[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip

Made me do a reappraisal of the character when I read that. Not even playing yet, and I'm thinking about inter-character dynamics +1

I strive to amuse.

I wish I'd got my fundamental into gear as quickly as the rest of the assembly.

Sorry about that. I was careless about adequately informing everyone of my having started this thread.

I've been involved in enough tendering processes to get a giggle out of the mental state it put me into being creative: "Must be more creative than the other players!!"

Heh!

I suspect that some of the more annoying characters in Red Mars may have had a hand in influencing this guy.

You can change him quite a bit if you like. He's not determining anything yet.

Like this guy more than my inital sketch, who may have been based on an unsympathetic version of an Australian politican *cough*Turnball*cough*.

And with the election only a fortnight away!

I'm never really strict about first-time-players' characters, but the Imperial Service is not like any bureaucracy you might know, still less like any competitive political system. It is impartial and efficient, a science-fiction concept. Imperial servants indeed contend fiercely over policy, but they don't scheme for promotion, conspire to bring one another down, etc. And once you get to four-stripers (or worse, higher) you are among a very strange set of monsters indeed. The Empire is staffed by idealistic fanatics: in the Navy, the Imperial Office, and a high rank, extremely cold-calculating ones. They may keep their mouths shut rather than talk the talk, but they definitely walk the walk. One playtester opined convincingly that FLAT BLACK ought not to have AI robots in it because they would steal the Imperials' schtick. Several details of your suggested ambassador couldn't work. So I salvaged features from your Dean of Survey. But that's just a starting-point.

If you're not comfortable playing a big wheel in the Imperial mercy machine, and if martinl is as fond of his ambassador as of his dean of Survey, you might swap places at the big table with him, allowing you to play the Dean of Survey as Marco Polo meets Mark Zuckerberg and him to play a more confident Imperial Office four-striper. That would mean martinl adding an explorer to replace his dean (I'm happy with the one he suggested—or for that matter with any different one he might since have been inspired by), freeing the aide for jmurrell to play (which he wanted), and letting you play your sympathetic shyster. But I think that to make that work we're going to have to find a way to spice up martinl's ambassador, because I sense that he finds his dean a lot more interesting.