Question: What's happened to all the characters from your Eastern Promises campaign? They all seem to have changed much more often than those in the other stories.
Indeed, they have! We're trying something new with our Eastern Promises game and its characters. When we started this game, we wanted to experiment with the ideas of a lot of interwoven characters in the same story and with the idea of a much more harsh and less Scion-ready world, so you're seeing that in action.
In essence, the Eastern Promises game is set in a time that the world, in general, is not ready for and does not contain very many Scions. The Titans have not escaped their prison yet, the gods are for the most part not meddling in the World thanks to the threat of Fatebonds and their own complex political agreements, and the PCs are therefore sort of under the radar. They exist to do their parents' bidding, and at least one god has hinted that there may be potential problems with Titanspawn that they have to deal with, but they're kind of secrets from many of the other gods and may or may not be violations of some treaties or accords, and the setting is a far cry from the modern-day, no-holds-barred Scion overload that occurs in games that are responding to the Titan War.
So the Eastern Promises PCs are dealing with very different dangers and concerns than the PCs in the other games. For one thing, they're in the nineteenth century, which means much more restrictive social codes in regards to race, sex and social class; for another, they all come from cultures that are currently dealing with hefty political considerations of colonization and East versus West, trying to find their way in a world mostly dominated by faraway European powers that don't accept them. They can't count on very much (if any) help from their parents or other gods, most of whom are absent or pretending nothing is going on. So far their opponents have been smaller-time than some of those in the other games because there aren't active Titans out endangering them, but they're on their own in a big way.
So, with all this going on, we're trying an experimental PC model; when we started the game, we asked each player to make five different PCs from one of the pantheons the game focuses on (Anunna, Deva, Pesedjet or Yazata, any parent god they like). Each PC has a fully fleshed backstory, Visitation, and at least a few connections to mortals and mortal society (both good and bad) that make them part of this nineteenth-century world. In addition, each player needed to have at least one PC that could fill a necessary "role" for the Scion band - a leader, a healer, a pilot, a fighter and an intelligence character (they could, however, overlap these - for example, one character might be both a fighter and a healer, another both a leader and a pilot, and so forth).
At the beginning of each story, the only rule for characters is that each role has to be represented in the band; the players then get to choose among themselves which of their characters to play to get the proper makeup to be most likely to succeed (if they choose a character that hasn't been played yet, they get some XP to bring them up to speed with the others that have, and also get to come up with a rough sketch of what that PC was doing during the time between Visitation and now joining the story). We have a system in place to let those who had the hardest time in the previous story - lost a character, had the most difficult time surviving or the most dramatic problems, and so forth - choose first, but we've found that everyone generally works together to come up with a good group. The first two stories are concluded and the third one is about to finish next week (probably... unless Pirate Island is also Haberdashery Island), so soon you'll see the group rotate out yet again.
In the first story, the group consisted of Terry Gaither, Shadan Mirza, Padma Billingsworth, Mohini Misra, Cassara Mitchell and Kebo.
In the second story, Terry and Kebo stayed in the party, but the others rotated out to add Kitty Sanders, Faruza Alinejad, Nisha, Shanti Paavantika and Akhileswar. When disaster struck and Terry and Kitty died heroically trying to prevent spawn of Apep from taking over a small mining operation, they were replaced by Sanjiv Nayak and Penelope Young.
In the third (and current) story, Sanjiv and Shanti stayed in and the rest of the players rotated again to bring in Yadi, Paniwi Bayteru and Darrius. Sanjiv died tragically last game, so he'll be replaced next week, and then everyone will choose who to play for the fourth story.
Since each player already has five PCs that they created and are excited about playing, the fact that the world is a lot harder to survive in and there's not much chance of them being rescued from death is somewhat mitigated; even if they die (and we're expecting several PCs to die over the course of this), they'll still have someone they're happy to play to fall back on. Some players prefer to stick with a character through a few stories; others enjoy jumping to new ones to try out different roles or ideas they may not have played before. We expect that things will settle down some when we get on into Demigod - several PCs will probably be out of play, and players will probably start digging into and exploring their favorites instead of switching out so much - but until that time, it's a pretty fun, wild ride, and has had the effect of all these many PCs being vaguely connected to each other in a Kevin Bacon-like web of interaction.
So yeah, you guys think there are a lot of Eastern Promises characters now - you haven't even met the other fifteen or so that still might make appearances!
No comments:
Post a Comment