Posts made by Apollonius

So I've been sorta following along with the thread. Is this actually happening?

I'm more curious than interested in stepping back into the realm of MU*s but I would be interested to see the results of this little experiment.

One recommendation to Cirno is to exclude the Asian faction entirely for the time being and introduce them at a later date. Otherwise, all that hard work into a cogent theme is going to be wasted by dual katana-wielding knights and crusaders dressed in school uniforms and tentacles before your eyes return to the screen. If the neglect of African history and culture riles up people on this thread, the gross misappropriation and misinterpretation of Asian history and culture into a very weird fetish is just as insulting. This also allows for the game to open up without the need to write cogent theme for an entire group of players and decreases factional OOC angst.

But I wouldn't put too much stock into my words. I actually tried to get into MU*s for a hot minute and... I mean. The amount of time that is freed up for RL is pretty ridiculous once one drops the hobby. The free time to play Skyrim and Crusader Kings II, of course.

I'm totally offering a TT style environment. That is how Fading Suns should be played.

Every player can have unlimited alts but after a certain amount of plays with a particular pc, you need to sit him or her out for a discrete amount of time. At the end of a full campaign, there would be incentives to kill off that pc, give that pc a voluntary rest, or otherwise roll again based on the next big plot.

That isn't to say that there is no permanence. I'd relax rules about interconnecting family members (just no PCs of that nature active at one time) or theme connections. Social RP is okay and you can have as much of that as you like. Staff approved player run TPs could interact with the overall world and meta plot. At the end of a major campaign, players get incentives to write up their version of events and they get recorded into a central database that explains the story so far.

If a PC achieves a certain amount of IC power or status, players will be allowed to play them from time to time as NPCs but their chronicle is more or less finished.

Staff never play main roles in plots unless invited to a player run plot and are generally limited to quest giving NPCs. All NPC staff actions will be reactionary in scope and based on numbers that will be either transparent or randomized with dice.

I think this is worth an experiment. The other FS paradigm is doomed to failure imho.

@Usekh The idea is that every sane KWer understood that if the Symbiots were at the doorstep of Cadavus, it would be a second front against the Symbiots... and that the BB and Muster don't have the manpower to handle both a campaign in Paradise and Stigmata, not that the Decados alone are shooting down ships. I don't think they have the manpower to shoot down every single ship anyway.

The idea is that there are three ways in (KWer, Antagonist, Symbiot) and two (KWer and Antagonist) are barred. It hermetically seals the system (for the most part, obviously there are going to be some means of smuggling shit in and out) ICly and OOCly in many ways. The Charioteers would be the most reluctant to give up the jump keys to Paradise but they'd be pretty damn cognizant that a second front of Symbiot activity would mean there is no more business at all to handle in the Known World. The Decados and their League buddies (understanding the League in itself is not a singular entity) would probably take the lead in sealing that space (or make an unusual agreement with the Hawkwoods) to prevent Symbiots into Cadavus, although some crazy Hawkwoods may just want exactly that.

It'd mean a messy, sloppy cover up on a galactic scale about the giant fuck up that has occurred in Paradise and perhaps cause turmoil across the Phoenix Empire. The focus of the game is the remainder on Paradise who are FUBAR. If the players excessively focus on off-world matters, well, maybe they deserve to get wiped out IC. Want to play a marriage simulator? You get a marriage simulator with Symbiot monstrosities.

I'm reviewing the planets in the books and I'm not particularly enthused by any of them. Anyone else have that problem?

I just put together a possible theme for a post-apocalyptic nightmare FS game that I'd run a few campaigns with. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of canon for Paradise and hand waving or forcing some of the thematic licenses below but honestly, you can replace the planet name and the main players and get the same result of merging Fallout with Fading Suns. There's some weird changes in tense and it sorta flows in a stream of consciousness manner. I just hobbled something together at 3AM my time.

Paradise Lost Again:

The famed jumpgate to the Justinian homeworld Paradise was recovered only for it to be a nuked out husk of a planet with huddled masses of humanity clinging onto the wreckage of centuries of war and devastation and dashing the hopes of a Justinian restoration. It is later found that House Decados has been in contact with Paradise for the better part of the century, in a proxy war with the Vuldrok, later on delivering nuclear weapons to unsuspecting natives who irradiated the planet against Vuldrok invaders.

Nonetheless, the House Justinian claimed Paradise as their own, while Hawkwood and Decados partisans claiming ancient treaties and marriage relations, both ancient and recent, swooping down to lay claim to whatever is left of Paradise. Imperial, Church, and League groups also descend into Paradise to fight the Vuldrok, recover lost artifacts, and rebuild Paradise. The effort against the Vuldrok come to a grinding halt, the Justinians controlling the main continent, while significant contingents of Decados aligned with League agents and Hawkwood aligned with Church agents as well as a Vuldrok chieftain all controlling large pieces of territory. There was a rush to find the Justinian scepter, bringing in questing knights of all shapes and banners trying to bring glory to their House.

Was being the operative word. An unknown ship of ancient make crashed into one of the nuclear-infested regions, bringing in rumors of a night road to Symbiot territory, brought into reality when Symbiots are confirmed. Rather than opening a new front against the previously contained Symbiots, a detente was achieved between the Vuldrok and the Known Worlders to simply abandon Paradise to its fate and seal the jumpgate again. After the initial exodus of people, the Vuldrok and Decados confiscated as many of the jump keys as possible and otherwise shot down any Charioteer and ship that refused to comply. The Decados would tamper with the jumpgate as they did during the fall of Alecto, this time sealing the gate all together.

Stranded against an impossible foe, the remaining humans on Paradise must take a stand against the Symbiot infestation or resign themselves to destruction or find another way out, the jumpgate seemingly open to the hell that is Symbiot territory still. To make things worse, the close proximity to Vau space is rumored to have alerted the Vau into summoning a fleet to destroy Paradise entirely. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen.

@bored If there is anyone in the FS MU* space that would despise the OOC Imperial hammer, it would be me. This was well before most folks' time but here's my version of the story.

During a period when Paulus and Lextius and pretty much the entire staff vacated Vargo and left it with Foresti (the staffer who had a doombot coded to pretty much implode the game on whim), my PC Caius Hawkwood had been working diligently to take over the governance of the main continent through a mix of political alliances with the local Hazat (not Custodius at that particular point in time), some friendly (bribed) Decados, and doling out enormous amounts of the coffers to build support from the local restive populace for a Hawkwood takeover. Vargo's natives were restive pro-Republican terrorists and Caius played into them like a fiddle, promoting a regime that supported local governance through its native aristocratic families (who were not really nobles but more like landed British gentry of second sons in the American colonies).

Anyway, Paulus saw that the little ragtag group of players left after he vacated the game was pretty active so he came back in full force, taking back controls to the game and firmly planting his own PC, Iskander, as the ruler of the planet by imperial fiat from the Emperor (despite Caius' own pleas to Princess Victoria of Delphi), marginalizing my PC by both OOC and IC means, and using his staff position to sow discontent amongst the players. In comes Custodius shortly after and with it both activity and toxicity that the man brings where ever he is found.

So no, I don't like Alexius. I don't like the looming threat of Imperial fiat coming in and wrecking PC activity. I suppose privately, the scenario between Alexius, Theafana, and Salandra is a means of neutering him on sort of a weird meta-meta level. One of the big giant open ended thematic components is who Alexius would end up marrying, which seems to attract a lot of people and a lot of partisans. But then again, almost all knights and ladies games devolve into marriage simulators given enough time.

What I am proposing is a game where the Emperor's court is distant, distracted by its own squabbles, and frankly in the position of abandoning its outer periphery to their demise after Alexius' own mismanagement of affairs is resulting in the rapid decline of the Phoenix Empire.

I'm even okay with a situation where the planet's jumpgates no longer work and everyone is trapped in a single planet with no access to the metagame outside. Actually, this should be the case outright in my opinion, other than a few NPC Charioteers that managed to survive with knowledge of the jumpgate coordinates who smuggle in the occasional supply or Kurgan pirates. One can easily set up the game that way and voila, no imperial interference. What I don't want is a cognitive dissonance where the people simply do not acknowledge the Empire outside of the game or having to create the theme of a pre-Alexius time frame. When the jumpgates basically don't work, it doesn't matter who the fuck you're related to. In fact, it should mean you are the first victims of any shakedown operation by those with sharper, pointier sticks.

@Alzie I'd be happy to help out with theme and campaign running if you can manage to get a game running, my reputation notwithstanding. That said, I know a major reason why Fading Suns hasn't been spread around much in the MU* community is because of the stupid intricacies of the chargen process. This is one of the reasons cited to me by P as to why they were hand-statting people and also handling XP spends the way that they did.

The history and foreign affairs major in me does not like to just do some creative handwavium to say that imperial politics are not in play for the setting but something that is often forgotten in a Fading Suns game is that... well, a planet is kind of a big place already, much less stuff on a galactic scale. So whatever the case, the greater metagame can be ignored but I'd rather run that by committee rather than any executive decision since several folks now have indicated disdain for the Byzantium Secundus aspect of the theme.

This is all somewhat academic as I have neither the time nor resources (ahem, a coder) who would want to work with me on a project. But to distill down the conversation, there seems to be an interest in a Fading Suns game and there seems to be an interest in less political focus and more of the adventuring/space opera feel of the theme per the books. There is the subject of chargen and the game system being wonky but as someone said before, it may not be the best game system but it isn't necessarily the worst. FS 2.0 did help mitigate, in my mind, some of the excesses of FS 1.0 although I personally like FS 1.0's sheet process better. But I've always been the crazy one.

@Alzie I'm personally very against setting the game pre-Alexius for the following reasons:

1. Hot War. Before Alexius, for the most part, the game theme is stuck in a hot war. This means blood is actively being said and the houses are allied or murdering each other or allied and murdering each other. And the butterfly effect is in place where even in some shit backwater planet (I'm looking at you, Malignatius)
2. Thematic Gaps. The end of the Emperor Wars under Alexius meant the extinction or marginalization of five of the ten great houses that were fighting for the throne. We'd have to piece together thematic stuff for Van Gelder or even Alecto depending on how far we want to go back.

I suppose it depends on exactly how far we go back. I'm leery about going back all the way to the last years of the Second Republic because of the dearth of thematic history, for example (although a functional game from that period would be kinda neat). There are large stretches of time obviously where the theme was not in a state of hot war, but I'd need to revisit the theme books. My set of campaigns could technically fall in any planet and time frame for the most part, but the dynamics between the PCs could be potentially very different.

@deadculture I'm probably not going to make an FS game anytime soon so no worries.

The problem with setting it before Alexius is Emperor is that the known worlds are in a state of active war amongst the Royal Houses which is sort of a pain to keep track in the meta narrative. You have to set it way before, maybe even for the brief time that Alecto was in power (and also deal with five other royal houses that were still in control), set it to 'present day' where that stupid metaplot lingers, or far enough into the future to tie things up (at the risk of having to deal with creative license on how all that stupid shit actually tied together).

If I do run a game, it'll largely be just an online base of operations for continuous campaigns that may or may not affect the overall meta-narrative on that particular planet. My first campaign will undoubtedly be set in some sort of gritty prison town under a genocidal Viscount and the players assembled need to escape or cope with continuing degradation of the human condition under the extreme situation of planet-wide death and war atrocities.

The next campaign will be on a port town ruled by a Pirate merchant magnate with a dark antinomist secret and a MacGuffin that suggests to the heroes/antagonists of greater power locked up in some lost Ur ruins. The town is besieged by husks.

The third campaign will be a race to find pieces of an artifact. Kurgans, Scravers, and the players (possibly against themselves) fighting and jostling for the pieces. Based on who 'won' the scenario, the planetary environment will shift dramatically.

The fourth campaign will entail a dig of a large capital ship that crashed a remote part of the planet. The search is on to find an important energy source but the ship and possibly the locals are invested by symbiots. 80% chance that the Vau and the Known Worlders are alerted, both of whom are intent on bombarding the planet to total extinction.

The final campaign, depends largely on whether or not the Vau and/or Known Worlder trigger occurred or not in the fourth campaign but either way, large scale Symbiot infestation. In this campaign, it's a last ditch to find a ship or save the planet before all life is wiped out.

Pretty much the trajectory of all Bioware games.

@Arkandel Aw, you're in my old Duchy. I stopped playing though a few months back.

It is more to just accelerate the timeline to a time where historical animus has calmed down in the overall metagame. I could care less about the metagame and who is fucking what in the imperial capital but if we accelerate the game 15 years and Alexius is still unmarried and still has no successor, the Known Worlds would have fallen into a state of total civil war.

We can have the same result, if a little more paranoid and screwed up if the jumpgate just turned off and the star is about to go nova in a couple of years but that'd mean that the influx of new PCs will have to come from the planet, necessitating a larger geographic sprawl or population sprawl, which comes with its own list of problems. This would, however, make the Imperial Questing Knights interesting, as suddenly, their home base and operations no longer exist, and since they abandoned their loyalties for the throne, a world sundered from the gate will not be very conducive for their well being.

My push is to make it dark and depressing as humanly possible without wholesale concentration camps and ovens spewing ash.

Actually, that, for a Fading Suns game setting could be very interesting.

I always wanted to set the timeline several decades into the future in a dark dystopian Empire (more so than usual) highlighted by corruption and decadence in the capital worlds and decay of the human spirit in the borderlands where the setting would be a sleepy town besieged by Vuldrok refugees from a Symbiot infested world and maybe a Kurgan or Sathraist presence causing discontent in a world where the slowly fading fire of human civilization is withdrawing into twilight. Far from the political squabbles of the Royal Houses (although with the historic animosities in place) trying to survive the winter that looms perpetual. And a giant armada approaching to wipe out the whole planet into a rocky smear.

In Byzantium Secundus, Alexius marries Salandra but not before he and Thefana produces a legitimized bastard son before she completely disappears in battle... as Salandra continues to be unable to conceive, threatening civil war as relations between the Hawkwoods and Decados reaches a nadir. No one gives a damn because the Vuldrok keep coming in this frontier world, there are reports of Symbiot activity within those refugees, and the star may potentially explode any minute. 'Normal' people are trying to get off the planet but the Empire enacted measures to limit flows of traffic to the known worlds, especially after still-unconfirmed rumors of Symbiots. Lawless Avesti and Orthodox fanatics run around killing anything that isn't remotely human while the hodgepodge of nobility left struggle to keep order or to horde resources as the planet's ecosystem is dying off. Local barons, muster captains, and a steady stream of Vuldrok raiders become feuding warlords and sellswords in an increasingly desperate environment where technology continues the fail, the planet is dying, and the unwashed masses are trapped to face an unknown foe with literally sticks and stones.

The planet becomes a hotbed for questing knights with delusions of saving the planet, second sons of nobles who want to carve out lands even in this inhospitable environment, league partisans out to strip the planet of every last scrap, and fundamentalist churchers running around 'purging' the planet of sin. Suicide bombings, mass murders in the market place, whole villages and refugee camps slaughtered, and the constant threat of famine and pestilence fills the air.

There are rumors of an armada being gathered in the capital worlds, but not to save the planet but to bombard it out of existence and close the jump gate forever. Or the Vau. It doesn't matter. Time is running out.

This may or may not be how I imagine certain parts of the United States deep south. (I'm in Virginia).

Late to the conversation, the game mechanics limp along acceptably with either FS 1 or FS 2 but as mentioned previously, it's very flawed. 1-on-1 Combat will take literally hours, especially if you twink out a good energy shield/armor combo. And that's not even taking into account actual poses.

The theme was, however, standout, and it's hard to find anything like it. Some of the Kushiel games, for example, have a lot of the high politics component but that's exactly why games of political plays fall apart. There's amorphous dice that allows GMs/Staff to manipulate the story with no player input and/or toxic political environments that result in factionalism and distrust. Or the third option of it devolving into a frankly terrible marriage simulator full of pretty princes and princesses.

So a Hawkwood Questing Knight, a Muster Slave Trader, and a Hazat Dervish walk into a bar in Severus...

I am aware of an aborted attempt by Paulus, Lextius, and Augustus@Vargo in setting up a Leminkainen game. Less freakin Kurgans and more Vuldrok and more combat/raiding than politics. Not sure of the specifics on what they had in mind, but I always thought it would be an interesting world conceptually to play in.

The setting will put certain factions CoughDecadosCough at something of a disadvantage (although they would have Masseri partisans) but I always thought it would be an interesting low-energy game situated on a frontier town where a fragile peace between the local gentry and Vuldrok is maintained.

I'm probably biased since I've played with Custodius across multiple games before getting fed up with his total bat shit shenanigans... but which one was worse:

Custodius/Renaud or Amber?

...All y'all can say Lyov if y'all want.

I will say Amber was detected in an nWoD I helped run and she was insufferable there too. The epitome of a Mary Sue.

Because Brother Battle is pretty much just geared towards blowing things up. With swords. Heavy swords.

Thematically, BB comes in with a lot of restrictions and they're often one note PCs.

Nobles tend to be more because there are a lot less societal restrictions and seem more 'familiar' to most people. They have weird quirks and have more flexibility in terms of what you can play and what roles you can take compared to the more specialized Church and League PCs. Nobles are also more fleshed out thematically so they can be more nuanced.

Or you can blow shit up with a punch as a BB.

I just want to play a destitute Hawkwood baron-turned-barkeep at a seedy bar in the boondocks after gambling away his off-world barony to his younger brother named Bertram but using his connections and knight's allowance to run guns for the Muster.

Oh, and for the love of God, no more Kurgans. I feel like the Kurgans-as-antagonists has just been totally played out.

I had a long detailed response to IC lay of the land but it'll prolly be taken out of context or pulled further into hyperbole so I'll just say that I RPed a decent amount for a good chunk of the time I was there, especially towards the beginning.

I set up office hours when I would be guaranteed to be on, stuck by it generally, and I was always on when someone made an appointment with me. The road goes both ways and you pinged me for RP maybe half a dozen times at most during the entire time I was there.

No good deed goes unpunished and affirmatively agreeing with you just to get bitten is getting old.

Full circle, the pool of players who know and like the FS theme is pretty badly poisoned by DBTS, Vargo, and Star Crusade. The chances of a MU*, run by P or Packrat or anyone else succeeding is pretty much slim to none as a consequence.

@bored ICly, you and Chiaka were both Justinians, so if a band of random Jakovians (no doubt broadcast to everyone despite my best efforts at being covert) murdered her, your PC wouldn't have been terribly happy with that decision even if it quieted down a major thorn in feudal relations in Auberry. And for the first few weeks, I was intensely involved, RPing non-stop, and on pretty much all the time. I think about three weeks in, I settled into a more managerial groove because I sort of started to wear out from P and Lex trying to screw over Lyov and Chiaka pretty much in open revolt most of the time. I also took the idea that a Count was not supposed to be involved in little plots (unlike Renaud who was involved in EVERYTHING) to heart and kept to mostly boring managerial shit. Or TSing the Bishop of Leon.

"Because that was the story they wanted to tell."

No truer words spoken about FS. It was never about building a story narrative together. It was their story and you got to be a dumb puppet. Some people were set up so they could never fail (Renaud, Caelwyn, Amber), while others were pretty much set up only to fail (Lyov, Antonio, Karl, Lysandra... etc.). Staff favoritism was not just about getting statted specially or getting extra shit. When the entire story was stacked against you, there's no point in trying. That's why I left. Staff was not interested in providing a healthy environment for stories and ideas to grow. It was just their own sandbox and you were just objects in the way.

@deadculture Paulus and Lextius probably watched with glee as RL friendships got torn apart by their lies and manipulations. It's just a game, but the reality is that there are real people behind those computer screens and they reveled in their ability to cause discord and engineer real humans to behave in ways that were destructive and hurtful.

It's like the movie Pandorum.

@Packrat My entire time was spent dealing with Chiaka conspiring with Amber and/or Custodius to either lead a full on coup or strip away my baronies and then P and Lex started metastacking the Curia against Lyov and Antonio in favor of Renaud and Amber. Lyov also didn't have that much Psi. He could read the entire room and that was about it.

I got feelers on the traitor baron at Newbridge but he was barely on when I was on to RP in the first place. Also bear in mind that Newbridge handed over Sidon to the Kurgans well after Lyov went native into Sathraist lands and Lyov gave a public Fuck You announcement that was pretty much interspersed with me giving the staff a Fuck You OOCly. Stuff about second chances and people deserving nothing but bullshit. I don't think Newbridge was in a serious position to revolt against the Decados while Lyov was in charge and I got the opinion that Newbridge was about to idle out IRL. He wouldn't log in for weeks, although he did have a weird offshore job. Anyway, he took advantage of the confusion that resulted after I had been effectively forced out of the game or otherwise be helpless while P and Lex tore apart Lyov as a PC. Good for him. Well, and staff screwing over @bored .

And the Curia votes were stacked. I have entire logged conversations somewhere in an old HDD where P practically cops out to it but handwaves it based on game balance and the importance of telling a story, much less testimony from other staffers. At a certain point in time, Auberry and Outrejoyeaux were brimming with PC activity while Leon and Johburg were languishing because Amber had driven out most of the activity in her county and all of Custodius' peons from elsemu* got bored and idled out. P and Lex rewarded them with a free hand at Curia votes and loyal subjects while the rest of us got dust storms and pirates... in part thanks to Chiaka. There was a point where it was mathematically impossible to stop Amber from pushing through stuff with the Curia and I was told either to assassinate her and be caught for treason, or to deal with it and see Auberry dismantled or handed off to Chiaka. Screw that.

So Lyov, thanks to his dad, was supposed to be filthy rich per background and P's assertions because said dad was milking the treasury of Akko for years. But when faced with giving me actual numbers, both P and Lex gave me the run around and they implied I barely had more troops than some of the wealthier baronies.