Hello all,
I am working on an EP campaign and thought I would post what I come up with as I develop this idea. So here is what I have so far:
The Villain:
Grant Walker, head of Walker-tainment industries (a theme park and entertainment company).
Ruthless and micromanaging to the extreme, Walker employees multiple forks of himself to watch over his holdings and is not a little paranoid of dying. His eventual goal is to research a way to boot strap his brain into having the power of a TITAN. This would take the form of distributing his consciousness across several thousand or so people in distributed network (think SETI@Home). The problem is that a paranoid and controlling personality with that much power tends to not have good plans for humanity.
The Players will be mid 21st century ego's who awake on earth at AF10 and have to eventual deal with Grant Walker
That all I have right now, any suggestions or comments are welcome.
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Ozymandius, An EP Campaign
Mon, 2013-04-29 12:07
#1
helios1014
Ozymandius, An EP Campaign
Tue, 2013-04-30 17:49
#2
helios1014
Chapter One, Welcome to the outer orbit of tommorow
The players wake up, in a disused resleving facility. The morphs are probably decaying by now or in some other way wrong. As they orient themselves and recall some scraps of the 21st century, a voice goes: "Greetings chono-naut slash traveler slash friend (make sure to the slashes out when we run this for real, I do not need a repeat of Antarctica Land). You are among the lucky few to reach stage three of project Taro. After this point I do the whole you have been brought back to life after this many years and light goes one for the next stage of orientation."
Project Taro (Cocktail Napkin draft):
Stage One: Get brain scan of random layabouts
Stage two: see if digital copy of brain can be made from scans
stage three: see if copies are functional
stage four: make sure I have working copies in case future me gets erased
Sat, 2013-05-04 08:14
#3
Brucie
Hey,
Hey,
Just a few questions that came to my mind.
1)Why 21st Century characters? Wouldn't they be a little . . . unexperienced to compete such a guy in the world AF10?
2)The basic idea seems good. How do you plan to expand it? What kind of characters are involved? Were does this Walker resides?
3)How do PC's get into the job? Who hires them? Why do they want to fight Grant Walker?
So much for now. As I said: just a few questions ;-)
Sat, 2013-05-04 10:37
#4
helios1014
@Brucie
1) My players do not have the time to read the book and I want to orient them into this new world. So the plan is to have a controlled environment when they will be introduced to the following: Basic Gameplay Mechanics, Nanotechonology, Hacking, Muses, combat, Resleving, and Simulspaces. In fact, I am currently thinking they will wake up in a simulspace that is not quite out of the alpha phase and as they hear more messages from Grant Walker (most of which will be memos to his employees) the players will get the sense that something must be wrong outside if they are awake at this stage. Then the simulspace will begin to hurt them. Haven't fleshed out the details quite yet, but they eventually get resleved ad get to see the earth and the devastation on its surface.
2) After the players escape the Project Taro facility, they will walk into the middle of a fight between forces from Ozma and Firewall operatives. Depending on their choices, they will get a recruitment opportunity or the chance to become test subjects (this detail might change because I have not gotten that far yet). I am considering the idea that Walker has some pull in Ozma but is using them for his own ends. One of the devices I plan on introducing down the line is a machine that allows an asynch to puppet-sock a biomorph. The test is dramatic and bloody. Ozma will not care so long as the public is not aware of the technologies existence and Walker might not be interested in sharing it with them. As to his residence, to be determined.
3) Going off of what I said earlier, firewall is the easiest reason to imagine them wanting to fight Walker. The Ozma side of the coin is a difficult proposition because I am not sure if Ozma would throw them at the problem, may have to dump Ozma as a viable option if that becomes a problem in drafting this. As to reasons to fight Grant Walker, well he is a micromanaging and paranoid man with a god complex and an insatiable need to control every aspect of his domain. i.e. He is working on becoming the borg queen sans a physical body to take down. At least one of my players will be driven to take him down by sheer resentment of being controlled.
That's what I have so far. Thank you for the questions and keep them coming.
Sat, 2013-05-04 12:57
#5
Brucie
Ok. That sounds reasonable
Ok. That sounds reasonable. I would think about one point in detail: Why would someone reactivate such old egos from before the Fall? Is there something in the backround of the characters that you could use as a tool? Why would someone want to use people who are not yet adapted to the AF enviroment to fight against such an important and powerful enemy? What makes them special? Why doesn't Firewall use other Sentinels to take Walker out? Is there something which only your players can provide?
If you can construct an angle where is makes perfect sense for Firewall - other than: This is the set of players I have to work with - to hire your group of Players it will defenitly increase the level of personal involvement and decrease the suspension of disbelief-stretch.
Thu, 2013-05-30 04:26
#6
Arenamontanus
Brucie wrote:Ok. That sounds
Here is what I am actually using in one of my ongoing campaigns: the pre-Fall PCs got restored from a lost backup server by a gerontocrat since they were *guaranteed* not to be involved in any of the elaborate plots woven by his post-Fall enemies. By virtue of being random people having been entirely offline there was no way the PCs could be agents of them. Of course, it was also important to make sure the server was not a plant put in place to fool him; there was some clever digging done behind the scenes to find it.
This sounds entirely compatible with your scenario. In addition, if you want to give some help to the PCs, maybe they *were* manipulated while in storage - Walker didn't quite do his due diligence with the backup server, and some clever group like Firewall or Ozma snuck in secretly edited egos. The PCs don't know it, but they are actually Firewall agents. Or at least equipped with subconscious "bugs" that allow some anti-Walker agency to peek at what is going on and maybe intervene.
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