Narrative Plans

This season takes place in the same universe as season one and features the same player characters.

See the season one brainstorming docs for details more around the outside of the blacksphere and loose details about the Something Empire and Peraxian Federation.

Worldbuilding

Peraxian Federation

The vibes here are a fusion of two eras of USA - 1800s wild-west expansionism (think cowboys, bureaus, railroads, ocean liners) and 1950s-60s cold war (think CIA, vast and shadowy government ops, paranoia and scaremongering).

Something Empire

The vibes here are a fusion of cold war era Soviet Union and the Imperium of Man. Think enormous temples, autocracy and oligarchy. This is more of a WIP than the Federation.

Narrative

The players uncover the story as written through notes, environmental storytelling and other means I have not determined.

The plan for the narrative is kind of integrated with the structure, in that the players choose where to go based on the information they have and the leads they wish to pursue.

There are three narrative threads, which all converge for the conclusion:

• Graves the super spy
• Shuri the researcher
• Calliope the undercover agent

And they all take place within the context of a cold-ish war between the Federation and the Empire, but tensions are extremely high on both sides. See Calli's section for more info on the start of the war, and the conclusion.

Graves

Graves Stone is currently one of the PCs, but has amnesia and doesn't know what he was up to before being found somewhere by season 1's Captain Jack. He is involved in the story as one of the three main characters, pre-amnesia.

Ben (the player) is hopefully going to send me some info about his personality pre-amnesia, though in absence of that he's a smooth-talking james bond-y kinda superspy with a very strong allegiance to his employer (the Peraxian spy bureau, better name pending) and the federation generally. With the info from Ben, he's much more of a medium-time criminal than a super spy. His ammnesia is also from dying and resurrecting rather than magical means; the only info from before the resurrection is a pretty classic job-gone-wrong shot-in-the-back-by-employer type beat.

As for how this affects the plot, it doesn't really. He can get the job to steal the magic amplifier from the spies pretending to be shady people or something, and end up in the same exact sitch. It does affect how Graves engages with the story, as he now doesn't really have a stake in it, and is instead along for the ride. This may work to my advantage, as Ben can perhaps roleplay preciesly what Graves thinks of events as they unfold.

His role in the plot looks a lot like A New Hope and goes something like this:

• Gets set up by the peraxian spy bureau to heist a magic amplifier, cover for empire territory and all
• Finds secret information about something war-critical/other macguffin deep in Empire territory. What this is doesn't matter too much.
• This turns out to be a magic amplifier called the Blackfire Torch. This is incredibly powerful, but he also discovers that the empire is in deep shit behind the scenes, much like the federation. This is their last shot.
• Finding this busts his cover, shenanigans ensue, gets in the shit
• Has to get rescued by Calli
• Delivers info to Shuri w/ Calli
• Is killed and yeeted to the mid circles, just outside the future location of the blacksphere.

Shuri

Shuri Sobek is an old character from the Fable of Sylvia, and Hermia's wife. At the time of the story, she is a powerful wizard and researcher of magic for the Federation's R&D bureau. Her role in the story is the creation of the blacksphere itself. The precise plot isn't fixed down yet.

Importantly, she's been continuing to research countermeasures for the black hole magic which destroyed Sylvia, and now has the blackwall spell almost nailed down.

Shuri records journals and messages in adapted Oortling psi-crystals.

potential plot outline:

• old black site R&D lab out on the edge of the core gets hustled by some Empire vassal state or something - nothing huge, but they have to move to much closer to the core.

This is where the PCs start the campaign and what points them to their main base.

• finishes off a project to make magic amplifiers for ships
• gets a message about an incoming ship with some secret tech on it
• makes the blacksphere device, minus the amplifier that graves and calli are delivering
• detonates it in an act of nihilisim after she and calli lose faith in both sides of the war

Calliope

Calliope is the only properly new main character, and the most important one. She's a galaxy-renown singer and performer, mostly in the Empire, where she enjoys a place among the rich and powerful. She uses this position to feed information to the Peraxian spy agency whenever she tours there.

She has a deep hatred of the Empire for what it did to her home planet at the beginning of the war ~30 years ago. It was some vassal planet at the very edge of the core which became the center of a resistance movement against the region's petty dictator. The Federation covertly supported the resistance in order to (successfully) provoke the Empire at large, at which point the Empire sent in a regiment of 'special military police' and crushed the whole thing, after a few months of all-out war. This kicked off the wider conflict. Calli herself was in the middle of a gig at the time the Empire police forces started chucking bombs around and only barely escaped, before being more or less dragged off-planet by her at-the-time agent.

She's a very beautiful human with pale white skin and long, straight purple hair. Most commonly seen in thin, flowing dressees and elaborate tiara-like constructions.

As for the main plot:

• Hear about some secret Empire project or something (the same thing Graves is stealing)
• While on tour in the federation, report this. Then gets a job to rescue Graves from handler
• Rescues Graves
  • This requires doing a little charming on one Darius Stendahl, seventh in line for the emperor position, the Throne of Nothing. He has a fast ship with some fancy camoflage tech or something.
  • Calli convinces him that they're both double agents or something and his dumb ass immediately believes it, ferrying them to the federation
• Bring the data to Shuri w/ Graves
• Graves gets killed
• Empire shows up looking for their missing heir, inadvertantly re-discovering the secret R&D facility and kicking off the war proper. It snowballs big time, with both sides calling in their biggest and best ships. This is all they have left, on both sides.
• Amid the destruction of the lab and death of almost everyone around them, she and shuri detonate the blacksphere device.

Places

Places which occur in the narrative section above; for building out the galaxy map. I need at least 22 (the total amount of sessions in the campaign)

• (1) Shuri's initial research base (destroyed space station, probably) (JN-917)

  • Name: Wildfire Spindle
  • See notebook for visuals

• (2) Shuri's final research base (JV-189)

  • Name: The Starseer Sentinel
  • The PC's home base of sorts for the campaign.
  • The place where the blacksphere device was set off
  • The only easily habitable place in the blacksphere due to posessing a large crystal of the same material as posessed by the Storm Chaser
    • This crystal's protection, however, only works in a radius much smaller than the size of the whole base.
  • Very close to the center of the galaxy
  • Staffed mostly by oortlings, as their psi crystals gave them superior memory over elven timespans than most other races

• (3) The place Graves gets his comission (HX-918)

• (4) The initial location of the amplifier (MM-173)

• (5) Where Graves gets captured (or something) and then rescued by Calli (SS-918)

  • Possibly split this into two places: where he gets hustled and where he breaks out from

• (6) Where Calli gets a hold of Darius and his ship (SN-134 and SN-212 respectively)

  • Separate the place where Calli finds Darius vs where they go for his ship?

• (7) Where Calli gets info about the magic amplifier independently (SI-801)

• (8) Where Calli reports her info to her federation handler (PX-564)

  • Name: Drummond
  • She was also doing a performance there at the time, as part of a Federation tour.

Extra ideas for places the characters can turn up in without being directly involved with the plot:

• (9) Graves' old haunt - a pretty centered orbital with one massive city on it running almost half the 500,000km diameter of the ring (HX-23)
  • Could bear the marks of being rapidly converted into a forward operating base for the Peraxian military
• (10) Someplace shuri finds and fits out her final base before moving it to the center of the galaxy (shipyards?) (PV-732)
• (11) A Calli arena performance or two
• (12) Federation and Empire military bases (space stations) for more about the state of the war
• (13) Some Empire temple or palace or something where Calli and Darius meet for the first time
• (14) The secret hiding place of a great trove of oortling knowledge (related in some way to the oortlings staffing shuri's main station and the PCs home base)
• (15) The seat of the Empire (Nowhere) (Not on the map, but close to SV-676)
• (16) The seat of the Federation (the Radiant Starcutter) (PX-457)

Miscellaneous ideas for cool places (see also: misc places)

• A ruined interstellar train terminal
• A shattered orbital
• A hollow planet

The map itself:

The Starseer Sentinel

A vast spelljammer, home to some of the last people alive in the core systems and Shuri Sobek's research vessel. It looks like a giant manta ray and is capital-ship-sized, being eight kilometers wide and ~5 long. (This is a little smaller than Bristol.)

The current inhabitants are a small group of oortlings and a few other longer-lived races (dwarves, gnomes, aasimar, hadozee, xixchil, perhaps others) totalling around a hundred, two hundred people. Enough for everyone to know everyone else. They only have a comparatively tiny part of the ship, since their crystal protection covers only a ~500m diameter area. This is the size of a small village, but it's pretty densely inhabited across multiple levels. All the oortlings in the settlement were born after the cutoff, and consequently are some of the only people not both bored and cynical.

Some notable characters:

• The 'mayor': an aasimar named Metrophanes with an overly inflated sense of self-importance but who genuinely cares for the village (whom he calls the Starseers). He self-elected and likes going around talking to people. He's tall, and made taller by a top hat he wears alongside a long, flowing coat and a cane. Looks mostly human except for slightly glowing golden eyes. He was deputy head of heavenly research.
• Shop NPCs
  • Blacksmith: Melanie, an older oortling, and her son Leo, who's a kid. They both share the same golem, a station standard one retrofitted for metalworking via a bunch of welding. Normally one of them rides on a little seat they've welded to the back. Their shop's called the Iron Giant.
    • Leo's father left to explore the wider blacksphere in a kludged-together ship and has not returned.
    • Their family was the first to take up metalworking after the collapse; they were previously normal researchers.
  • Miscellaneous normal adventuring gear and firearms: Francis, a curmudgeonly old dwarf who don't trust no magical shenanigans after the cutoff. He's grey-bearded, short and stocky even by dwarven standards. He used to be the weapons master of the Sentinel, and even then was averse to too much magic. Before that, he served on Giff navy ships for almost a hundred years. His shop's just called Francis Adventuring Gear.
  • Trinkets and gizmos, mostly magical: A xixchil four-person polycule of Amara, Raya, Ash and Sam. The shop's called ASRA. (they're also the only xixchil in the settlement.) They were on the Sentinel as a temporary Xixchil detatchment for research into their cybernetics practices, then got stuck after the cutoff.
    • Sam is the expert on potions
    • Ash is the expert on runes
    • Raya is the expert on alchemical items
    • Amara is the expert on talismans
  • Spelljammer parts: Silas, a very old hadozee who cut his teeth in the Peraxian navy but hasn't sailed in a hundred years. Has a few oortling trainees around. He's mostly maintaining the air/grav generators and occasionally works on exploration vessels or probes.
• The hydroponics crew: Led by Iltameh, the only human on the ship, and a powerful druid (not affiliated with the Stargazers). They take care of the hydroponics, which is responsible for the Starseer's water and air. A few other oortlings are his trainees. Iltameh himself was on-station researching hydroponics and has taken to continuing his experiments.
• The researchers: Most of the oortlings on station. Turnover is pretty quick, with Felix and Lily currently in posession of the two oldest golems, making them the de facto leaders. Their research is wide-ranging and they are descended from the station's initial inhabitants.
  • Subsection of the researchers: the ship scouts. They venture out into the ship occasionally for short periods to gather data or conduct experiments.

Between a couple of pretty powerful magic users and clever engineering, the settlement doesn't need that much glitter to keep running, greatly helped by the crystal covering about a fifth of the fuel tanks for the Sentinel, which happened to be full at the time.

Player Story

This is what the players are up to, as opposed to the narrative happening 100ish years ago. As of the start of the campaign, they have one concrete objective (get out) and one lead.

They can get out by destroying the blacksphere by disabling the device which sustains it. It is (in fact) in the center of their home base, but they don't know that, especially given that the home base is much larger than the area the crystal protects. It cannot initially be disabled for reasons not yet determined. They must follow the narrative to figure out how to disable it.

why do the players care about the narrative?

• Graves: he's involved in it; that's him told
• Eeta: No current reason
  • Perhaps something to do with the oortling legacy? A lot of Shuri's techs were oortlings, and Darius stole his ship's fancy cloaking technique from some oortlings
• Olem: No current reason; not much character.
• Azeglio: No current reason
  • Idea: Calli plays at a circus? Or collabs with a circus in some way?
• CB: No current reason; not much character.

Note: Olem and CB have backstories which I don't remember. I will work them in if they display more character during the campaign. All the characters will also have mechanical reasons to follow the story via side quests for gear and ship tech.

Demonic invasion

A large portion of core systems, especially the habited ones, are under current demonic invasion, more or less in the style of Doom Eternal.

This is because demons aren't affected by the blackspere (for some reason), and because the people who used to take care of the small breaches are gone now. At least, that's what the Starseers think.

Ember & Kira

As the two NPCs on the ship with the PCs when shit goes sideways, they have some serious opinions.

Ember:

• Wishes to begin the work of cataloging the preserved history inside the blacksphere, under the assumption that when the sphere presumably collapses, everyone will come rushing in with little regard for preservation. This is founded on her time on the Astral Island, which was as much as anything else a place of storing historical records.
• To this end, she tags along with the players, perhaps occasionally suggesting where they go, and records as much as possible, venturing out on her own when the PCs stop.

Kira:

• Stays at the home base as soon as the PCs get there. Given the large oortling population and Kira's curiosity, she wants to investigate as much as possible.