The Reach – Episode 0

The Reach – Episode 0

Character and World Creation

Before the game night and basic setting:

Having been enticed into The Veil, we had decided to use Microscope (also for the first time) to give us an idea of a history for our setting. This also came out of the desire of the group to generally have a science fiction game that wasn’t a swashbuckling space opera but instead would explore a more personal space and potentially deeper questions.

I am really satisfied how this turned out, as the Microscope game of two sessions was basically about humanity spreading to the stars with a nice caveat:

As we start The Veil our universe has had FTL communications for a long time but no means for humans to travel at faster than light speeds between star systems.

This makes for a juicy situation where the Veil in this setting is of great importance as it is the thing that connects all of humanity while at the same time it means each world/culture is in reality very much isolated from each other.

(So, it’s basically like being on social media^^. If you have a crisis, people might give you sympathy, help out with resources but they can’t come and actually help you directly.)

Our specific star system is a rather rich one, held in a precarious balance of two habitable worlds that are interdependent. One, dominated by a handful of sprawls is hot and lacks in natural resources, the other, smaller,, is cold, harsher but has an abundance of water, etc.

The Playbooks:

It took some time going over all of the Playbooks with people having multiple favorites (my players are nice in a way where they want to accommodate their fellow players’ desires but this means no one really brings the ‘I want to play this one thing!’ that jump starts everything^^).

After a simultaneous gut choice we ended up with:

The Catabolist

The Honed

The Seeker

Uh. Oh. =D

The initial concepts behind the Protagonists:

The Seeker belongs to an old faith that opposed the integration of an alien life form that directly interacts with tech into the FTL com network (the seed for this came from the Microscope game) and he arrived in the system via “conventional” space travel in cryostasis 6-12 months ago.

The Catabolist is an experimental cybernetics research expert who survived a freak accident by integrating a Yavlin (the name of the above mentioned life form—and now his Omni-Tool) into himself.

The Honed is a descendant of the first settlers of the system and part of the minority culture that remains of them.

That last one, named Emet Kessner, was initially the trickiest to fit into the setting. But the solution that his people had to rely on their own physical toughness and prowess to weather the harsh environments and to be able to cope when machines failed made things come together.

Funnily enough, he now is the youngest kid of a family headed corporation that owns a major mining fleet that work the outer planets & asteroid belts. Full of ideals and being paraded around for his perfect image and living of his family’s wealth. His Jam: being a playboy.

Dr. Grant, the Catabolist (who had a run-in before his accident with the Kessner family because he came to entice a cousin of Emet who has to deal with a physical disability into seeing a future in cybernetics) was part of the expedition that met the spacecraft Andron, the Seeker, was arriving in.

Andron, after waking and having his old cybernetic parts treated and upgraded by Dr. Grant, convinced him to smuggle out a Yavlin specimen that he had locked away on-board so that it wouldn’t be confiscated and fall into the wrong hands(!).

The details of what caused the accident on the research station Belina-Calder, where Dr. Grant took the alien lifeform, are nebulous. The only thing he is sure of is that it was the station’s AI who helped him integrate the Yavlin to save his life.

Only, this also caused the violent rejection of all of his ordinary cybernetics: Currently Dr. Grant is on medical leave in Surge City, still without eyes and one-armed. Navigating his surroundings currently relies on the assimilated neurochip working on creating an abstract representation of all of the things & people connected to the Veil in his surroundings.

While the Dr. has been busy with getting a grip on his new situation, Andron has been received by city officials as he was identified as an old and high ranking member of the Church of Unbound Humanity.

He has settled in and managed to persuade a city politician of the faith to create a Garden of his Order, where he resides as a guide for people who seek help. Taking on a troubled young man as an apprentice and communing with his Order outside of this star system via the Veil, he is dormant in meditation. For what reason or mission he was sent here, he does not know, yet, as those memories do not reside with him currently (one of the wants is +memoryloss, which the Church then keeps save and to enable super long lives for humans).

His major concern right now is that Dr. Grant has vanished and he doesn’t know what has happened with the Yavlin he entrusted to him. And to keep the hot-head apprentice, who seems much more enamored with the celebrity Emet, who they saved them from some drugged-up punks that threatened to wreck havoc in the garden.

It is in this situation that Andron is rudely interrupted by his apprentice: it’s the middle of the night and there is a fireball streaking down straight onto his garden covered by a tranquility dome. Emergency lights and alarms already engulf the city outside of it.

Emet is rushing out of his hotel, seeing multiple impacts go down, heading against the crowds of people fleeing and towards the nearest explosion.

The news are broadcasting emergency evacuations and announcing several dozen unidentified Drop Troopers in Power Frames hitting the city in multiple locations.

And as Dr. Grant takes in the feed sitting in his apartment, we see out of his window across the city.

The first district flickers and goes dark.

Then the second.

The third.

######

What really worked well were the Giri-Questions. Basically beyond the concept all of the story above was generated by them and by talking how they might have come to pass.

While I also had everyone roll up one NPC with the Link move in general, if we didn’t see a PC fit to one of the Giri-questions the player used Link again.

This created the disabled Kessner woman who is convinced by the Catabolist ideology and gotten into deep trouble with her family (a miss). As well as the apprentice who has mutual Giri with Andron plus one more for saving him from his doomed garden (also from a miss^^).

And a father who will up his expectations of his son for representing the family in a proper light.

We don’t have Beliefs, yet, but we ended on the opening situation so I don’t see this being an issue. There is enough immediate crisis, tense relationships and firm worldviews to write them. Looking forward to what the player settle their priorities on!

Thoughts, themes and concerns:

So, the backdrop certainly has some weird themes of victim-less colonization in the sense of humanity spreading across the stars. Which I don’t quite know how to feel about. The Yavlin are a completely alien lifeform with a nebulous relationship to the sentient (?) AIs of human origin. Otherwise, there is not much established interaction between them and humanity.

The Church of Unbound humanity is a vague call-back to catholic monks with institutionalized memory management for their members and the Kessner/original settlers/The Honed are very much informed by Judaism (well, not the literal body image stuff but their culture in general (which I am not an expert in but the respective player is native to)).

Then there is the definite tone of “what’s best for humanity”. This is found in the juxtaposition between the Catabolist and the Honed. And the character with a disability is already caught in the middle of those two stances. This has the danger that it could veer into “what makes one superior” territory which… ugh, well. Mmh.

The Seeker is arguably more on the technocratic side of things, but then again the integration of alien lifeform is seen as sin.

This game /o