Hey there,
I am planning to run my first EP game pretty soon, and since I have a thing for long campaigns with solid arc joining all the adventures, I was thinking of an appropriate antagonist/villain to fill the gap. Usually, I run my games in a very sandbox-ish manner (the players find themselves in a big location torn apart by faction conflicts and have to work up from there), but this time I'd like to do something different and exploit the plethora of flavours available in this amazing setting, while still keeping it pretty coherent. How do I do so? Enter Kadmon Aristo.
Kadmon Aristo is (or was) is a moderate Ultimate mercenary...or at least his original fork was. See, a few years ago, in his pursuit for self-development, Aristo decided to extensively use forking and re-sleeving in order to explore various factions and forms of life available in the Post-Fall reality in order to discover their flaws, while incorporating valuable elements into his ego ego, pushing him further on his way to post-humanism. His original fork worked as a gatecrasher in order to acquire funds for numerous bodies and egocasting services he'd have to use, and then he forked himself numerous times, creating a number of alpha forks, slightly pruned to his liking via psychosurgery and memory editing to make them more adaptable to certain social and political circumstances, essentially implanting them ideas of love/hate towards selected factions. Then, he let them go into the Solar System; each fork was bound to return after a few years in order to merge with the original Aristo.
This went worse than expected. The forks infiltrated numerous factions - the uplift community on Mars, a certain scum barge looping around the inner system, pro-synthmorph cells on Luna, and even the Jovian Junta, among others - but the merger with the original ego caused all the negative experiences and false memories to combine, effectively twisting Kadmon Aristo into a misanthropic overhumanist full of hatred towards the so-called Transhumanity, notably the powers of the Inner System. The archaic political entities of Luna and Mars were a flaw that could be fixed only by fire. His mind, now brilliant with knowledge but confused by fake memories and exaggerated animosity came up with a plan to infiltrate the factions once again, this time not to explore their flaws, but to exploit them and cause a civil war in the Inner System, while the 'original' Kadmon Aristo egocasts to an overhumanist stronghold somewhere in the Kuiper Belts and tries to gain enough political cred to persuade his peers into going to war against the spoiled vermin the Inner System inhabitants really are.
Some of the forks managed to work up the ladder of various terrorist organizations, organizing bombings and other acts of violence in order to destabilize the oh-so-precious social balance in the Planety Consortium and the LLA - the so-called Citizen Zero, a neo-gorilla leader of the neo-primate terrorist cell in New Shanghai is said to be one of them, fueling the mutual hatred between the large uplift community of Mars and their transhuman neighbours. Meanwhile, a bio/technoconservative organization plans to sabotage the Olympus space elevator once and for all under Aristo's guide, while a certain hibernoid comet herder secrectly changed the trajectory of the iceteroid to derail Progress out of its orbit and crash it into the surface of Mars.
What Aristo doesn't know is that one of his original forks, sent before he went mad, haven't returned, but its still alive. Originally sent to the Jovian Republic in a flat morph, without a cortical stack, he was considered dead by his creator, but the truth is different. During his stay in the Junta, the fork discovered a mysterious organization dubbed 'Firewall', and decided to discover what's their cause...and he liked what he saw. Now acting as a Firewall proxy, Kadmon Aristo sends a group of sentinels to chase his insane selves throughout the Inner System and stop the inevitable bloodshed.
What do you think about Aristo? Any ideas where else this madmen could've gone to fulfil his dark dream?
Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.
NPC/Campaign seed: Kadmon Aristo
Mon, 2013-07-22 04:50
#1
zombiak
NPC/Campaign seed: Kadmon Aristo
Mon, 2013-07-22 06:39
#2
Arenamontanus
I like the explanation of how
I like the explanation of how he got crazy and how a version of him is also helping the PCs.
The big issue is why he is a threat: there are plenty of misanthropic overhumanists around who want to set the world on fire. Somehow the broad experience must have made him a proper threat.
One possibility is that he now has a very good big picture and can coordinate the different plots. Worsening transhuman-uplift relations is not in itself useful, but if Martian society gets into a militaristic phase if the beanstalk is destroyed (or the plot averted and planted evidence leads towards certain hypercorps...) those tensions can blossom into bigger violence. A comet intercepting Progress is not a threat as long as the Batteries are up and running - but a fork might be planning to add a high bandwidth laser link to them pointing down into the Quarantine Zone, expecting something awful down there to take them over. And so on.
Another possibility is that over the years of Gatecrashing he has changed. He went somewhere and something did something to him... he is now an agent for an external threat, far smarter and more capable than he should be. He doesn't really notice this himself (but the Firewall fork is starting to suspect).
—
Mon, 2013-07-22 07:02
#3
zombiak
Yes, the ability to see the
Yes, the ability to see the bigger picture and coordinate the attacks in a way unsuspected by the authorities is supposed to be his biggest advantage, along with the access to various resources; after all, a scandal involving uplift experimentation (disclosed by his 'hypercorp' fork) can instantly motivate the organization led by his 'uplift' self to act in retaliation. A series of seemingly unrelated scandals and attacks which the PCs can discover to be more complex than just simple coincidence and 'bad day at work'.
I thought about making him encounter some kind of alien intelligence behind the Gates, but actually it might be more fun (and terrifying) to think that he actually managed to do it all by himself - through forking, merging and psychosurgery, he became a huge threat, which might be a signal that the transhumanity and the technology itself is actually the biggest potential X-threat. It might also explain why his ex-Junta/Firewall fork, implanted with some bioconservative ideas actually turned against him.
I'm going to throw some TITAN-related baddies at the players as well (already thinking about an extreme/suicide sport Mesh celebrity selling illegal XP from the Quarantine Zone, which obviously went bad), I think that having both minor TITAN activity and an unrelated greater force (Aristo) will keep the players on their toes.
Mon, 2013-07-22 15:00
#4
Arenamontanus
zombiak wrote:I thought about
Sounds like a good principled choice.
He reminds me of an evil version of one of my NPCs, Mr/Dr/Professor Terry Ramirez, an academic guy who forks and merges widely (see this thread for a description). In fact, the Banyan lifestyle thread might be of interest. Aristo might simply be an unusually cohesive, dedicated and nasty banyan. So one part of the campaign might involve researching the others with the lifestyle and trying to figure out their weak point (or enlisting them).
—