anonystu
J'Accuse PirateCat!
( ic | ooc | characters | recruitment )
Recruitment: We have four great players with characters ready to go, and we're starting tonight, but would like a fifth to join as soon as possible. If you're interested, just read this introductory post, see if it fits, then post at the end to reserve a spot, and start reading the rest of the thread, as nuggets of truth and wisdom are hidden throughout! Have fun. --stu
When Journalists Attack! - d20 fantasy (Play By Post)
(edit: added Photographer role)
This is long, but hopefully it sets up everything nicely. I hope you have as much fun reading as I did writing this, and I hope even more you're motivated to play.
One sentence description: The PC's are kick-in-the-door journalists who investigate and report on stories in a world ruled by two political parties of mages, who have made journalism a crime punishable by death.
Hollywood Stupid Executive High Concept Pitch: It's Transmetropolitan meets 1984 with swords!
The World: (rough draftish, but good enough to communicate the idea, and I'm open for suggestions and criticisms)
There is a roundish world, and a sun. The sun sustained all life on the planet, and most people thought that was a pretty good accomplishment, and were happy with the sun's performance as the reason for them being alive.
Some, ancestors of the alien race we call 'middle managers', decided that they, being worthy, would like more sunlight, and that others, being unworthy, could go without. The problem was, they really didn't know how to entreat the sun: it wasn't a very good conversationalist. Yet, other people didn't need to know that: so, religion flourished, although the sun didn't care one whit at all the people sacrificing spatulas to it.
Everyone had their own implements and rituals for calling on the power of Sun, and making the evil Clouds stay away, and in a very similar way to how Hamlet was composed, eventually someone got it right: certain materials, and certain areas trapped the heat and light of the sun really well, and if you focused and squinted and said just the right word, poof!, you exploded into a pool of blood. This wasn't such a happy discovery for these pioneers, but eventually people figured out how to get other people to explode into pools of blood, and thus magic was born, and religion sort of went by the wayside, exploded into a pool of symbolic blood.
The problem was, while you could do a few small things just on your own, you needed to have access to areas that collected the sun nicely to really do anything important. So, would-be wizards rushed all over the place, claiming this and that land, and fights started breaking out. Several mages, decided to rise above all this nonsense, and so yanked giant parts of the land out of the ground, and floated them closer to the sun, where they could get rid of those unsightly magic tan lines. This worked for a little, until everybody started floating what would be called 'cities' (as to distinguish themselves from the commoners below) up into the air, and the parking got a mess, and then people started arguing over which city was 'The City', and war broke out some more. War between mages tended to be the sort of thing which not only ended in one mage meeting a gruesome end, their city exploding as well, but also, roughly half the population of the world too as collateral damage.
The clerics, lurking in the shadows and clutching their spatulas, had not let all this time go to waste. They figured out that people needed sun too, and so that they were conduits for magic as well. If they got people to wear their spatulas (or the technical term: holy symbol), they could suck a little energy out of them, and do magic too. The clerics, now fueled by life-based magic, became popular, both among the half of the world still living, and the half of the world now dead, who thought this was their ticket back from 'pool of blood' status.
The clerics, wily in their spatula-wielding ways, convinced the mages to find a peaceful end to their wars, by not inflicting pain via magic, but by inflicting pain via bureaucracies. They agreed to organize into two groups, the reds, and the blues, based on favorite color of robe (those who preferred colors like yellow were promptly executed, lest they make this more complex). They divvied up the land, and agreed not to poach on each other's territory, or at least, to make up a large pretense called an election, and to try to give districts that had a change of power at least five seconds head start before the fireballs started raining in. The clerics out of this deal, had to waste a lot less of their energy on resurrecting pools of blood, which made everybody more or less happy.
Here, we reach the situation today: there is a two-party government, the Reds and the Blues. Whichever one is currently in power is called the Ruling Party, and whichever one isn't is called the Opposition Party. People support their party year round by wearing small tags, buttons, pendants, that suck a bit of life from them, and store it off in a vault. Come election time, the candidates draw on all the power that has been stored in the vault, and attempt to obliterate their foe in one large blast of energy. The winner takes control of the office, and the loser generally liquefies. The clerics have been instrumental in making sure that no one party gains too much of an advantage.
From the remains of the mages war, only one floating city remains, which is now correctly called: The City (sometimes The Float as well). It's always daylight in the City, the better to collect magic. Real estate in The City is extremely valuable, and the results of elections not only determines access to the lands below on the world, but also, the divvying up of territory on The City. Access between the world and the city is available even to those who don't study magic: there are permanent reverse gravity fields over the world that quickly elevate one up to the level where the city passes by: going down is a matter of sliding down the sides of the field. Sometimes the people guiding the city disagree on where exactly the best sun would be, and so people waiting for the city to pass by, sometimes get run over, but such is life.
This order has been fairly stable for all three parties, but people have every so often complained that either a) they're not in on the power or b) do so many people on the ground have to die carelessly. These people get liquefied like all the rest, but actual magic's kind of taxing, so they've fallen back on bureaucracy to do the work of making sure people don't disagree.
An example of some of these laws:
1) People expressing opinions not held by either of the two parties shall be put to death.
2) People thinking bad thoughts (where bad is officially defined as whatever the Secretary of Thinking does not think should be thought), shall be put to death.
As a fallback, the Secretary of Style may put to death anybody who clashes with the decor. Other laws prohibit the carrying or use of sharp weapons (although several unions have successfully bribed exceptions into the law, such that you can spot the butchers in any town, because they're the people with the greatswords).
Into this, comes you: you are a journalist. This is a patently illegal occupation, punished by death, but you're well funded (although by whom is a good question, that nobody asks and nobody answers), and whatever you write gets distributed cross the world (sometimes killing subscribers by newspapers falling at tremendous velocities, but such is the nature of communication), and people read it a lot, even though this is also illegal: gossip, politics, where to be if you don't want to be liquefied next election, and so on. You're the only information source that's free.
Of course, your job is a little difficult: people won't cooperate with you (also punishable by death), and so, getting an exclusive interviews means breaking down someone's door, breaking a pinky or two, breaking into their mind, and breaking their will. Luckily, you're well equipped, and your journalistic ethics handbook reads:
1) Get the story before they get you.
So, you do it, you get the story. Because it's right. Because it's important. Because well...nobody's ever retired from the Daily Float.
Character generation: 10,100 XP (5th level for those playing at home).
30 point buy.
Equipment: 20000 gp to spend (or craft) as you like. In addition, part of every journalist and staff member's kit is a free Hat of Disguise, and an Amulet of Protection Against Scrying. These are very important to your work, as the element of surprise is really the only element on your side. The catch is that a few journalists with hats have been caught, and so the city guard is vaguely aware of the menace that large groups of hat-wearing people represent. You can spend 1000gp to request a custom X of disguise, where good suggestions for X involve things like bracelets, rings, necklaces, cloaks, bracers, etc, while bad suggestions for X involve things like the Underwear of Disguise. (The extra money is a representation of recent breakthroughs in creating dimensional planes that periodically split into two identical planes: the magic item economy has now been flooded...although rumors are that the cloned magical items sometimes behave a little wonkily).
You want hints as far as how to spend all that lovely money? Focus on abilities, not stat bumps: you want to be resourceful, not twinked. Feel free to use the magic item creation rules to make your own things: bonus if they're particularly funny (like, for example, The Greatclub of Suggestion: casts suggestion 3/day on successful hits (DC 10+ 1/3 dmg)).
Sources: Loose guidelines here. Stuff from the core books and other wotc-published books is likely to be accepted without a thought, although please don't try to do anything too broken (widgets of shield come to mind). Other d20 fantasy material should generally be fine as well, although I reserve rights to reject things which unbalance or don't feel right. If there's something outside that scope that you just think will be perfect, ask me first, and we'll talk.
Standard Jobs in a journalistic team (some people may have multiple roles):
Journalists: the people who get all the credit, lead the team, and get all the blame when things go bad. Some of them actually write.
Copy-editor: Their name never makes the page, but they do all the work. Drinking is not an option, it's a requirement.
Photographer: Anybody can be the photographer. You look at a scene, concentrate on the scene real hard while also thinking of a tag, like 'orange two-floor house'. Then, when you turn in your story, the psions for the paper rip open your mind, and find the tagged image.
While this works for anybody, most groups with a psion tend to nominate them for photographer: psions are much better at only showing the staff the orange two-floor house, and not revealing lots of material from their mind that makes for suitable blackmail.
Bodyguard: Well, when the entire city guard is told to shoot on anything that vaguely resembles sight, you need someone to keep them busy.
Interrogator (Mental): Why bother asking when you can just crack their head open? (figuratively)
Interrogator (Physical): Why bother asking when you can just crack their head open? (literally)
Handler: Lingo for: well, they don't really help write the story, but they make the rest of our lives go pretty smoothly, with, what the connections and sharp daggers and willingness to kill and all.
Research Assistant: A sort of mixture of previous jobs, they offer some help interrogating, and finding out details, and roughing the right people up for information.
Posting frequency: Once every two days is what you and I will both commit to: more frequently may happen and that is just dandy.
Game speed: I'm looking to keep things moving, so the goal is to give PC's a lot of freedom in defining their actions, to take charge, to bust down the door and torture...err...interrogate..interview! The responsibility this brings back to you is to be descriptive, be creative, and be lively.
Game feel: While the issues of journalistic ethics, and ends justifying means should definitely come up, and satire should be par for the norm, this isn't going to be a game about philosophical wonking, or making profound political statements about today. The game is going to work a sort of gritty comic feel: bad stuff goes down, the PC's are isolated from society, constantly watching their backs, but, hey, it's fun being an outlaw journalist, especially when that means scaring the hell out of some scum.
Game Logistics: I will roll dice unless you roll for me. Rolling on your part involves using one of those handy dice rollers that email results such that I know everything's on the up and up. When you include roll results in a post, just put the name of the check, and the result, like (Spot 23) or (Disguise 19) or (Greatsword, 24, 16) (that's attack roll/damage).
Keep OOC stuff on the OOC thread, unless it's related to understanding the post.
So what do I do?
1) Reserve a spot here: this is first come, first serve. I'm looking probably for 3-5 players+alternates, although if things go well, I may let the alternates join in as another reporting team.
2) After you've got your "First!" post in the bag, think about what type of character you'd like to play. Think of the two-three sentence description, that includes role, and brief personality, classes. This is just so people know what you're doing, and can plan around that.
3) Rock out a character. Post it here. Current personality and history are just as important as getting the numbers all right. Monday-Tuesday sounds good to me for this, though I'm flexible if people are busy. If you've got the secrets and the bones in your closet, just email them to me off-board. I like heroforge, because it makes neat statblocks, and makes all the numbers squiggly in the right way, but use whatever floats your boat.
4) Once we've got all the characters, we'll take a day or two to tie it all together. This means figuring out how you relate to each other, and how you relate to the world. This will not just be articulated, in that charming way we call English, but we'll also have Background Feats, which I'll list in a day or so. Basically, for each PC, you get to pick from a list of feats that define all sorts of relationships: this person your rival? Pick the Rival feat, and get a +2 to any actions to show him up (more precisely defined then that, but you get the idea).
In addition, you'll have a pool of Background feats to be applied to the world writ large, so you can have enemies (traditionally the people you've reported on in the past), obligations, goals, desires, etc. (Think Backgrounds like spycraft).
5) The actual game. Yay!
Whew. I think my hands are about to fall off, so I'll just leave it to you. Feel free to ask any questions you like.
Recruitment: We have four great players with characters ready to go, and we're starting tonight, but would like a fifth to join as soon as possible. If you're interested, just read this introductory post, see if it fits, then post at the end to reserve a spot, and start reading the rest of the thread, as nuggets of truth and wisdom are hidden throughout! Have fun. --stu
When Journalists Attack! - d20 fantasy (Play By Post)
(edit: added Photographer role)
This is long, but hopefully it sets up everything nicely. I hope you have as much fun reading as I did writing this, and I hope even more you're motivated to play.
One sentence description: The PC's are kick-in-the-door journalists who investigate and report on stories in a world ruled by two political parties of mages, who have made journalism a crime punishable by death.
Hollywood Stupid Executive High Concept Pitch: It's Transmetropolitan meets 1984 with swords!
The World: (rough draftish, but good enough to communicate the idea, and I'm open for suggestions and criticisms)
There is a roundish world, and a sun. The sun sustained all life on the planet, and most people thought that was a pretty good accomplishment, and were happy with the sun's performance as the reason for them being alive.
Some, ancestors of the alien race we call 'middle managers', decided that they, being worthy, would like more sunlight, and that others, being unworthy, could go without. The problem was, they really didn't know how to entreat the sun: it wasn't a very good conversationalist. Yet, other people didn't need to know that: so, religion flourished, although the sun didn't care one whit at all the people sacrificing spatulas to it.
Everyone had their own implements and rituals for calling on the power of Sun, and making the evil Clouds stay away, and in a very similar way to how Hamlet was composed, eventually someone got it right: certain materials, and certain areas trapped the heat and light of the sun really well, and if you focused and squinted and said just the right word, poof!, you exploded into a pool of blood. This wasn't such a happy discovery for these pioneers, but eventually people figured out how to get other people to explode into pools of blood, and thus magic was born, and religion sort of went by the wayside, exploded into a pool of symbolic blood.
The problem was, while you could do a few small things just on your own, you needed to have access to areas that collected the sun nicely to really do anything important. So, would-be wizards rushed all over the place, claiming this and that land, and fights started breaking out. Several mages, decided to rise above all this nonsense, and so yanked giant parts of the land out of the ground, and floated them closer to the sun, where they could get rid of those unsightly magic tan lines. This worked for a little, until everybody started floating what would be called 'cities' (as to distinguish themselves from the commoners below) up into the air, and the parking got a mess, and then people started arguing over which city was 'The City', and war broke out some more. War between mages tended to be the sort of thing which not only ended in one mage meeting a gruesome end, their city exploding as well, but also, roughly half the population of the world too as collateral damage.
The clerics, lurking in the shadows and clutching their spatulas, had not let all this time go to waste. They figured out that people needed sun too, and so that they were conduits for magic as well. If they got people to wear their spatulas (or the technical term: holy symbol), they could suck a little energy out of them, and do magic too. The clerics, now fueled by life-based magic, became popular, both among the half of the world still living, and the half of the world now dead, who thought this was their ticket back from 'pool of blood' status.
The clerics, wily in their spatula-wielding ways, convinced the mages to find a peaceful end to their wars, by not inflicting pain via magic, but by inflicting pain via bureaucracies. They agreed to organize into two groups, the reds, and the blues, based on favorite color of robe (those who preferred colors like yellow were promptly executed, lest they make this more complex). They divvied up the land, and agreed not to poach on each other's territory, or at least, to make up a large pretense called an election, and to try to give districts that had a change of power at least five seconds head start before the fireballs started raining in. The clerics out of this deal, had to waste a lot less of their energy on resurrecting pools of blood, which made everybody more or less happy.
Here, we reach the situation today: there is a two-party government, the Reds and the Blues. Whichever one is currently in power is called the Ruling Party, and whichever one isn't is called the Opposition Party. People support their party year round by wearing small tags, buttons, pendants, that suck a bit of life from them, and store it off in a vault. Come election time, the candidates draw on all the power that has been stored in the vault, and attempt to obliterate their foe in one large blast of energy. The winner takes control of the office, and the loser generally liquefies. The clerics have been instrumental in making sure that no one party gains too much of an advantage.
From the remains of the mages war, only one floating city remains, which is now correctly called: The City (sometimes The Float as well). It's always daylight in the City, the better to collect magic. Real estate in The City is extremely valuable, and the results of elections not only determines access to the lands below on the world, but also, the divvying up of territory on The City. Access between the world and the city is available even to those who don't study magic: there are permanent reverse gravity fields over the world that quickly elevate one up to the level where the city passes by: going down is a matter of sliding down the sides of the field. Sometimes the people guiding the city disagree on where exactly the best sun would be, and so people waiting for the city to pass by, sometimes get run over, but such is life.
This order has been fairly stable for all three parties, but people have every so often complained that either a) they're not in on the power or b) do so many people on the ground have to die carelessly. These people get liquefied like all the rest, but actual magic's kind of taxing, so they've fallen back on bureaucracy to do the work of making sure people don't disagree.
An example of some of these laws:
1) People expressing opinions not held by either of the two parties shall be put to death.
2) People thinking bad thoughts (where bad is officially defined as whatever the Secretary of Thinking does not think should be thought), shall be put to death.
As a fallback, the Secretary of Style may put to death anybody who clashes with the decor. Other laws prohibit the carrying or use of sharp weapons (although several unions have successfully bribed exceptions into the law, such that you can spot the butchers in any town, because they're the people with the greatswords).
Into this, comes you: you are a journalist. This is a patently illegal occupation, punished by death, but you're well funded (although by whom is a good question, that nobody asks and nobody answers), and whatever you write gets distributed cross the world (sometimes killing subscribers by newspapers falling at tremendous velocities, but such is the nature of communication), and people read it a lot, even though this is also illegal: gossip, politics, where to be if you don't want to be liquefied next election, and so on. You're the only information source that's free.
Of course, your job is a little difficult: people won't cooperate with you (also punishable by death), and so, getting an exclusive interviews means breaking down someone's door, breaking a pinky or two, breaking into their mind, and breaking their will. Luckily, you're well equipped, and your journalistic ethics handbook reads:
1) Get the story before they get you.
So, you do it, you get the story. Because it's right. Because it's important. Because well...nobody's ever retired from the Daily Float.
Character generation: 10,100 XP (5th level for those playing at home).
30 point buy.
Equipment: 20000 gp to spend (or craft) as you like. In addition, part of every journalist and staff member's kit is a free Hat of Disguise, and an Amulet of Protection Against Scrying. These are very important to your work, as the element of surprise is really the only element on your side. The catch is that a few journalists with hats have been caught, and so the city guard is vaguely aware of the menace that large groups of hat-wearing people represent. You can spend 1000gp to request a custom X of disguise, where good suggestions for X involve things like bracelets, rings, necklaces, cloaks, bracers, etc, while bad suggestions for X involve things like the Underwear of Disguise. (The extra money is a representation of recent breakthroughs in creating dimensional planes that periodically split into two identical planes: the magic item economy has now been flooded...although rumors are that the cloned magical items sometimes behave a little wonkily).
You want hints as far as how to spend all that lovely money? Focus on abilities, not stat bumps: you want to be resourceful, not twinked. Feel free to use the magic item creation rules to make your own things: bonus if they're particularly funny (like, for example, The Greatclub of Suggestion: casts suggestion 3/day on successful hits (DC 10+ 1/3 dmg)).
Sources: Loose guidelines here. Stuff from the core books and other wotc-published books is likely to be accepted without a thought, although please don't try to do anything too broken (widgets of shield come to mind). Other d20 fantasy material should generally be fine as well, although I reserve rights to reject things which unbalance or don't feel right. If there's something outside that scope that you just think will be perfect, ask me first, and we'll talk.
Standard Jobs in a journalistic team (some people may have multiple roles):
Journalists: the people who get all the credit, lead the team, and get all the blame when things go bad. Some of them actually write.
Copy-editor: Their name never makes the page, but they do all the work. Drinking is not an option, it's a requirement.
Photographer: Anybody can be the photographer. You look at a scene, concentrate on the scene real hard while also thinking of a tag, like 'orange two-floor house'. Then, when you turn in your story, the psions for the paper rip open your mind, and find the tagged image.
While this works for anybody, most groups with a psion tend to nominate them for photographer: psions are much better at only showing the staff the orange two-floor house, and not revealing lots of material from their mind that makes for suitable blackmail.
Bodyguard: Well, when the entire city guard is told to shoot on anything that vaguely resembles sight, you need someone to keep them busy.
Interrogator (Mental): Why bother asking when you can just crack their head open? (figuratively)
Interrogator (Physical): Why bother asking when you can just crack their head open? (literally)
Handler: Lingo for: well, they don't really help write the story, but they make the rest of our lives go pretty smoothly, with, what the connections and sharp daggers and willingness to kill and all.
Research Assistant: A sort of mixture of previous jobs, they offer some help interrogating, and finding out details, and roughing the right people up for information.
Posting frequency: Once every two days is what you and I will both commit to: more frequently may happen and that is just dandy.
Game speed: I'm looking to keep things moving, so the goal is to give PC's a lot of freedom in defining their actions, to take charge, to bust down the door and torture...err...interrogate..interview! The responsibility this brings back to you is to be descriptive, be creative, and be lively.
Game feel: While the issues of journalistic ethics, and ends justifying means should definitely come up, and satire should be par for the norm, this isn't going to be a game about philosophical wonking, or making profound political statements about today. The game is going to work a sort of gritty comic feel: bad stuff goes down, the PC's are isolated from society, constantly watching their backs, but, hey, it's fun being an outlaw journalist, especially when that means scaring the hell out of some scum.
Game Logistics: I will roll dice unless you roll for me. Rolling on your part involves using one of those handy dice rollers that email results such that I know everything's on the up and up. When you include roll results in a post, just put the name of the check, and the result, like (Spot 23) or (Disguise 19) or (Greatsword, 24, 16) (that's attack roll/damage).
Keep OOC stuff on the OOC thread, unless it's related to understanding the post.
So what do I do?
1) Reserve a spot here: this is first come, first serve. I'm looking probably for 3-5 players+alternates, although if things go well, I may let the alternates join in as another reporting team.
2) After you've got your "First!" post in the bag, think about what type of character you'd like to play. Think of the two-three sentence description, that includes role, and brief personality, classes. This is just so people know what you're doing, and can plan around that.
3) Rock out a character. Post it here. Current personality and history are just as important as getting the numbers all right. Monday-Tuesday sounds good to me for this, though I'm flexible if people are busy. If you've got the secrets and the bones in your closet, just email them to me off-board. I like heroforge, because it makes neat statblocks, and makes all the numbers squiggly in the right way, but use whatever floats your boat.
4) Once we've got all the characters, we'll take a day or two to tie it all together. This means figuring out how you relate to each other, and how you relate to the world. This will not just be articulated, in that charming way we call English, but we'll also have Background Feats, which I'll list in a day or so. Basically, for each PC, you get to pick from a list of feats that define all sorts of relationships: this person your rival? Pick the Rival feat, and get a +2 to any actions to show him up (more precisely defined then that, but you get the idea).
In addition, you'll have a pool of Background feats to be applied to the world writ large, so you can have enemies (traditionally the people you've reported on in the past), obligations, goals, desires, etc. (Think Backgrounds like spycraft).
5) The actual game. Yay!
Whew. I think my hands are about to fall off, so I'll just leave it to you. Feel free to ask any questions you like.
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