You guys ever open up a mission in medias res?
I know Hamish talks about the system’s flexibility to do so, and I think it might be a fun way to set an intense opening scene and fill in the blanks as we go, but I’m wondering if anyone has any experience putting it into practice.
My current idea is to set up a mission where the team is standing in a seedy hotel room with a dead courier laid out on the bed with a chunk missing from the back of her skull and her eyes scooped out of her head. I’d open by really setting the scene of how rundown and filthy this hotel room is, the way the searing light from some neon sign across the street is flooding the room with an unearthly glow, etc. Then I’d drop the body on them and describe the commotion of cops coming down the hall, then hop back in time and ask them some questions about the mission…
* Which one of you got the call about this job? What channel did Mr. Johnson reach out to you through?
* Mr. Johnson requested to meet you in a rather unusual location. Where was it?
* Mr. Johnson had a piece of very expensive custom cyber ware that caught your attention. What was it and in what way was it identifiable as custom? Was he trying to hide it or was it out in the open?
* Mr. Johnson had an associate with him. What was it about this person that made you nervous?
* What were you told you’d be picking up from the dead courier laid out in front of you?
Stuff like that.
So we’d RP out the meet, do the Get The Job roll, then cut back to the hotel where they cops are just about outside their door.
I’m thinking from there I’d mention that one of the team isn’t there with them and ask which one of them that was and where they are. If they were outside the hotel, I’d ask them what sort of situation were they currently dealing with that kept them from notifying the rest of the team that the Cops arrived Then we’d go from there.
As far as Mission Directives go, I was thinking something like this…
* When you escape the hotel, mark XP
* When you discover the location of the package, mark XP
* When you retrieve the package, mark XP
* When you clear your name for the murder of the courier, mark XP ??? (not sure if this is necessary)
* When you deliver the package to Mr. Johnson, mark XP
and maybe an added bonus for…
* When you exact your revenge for being set up, mark XP
This feels like a nice generic noir setup that you can dump in any sort of justification you’d like and hit the ground running. There’s probably some better questions I could ask the players that might further alleviate the truth about the setup/the contents of the package/etc, but those are just off the top of my head. Maybe tying in your +Hunted character’s pursuers into the mix, or any other faction they may have screwed over in a past game.
I could see it working. You could use flashbacks for getting the job and legwork. It might make the clocks wonky though
I started a game in the middle of a gun fight, and then flashed forward to them talking about the gunfight as they were waiting for their contact for the next job.
Matt Petruzzelli Once we do the initial flashback to the meet and hop back into the current timeline I think it would be treated like any other mission. Once they’re free and clear of the hotel, the mission would be about getting the package back (which I was initially imagining as the scooped out Neural Interface from the dead courier). The cyber eyes the killer took from her would also probably contain all sorts of incriminating evidence implicating the murderer and the person the courier originally got the info from (which I was thinking would be a Scientist from Corp B selling secrets to Corp A).
You’d just need to decide who the operative/killer who offed the courier was working for and what lengths they were doing to get away and make their own delivery. Maybe come up with a good reason they didn’t just hop in a car and drive to a location to dump the package. The clocks would probably be about how close you were getting and how aware the assassin was of your progress.
I’m now realizing that planning a manhunt is a bit more complicated than I first imagined, but I think the setup could still be fun, and in true PBTA fashion, asking those questions about the mission seems in the spirit of games from this system.
Just a wild thought: You might combine this with the Fate Core world “No Exit” (one of six worlds in the Fate Core Worlds of Darkness book) where characters wake up in a hotel with no memory of who they are, and discover they cannot really escape the hotel grounds as anybody who walks into the mist past the hotel loses consciousness and wakes up in their bed again. You will meet a lot of strange and creepy hotel guests but answers are hard to come by…maybe you discover the body, the Internet still works and you naturally fall into the role of figuring out what the heck is going on.