Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
I suppose that if necessary such a lawyer could be eaten by a tyrannosaur.
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Ironically, as this is being worked out as background, I already know that of all the people who go in 1995, only Wehmeyer and three security personnel return.
Twenty three years later, about six months before the start of my campaign.
One is catatonic, one keeps screaming and crying and Wehmeyer, while seeming better than that at first glance, displays deeply concerning delusions, paranoid tendencies and even homicidal impulses.
The fourth character who returned is Teddy Smith (PC), a Rhodesian veteran of the Selous Scouts and the French Foreign Legion (2e REP). As play started, he had recently been certified by a team of specialists as 'apparently sane', but obviously deeply affected by by his ordeal.
Oddly, however, neither Wehmeyer nor Smith report having been absent for the full 23 years. Smith thinks he spent about two years in a sidereal world of perpetual twililight inhabited by terrible monsters and a race of aquatic intelligent beings. Wehmeyer recalls the same world, but reports, variously, that they were there for several days, a few months or 'a lifetime, in some ways'. Both were emaciated, disheveled, nearly naked and generally appeared like they had been through some very hard living in the past months or years,
but neither appeared as much aged as twenty three years would dictate.
The rest of the expedition, scientists, scholars and security, were all killed in variously horrific ways.
There are numerous reasons I care about the names and backgrounds of dead NPCs.
First, versimilitude. Smith would know the people he was marooned with, even if they didn't make it back.
Second, some might have left friends, family or colleagues behind who might have questions for Mr. Smith, officially reported drowned in the same hurricane as the others of the expedition twenty three years ago.
Third, the universities and other institutions the scientific members of the expedition were associated with provide clues to where the billionaire Patron's tendrils of influence stretched in 1995 and suggest which universities he might retain connections with in the current era.