Character planning and intro-ing thread

[jewelfox]

As of right now, we have four players: redsixwing, sablin27, blackswanseer, and kaesa!

EDIT: We also have a provisional fifth player, adad64!

This is the thread where you all can introduce yourselves to each other. >_>b We would like it if you would each say a little about yourselves maybe, along with the following:

• Your preferred pronouns

• Your character concept so far

You are encouraged to comment on each other's concepts, and brainstorm ways that your characters might know each other or that their stories might fit together.

Speaking of stories, here is the plot: A group of people from the past end up in the sci-fi transhumanist future. The ways that someone can do so include, but are not limited to, cryogenic stasis and reconstruction from a thanogram. You can also play as someone from a Korean generation ship isolated society, if you like, one which may be socially and technologically regressive.

Finally, you can play as someone who's from the future and has to help the newcomers adjust ... or who wants them to play a role in their plans!

So yeah, please do the brainstorming thing in this thread. >_>b Don't forget that you can subscribe to individual comment threads, here on Dreamwidth.

More answers to questions will be forthcoming, if we can deal with our IRL stresses enough to do so. ^^;

Comments

[jewelfox]

I will start with the introductioning!

We use the first-person singular and plural interchangeably, but we prefer female pronouns (she/her).

We are considering having *Nemesis and/or The Investigator cameo in this RP. Mira's backstory is that she was genetically engineered to be an exotic pet, but was deemed unsuitable after causing a serious accident, and so she was cryogenically frozen and placed in a warehouse with other "products."

By the 50th century, the Suul'ka-influenced corporation which had created her had long since been dissolved, but not all of their caches had been identified. A Striker named *Nemesis found her, and took her under her wings as she adjusted to modern-day life.

There were almost certainly more people involved in this, both on the rescue archaeology side and in the frozen food section. >_>b

[redsixwing]

Hmmm. So, would our PCs be likely to start of knowing Mira and/or *Nemesis?

If the idea is that we're all waking up from cryogenic storage, maybe we're - if not in the same place as Mira - in a very similar boat, and thus likely to follow the same paths, or use the same resources.

[jewelfox]

If you know Mira, she's in the same boat as you, as you said. Either she's stuck in the same facility, or she's attending the same support group for new arrivals. >_>; I'll leave it to you to decide which one's more amusing.

*Nemesis is probably a Striker trying to find ancient Suul'ka caches. You're not likely to net her the kind of reward she expects, but she's not about to leave someone behind.

Knowing her, she'd probably try to take charge. >_> Her biggest weakness in SotS: The Pit is needing to eat a lot to sustain herself (roguelike resource management ahoy). I might stick her with a series of "weakened" consequences if she's had to go deep in a dungeon to find everyone, to keep her from dominating (socially as well as physically).

For any parts of the game that take place outside of a The Pit style dungeon, she may still be full of herself but she's also got more important things to do than babysit newcomers. In her own mind. >_>;

Either way, and for either character, I'll probably try to gauge people's reactions to them before tying them too deeply into the plot.

[redsixwing]

Hooray, introductions!

I use pronouns. Online, they're often neutral (they/them) but I'm not overly particular. Pronouns are cool.

So far, I'm looking at using Rai - sort of a branch of an older character, quite possibly a literal code branch. I'm thinking of having him be an experimental AI that somehow ended up in an organic body. He may not actually be aware of that origin, however...

His signature abilities are illusion and lightning magic, and he's likely to have skills in deception as well.

Given Fate's standard question of "how did you all meet before game starts," I'd be fine if other characters had met either the organic-form Rai, or his AI/holographic precursor.

[jewelfox]

Is he an experimental AI of a fictional character? ^^ From the story-verse you said he was from, maybe! And created before AIs were widely identified as being people.

(Although Love appears to have had that happen sometime around 1990. IDK, Digital had kind of a contrived ending anyway.)

That was only one idea you mentioned, though. The other was that he started out as *Ascension, I think, an experimental piloting AI?

If we're using SotS-verse technology to fill in some of the holes, the earliest FTL drive system that the dustlings humans created took ships through "subspace," which was basically the lite version of 40k's Warp and is only accessible through "nodes" in certain star systems.

It has some interesting background behind it:

• Human Discovery of Subspace


• Subspace and Node Drives

(I can't find it on that wiki, but there's also a story where a Liir psion taken into subspace on board a human ship flips out, and telekinetically destroys it.)

[redsixwing]

Y'know, the more I think on it, the more I really like the idea of him being an AI of a fictional character, so let's go that route.

And, yeah: in source story, AI definitely wouldn't have been recognized as people.

Now I'm just trying to figure out: someone made an AI to replicate a fictional character as closely as possible. Who and why? Presumably one doesn't spend all the time, effort, and money to create an early, functional AI for no reason... so is this an "it was there" sort of thing? Or, what purpose did they want him to accomplish? Hm.

In either case, I'd prefer his prior name to have been *Ascension. :3

[sablin27]

I can definitely see a particularly extreme fan putting vast effort into making their favourite character real, without considering the issues.

On the other hand, if you want to posit a mysterious mover and shaker doing weird creepy things and then sitting back and watching...

[kaesa]

I do like the crazed fan theory of why they made him (I have fond memories of ridiculous conversations with Snapebot, so it's not without precedent) but other things that occur to me off the top of my head:

* created by the owner of the property; people can pay to have conversations/dinner/whatever with the character, as an interactive spinoff of the franchise. (You've read the books, you've played the game, you've watched all the movies... but have you asked your favorite character what he thought of the ending? NOW YOU CAN TALK TO HIM for only $20 a minute!)

* the original writer/creator died with a manuscript/game/whatever only halfway written, and the heirs want to squeeze as much money as they can out of it, but don't know how the last installment was supposed to end, so they invest in feeding all the available information into a computer to find out what the character(s) would do.

* same as the above, but instead of the heirs, the fans crowdfund the solution.

* unscrupulous L. Ron Hubbard-type creator decides to transition from fiction writer to cult leader and wants to prove that his creations are totally real, so he makes them real and introduces them to his followers.

* if the character is friendly and/or a children's book character, I could see a children's hospital using "visit with beloved character X!" as a theraputic thing, kind of like therapy dogs.

* Disney theme park meet and greet taken to the next terrifying level!

[jewelfox]

What if *Ascension is a video game character?

I'm having trouble articulating the way this might change things, but I'm imagining bringing in tropes particular to whatever media he's from either way. Also there might be a creator somewhere who wants to give people the chance to "play a game," which could be as innocuous or malicious as needed ...

[kaesa]

I see what you're getting at, I think? My first thought when I read this comment, actually, was wondering what kind of potentially embarrassing or traumatic "easter eggs" someone who'd do this would hide in his programming. And how having multiple endings would work for an actual real person.

[blackswanseer]

All really cool ideas; and I particularly like the video game character one!

[jewelfox]

Also I like all these ideas and I think you may have already covered what we were trying to say with ours, whoops. ^^;

[redsixwing]

So I love the idea of him actually being a nav AI who, to survive after the Traveler crashed, borrowed a bunch of memory from someone else's favorite media (be it video game or whatever - I'd like to stick with "corporate espionage serial" as a short description, but video game, recorded drama, or written fiction are all good options and I'm sure there's more I'm not thinking of).

So the next question I have is, what happens if/when he remembers what he used to be?

This is probably where the dysphoria kicks in big time - his current skillset doesn't align at all with what he'd need to be a functional navigator.

[sablin27]

Would you have memories of being organic prior to your actual incarnation or amnesia?

[redsixwing]

I'm thinking having memories is the way to go - on the one hand, it makes him a more convincing organic.

On the other hand, it's going to be a heck of an impact when he figures out his nature and origin.

[sablin27]

Hi!

I prefer "xe, xyr, xym" pronouns. Singular "they" is good as well.

I am working on the character concept.

I'm currently leaning feminine and non-magical, because redsixwing is going the other way, but depending on everyone else's choices and the prevalence of "magic" it might be moot. I like the idea of being an AI without a physical avatar, but that would be hard to co-ordinate with other people, unless we were all virtual.

Honestly, I'm not sure what sort of challenges we'll be facing.

Are we looking at social, physical or mental challenges? Do we need to have a rounded team?

Are we going to be spending a lot of time in mostly deserted confined spaces, as in the games that inspired this world?

Does anyone have any thoughts?

[jewelfox]

The kinds of challenges we'll face will depend on what everyone's suited for. >_>b redsixwing's character has lightning powers, for instance, so there's probably something that will need blasting.

It might not be an enemy or a monster or anything, though. It could be a console or door lock, or a pile of flammable materials. And even if I don't describe something like that being part of a scene, you're free to chime in with anything you think fits and would make the story more interesting! I might call for rolls in the process (like to notice or take advantage of a given detail), but only to keep up the tension, not to punish you for being creative.

(Once again, in Fate dice rolls aren't always pass/fail; it's more of a measure of how well you succeed, and/or at what cost you succeed.)

I like the idea of being an AI without a physical avatar, but that would be hard to co-ordinate with other people, unless we were all virtual.

You might be surprised!

I screamed like a little girl, and slipped and lost my footing, only to realize what I was looking at. The "fox-woman" was *Mute, back in her hanbok and cat ear-shaped headdress. And she was standing right there, in the foyer just outside the plaza.

Flailing and trying to latch my feet back to the floor, I overcorrected and fell right on top of her. Or at least I would have, if there hadn't been a window between us.

It took me as long as it did to stand back on my feet, to realize I was seeing her through a wide, transparent glass panel, which was attached to the floor. I had forgotten that this was how AIs could manifest, before they had hardshells and things. The panel was cracked in places, and some of the lights along it were out. But *Mute looked solid and three-dimensional ... and was standing half a metre away from me, watching impassively with her arms folded and waiting for me to compose myself.

I know I'm really short, but I was still surprised that she was almost as tall as I was, in person.

If we wanted to do something really inspired by Analogue, maybe your character is an AI at the abandoned warehouse / generation ship / underground vault where the player characters from the past are? And whether you were deactivated or fully conscious during that time, you only remember what your society was like thousands of years ago.

[sablin27]

OK. It's good to know that the challenges (and solutions) will be tailored to us. It makes chargen a lot easier. (There's always something that needs blasting. It's a classic hammer/nail thing.)


I asked about whether there's likely to be a lot of confined spaces, because that was about half of why I decided Catherine, my first character, wasn't a good match. She's seriously claustrophobic and I didn't want to go there. As I have now rethought whether the other half, the worlds having some major similarities and dissonances, is an issue, I thought it made sense to check about the small spaces.


I don't think a generation ship is where I'd want to go with an AI. It doesn't fit any of my half-formed ideas and it would be odd not to know the material I was contrasting.

[redsixwing]

Just throwing ideas around, here!

Hmm. If you're a nonphysical AI, I guess it depends on how you interact.


Something like *Mute in jewelfox's fic - or the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, who ended up with a holographic form with an incorporated force field and a portable project, and could manipulate physical objects and walk away from his "home base" that had the good projectors in it, would permit analog interactions.

You could go virtual-space-only, communicating to the rest of the group through whatever physical systems are present - which could get really interesting if/when we've got to jump you across an air-gap, for example - or maybe even borrow/hijack existing or abandoned hardshells, essentially giving you a series of bodies, none of which are your Final Form, because that's all digital. *s*

[sablin27]

Hijacking whatever's around sounds very cool and just slightly creepy. I'll definitely do that if I'm an AI.

[kaesa]

Aaah, I have a character (not for this game) who randomly hijacked equipment and bodies until he was convicted of several serious crimes and his right to inhabit anything with more than X number of moving parts was taken away. Which is a horrible punishment, but before that he was hijacking heavy equipment and forcing people to build him a body optimized for serial murder, so, uh. (He's a failed military intelligence experiment, programmed to enjoy harming people not on the "side" he imprinted on, but since he imprinted on one person, no one else is ever on his side. I don't know which government commissioned him but whoever they are, they're assholes.)

Anyway, he's in the care of his human "sister" and gets his kicks by holographically projecting himself as unnerving things, or just, you know, not projecting himself visually at all and throwing his voice so that he's always BEHIND YOU.

It's incredibly creepy. He loves every minute of it, and that is one reason his sister tries not to have guests over.

[sablin27]

That sounds hilarious.

[sablin27]

I'll probably go with a very honest character, because I enjoy writing them and it will go nicely with redsixwing's character's deceptiveness. So my character will either be nice and trust in people or highly inept at socialising.

[sablin27]

My character is the ship's engineer. So far, they are blunt, they take their job seriously and they are normally pretty laid-back.

More characterisation coming soon.

[sablin27]

Maybe, they're too laid-back for their own good? Constantly wandering toward anything that looks exciting?

[jewelfox]

What does that mean for the ship and the rest of the crew, though? Is there potential for hilarity (or tragedy)?

"Oh yeah, the coffee maker's offline ... I sort of broke it while seeing if I could program the loader mech to make breakfast. Don't worry, though, I've built forty-seven prototypes in the 3d printer and I'm this close to making a replacement for you!"

[sablin27]

More like, "The network of laser turrets in your room is intended to vaporise the discarded food remnants you keep there. From its memories, it has improved your room's hygiene by 36%. Were you using the ceiling space for something else?"

[jewelfox]

o_o;

Oh dear.

(This is good, go with it ^^ )

[sablin27]

OK. :)

[sablin27]

Her name is Alexandra Boisen. Her friends call her "Sandy".

She likes dogs and machinery. One day she will decide whether she likes machinery better when it needs more fixing or when it is finished and perfect. (She likes dogs all the time.)

[kaesa]

OKAY SO. My pronouns are she/her, although if you forget or just use they/their I don't mind.

Because I love AIs, I'm trying to decide between one of two AI characters I created for an unposted story:

The first one is *Adriana, an AI with lingering memory issues who does not recall her origin, but (at least as of the story I'm writing) likes to think she's a third-generation AI as per the Analogue: A Hate Story prequel Digital: A Love Story. She's an artist and ex-journalist; she generally wears humanoid hardshells with parts she can switch out to express herself; usually they're very striking. She's reckless, idealistic, and a very keen observer.

I had considered her as having been reactivated with most of her memory gone and, in her search for a purpose, found this religion that worships their idea of the *Mother entity from Digital, so IF I go with that, she's built her life around that and has certain religious restrictions as to what she can and cannot do, most of them having something to do with the religion's core value of observation and gathering knowledge. (Please note: the events of Digital do not have to be actual history for this character concept to work; I'm assuming the religious version of the events are so far removed from this future as to be almost totally unverifiable and probably much exaggerated even if they are true.) I could play her as a helpful person who's been through something similar, or a journalist looking for a story. On the other hand, I could play her as just waking up from the less-technological past (and ditch the religious backstory), dealing with her gaping lack of memory and maybe finding out her real origins, and finding her way through the future.


The other possibility is *Garamond. He was created to keep a rich, grumpy old lady company in her dying days, as none of her children or grandchildren were willing to put up with her for very long; she did not want to be uploaded, and of course he outlived her, so after gaining his legal personhood he wanted to explore the world he'd never been able to see while fulfilling his original programming, and became an anthropologist and explorer. (In the story he settles down as a university library database for a while.) People from the past would absolutely FASCINATE him, and he'd probably ask a lot of super-invasive questions and then apologize but not really be all that sorry. In particular, he's very dismissive of anything that he can't 100% know and pin down with data, in the name of Science, which gets very old if your actual real life is anomalous or just doesn't fit with what he knows.

As a bonus he's one of those obnoxious people who just wants to ~help~ everyone he perceives as not quite on the right course, as defined by him, because he totally knows best!!! always! and is super dismissive of people who don't agree, although he's very passive-aggressive and ~polite~ about it. He's very much a people-pleaser in general. He is most comfortable inhabiting a building or a swarm of nanites and projecting an image of himself holographically, but probably a lot of places don't like nanites around and buildings are super awkward to travel with, so he'll compromise by being non-physical or wearing a hardshell if he must. Being able to project or wear a human-looking body is very, very important to him, though, no matter what sort of body he's in, and even if he's the only non-organic in a room his image will usually look the most baseline H. sapiens and be the most soberly-dressed.


If neither of those works, I can absolutely create a different sort of character altogether! (I do have a third AI and his human "sister" in this story, but I don't think either of them would mesh well with the premise, as where one goes, the other follows, and the AI is based on my best friend's RP character anyway, so it'd be weird playing him myself.)

[sablin27]

Both sound fun.

[blackswanseer]

Agreed! It can be a lot of fun to develop a character who has amnesia. It allows you a lot more runway to play with.

And hey, someone who's spent time as a university database...Ilaria'd probably love that*L*

[blackswanseer]

Hello!

Pronouns: she/her

Character concept (some recap from a prior thread, sorry): Ilaria Viteri is a Peruvian-Italian woman from a future period on earth, sufficiently future that there's a complex virtual reality world-wide network (a la the Matrix of Neuromancer and similar things), AIs, etc. She herself works in the field of computational archaeology, focusing on pre- and ancient

history. She makes use of drones in her work for surveying, discovery, etc. Ilaria has great skill with computers and analysis, distilling what is discovered in the meatworld into fodder for her algorithms, models, and simulations. It is both a forward and backward approach. Data about a site or civilization can be modeled to 'fill in the gaps' so to speak and guide a search for the missing pieces. Or, collect enough information about enough iterations and extrapolate backwards to possible origins, then look for evidence of those precursors until you
can narrow in on which is the strongest candidate to be correct.

She works in that interstice between mainstream archaeology and the fringe, the latter consisting of the areas often dubbed 'alternative' or 'pseudo' archaeology. She doesn't believe aliens or magicians rendered ancient, advanced civilizations out of a breath and a wink. But she is in the camp that conventional archaeology has frequently failed to take a hard and thorough enough look at artifacts and other evidence that do not cleave well enough to established theories. Ancient technology and writing systems of ambiguous origin, anatomically-modern footprints discovered in circumstances that defy well-rooted thought on chronology, vast and complex structures that are often dismissed as tombs without sufficient evidence or rigor: there are the things that pique her interest and drive her to find better explanations. Find enough missing links and they will form a chain back to the truth - that is what Ilaria believes and what she intends to find.

She is a veeeeery driven person, which has not been without its negative consequences in her life.

I need to dig around in FATE rules and figure out what might be the equivalent to GURPS Intuitive Mathematician (can do math without a calculation, algorithms, engineering designs, etc.)

There's a notion I'm kicking around I'll put up here when I'm done trying to articulate it well enough, about a proposed phenotype/neurotype mismatch of a particular sort and see what folks think. (Or rather than being outright inborn, it could be the result of the post-cryo messing about.)

Why in a capsule? Well, there were some things she got up to in her original incarnation that could have been impetus for someone to want to get her out of the picture. This is already pretty long, so I'll finish typing up that in a bit. Suggestions are also very welcome!

If advanced alien life is a known thing in the current time of the gameworld, it would work far better if her time of origin (i.e., when the capsule came into things) predates that, otherwise that doesn't work so well for her core motivations.

And now, a question for everyone. What does "magic" mean in this world? Is there actual magic or are the things *Ascension, etc. can do in fact taking a page from Arthur C. Clarke and are they really manifestations of advanced technology? If it's real magic and not tech, has it always been around or was it a more recent discovery? (For instance, if you've played Shadowrun, something like the Awakening to the Sixth World.)

[jewelfox]

We're probably going with a "sci-fi psionics" kind of magic. >_>b There's a page about it on the wiki for SotS: The Pit. I don't think we have to port their system directly, but it might serve as inspiration. Either way, I imagine it being seen as just another kind of technology at this point.

Fate (it doesn't have to be capitalized) has the Crafts and Lore skills, to cover your science and engineering needs. And if needed we could always create another skill, or a stunt! A player in my in-person campaign actually has the Mad Science skill. ~_^

An intuitive understanding of mathematics, I would say would be part of an Aspect. Aspects aren't like "3-point advantages" that 90's-style games like World of Darkness and apparently GURPS have; they're more like the tropes that define your character. Think of the coolest possible way to describe her to someone else; that's your Aspect right there, whether it's her neurotype or an additional one.

The way it would work in play is, it informs the way you narrate her actions (you could say if she uses the Drive or Shoot skills that she's calculating trajectories in her head, if she's that kind of calculator), and if you don't roll well enough you can spend a Fate Point to invoke that Aspect, for a +2 bonus or a reroll. It just needs to be one where you can reasonably say "Because I am _____, I should be able to ______."

Of course, a good Aspect is one that I can also compel to give you more Fate Points ...

EDIT: Oh, if you want something more like a Trait / Feat / Merit / Advantage, you could always make her ability a stunt. Those do things like, let you do something else with a skill, or get a bonus to a particular use of a skill, or other things.

EDIT 2: Or a reroll. Not a +2 bonus on a reroll. -_-