How visible are your Tethers?

[Rocket Man]

Just what the thread title says. In your campaign, how publicly known are the various Tethers in a region to the War's participants? Are they fortresses, visible but untouchable? Are they hidden safe houses, protected in part by their anonymity and in danger if exposed? Are they a mix, or in some other category all together?

[johndallman]

There's a mixture. There are some places in London where it's obvious major tethers might exist, and some of them do - the Cenotaph for War, The Science Museum for Lightning, The Tower of London for The Sword, and so on. Cambridge University Library isn't a tether as such, but the L-space effect gives it routes to the Library and the Archives. Those are well secured.

Smaller tethers are usually much more anonymous, and shorter-lived. Those get fought over.

[tHEhERETIC]

I'll answer even though you know my answer--they're as secret as the angels can make them because they're war assets. (Funny, I can't think of an demonic tethers I've actually used). Marc has it lucky--there are hundreds of ice cream trucks in L.A., so that even if it became known that he had a tether in one it's still a shell game to find it. I have a similar situation for Janus' red-eye plane. Yves is another one with a mobile tether, though I suspect I'm bending some rules there. He sets up shop in whatever library or bookstore he pleases.

Death Valley is better known but no easier to find, given its vastness, though I never determined what human battle was there to establish something so convenient for War. I also expanded his known territory to much of the Mojave, further hiding the exact tether's location.

The Riverside orange groves must be a Death tether but I've never explicitly said so.

San Francisco, being friendly territory and full of new fledges can be quite open about its tethers. The Dream theater is well known and barely guarded. The Palace Hotel (Fire) is popular enough that it is informally guarded by the angels who happen to be there.

Pohang (War) was both famous and thinly guarded, and it fell.

Nagasaki has known tethers to both sides, but I haven't decided how that works given how I've altered the canonical war in the game.

Kilauea (Fire) is an active volcano on a well-populated island, and a tether held in uneasy tandem with the ethereal Pele. It's well known but full of lava.

Can't think of any others this early in the morning.

[robkelk]

My game is based in NYC. It's assumed that every Superior - even Christopher and Furfur - has at least one Tether somewhere in the five boroughs, but the locations of most of them aren't particularly well-known.

Since 9/11 (which took out Marc's best-known Tether, although only Marc and Yves know it turned into a Destiny Tether because of the efforts made by the people who did their best to get everyone out), no Tether is completely unguarded. On the flip side, no Tether is fortified to the teeth - not only might the Other Side discover it, the humans might notice. (It's a big city; there's bound to be a few "natural" six-Force humans out there ... and the prevailing opinion is that most "naturals" can't keep their mouths shut about this sort of thing.) It's a fine balancing act.

[Omegonthesane]

I frankly suspect Tethers, especially fixed location Tethers, would have difficulty staying secret in the long term given how Disturbance works, especially angelic tethers - a full-force angel descending from Heaven is barely quieter than a murder, and that noise is coming out of the Tether every time a new soldier comes down it. Asmodeus is likely to have any warzone seeded with imps for precisely this sort of listening out, since he canonically has lots of imps who build Roles and can easily have them also perform the duty of "listen in and write it down if you hear a disturbance".

This is ignoring any extra disturbance from Noisy or the like, though if your tether's Noisy it's also usually powerful enough that being detected isn't the worst outcome.

[Jason]

I have a mix in my games, but for the reason Omegonthesane notes, Tethers with any degree of regular inter-realm traffic and performances of Corporeal Healing (and thus noisy disturbance) are the ones that everybody knows about. This mostly accounts for landmarks in dense urban areas, but there are always rumors of places that are rumored to be Tethers (or being groomed or secretly struggled over as potential Tethers).

In a Phildelphia-based campaign, for instance, everybody knows about Liberty Bell (Freedom), the "Rocky steps" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Dark Humor), the one adult theater that manages to stay in business in an increasingly ritzy Center City neighborhood (Lust), and the unstable Tether that moves back and forth between rival cheesesteak purveyors Pat's & Geno's (Gluttony). It's rumored that there may be weak, secret, or sought-after Tethers at places like The Comcast Center (The Media), The Lex Street Massacre Site (very unlikely site for Drugs or Death, but Saminga insists on trying), and whatever street in West Philly that middle-class white locals warn tourists not to cross (Factions).

This is all subject to change for us, as well, as manipulating and disrupting Tethers is a valid technique in secret wars. At the end of our last campaign, the PCs managed to sneak into the Masonic Temple via a Tether to a Marches domain controlled by ethereal manifestations of the Illuminati, stage a flash mob outside while they stole a relic, and escape back through it just as the door shut behind them (so to speak) as the flash mob's bizarre activity disrupted the unstable Tether and sent it careening between Dark Humor's and Secrets's palaces in Hell.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Jason

I have a mix in my games, but for the reason Omegonthesane notes, Tethers with any degree of regular inter-realm traffic and performances of Corporeal Healing (and thus noisy disturbance) are the ones that everybody knows about. This mostly accounts for landmarks in dense urban areas, but there are always rumors of places that are rumored to be Tethers (or being groomed or secretly struggled over as potential Tethers).

In a Phildelphia-based campaign, for instance, everybody knows about Liberty Bell (Freedom), the "Rocky steps" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Dark Humor), the one adult theater that manages to stay in business in an increasingly ritzy Center City neighborhood (Lust), and the unstable Tether that moves back and forth between rival cheesesteak purveyors Pat's & Geno's (Gluttony). It's rumored that there may be weak, secret, or sought-after Tethers at places like The Comcast Center (The Media), The Lex Street Massacre Site (very unlikely site for Drugs or Death, but Saminga insists on trying), and whatever street in West Philly that middle-class white locals warn tourists not to cross (Factions).

This is all subject to change for us, as well, as manipulating and disrupting Tethers is a valid technique in secret wars. At the end of our last campaign, the PCs managed to sneak into the Masonic Temple via a Tether to a Marches domain controlled by ethereal manifestations of the Illuminati, stage a flash mob outside while they stole a relic, and escape back through it just as the door shut behind them (so to speak) as the flash mob's bizarre activity disrupted the unstable Tether and sent it careening between Dark Humor's and Secrets's palaces in Hell.

No divine tethers?

[Captain Midnight]

It's been quite a while since I ran a game, but in my last campaign (set in Memphis, TN -- city I grew up in), there were only a couple of well-known Tethers, and the rest were clouded by obfuscation. The only well-known angelic Tether was a Destiny Tether at Sun Studios, and the only well-known demonic Tether was a Gluttony Tether at Graceland. Both were protected to some degree by being famous locations, and instructions were given to both sides to avoid any situations with the risk for extensive damage to the sites.

That didn't stop the PCs from jumping a bunch of demons who were retreating to the Graceland Tether, and winding up in a big firefight on the lawn. It culminated with an angel crashing a burning SUV through the gates and zooming up the drive... whereupon a Calabite with an RPG sent him to contemplate mortality. His buddies managed to finish off the rest of the crew they had bushwhacked, but when asked by their Superiors about the tremendous mess they'd left, couldn't say much more than, "Oops."

Everyone had a good time, even if my plot got shredded. I had to remind myself about the real purpose of playing the game, and just let my earlier plan fall by the wayside.

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

No divine tethers?

Well, it is Philly ... ;-)

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

The only well-known angelic Tether was a Destiny Tether at Sun Studios, and the only well-known demonic Tether was a Gluttony Tether at Graceland.

If my angels go South, I am so going to have to steal this.

They say you follow your teacher, and I tend to follow the example of the GM I first played under, ISNorden --big Tethers are pretty obvious, smaller ones can be lost in the background "noise" and can become valuable intelligence prizes if discovered.

Sometimes that can make the big Tethers big targets; my PC was part of a group of angels that took down a major Greed Tether near Madison, Wisc., the Ho Chunk Casino. On the other hand, that set off a chain of events that made Hell aware of a much smaller Protection Tether at the YWCA women's shelter, and almost got it wiped out! Ultimately, the results required the group (which I was now GMing for) to undertake a harrowing rescue mission into the world HQ of Oscar Meyer, a huge Gluttony Tether. That's where they learned how powerful and impregnable a big Tether can be; they got the victim out but barely escaped with their lives.

It's interesting to see how everyone else plays this out. It looks like most of us say "It depends," an answer which can be very freeing for a GM. But I can see where "Everything's secret" or "Everything's known" could rapidly set a particular tone for a game.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

No divine tethers?

Those are the Tethers in an alternate setting we played in where the angels haven't been seen outside of Heaven since the end of the Purity Crusade. (I spent the longest coming up with Tethers for that setting, so I remember them offhand better than I remember whatever I went with for Manhattan and the fake town I made up in Connecticut.)