray the mission for the interest of let's say "Magna Obra" Corporate Lobby / the Jade Emperor / Praxis Module "Sado-Maso-Chimera-Fetish-Haven" / Silk Lord Osama Bin Laden / Stavka "We Are NOT the K.G.B. in Space, really" / A.L.E.P.H. Aspect Agent Smith . . . . .then the P.C. are RIGHTFULLY justified to shoot them in the head with an Handcannon BECAUSE the Overseer is SURELY a Shaasvastii Infiltrator. . . Or You could SIMPLY have ALL the Players from the SAME Faction (so that Conflicting Personal Overseers are a "Internal Affair"). . .!!
Having watched Death of Stalin lately, I love this line. I am absolutely considering Voronin or any other Stavka handler I make up to come off like Zhukov.
I have based My Infinity Campaign on Ariadna, with the premises that the Kazak Secret Service of Matr is endorsing and actively backing a Multi-Faction Mercenary Company that aim to "Revamp" the arretrated Ariadnan Military Hardware AND their Antiquated Warfare Techniques that could NOT stand easily against MANY of the most lethal Ordnance of the "Main Hyperpowers" (Antipodes and 3 m. Tall Werewolves with Teseum Zweinhanders are cool, yes, but against a Mechanized Battalion of 4m. high T.A.G.s with heavy Artillery Drone Support, could have some issues with their lack in "Hacking / Counterhacking" and so on). . . I have TOTALLY ignored the various "Backstab Potential" of the Wilderness of Mirrors Idea; for SOME Campaign could be interesting, but for some other could be a "Recipe for Incoming Disaster". . . It will be like making a Game of the old, venerable "Cyberpunk 2020" R.P.G. that inspired Gutier and Corvus Belli "Core Staff" to create the Infinity Background and Universe, with a Player that is "Militech" (All American Heroes Corporation; technically "Cyberpunk G.I.Joes") another is "Arasaka" (stereotypical "Evil Japanese Corp" with a Zaibatsu with Yakuza in the Boardroom and Ninjas as Enforcers) and another is "Sov Oil" (a sort of Anachronistic idea of Gorbachev-Era U.R.S.S. jumping from Communism to ruthless Capitalism without a beat, becoming a sort of "Command & Conquer" Red-Alert style Army bent on Petroleum exploitation). . . Or taking the Warhammer 40.000 Roleplaying Game one of the Inquisitor Players is a "Puritan Zealot" (Torquemada styled, but in Space) and another is a "Radical Xenophile" (treating as equal the Alien Races that in the WH40K Universe are "SHOOT ON SIGHT !!") and another one still is secretly a Kaos Cultist of the Ruinous Powers of the Warp. . . Could be VERY INTERESTING as a Game, but EVEN with the MOST Mature, Well-Balanced Players any Game Evening will be akin to a "Russian Roulette" with MANY Bullets in the Chamber. . . . .Sooner or later the demands of Background will FORCE any Player at the throat of the others. . . So EITHER: 1°) Ditch totally the system of Faction Handlers and Cultural Overseers pullig the strings of their Puppet Like "P.C. Slaves". . . 2°) Mono-Faction, any Hyperpower has ENOUGH Cultural Difference to allow for varied, interesting Archetypes. . . 3°) Fuck The Wilderness of Mirrors! We are facing an EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT against the Combined Army (or the far, Far, FAR more INSIDIOUS threat of the Tohaa "Illuminati Conspiracy" Triumvirate, that make SERIOUSLY the Idea of joining the Slave Races of the Evolved Intelligence a smart move !!). . .
So I've had one idea come up, with a lot of possible ways it can go. Geist-dubbing - somehow, someone is cloning peoples' geists and using their access and data to wreak havoc by proxy - politicians outed, securities compromised, in one case an O-12 counselor had classified info outed thanks to his 4-year-old son's geist having recorded him playing in his dad's office via child monitoring protocols. O-12 has captured the first stage perpetrators on a variety of reasons and across multiple factions - the variety of goals, means and motives suggest a dealer in this technology rather than an organized attack. And given the number of people being affected, every faction has some ulterior motives involved. PanO, for instance, wants the creator's data to make countermeasures; de-fanging the snake and restoring status quo. The Emperor wants to meet this individual. The Party wants the creator secured or gone. The Nomads want the creator and his data out of Aleph hands. The Submondo wants this operation out of the picture; it's bringing too much heat on other quantronic crime. Aleph wants this ended before it starts hedging into AI research. Haqq wants this to never threaten the Silk monopoly or cause insider trading. And Ariadna..is...largely unaffected by this because of their lower tech level. I need some ideas on how this could affect them and what kind of things the I-solemnly-swear-we're-not-the-KGB would ask a PC to do.
To be fair, it's ok for some factions to not give a side mission for every game. That's what I've been doing and it's worked out well. I'm playing with the full "Wilderness of Mirrors" but with most of the information open to the other players. So I give them their faction sub-missions (where applicable) and the other players know what they are. The characters don't 'though and we're careful to keep that info separate. There was a delightful incident where a seriously injured reporter "just didn't make it" after the PanOceanian doctor had been asked to ensure that she didn't get a chance to spread her story. These challenging operations, they can be so tough and risky... she HAD been shot in the head...
Heh. Yeah, I mean, a cube's only so durable, you know? Nothing to do if you get shot in the stack. There's also a part of me that's dying to have a Hac Tao lay into an entire party with all the shock and awe they can muster, regularly vanishing and reappearing to blaze away with a HMG.
Well, or if you get hit by E/M. There's a reason it's SUPER illegal. Any decent opponent with TO is frighteningly deadly, TO is just as good in the RPG as it is in the tabletop wargame.
This is why I have split out the old Cyberpunk 2020 Lifepath and Cybergeneration Plotpath sections and share them under Fair Use. The Lifepath also works great in fantasy games, just swap 'Corporation' for 'Guild'
The Wilderness of Mirrors presented in the RPG is cool and interesting but you don't need to follow it if you don't want to. Meaning your free to do without the group espionage angle. Doesn't mean you can't do espionage though. You could run a game with solely members from say the Hexehedron or the Hassassins. None of this O-12 hodgepodge groups. Character creation becomes a little more limited but you have a lot of options to play with for all the intelligence groups of the Human Sphere. My usual preference is making the PCs work as a third party. Intelligence groups love them some deniable assets. PCs are free to come with as much or as little baggage from their home factions as they prefer. However, doesn't mean it will stop their home factions for tapping them for espionage or other work. Like say an ex-Chimera getting asked to do some dirty work on Dawn at the behest of the Black Hand. Right, @Section9 ? :P
Or run an O-12 group, just have the factions asking special favours of the PCs an exception and not the rule.
Don't have time to play at the moment, but i'm currently working on an O-12 campaign set-up during Yu-jing's uprising. No yu-jing/japanese PC, as the O-12 need a "completly neutral" party to investigate some dude disappearance or a potential Shaasvastii infiltration. In this context i plan to use the wilderness of mirrors to make the PC either help or sabotage the japanese revolution (help those smuggler, tip the ISS about this japanese cell, etc...), depending of the outcome their superiors would rather see. Can't wait to have my players run away from an Imperial Service task force, with Su-jians and kuang-shis after them!
When the Nomad book drops I'm looking at running a Vaudeville Noir RPG. Relatively low powered group of freelance investigators / troubleshooters. No reason everyone would need to be a Nomad, but everyone needs a reason to be on Bakunin. The fact that Motherships are mobile means that you can easily have second and subsequent campaigns in different locales to Bakunin itself. Hell, have them try to deal with a problem in the middle of a Krug for maximum lols :)
Mmmm... You want plot? The question is, how much evil do you feel today? I say it a lot, but the RPG game Eclipse Phase (yes, it can be paid for. No, you don't need to since it's under Creative Commons, and one of the creators shares all the sourcebooks in PDF for free) gives a lot of ideas and background for minor, major, and in-between groups, as well as fleshing out several options to flesh out hyperrich old coffin-dodgers, wild partygoers (seriously, they have a damn colony outside of the Solar System with people whose kink is being eaten -by a recreated T-Rex, no less- and then ressed), strange people (The Cock, a very famous late-night presenter, is not precisely avian-shaped) and shady organizations, one of which is the "default PC knot". Called Firewall, they are a conspiracy to protect (trans)humanity from existencial threats, present in the shape of things man was not meant to look to close to, or alien stuff that can really make a mess (the Exurgent Virus...), and you can take that and a lot of really hard data (how a space habitat goes, how people goes around in a post-scarcity society...) to give depth to all your games. Delta Green is also a great source of inspiration. Anyway, think about the players, and what do they want to play. There are endless opportunities, even if they all belong to the same nation. Hunting infiltrated Shasvastii is a fun undertaking!
Yeah, if you are up to the "current events" in the timeline there are about to be A LOT MORE Shasvastii Speculo agents (same as the killers, but with slightly dialed down combat skills) out there in the Human Sphere.
So how do people run their Shasvastii hunts? I like making systems and plots make sense logically, this can become an issue as I suddenly realize I have to understand how to make covert and undercover operations realistic. (I swear to god it's research only, those spooks who are watching) What do the Shasvastii *need* from humanity? What's the goals, aside from just opening up vulnerabilities and backdoors in human security networks and organizations for the CA to exploit? I can make a plan for the Shas that's destructive, what can I do to make it interesting?
Shas are classic Fifth Column. 1. Intelligence 2. Disruption - Remove leaders (kill/discredit people who are coordinating the resistance) - Sow discord (get PanO and YJ fighting each other rather than the CA) - Destroy critical infrastructure (that plant on NC that is the only place that builds a widget needed for G:RP TAGs) - Stop anti-CA tech (that Praxis scientist who's just developing Sepsitor-proof Cubes for the masses.... odd that he just stepped out of a malfunctioning airlock... Huh... His Cube seems to have suffered a random failure as well. Talk about irony). 3. Infiltration. (Basically as a door opener for a Shas/CA strike team ie. the role they have on an Infinity table) Long term they've hitched the survival of their species to the CA. So at the moment they're aims are (in part) the CA's aims: the Human Sphere choosing to join the EI and assisting in its transcendence. But you can also do sub plots about a Shas Infiltration of Praxis and guiding them towards some new bioengineering tech to give Shas society another survival strategy (or hell, hedging against the EI going all Hal-esque by building EI-immune bio-Cubes).
