That’s a good idea, but I don’t want to overdo it.
The player has been playing in my Flat Black games for twenty-five years, and knows the setting pretty well. I think he is one of very few people who knows what the Imperial Secret Service actually does. For this campaign he asked for a look behind the curtains, to see at last who are the figures in the big picture, and what goals they are playing for in the Great Game, which is why he has a point of view that is secret even from the Empire.
Because of that, the use of social engineering to design and modify the societies of the colonies without their knowledge and against their wills is a major element of the campaign. The PC has already dealt with (i.e. assassinated) one major villain who was trying to remake his society naïvely and one who had a scheme based on a sound knowledge of social engineering. His adventure on Fureidis was obviously a brick in the wall of a large scheme by his org to build up a monarchy there, and his first adventure here was a preliminary skirmish to frustrate someone else’s scheme to establish parahuman eusociality here on Persatuan.
I’ve been doing this a lot. I ought to mix it up a bit.
I don’t think I’ve solved the Problem of the Three Samsonites, and perhaps it’s not a good idea. Has anyone got a completely different suggestion?
Should I invest a session in getting the PC’s neighbourhood established now? The player has expressed an interest in a little non-mission material, and maybe it would work better to do that while the PC is still new to his neighbours.
So what’ve we got? Byronic hero owning the café-casino. Blind piano teacher in the flat next door. The former courtesan whom Hunter leased the PC’s flat from. Gym where the PC works out. Martial arts dojo. Freerunning group. Practical Pistol Sports club. Tragic torch singer in the cabaret? Street kids? Gang of thugs & standover merchants?
Just Plain Folks who give an idea of what just plain folks are like in this world? So does it in fact have street kids as we know them, or do they look like street kids but for world-culture reasons have a completely different background and motivation?
What does the PC do for relaxation/recreation? Or does he? Is all his downtime spent on self-training regimens, or on research for the next mission? Any of those activities will give you an idea what sort of people it would be interesting for him to encounter.
He plays chess, and that seems to be his only actual recreation. But he does engage in a lot of very varied self-improvement. Recently he has been working on picking pockets and locks, dancing, and sex.
In a while they might give an indication of how Edhi Parcroor is getting along with his campaign to lead Persatuan into modernising and rationalising, but the org is going to destroy Parcroor come what may.
I guess that a lot of shakers and movers and opposition agents, coming to Persatuan by several days cooped up in a liner, must land at the spaceport and seek (1j immediate local colour, and (b) some recreations not available in the confines of a spaceship. Perhaps Hunter might direct the PC to cultivate contacts where new arrivals make a splash.
I’d absolutely go for an “establishing himself locally and making contacts” episode before delving into the suitcase thing. You could also drop some preparation into that one that may seem inocuous like a person he befriends who is part of the ruby suitcase faction and could turn from friend to enemy due to the whole mixup.
I like to have a few named NPCs that serve no specific campaign purpose until I need them. That would be the perfect time to name each and every person he meets (in our big fantasy campaign it was immediately suspicious if the DM named a character–other than Alrik which was the equivalent of naming someone Mr Smith pre-Matrix only as a first name. When I dm-ed, I’d go through the onomastikon and behindthename to create a list of names I could drop on the players so that wouldn’t happen. Getting off topic here… sry)
But as you said the PC has “people skills” giving him some locals to work with would probably help him solve the problems you’re going to throw at him and they can help you, when things get to easy for him as they can just as well serve as distractions and red herrings.
Speaking of “Mr Smith”, the PC makes a habit of using forenames that are cognate with “John” and surnames that mean “Smith” in obscure languages. At the moment he is “Jenko Tömürchi”; on Fureidis he was Yahya Haddad; previously, Ivan Ferrari….
Urged on by my brain care specialist¹, I have arranged to resume GMing on Saturday night, Godzone time². I had a bit of a chat with the player, and he has expressed an interest in doing “a bit of Burn Notice stuff” to exposit his neighbourhood and establish a network of contacts so that “if a street urchin steals a cracker I will know about it”. So we’ll do that. I explained that Hunter is not going to allow his character to take up free-lance stunt work, because he wants him to be able to disappear off on operations on a moment’s notice without attracting the annoyed notice of people he’s supposed to shoot scenes for. I think I’ll try establishing the bouncer at the café-cabaret-casino downstairs as likeable and putting him in either a parkour or a martial-arts class with the PC, then bring in a local extortion racket.
I had a word about not knowing what the PC likes or enjoys, what makes him tick. The player said that he’ll think about it a bit and engage in further conversation by e-mail before trying to portray a bit more motivation in future adventures.
¹ She opines that GMing will make me feel better and that buying a lovely watch will not.
I got back on the horse last Saturday and went for a gentle walk around the yard. We didn’t get through very much material, and I didn’t get the doorman at the Porte d’Or, Joko Dauoud, to stick. Never mind: the PC will meet him again when he is picking out a gym to frequent.
The NPC who did stick was the casino manager, Ricardo Susilano. Intelligence suggested that Susilano ought to be an expat from Fureidis, but on meeting him the PC instantly recognised that he is in fact a Beleriand orc¹. Susilano cemented his impression of being someone worth reckoning with by discerning through the PC’s dissimulations that he is originally from Tau Ceti and specifically from Hell.
We’ll press on on Saturday to see what sort of trouble his neighbours are in and what he can do to pacify things without showing his hand.
¹ Getting well on for “troll”, actually. He has [had] pituitary gigantism, acromegaly, and Paget’s disease of bone, and is 220 cm tall with 140 kg of body mass. Sadly the player has not been one of my players long enough to respond as I would like to an NPC “seven feet two and a half in his stockings, two axe-handles across the shoulders, and with a face that only a mother could love”.
My first reading was that the PC is actually from Hell, but on second reading it occurs to me that you might be saying that being from Hell is his cover story, which Susilano has penetrated, lynx-eyed.
The name “Ricardo Susilano” looks as if it might be interestingly mixed linguistically: Italian or Spanish given name and perhaps Indonesian surname?
Your first reading was correct. Hell is one of the eight de jure colonies on Tau Ceti. Tau Cetians maintain that they have subtle but distinct differences of ethos, culture, and national spirit, but most foreigners find these indiscernible. Susilano was using cold-reading techniques.
Correct. Such misassorted names are very common for NPCs and my PCs in Flat Black, meant as a reminder that the families, cultures, and races of Old Earth got blended even before the colonies were settled.
Not much, certainly not of cultures that we would recognise from the early 21st Century. Perhaps Tau Ceti is recognisably the West, and it’s fairly prominent. Navabharata and Xin Tian Di are no longer much like India or China (respectively), and they aren’t prominent, either. The Muslim colonies likewise. It’s mostly new cultures that have developed in place on the colonies, from either heterogeneous groups of migrants or from deliberate attempts to create something new.
and behindthename to create a list of names I could drop on the players so that wouldn’t happen. Getting off topic here… sry)