Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

I am quite interested in joining your game. my basic Idea is as follows:

definitely Celestial

immigrate from japan. probably brought over because of his skills?

quiet guy, follows orders, hand-to-hand expert as well with blades and stealth...

ok so he is a ninja so shoot me! :D

none the less I was thinking of a quiet guy who knows things others don't really know, helps fill in the gap with info and is good at getting in and out of places.

hasn't been in america long but is quick to pick things up. I will post more later. :)

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

I am leaving for the country over the weekend and will be very busy until then so I don´t think I can commit to this game enough as it is.

So I think I must drop out. Thanks for considering me.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

We will not start gaming until after the weekend, I am sure. If you are free after that, we will see if the roster is full by then or not.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

This is problematic for several reasons.

Reason the first. How would a few politicians in New York and Washington hear about a quiet, secretive stealth and hand-to-hand expert in far-away Japan?

Reason the second. Even if one of the few politicians, bureaucrats and potential PCs that are involved in setting up this small team somehow did hear about this person, how would they go about bringing him over because of his skills? The world is not as small then as now. If he has any loyalties, they will be to people he lives with or at most, to his local government. Certainly not to a foreign government half a world a way. Even if they did contact him, they would not expect him to want anything to do with them.

Not to mention, if his skills are so valuable, why are the Japanese letting him go? It is not as if the government of Japan in the era encouraged their citizens to become engaged with the outside world. They only allowed trade with it at gunpoint, a mere 25 years before the start of play!

Reason the third, the people appointed to this team are the people who have been agitating for it and perhaps a few others that these agitators have heard about and contacted. There is no extensive recruiting phase, no worldwide search. Not to mention no training, no language education and nothing else of that nature. A foreigner of a race that is negatively perceived, who doesn't speak the language and does not have citizenship is not going to be appointed to Federal office (Special Agent).

This is why the character cannot have been specially brought over. Now we move over to the idea that he may have emigrated to the US for other reasons, had a supernatural experience and the other PCs heard about it and brought him to Washington to be another witness for their petition.

This is slightly more plausible, but runs into other problems. The first immigrants from Japan to the United States* went in 1868. There were only about 150 of them and they went to Hawaii. Several other groups went to Hawaii between that year and the start of gameplay in 1879, but the number of Japanese in the US is still incredibly small. And nearly all of them are manual labourers in Hawaian sugarcane fields.

To put this into context, at the time, Iceland had less than 100,000 people. Yet the number of Icelandic settlers in the United States outnumbered the number of Japanese there by an order of magnitude.

*Other than perhaps individual travellers.

I will not forbid you from playing a ninja. If we suppose that the premise of the setting includes shamans with actual magical powers as well as cryptids surviving into the 19th century, the existence of actual ninja clans, while historically dubious, is at least as plausible.

Nevertheless, combining the problems with Japanese ancestry above and the strange confluence of circumstances needed to make it plausible that a highly trained ninja from a secretive clan of assassins and spies would emigrate to work as a field hand, let me float another possibility.

If the important core of your concept is martial arts and hand-to-hand expert with stealth skills who starst off as somewhat out of place in Old West society, why not consider a Tong boo how doy (hatchet-man)? These men certainly did use knives (up to sword length), hatchet and various blunt weapons to carry out murders and assissinations. They belong to a criminal fraternity and must hide their deeds from authorities, so would certainly know stealth and specialists could be good at breaking and entering or disguise. The Chinatowns in San Francisco and Sacramento are large enough so that many of them will speak only Taishanese or Cantonese in their daily lives.

Also, a boo how doy is not yet as cliched in Western culture as a ninja. So there is that.

If you must play a Japanese ninja, work up a description that explains his presence there well. If it is original, plausible, interesting and well done, perhaps it will not seem cliched to me and the other players. But I think that it would be very difficult.

Just a note, Asian immigrants to the US did not have the right to become naturalised citizens in the era. If citizenship is desired, it would therefore be beneficial if the character is born there.

Without citizenship, the characterwould not be made a Special Agent. This would mean less authority than the other characters and nominally, at least, a subservient position to them.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

Looks like the regiment is found.

Serious, calm, cool under pressure. But if he loses his temper it's really really lost.
Father was a Birmingham gunsmith, and perhaps dabbled in other areas of engineering.



Well, now we're talking...



Oh, and Real World considerations. I'm leaving the country on the 16th, will return on the 27th. IF that's a reason to boot be, then so it shall be.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

'tis not, I should think.

I'd rather have a week or two in scheduling conflicts than months of unsatisfactory playing performance.

So, we've established that he carries a claymore, a family blade that may well have a history back to the 74th at Assaye. For other weapons we could get creative, given his background. He could have new-fangled weapons or old and rare ones. A coach shotgun in the largest bore he can comfortably handle would be a very practical weapon, of course. Good against anything from waterfowl to foul creatures from the nether realms. And road agents.

Did he fight as an officer or enlisted in the war? From his social position, I'd say that both were possible, determined as much by his personal abilities and forwardness as anything else.

Have you thought about what he did from the end of the Civil War until the start of play? That's fourteen years, the vast majority of his adult life, probably. Did he go back to New York, work as a factory manager or in civil engineering? Gunsmith?

Did he go to rebuild the industrial capacity of the South? Carpetbagging? There would have been opportunities galore if he had any capital or could offer his skills to go into partnership with one.

Or did he go out West? Mining engineer?

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

You might start with the US trade fleet in '54.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

Here is were I am at with Dr Armand Villeneuve.

Before the War Between the States he studied law and banking at university and handled business contracts and financial affairs for his family. He has always been a keen amateur scientist so medicine wasn't totally new to him.

Personality wise he is the brake not the gas. He is cool and laid back but not serious. He has a dry wit than can turn sharp. He is forthright and truthful. He will call a spade a spade but isn't good with the softsoap. He is a cynic.

He could certainly have moved west to Texas if we want to posit him and the Ranger as friends. He probably retains enough legal knowledge to advise on the law.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

Just poking my head in to say I really like the idea for this game. I don't have time to join in myself, but I'm filing away the concept for future use.

Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents
 

Very good. That will certainly be useful to you at some point.

And when the war breaks out, is he the head of household? The Villeneuve at the family estates?

So he goes and raises a couple of companies, perhaps making up a nice little regiment along with other leading citizens.

Is this far outside New Orleans? A rural setting, rather than urban?

The Villeneuves have probably been there for a long time. Any interesting family history of note?

In TvTropes lingo, he is likely to become The Lancer of a typical five-man-group of heroes. If another character is better suited for that role, could also do duty as The Smart Guy.

Works best if paired with a hard-charging, self-confident Hero who can benefit from cynical advice to take things slowly sometimes. The Bones to Captain Kirk, in other words.

As I said, I would like if some characters in the group are friends. Doesn't have to be sir-pudding's Texas Ranger and Dr. Villeneuve, but it would work well that way.

Hell, if he was a friend of sir-pudding's PC, he could not have had any supernatural experiences of his own, not proper ones. Instead, he could have gotten involved to help his friend. Used old family connections, reached out to Democratic politicians trying to end Reconstruction and eventually gotten some of them to listen to him in time for the Compromise of 1877. One of the behind-the-scenes concessions made would then have been the financing of the team of PCs.

What does sir-pudding think? Would he like Dr. Armand Villeneuve and his character to have a pre-existing friendship, probably from having lived in the same frontier town the in the past decade?

Okay, more general things.

A Southern gentleman could be a good horseman even before the war and a frontier doctor would keep it up, as he makes housecalls on horseback.

Would you like to be a swordsman? New Orleans was probably the city in the US with most fencers per capita in the Antebellum years. Smallsword proficiency is very likely, with techniques adapted for military swords in the War (or not, a smallsword can certainly kill unarmoured men well enough).

New Orleans is the home of Dr. Jean Alexandre LeMat, inventor of the LeMat grapeshot pistol (and cousin of Gen. Beauregard). Is Villeneuve familiar with him? Does he perhaps carry one of these exotic and interesting weapons? They are percussion revolvers, but if Þorkell's character is a good enough gunsmith, a cartridge conversion is not out of the question.

Hunting in the Antebellum would have been with a fowling shotgun or a small caliber muzzleloading rifle, neither of which is especially useful on adventures. On the frontier, Dr. Villeneuve could have adopted a more modern weapon, such as a new Winchester lever-action in a medium cartridge like the popular .44-40 Winchester. It's too much for most small animals, but right for javelina, coyetes, small deer and humans. Depends on what he hunts, of course. He could own a .22 rifle as well and a fowling shotgun, just wouldn't take them on adventures.

Dr. Villeneuve is a widower. Is he a sad, lonely widower or is he actively seeking a new wife? Or perhaps a shorter term accomodation? It would be nice if some PCs were social and prone to making new friends or love interests. Adds new elements. Not that it has to be Dr. Villeneuve. Just some of the characters.

The more I think about it, the more I like Dr. Villeneuve and a former Texas Rangers as friends. While the silent loner is a Western trope, all good Westerns that work for gaming inspiration for groups have a very strong male friendship(s) at the center. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Wild Bunch. Unforgiven.