Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
I'm fond of having a zone mind from reign of steel discover or come close to discovering parachronics. My favorite is Beijing, as it is playing around with Faster than Light travel, and so may stumble across the physics it needs. This scenario has the following advantages:
- Centrum can't speak the language it needs to infiltrate
- Infinity doesn't have the biowar experience it needs to not have agents drop like flies
- Its in Centrum Territory
This pretty much forces them to work together, for the short run at least. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apollonian
I think you could also get a reasonable game out of Centrum/Homeline Dark, Interworld Service/Infinity Patrol Light setup. Centrum is an almost-dystopian technocratic collectivist regime; Homeline is a collection of selfish, exploitative agents out to ravage the infinite worlds for their own benefit. Caught between them are the two crosstime agencies, who often find they have more in common with each other than with their masters in the home timeline. Interworld Services agents develop a knack for individual initiative out of necessity, one that's suppressed on Centrum; Patrolmen learn respect for the outtimers that their homeline considers non-persons. And so on.
You could play it a bit comic, like Terry Pratchett's Small Gods; most of the campaign centers around dealing with a common foe like Reich-5 or the Cabal, with regular bits where the crosstime agents have to pull the wool over the eyes of officious inspectors or crooks from back home. Or you could go with something more deeply political and ambiguous, using the agencies to highlight what's good about their home cultures while critiquing the cultures themselves.
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I'm really enjoying this metaplot concept. Since we're bringing Steel into the mix, it raises the question of how the Cabal and Reich-5 (among other parachronal societies) would respond.
The Cabal would be fun in that there's so many subfactions that it not a matter of what they'd do, more a matter of how many of them take each action. Oh sure, a lodge or two decides to buddy up with the centrum/homeline alliance. But there's always a lodge that tries to split them up, one that's still trying to bring Reich-5 to power, and the one that's decided that a worldline dominated by a single robomind would be quieter than things are now.
Reich-5 is distant enough from Steel (presumably) that they might be able to ignore it; on the other hand, their dream does not have room for other powers, and as inhumane as Nazi ideology is, they probably would despise machines turning against humanity as much as anyone. Still, I don't see Reich-5 ever functioning as an ally. Maybe a Centrum planner wants to get Reich psitech to enhance the war effort, necessitating an infiltration of the far more human foes in the midst of the larger war.