Fronteira completed

[whswhs]

This afternoon I ran the final session of my GURPS campaign Fronteira. This was by technical definition (moderately) hard science fiction, set in the city of Pavonic Portal (from GURPS City States) moved sideways in time to the Shikaku-Mon timeline (from GURPS Alternate Earths), where a near-anarchist Brazil was one of the great world powers; but its actual genre was more a midpoint between telenovela and family saga, spiced with slice of life and noir.

All of the player characters belonged to the Silvas, a Wealthy family that owned hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues: Guilherme, the father, heir to his own father's business empire, who had had a succession of younger mistresses from the performing arts community; Sakura, the contract wife of his son Duarte, who was a brilliant analyst but had minimal social skills; Toni, his oldest unmarried daughter, an outgoing young woman with a good reputation for journalistic integrity; and Iris, his second unmarried daughter, an introverted artist aspiring to do stories set on a future terraformed Mars.

Major storylines concerned the Silvas trying to get the contract to build a keystone hotel in a planned new arm of Pavonis Portal, and Toni's being courted by a young army officer who had originally asked her out on a bet, and won her favor by admitting this on the first date. Important crises included Guilherme being visited by his illegitimate son by one of his early mistressed, whom he introduced to the whole family, and Sakura's taking a crossbow bolt to the lower abdomen while trying to scout out two thugs who worked for a business rival, and losing an early stage pregnancy as a result.

In today's session we looked at Iris going to a salon and getting close to a young fellow artist there; Guilherme learning that his youngest unmarried daughter, Bela, not wanting to be parted from the daughter of her lute teacher, Cyra, had come up with the idea of converting to Islam so that she could be a second wife in her household; and Toni and Lourenço finally getting married and having a celebratory Mass and a reception. The players all seemed to be enjoying themselves, and had definite ideas about how their characters were reacting.

This was a campaign where GURPS Social Engineering was far more important than GURPS Martial Arts, GURPS Powers, or GURPS Thaumatology, to a degree unusual even for one of my campaigns. I had a lot of fun running it.