Category Archives: SF and Gaming

Thoughts, reviews and opinion on the overlapping worlds of science fiction and gaming.

Vignettes and Implied Setting

I’m posting most of my RPG-related posts over on the RPG blog, but I thought I’d post one here. It’s an introductory vignette/teaser I wrote for a playtest PBeM a year or so ago. I think it gives a lot of flavour of the both the setting, and the specific adventure.

Within the ancient stone walls of Ardryr House, the kandar overlord Zartheyn Tyr has summoned his chief of security.

“So, Valneth”, said Zartheyn, “It is six days since we last spoke. Please update me on the security situation”.

“The rebels attacked us again last night”, the knight replied.

“And?”, Zartheyn asked, “What damage this time?”.

“My militia gave a good account of themselves”, said Valneth.

“You have not answered my question”. Zartheyn tried to suppress his rising anger.

“They.. attacked the village at Gavius Hill”, the knight replied, “Set fire to the barns using flamelances. And some farm workers are missing. My men extinguished the fires, and saw the rebels off”.

“Flamelances again?”, said Zartheyn, “We’re not up against regular feral humans, are we? They sound like legion deserters to me. Or worse.

Zartheyn let out an audible sigh. Valneth was his half-brother, after all, and ties of blood within the clan are supposed to run strong. He’d be in trouble with the elders if he dismissed him without good cause. But Valneth was so clearly not up to the job.

And the rebels did have to attack Gavuis Hill, of all places. It was almost as if they *knew*.

“It is probably fortunate that I have persuaded the legion to step up their border patrols”, Zartheyn continued, “I am expecting reinforcements to arrive tomorrow, and expect your full co-operation”.

“Will there be humans in the patrols they send”, asked the knight.

“They’re from Calbeyn, so that is to be expected”, Zartheyn responded, “And don’t look so disgusted. They tell me they’re sending veterans from the Zughru wars, so they’re men, kandar and human, who know how to fight. And I’m summoning their commanding officer here as soon as he arrives so that you and I can brief then on the situation. Understood? Good?”

“Yes, brother”, Valneth replied, as he turned to leave.

- - - - - - - -

“So, what have we learned?”, Brogan asked his fellow across round the campfire, “Are the Academy of Life just growing bigger and better turnips, or is there something more sinister going on?”.

“Perhaps the turnips are the sinister goings on?”, asked Qeelu, the solidly-built woman who acted as his second-in command. “Perhaps those rumours really are true”.

Brogan laughed. “What? Turnips that render humans infertile?”

“Don’t dismiss it out of hand”, Qeelu responded, “We don’t really understand the magic of the Academy of Life. Our reconnaissance did pick up a lot of Academy of Life comings and goings to and from the village”

“And the barns we torched were full of turnips”, added Grodd, a small wiry man who acted as the scout for the group. “We all know how the kandar fear the rate at which we breed”.

“You’re both expecting me to believe this nonsense”, snorted Brogan, “Turnips are cover; they have something nastier in the works”.

“Which we’re not going to find out about unless we raid their research complex at Guvil Bridge, Grodd replied, “Which is too well defended, and will bring the legion down on our heads if try a fool stunt like that”.

“And I’m no fool”, Brogan stated firmly, “Guvil Bridge is off-limits; but I know enough about the Academy of Life to know their black projects are never based at their publicly known facilities. There’s something going on at or near Gavuis Hill, that needs a stop putting to. And I intend to find out what it is”

These things are quite fun to write, and seem to an effective means of communicating elements of the setting in a way that demonstrates how they can be used in an actual game, more so than the traditional sometimes dryish info-dump.

They don’t have the form and function of complete stories, because they don’t serve quite the same purpose - they’re intended to demonstrate the potential for the stories the players themselves will create in the game.

So, if anyone cares to comment, what does the above tell you about the setting? Or the scenario? And does it make you want to find out more?

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Summer Stabcon 2011

I’ve been going to Stabcon for the best part of the decade now. Advertised by little more than word-of-mouth (it doesn’t even have a website), it’s a friendly board, card and roleplaying game convention, currently held twice a year at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. With many of the same faces year after year, it had effectively become the nearest thing to my local gaming group. Except now I’ve moved down south, it’s a three-and-a-half hour train journey away.

Still, it’s great to meet up with old friends, play some great games, and of course drink beer. Beer has always been an important part of Stabcon – back in the days when it was held at Woolton Hall we always used to drink the bar dry by the end of the con. Nowadays the hotel stocks up on real ales for the occasion. I usually prefer to spend the Friday night playing boardgames, this year it was a Eurogame whose name I forget, and for which I never really got my head round the rules, and Runebound, which I cruelly and probably unfairly described as “Munchkin without the jokes”.

I really go to Stabcon for the roleplaying games, but some years I’ve spent a good part of Saturday playing board games because there weren’t enough RPGs I fancied playing that both had free slots and didn’t clash with other games. This time it worked well, with all the good the GMs sensibly choosing non-clashing slots, so I managed to get signed up for three games over the course of the day.

We started with a Battlestar Galactica run by Dr. Bob. The player characters were captains of a fleet of abandoned ships without functioning faster-than-light drives, but with a large number of refugees. We started to cobble together some working drives by cannibalising others, so at least some ships would be spaceworthy. After lengthy discussions about which ships to take, we jumped to the next system and found ourselves answering a distress call, where we found the last survivor of a research station where everyone else had been horribly murdered…

The afternoon session was the latest of Phil Masters’ GURPS Diskworld adventures. The PCs were special agents of Sto Lat, sent on a mission “To prevent a Story happening”. To say too much about the nature of the story would be a spoiler for anyone playing the same scenario at another convention, but let’s say that, in the true style of this sort of Diskworld scenario, no cliché was left unturned, and we dispatched the bad guy in the correct manner for the story in question.

The evening session was Kev Dearn’s Call of Cthulhu game, set during World War 2 at an archaeological dig in Alsace-Lorraine. It was the sequel to a game set in Roman times, with the dig being the site of the original game. As was to be expected, we encountered sanity-blasting Things Man Was Not Meant To Know so horrifying that they made the SS (the player characters!) look like the good guys.

Unusually for a Stabcon, there were two games on the Sunday. The first was a Terminator game using the Twilight 2000 2013 system, again run by Dr. Bob. The scenario was not dissimilar to the original Terminator film, except it was an entire team sent back into the past, and our mission was to save the physics professor who had discovered the secret of time travel. Once we heard news reports of “a naked gunman on the rampage” it was clear what the opposition was. We did survive a run-in with Arnie and lived to tell the tale.

The final game of the weekend, run by John Parr just after lunch, was very silly indeed, but extremely entertaining. Trumpton, the RPG is a (presumably) unauthorised fan-written system. What actually happened in the game is best summed-up by this quote: “All the scythe-bots are dealt with. We blew up two of the things in Trumpton town square, Captain Snort’s men dealt with one, one fell in the Chigley canal, and Windy Miller’s smoking a joint with the last one”. The game ended with us discovering which character from a completely different programme was responsible for mining the canal, and my character shooting down his Royal Mail helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.

And so ended another Stabcon, and hats off to organisers Michelle and Hammy for another great weekend. This time, instead of being home by tea-time, it would be three and a half hours on board an Arriva Cross-Country Voyager before I’d arrive home. At least I had time to read the whole of “Cthulhu Invictus” that I’d bought from Fan Boy Three.

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The Merchant Princes

I’ve just started re-reading the first books of Charlie Stross’ “Merchant Princes” series. I haven’t found them that easy to get hold of in the UK, unfortunately. All those I have are imported US Mass Market paperbacks, and I have yet to get hold of the final volume “A Trade of Queens”. This series is further proof Stross is a very versatile writer. Not only has he written space opera, near-future technothrillers, and the excellent darkly humorous HP Lovecraft/Ian Fleming/Scott Adams mashup that is The Laundry books, but he’s also trying his hand at fantasy.

The story revolves around “The Clan”, an extended group of families who possess the hereditary power of World Walking, a quasi-magical ability to move between worlds. They have used this ability to grow rich by trading, becoming the Merchant Princes of the title. Most of the action takes place across three parallel worlds, one of them being our own, the others having histories that diverged from ours hundreds of years ago,

I love the way Stross knowingly uses so many tropes that have become bad clichés in the hands of lesser authors. There’s an ordinary person from our own world magically transferred into a fantasy setting. It’s got a pseudo-medieval dynastic soap-opera. It’s got alternative history, complete with airships. It’s even got the hoary old plot device of character from a humble background who discovers’s she’s a princess. But then he goes and subverts them all. The princess isn’t a naive teenager but a worldly-wise and highly educated thirty-something divorcee. The feuding Clan are explicitly compared with Arab oil sheiks or the Mafia. And most significantly of all, going against all conventions of the genre, the fantasy setting has believable economics.

It’s been compared with Roger Zelazny’s “Amber”, but for me it actually delivers what Amber promised but failed to. It’s got all the brutal dynastic politics, but rather than Amber’s insubstantial ‘shadows’, the worlds in which the Merchant Princes operate are fully realised with enough detail and colour that it feels like Stross takes you there with them. Stross is a writer who believes strongly in worldbuilding such that the setting becomes an important part of the story. And it shows.

The central character, Miriam, is another of Stross’s strong-willed and independent female leads, in much the same mould as Rachel Mansour from “Singularity Sky” and “Iron Sunrise”. Through her we meet a rich cast ranging from the morally ambiguous to the blackest villainy, As the series progresses the viewpoint pans out so that we see things from the perspective of many more characters, and one major villain turns out to be a significant figure from our own world.

While billed as fantasy, with an emphasis on the very character-driven dynastic politics, it still reads like quite hard SF in many places. The emphasis given to the way the economies of the worlds function is an aspect of this. But you see the same approach later in the series when a faction of The Clan try to determine the true nature of their world-walking ability.

The one big flaw in the series (and bear in mind I have yet to read the last volume), is the way the story is chopped-up to fit the demands of American publishing, especially the printing technology used which restricts the length of each volume. Not one of the books works as a standalone novel. As Stross once explained on his blog, the whole thing was originally conceived as two separate 600 page novels.The first two, “The Family Trade” and “The Hidden Family” read as a single 600 page story split across two books. But what was to have been the second 600 page book ended up ballooning into four volumes, partly to end each book on a cliffhanger, and partly because having to recap on things expanded the word count.

Despite those structural flaws, the first five books make for a well-written and thought-provoking series. As for the final book, I’ll give my verdict once I’ve read it.

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Why I Don’t Like Game of Thrones

I’m probably in a minority amongst science-fiction and fantasy fans in that I never got past the first book of George R.R.Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice”. the long-awaited final volume of which will be published this summer, and which has now been adapted for the telly.

I remember reading the first volume as part of the Book Club on the CompuServe SFLIT forum (who’s old enough to remember CompuServe?). Everyone else was gushing praise about it, but it left be a little underwhelmed. Yes, it was a page-turner, but I found it read too much like a daytime soap-opera in medieval clothes. One reviewer described it as “Dallas in furs”, which for me was precisely what was wrong with it. Far too many characters, and not nearly enough emphasis on the worldbuilding. It may be there was a lot more creative worldbuilding that’s revealed in later volumes, but in the first volume at least, GRRM didn’t show me enough to keep me interested enough in the series to want to read any of the following books.

For me. it was a stark contrast to Frank Herbert’s classic Dune which we’d read previously, which is a book where the worldbuilding is very much centre-stage. I remember the sysop saying how much better Game of Thrones was than Dune, and the patronising way she kept dismissing my attempts to defend Dune still rankle a decade later. The line she kept parroting, which she claimed came from the TV industry, was “If you care about the characters, nothing else matters. If you don’t care about the characters, nothing else matters”. I took that as an example of how SF and Fantasy must be watered-down for mass audiences, and her repeating it showed a very strong preference for character-driven books, and no interest in worldbuilding at all. “How on earth can the planet be a character” was another line.

And that’s my problem. The sort of fantasy and science-fiction I prefer is always driven by the worldbuilding, in the broadest sense. Not just the physical environment that’s so centre-stage in Dune, but the back-stories, history and cultures. For me, the setting is far more than just background, but rather the context for both the characters and the story. Instead, “A Game of Thrones” takes as it’s plot a retelling of the Wars of the Roses, and takes it’s characters from the archetypes of American soap opera.

Not that I’m suggesting characters the readers can strongly identify with, or gripping plotlines don’t matter. Any worldbuilding is wasted if the world the author ends up with isn’t one in which he or she can tell a great story. But I read SF and Fantasy to have the author take me toanother world. It’s got to be a story which couldn’t have been set in suburban Bracknell.

On this subject, Charlie Stross agrees with me. That’s why I like his books.

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Unblogged bits

Which is where I put random thoughts on things I’ve read which aren’t worth a full-blown blog post, but still worth more than a throwaway link on Twitter.

First, the utter beigeness of The Q Awards. Are Kasabian really the best band in the world? It does make me wonder who actually reads Q nowadays. Is it people in the 30s and 40s who no longer either buy albums or get to gigs, but like to think they’re still in touch with what’s going on in music, and don’t want to be told that they aren’t?

Next, the Guardian Music Blog post on the Japanese genre of “Visual Kei”. It seems to be a combination the worst excesses of 80s fashion disasters set to some utterly derivative power metal. It gets a lot of rotten tomatoes in the comments, some of which come from me. A commenter linked to an interview with an (unnamed) Visual Kei record executive, which lays bare the sordid sausage-factory nature of the entire scene, and how it’s cynically exploitative of both musicans and fans. And I thought the US/UK music industry was bad.

Charlie Stross has always been one of my favourite science-fiction authors, and his blog is always an excellent, thought-provoking read. Recent posts have included outlines of novels he might have written but didn’t and some wise thoughts on the bursting of the higher education bubble. His latest rant is a broadside against the Steampunk genre, which in his opinion is far from “what happens when Goths discover brown”, it is, according to Stross, all about romanticising too many bad things about the past. Like High Fantasy, only even worse, is the conclusion.

Finally, BBC’s Mark Easton is trying to work out why “Olivia” is the most popular girl’s name this year. He has one or two possibly half-baked ideas:

As for Olivia - even digitally re-mastered pictures of Olivia Newton-John wearing “those trousers” in the movie Grease cannot provide an explanation.

I am beginning to wonder whether we are witnessing one of the subconscious side-effects of a Mediterranean diet. All that olive oil and low-fat spread. Could it be that our eating habits are affecting the way we fill out birth certificates?

Now, while I’d love to think they were all named after Mostly Autumn’s new singer, somehow I think Mostly Autumn fans haven’t been breeding at that sort of rate.

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Whatever Happened to the Kalyr RPG?

A while ago, I started work on a Fudge-based RPG using my science-fantasy Kalyr setting. It got to the point where I had most of the first draft written, and got as far as playtesting it. But there were one of two elements I’ve was never quite 100% happy with. Things have gone so quiet you’re either wondering what happened to it, or else you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Over the past couple of years, Fate has really taken off in a way I hadn’t anticipated when I started work on the game. While Spirit of the Century justifiably won awards back in 2005, the more recent success of games like Diaspora and more recently The Dresden Files RPG have made me realise that what I’ve been trying to do is insufficiently different from an implementation of Fate to be able to justify the game not being a Fate game.

So it’s back to the drawing board. Well, not quite, the setting material doesn’t change, and there are certainly significant parts of the rules chapters I can salvage and rework. The challenge is to find a way to streamline Fate so that it works well in a PBeM context with a much simplified and compressed turn sequence. I’ve got some ideas, so watch this space.

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Why Charlie Stross hates Star Trek

Science fiction writer Charlie Stross explains why he hates Star Trek

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.

He described how the writers would just insert “tech” into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they’d have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

“It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script. You know, Picard would say ‘Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.’ I’m serious. If you look at those scripts, you’ll see that.”

Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:

La Forge: “Captain, the tech is overteching.”

Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”

La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t work.”

Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”

“And then Data pops up and says, ‘Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech … ‘” Moore said. “It’s a rhythm and it’s a structure, and the words are meaningless. It’s not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it.”

Stross compares it with the way he goes about creating written SF.

I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.

Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it’s background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o’war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly. (The only casualty would be the eyeball candy — big gunpowder explosions be damned, modern audiences want squids in space, with added lasers!)

That’s right on the money for me. But I read an awful lot of written SF, and I’m not a big fan of franchise TV science fiction at all.

The way Charlie Stross writes science fiction produces the sort of science fiction I like to read. The “tech the tech” approach all too often results in the sort of contrived dea-ex-machina endings which will be very familiar to viewers of Russell T Davies’ writing in Dr Who and Torchwood. Look at the ending of “Children of Earth”, for example. Very powerful human drama, yes. Coherent science-fiction, no way.

I remember a quote from a few years back that SF Cinema was a generation behind written SF, and TV was a generation behind that. I also get the impression that most franchise science fiction TV is written by people with no understanding or interest in science, so it’s not surprising we all-too often end up with something that resembles a soap opera with a few SF props as window-dressing.

Fine if you like that sort of thing, but it’s a pity that ‘real SF’ never makes it to the small screen. In order to justify the special effects budgets, they have to hook in an audience far broader than SF fans, and that audience tends to want soap opera.

I’ve even run into that attitude from within the SF world. I remember the sysop of the Compuserve SFLIT forum years ago patronisingly repeating the mantra “If you care about the characters, nothing else matters; if you don’t care about the characters, nothing else matters” when I took exception to her dismissing Frank Herbert’s classic “Dune” in favour of the latest Big Fat Fantasy epic which read too much like an American daytime soap opera for me to stomach.

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The Future of the Past

Phil Masters visits the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition at the Science Museum in London, and ponders the associated social history.

The problem for an exhibition like this, I fear, is that it has to deal with the persistent scent of failure that hangs over its subject-matter. The Hi-Tech Britain of which this exhibition speaks meant a motor industry whose management and workforce alike were all too stuck in old ways; it meant Comet airliners which crashed, and lost us that crucial lead to Boeing; it meant shiny new diesel and then electric trains, running on essentially Victorian tracks. There was some brilliance there, but too much of it was necessary ingenuity, improvisation around ingrained habits, bad decisions, and the problems of a country still recovering from its involvement in an expensive war.

Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” from the sixties now seems terribly, terribly dated, especially when people use imagery from that era decades later. I remember a logo in the 1980s featuring a stylised image of an electric train passing the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. It was meant to promote industry and modernity, but left me with an impression of an organisation stuck two decades in the past. The worst irony was the locomotive, one of the unsuccessful first-generation machines from the 1955 modernisation plan, which turned out to be hopelessly unreliable and destined for the scrapheap after a relatively short life.

Phil concludes that Dan Dare himself wasn’t so much a man of the future as a man of the recent past:

But not only is Dan Dare not flying the spacelanes in our defence, he’s never going to, whatever may happen in space research. We’re unlikely ever to see his sort again, and perhaps a big symptom of Britain’s problems in the 1950s was the idea that the hi-tech future would lie with a square-jawed pilot who wouldn’t have been out of place in the Battle of Britain, backed up by a comedy Yorkshire sidekick and a gruffly paternalistic staff officer.

Read the whole thing.

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Summer Stabcon 2009

I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcon’s I’ve been to now.

Stabcon is the twice-yearly games convention now held at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. It’s small enough that I recognise all the regulars year after year; in that respect it’s almost like a Mostly Autumn gig. Come to think of it, it’s a very similar demographic…

Although the emphasis is on board games, there are also plenty of RPG sessions over the weekend. The organisation is very informal, with nothing booked in advance. GMs put prospective games up on the notice board, players sign up to them on a first-come-first-served basis. This does mean that popular games tend to fill up by the Friday night, but there does seem some form of self-balancing between players and GMs over the weekend. I see very few games fail to run for lack of players, and additional games always seem to appear on the board whenever all the other games are full. This year I ended up playing four RPG sessions over the weekend, more than I have done in many conventions.

Friday night’s game was GURPS Reign of Steel. The setting was a Terminator-style near-future; the robots had won, and the survivors of humanity are either fighting a guerilla war, or just lying low and hoping the robots ignore them. The plot had the PCs as members of the SAS, the last surviving military unit serving the last surviving government in Europe, and involved Frenchmen stealing Britain’s last remaining nukes, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and this exchange:

GM: The robot manages to dodge the combine harvester.
Me: I’ll turn and try to ram it again - I guess it will take a couple of rounds to circle round.
GM: It’s a cinematic game!
Me: OK them, make that a handbrake turn…

Saturday, after a few card games, was another GURPS game, this time a Diskworld dungeon adventure, run by Phil Masters. I played the stereotypical Hubland barbarian, as we hacked and slashed our way through sewer-slugs and skeletons. The last fight seemed to go on for ages as we had yet another example of my appallingly bad convention die rolling, although my biggest criticism of GURPS nowadays is that fights sometimes go on for too long.

By the evening, things started to get very silly, with InSpectres, which is basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off. I’ve played this game at Stabcon before; a very rules-lite system designed to encourage player creativity, and played strictly for laughs, of which there were many; when we had player characters with combat origami, our ghost containment device was a wet paper bag, and our vehicle was a mutant hybrid of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost armoured car and a bendy-bus. You get the idea? We had to deal with a demonically-possessed teddy bear, four escaped tigers (due to an accident with the rocket launcher), and how to dispose of a dead elephant stuck half-way up the stairs.

Paranoia on Sunday was the only way to top that. Paranoia is one of those games I’ve always wanted to play, but up until now nobody had ever run at a con I’d been to. The Computer is your friend! Denounce your comrades as Commie Mutant Traitors! You do not have security clearance to eat blue M&Ms! And are you questioning the skills of R&D with the L-shaped gun for shooting round corners? Report now for termination!

The next Stabcon will be the first weekend in January 2010. I’m already paid and signed up.

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More actual play - An interrogation

Another of those ‘actual play’ threads from the Dreamlyrics forum.

This scene covers the interrogation of the major villain, Guruinath Zalyn before his superior and the acting commander of the Legion. The two PCs are Kolath, a relatively junior kandar Legion officer, and Hollis, a powerful if unstable human psychokinetic who’s been, who are major witnesses to his wrongdoings.

[GM]

The prisoner sits in a wooden chair, constrained by leather straps. There’s an ugly bruise across his face that wasn’t there when Hollis saw him last. His face is twisted to an ugly snarl. He’s accompanied by two immense Legionnaires, both human, who Kolath recognises as as two of the guards from the Legion’s military prison.

Apart from Guruinath’s chair, the chamber is empty. Everyone else will have to stand.

Lavuyl, the senior Karazthani, takes a small spherical device from his pocket, and places in the floor a few paces from Guruinath.

“Recording eye”, he says, “Everything that happens in this room will be on record. This will form part of the official investigation”.

“This is an imposition!”, says Gurinath.

“Shut up”, says Nir-Urileyr Kavarluis, “You are not to speak except to answer questions”.

“I demand independent representation!”, says Guruinath.

“This is not your trial”, says Lavuyl, “This is your interrogation. You will just make things harder for yourself if you you do not co-operate”.

[Kolath's player]

The tall, thin Kandar legionnaire nodded as Lavuyl placed the recording device on the floor and activated it, relieved that the interrogation would be recorded.

“Requests would possibly be considered, Guruinath, but your demands no longer impress us overmuch.”

[GM]

“Don’t listen to him”, snaps Guruinath, “Can’t you see that human wizard is mind-controlling him? She’s making fools of you all. Known terrorist, she is. You know her brother is in the cells, don’t you? Accessory to murder. Don’t try to deny it woman, you know it’s true”.

[Hollis' Player]

“Let anyone ask the questions,” Hollis said, maintaining a steely demeanor despite the spike of fear this revelation engendered. How much did he know? How much could he know?

“If you fear me so much, I will leave the room and let anyone ask the questions. Besides, if I could mind control anyone, why not just mind control you into admitting your complicity in treason?

“I suppose they could bring in someone from the Academy, who could check for my presence in their minds. Face it, Guruinath; You’re whining is so transparent. You are a traitor who’s been caught, and you are trying to blow enough smoke to conceal your treason and confuse your interrogators. You are so used to bullying everyone to get your way, you keep trying it even when the truth would clearly be best. Who’s in prison has nothing to do with your guilt or innocence.”

[Kolath's player]

His expression did not change much, but he did wonder about the brother statement. Now was not the time to delve into that subject, however; Hollis was right.

Kolath cocked his head slightly to one side and looked at his associate and, yes, friend and he nodded before turning his attention back to Guruinath.

This is a scene where powerful NPCs are in opposition to each other, but I have to remember it’s got to be about the PCs. So I’m treating the it as a conflict between Guriunath, who’s currently down but not out, and the two PCs. The stakes are simple, it’s who’s story Kavarluis and Lavuyl, the two high-level NPCs believe.

So far, we’re just scene-setting, and I have yet to roll any dice.

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