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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6193724" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK, I teach (elements of) contract law, I like Minority Report and Raymond Chandler, I've seen the whole first season of Arrow (and liked its use of flashbacks - I think the acting is fairly mediocre and the scripting not a lot better, but the plotting and editing was pretty tight in my view), and Casablanca is one of my favourite movies.Make every player build one outstanding debt or contract into their PC background. Perhaps this also has to be part of the reason why they've come to Shallamas (whether to escape it, or try and discharge it) but maybe that would be pushing too hard on this particular issue.The NPCs the PCs meet and interact with seem to know of these debts. And to be leaning on them to get the PCs to comply ("Do it or I'll tell your creditors where you are"; "If you don't do this thing for me, how will you ever raise the money you need to buy your freedom?" etc). How do they know about them? Because they first met the PC (or PCs - depending how integrated the group is in terms of background) in a vision of the past - and from that vision they know something the PC doesn't know, but it is obvious that the PC needs to know to turn the tables on the NPC. So the PC(s) also need to have that vision, or have someone tell them what it was, or otherwise get access to that secret information about the past. Maybe there is an NPC who sells visions of the past, or information about them. The PCs get ensnared in new deals as part of the price of trying to get out of their old ones.Less relevant to core campaign dynamics, but more for colour: every time the PCs try and sell something (or, at least, something of non-neglible value), have the purchasing NPC insist on seeing documentary evidence of chain of title. When the PCs buy something, have NPCs challenge them with documents that prove that they, and not the PCs, have the better claim to title. If you want to give it a more dystopian vibe on top of this, have all service provision - security, healthcare, access to places of worship, etc - based on privatisee rather than public provision, so when the police turn up they only help those who are subscribers, the library requires you first to be a paid up member before you can enter it, etc. So even if you buy yourself freedom from your debts/enslavement, you are still in practical terms a non-citizen who is beneath the regard of all others. (And for ideas on how to flip this libertarian idea from dystopia to utopia, read section 3 of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia and draw on his "framework of utopias" idea - maybe there is a suburban ring of anarchist living in their little utopias outside the contractual framework of the Shallamas mainstream.)I don't know if any of that helps - just some ideas from someone who knows your source material but doesn't know much about Numenera!</blockquote>

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