InsaneJournal

Current mood:	okay
Current music:	"Swords Crossed" :: Pirates of the Caribbean
Entry tags:	plot: hunt the hare

Hunt the Hare explanation
Puzzle-solving: not as good over the internet as in real life.

Purpose: Twofold. Maybe two-and-a-half-fold. We want to introduce a new, antagonist faction, or at least antagonist character who controls hordes of faceless NPCs until he can start controlling hordes of PCs. This character, whom absolutely no one should be surprised to realise is not yet fully written up, is Andrey St. Laurent; journal is at morningofthewar. Gwen and I both feel that games cannot survive without conflict of some kind, and we like ours moral.

The second purpose of this plot was to get players to, as time allowed, start to develop their worlds. We've all sketched in some rough outlines, but honestly, there's a LOT left to figure out, and that's not in the game setting but in terms of how your characters fit into the world. Off the top of my head, I would say that all the characters are socially well-grounded - seriously, find me someone in this game who knows NO ONE - so who are the people the characters interact with? Where do they go first? Is that the place they feel most comfortable? What do they think of first when presented with a relatively unreasonable situation? We want this plot to be about the characters, not about the situation.

Additionally to that, how do the characters work together? We wanted to start that interaction small, with something relatively harmless; as Matt and Maxxie have just found out, for example, not having a coordinated plan of attack is a bad idea when you're confronting a set of villains with a gun and a teleporter who knows TKD. Matt will have nightmares for some time to come about almost shooting her when she blinked into his line of fire. What are the natural lines of authority in the group? Whose power complements whose? How good is the exchange of information?

Time Constraints: Player generated, honestly. I can keep throwing bits of solution at everyone in sight for as long as I need to, and when Gwen returns she can pick up right where I left off. If people want to take this as a long event (for either IC or OOC reasons) we can run longer with it. If people are tired of it, we can chop it off sooner than we expected. Since it's mostly a plot for player exploration of characters and world, it's really up to you guys how long it runs.

Ultimate Upshot: Well, Barton's gonna die. Katherine may be disappointed by this, or she may not be; it kind of depends on what the team decides to do and how they choose to handle the situation. However, she doesn't know about St. Laurent in specifics, and she isn't aware that this is a fishing expedition of his own, so that part of it Katherine doesn't control. So from a mod viewpoint, the ultimate upshot would be to bring in St. Laurent, figure out how the group works together, and go humbly tell Katherine that they might've, kind of, possibly, fucked up. (I recomment Maxxie's meek and mild demeanour for THAT mission.)

Questions? Comments? Leave them here, or direct them to the mod box. (For reference, the mod box forwards to me, because I am very lazy and hate Gmail; Gwen, when she's got internet access, checks the mod box every day.)