OOC Discussion

[Mister-Kent]

For all out-of-character conversation and what-not.

Welcome to the game! I hope to have this started a week from now, giving us ample time for chargen and setting up the sector.

[kmbll]

Curious question mostly - don't we have a really huge crew for a free merchant?

[Mister-Kent]

You totally do, and I'm totally going to have to figure out how to work it, but I'm confident it can be done

[kmbll]

Give us a bigger ship! Two ships?

[Enoch]

A Death Star! With our planet-kills painted on the side.

[Glintwine]

How many people do we have now? Six or seven by my count, eh? Well the Extended Life Support upgrade for a Free Merchant only costs 5K in credits for doubling the potential crew size - allowing us to carry up to twelve crewmen instead of only six. That will also increase the amount of person-days that we can float around in space before having to resupply, though we're going to be paying extra for the life support for the amount of people we're carting around no matter what. You can just add the cost of the upgrade to the bills that we will no doubt already be starting with. xP

Alternatively, if you wanted to go more gritty, we could always just say that one of the crew members has been forced by necessity to take up residence in the Engine room or wherever else their workstation might be due to all the normal cots/quarters being taken - it would probably be uncomfortable for them until we manage to buy the upgraded life support, but it would be doable. Again, we'd be paying for it in terms of shortened person-days available for travelling in space. In fact, with 7 crewmen in a six-person ship that can fly for 2 weeks, we'd probably be unable to travel for more than one hex at a time, and only to populated systems where we can resupply, otherwise we'd run out of life support in mid-jump to the next system. But it could work. If we do decide to go the gritty route... I say "not it"

[Enoch]

Meh, I only need enough room to cross my legs in the lotus position and meditate. This fleshy existence is just an illusion, anyway. At least, that's what he'd tell himself if he got shoved in the engine room!

[Glintwine]

Meh, I only need enough room to cross my legs in the lotus position and meditate. This fleshy existence is just an illusion, anyway.

... I'll be honest, I was thinking of your character when I made that suggestion! I personally felt bad about it afterward, but I do honestly feel like my exiled noble psychic WOULD be that callous toward an old scavenger, at least until he'd proven himself to her. xP

Whatever the case, it will be up to the GM how we end up breaking things down.

EDIT: Wait, sorry, I got your researcher dude confused with whomever is playing the scavenger/roboticist dude. >_< Don't hate me, guys, we don't have proper character sheets up yet so it's hard to keep track of ya'll.

[Enoch]

Don't sweat it. I can remember my own character and that's about it. I think the scavenger is the more natural person to get shoved in the closet, but only if the player is cool with it! I don't mind it being my character either (although my character might grumble about it and quote scripture to himself).

[Mister-Kent]

Aw, what a team player!

[explosiveghast]

Perhaps that time when Guy wrecked the Cat's Cradle on that one desolate moon could be Madoshi's entrance. The ship was totally screwed up and the crew's morale was sinking real low, real fast.

Though all scans had showed no signs of life, this strange old guy shows up and started wordlessly repairing the ship with a ragtag band of scavenged repair bots at his command. He waved off your concerns as he patched the hull breaches, repaired the drive damage, extended the life support and reconfigured his junky looking robots into a crazy looking new bulbous workspace jutting from out the hull of the ship. And you all just did not have the heart to maroon him on the isolated moon and since he seems kind of handy for a mute hermit. You have also decided to let him stay in his weird workshop since he started staying there already. On the upside, the air from the recyclers no longer smell like vomit, liquor and cleaning chemicals. You can now catch wafts of Killdozer's appetizing offerings when he is cooking and only when he is cooking. Also, you got the ship off the moon. I am just saying... that could be one way it played out.

[Glintwine]

Ghast....








I love it.

[Glintwine]

(Double Post Incoming - my apologies in advance)

Whew! Finally got done with my character sheet - pretty proud of it, all things considered. Raquel is all at once a powerful character and a completely un-optimized one xP should be interesting to see her in action. The Unseen Servant character sheets are pretty neat - highly customizable, if obviously meant for more traditional D&D type games. Still, I like them.

Enoch - I read through the brief description of your character that you stuck in the Character Creation thread. If I may, I would recommend taking the Scholar background rather than Priest, as I myself took the Tribal Shaman class training which means I have the Religion and Leadership skills myself. Of course, you can still free to take Priest if you prefer to stick to the flavour of your background - I myself made a lot of "poor" build choices to stay in line with the theme I wanted for my character, so there's nothing wrong with that.

Provided that Raquel survives to advance in levels, I might decide to take some levels in Biopsionics to provide more healing support for the crew - if you were also thinking of going into Biopsionics on subsequent levels however, I will back off and go into Telekinesis instead (my preferred third discipline).

Just trying to make sure we step on each other's toes as little as possible. Whatever the case, I look forward to our characters butting heads over religious/psionic philosophy in the future.

[Mister-Kent]

Yes, Unseen Servant's sheets are pretty spiffy--luckily SWN fits the format about 90%

I hope to have enough time on the home computer in the next two days to edit and post the sector intel. As an overview for alien races, there's a persistent reptilian and insectoid theme there, and those were just the randomly generated ones. I'll be adding in a couple more.

Edit: Glint I just saw Raquel's sheet. So...I'm rusty on my sprechen sie Deutsch, but..."soul-friend", right?

[Enoch]

Enoch - I read through the brief description of your character that you stuck in the Character Creation thread. If I may, I would recommend taking the Scholar background rather than Priest, as I myself took the Tribal Shaman class training which means I have the Religion and Leadership skills myself. Of course, you can still free to take Priest if you prefer to stick to the flavour of your background - I myself made a lot of "poor" build choices to stay in line with the theme I wanted for my character, so there's nothing wrong with that.

Provided that Raquel survives to advance in levels, I might decide to take some levels in Biopsionics to provide more healing support for the crew - if you were also thinking of going into Biopsionics on subsequent levels however, I will back off and go into Telekinesis instead (my preferred third discipline).

Just trying to make sure we step on each other's toes as little as possible. Whatever the case, I look forward to our characters butting heads over religious/psionic philosophy in the future.

Me too--I think it will be fun to explore our differing ideas about faith. The religious aspect is just color at the moment. The Religion skill, as I read it, is as much/more about other people's religions than your own, which isn't necessary to the concept, and you can be religious without having the Priest background. Scholar is just as appropriate for a religious scholar as Priest, and I like the skills.

I'm looking at Metapsionics as a primary and Telekinesis as his extra, so Biopsionics won't be stepping on my toes at all. From what I've read, psionics aren't the overpowering abilities that they can be in other systems, and a lot of the effects are personal--I imagine we could have a lot of overlap without any stepping on toes.

[Glintwine]

Edit: Glint I just saw Raquel's sheet. So...I'm rusty on my sprechen sie Deutsch, but..."soul-friend", right?

Ja genau, meine kluge Spielleiter. ^^

Seelenfreund does indeed mean Soul-Friend! I didn't pick it with the deepest meaning in mind, mostly I just thought it sounded good and I needed a German last name. You could interpret it as having some symbolism to do with her psionic powers however, stemming from her "soul" which if you interpret as consciousness, she is arguably closer to than most, hence being a "friend" to it. Or perhaps being a friend to the "souls" of others in the way she is able to sense and manipulate their consciousnesses. Lots of potential meanings in there.

The full meaning of her name comes out when you translate her first name as well, however. "Raquel" is the Spanish form of "Rachel", which in Hebrew can refer to someone who is "Pure" or "One who is Pure/one with Purity". So fully (loosely) translated to English (and heavily interpreted) her name comes across as "One who is a pure friend of souls" or perhaps "One who is a friend of pure souls".

What does this refer to or signify? Not necessarily anything! Though again you could interpret the loose combination of meanings above to show that she is either friend to those who are pure (of heart one might assume), or using the psionic connotations mentioned in the beginning, that she is a powerful (pure) manipulator of the souls that really only she can sense, thus being 'friend' to them.

It's all a bunch of gobbledygook, I know xP, but you got me started so I went into detail. And yes, this vast over-thinking of RPG characters also extends to most other aspects of my life.... I have a problem. Also, while I talk a big game, I'm far from an expert in etymology, so if I've made grave, embarrassing mistakes in my interpretations of these names, well... I honestly don't care all THAT much.

snip

I'm glad we're seeing things the same way! True, Psionics aren't exactly as ground-shaking as magic powers tend to be in most RPGs, but they can be very useful nonetheless! Biopsionics for example are invaluable in keeping the team alive, so I suppose I will go into them for the good of the team. But also hoping to at some point pick up a point or two in telekinesis so that I can slash enemies to ribbons with my sword from a distance.

[Mister-Kent]

German has the funnest lexemes--I love playing around with them. In the notes for my Dungeonesque game I dubbed the southern forest the Eisenwald. I've got adding eisen- to things, and using geist as a suffix.

[Glintwine]

It can indeed be hard to resist the temptation to constantly draw on more complex and deep-sounding languages. ^^ It's something that I think most of us fantasizers inherited from good ol' Tolkien. I obviously suffer from the same need to name things creatively!

[kmbll]

Glintwine made the good point that we should switch out shared history discussion to here. So I guess we're all in quasi-agreement but I guess I'm just not sure where we're at.

[Glintwine]

Well, I think that the four of us in the discussion (that being Marullus, Enoch, you Kmbll, and myself), are pretty much in agreement about what we want from the game as far as interaction/motivation goes, as well as how we want to start the campaign having the common bond of the prison break. Other characters in the group however, right now particularly Killdozer and Modashi, have different ideas for how they want to enter the story.

Personally, I think it's fine that they want to join the tale in a different way than the four of us. It lacks a bit of narrative balance in that those of us who are involved in the prison escape will probably be a little bit closer to one another than we will be to others in the group, but I don't think that it's a game-breaker. After all there are other factors that will probably bring certain characters closer together than others as well, such as Raquel, Killdozer, and the podborn Slayer (forgot the name if there was one yet) all being from primitive worlds.

Of course, an alternative to the disparate character introductions might be to say that all of us come together BEFORE being incarcerated as a group, that way those of us with more unique origin stories get to be part of the team-building events that lead up to our breaking out. Since not all of us are criminals in our backstories however, maybe we could say that the authorities that took us in were really just looking to capture a few of us (Probably Raquel and Savage for their criminal pasts, and maybe also Nekodemos and Malachi for their involvement in the wars/other shady behaviors) and just ended up treating everybody else as guilty by association. That would pretty much solve everything, allowing people to have their unique entrances to the group while still giving us a cool prison break scenario in the recent past to bind us together in a fellowship of necessity, since we are now ALL criminals whether we like it or not.

The only thing is, that version of events does mess with the timeline thus far, mostly in the area of your ideas for Guy becoming "the Savage", Kmbll. Do you think there's anyway we can compromise with that? (assuming of course that everyone else votes Aye on the prison break scenario to begin with). Basically you would have had to have become "the Savage" before the prison break.

Maybe this most recent incarceration is a separate event from the one that happened just before Guy betrayed the other pirates in the past? That's a thought.

This is all becoming rather complicated though, isn't it? xP If anyone has other ideas or opinions, please feel free to share them.