The ShardPunk Setting

This is the second setting I presented to my Sunday group as a candidate for our new campaign world.  It takes the world of Prodigy discussed elsewhere on this blog and runs the clock forward about 600 years, bringing the technology level to about the present.

Most of my players are at least somewhat familiar with the world of Prodigy (3 of them play in the Saturday game which transpires within it), and much of the session's beginning was spent updating their expectations.

The world is well on its way to becoming an Orwellian nightmare.  The Archivists, a race of very smart and wise creatures who are very technologically-savvy have essentially taken control of the known world - the MagiTek Corporation owns and operates the shard mining industry, which supplies the world with the shard fragments that power it.  It also holds the patents for the process by which shard fragments are used for the various rituals that make the conveniences of modern life, as well as controlling the production of firearms and security drones.  MagiTek's position is as if all of the oil and power companies had merged with Microsoft, Google, and Apple and had employees who were demonstrably smarter than anyone else in the world.  Consequently, they hold most of the world's finances in their coffers and runs most of the world's governments.

The Archivist's success is based upon two things: their superior intellect and their monopolization of all magical knowledge.  The Bairnedred Liberation Front, a group of protesters-turned-freedom-fighters trying to stop the massive deforestation of Sahargeen (the massive rainforest which the Bairnedred call home) and the mass emancipation of the Sidh, a collective name applied to many different powerful creatures with the ability to manipulate the minds of mortals.

There are other powers at play, but I'll hold them in reserve for now in case my players read this.

The setting, then, is ripe for a group to take the side of the resistance and strike back at the fascistic empire or to side with said empire to eviscerate the resistance and cement Archivist authority for all time.

My players enjoyed the running - they survived a protest-turned-massacre and were recruited by the BLF to assault a MagiTek factory and steal the information stored on its computer terminals.  They were gearing up to begin the intrusion when we had to end it for the evening.

A lot of my players' time was spent trying to think of creative ways to cause havoc while eluding detection by the MagiTek-sponsored police authorities - making napalm, thermite from rust and aluminum foil shreddings, etc. - using the elements of their environment to prepare for a great deal of destruction while saving their credits for less easily-improvised tools.  They've all played a fair amount of LotFP with me before the session today, and I think they wanted to compensate for their fragility with as much destructive power and foolproof planning as they could muster.

Based on this, and given they did something rather similar in the Demi-Monde setting, I think that one of the challenges a fantasy game in a modern setting presents is that one of the first places players go, when envisioning such a place, is superhero/action hero-esque filmography to tell them the kind of characters they should be - ready for lots of violence, with clever plans to escape the imminent death that accompanies such 'splosions.  They don't base themselves on the characters from The Thing.  The group was ready to drop into terrorism against the fascist state, almost from the getgo.

And yet, despite (or, perhaps because of ) this violence-readiness, the stakes felt very low tonight.  We had a fair amount of chatter at the table, a lot of side jokes and commentary that kept pulling our focus away from the game.  While some of that is definitely attributable to everyone's mental state - we had a lot of people exhausted from the week - I also think the meta nature of the world also encouraged this behavior, too.  I had a lot of questions asked of me to satisfy a player's curiosity about how things had changed that had little bearing on the situation at hand.

I also spent a great deal more time in the last two weeks preparing the higher-level world material (corporations and their agendas) rather than really hammering out what each of the different game environments would feel like, the mechanics of living in Hackerith City, and so on.  I think this very strongly contributed to the city not feeling very real and so not providing reasons to not blow it all to pieces.

So, the takeaway from today is that world-level and local-level content has to be generated in roughly equal amounts in order to make both the world and the immediate circumstances of the characters feel real and intriguing.  It's a lesson I'll take to heart as I prepare for the final setting.