A new expedition will begin in my ICON game tonight! The players are going to a Chronicler Monastery.
the vibes are going to be good
Something that I think is really interesting about ICONs Chroniclers is that, alongside their role as a faith institution, the churning age has foisted a new role upon them. They have a mission of securing arkentech in chambers for everyone else’s safety. This signals to me that going to a Chamber means going to a place where the Chroniclers have absolute control. The Chronicler vaults, full of arkentech, are somewhere between Nuclear Bomb armoury and Museum. To prevent disaster anyone that comes to see the vault only does so at the discretion of the High Priest. Chroniclers are described as very Hierarchical in the book and I feel like this dovetails well with an unspoken authoritarian control over whatever arkentech a given chamber controls.
My metaphorical ears perk up because a year ago, one of my players and I had a conversation about Langdon Winner’s “Do artifacts have politics,” where Winner discusses (and you’ll have to forgive me if I botch this because I’m appropriating political theory for a roleplaying game in 2023) but the short version is that the nuclear reactor could never be managed by anything other than an authoritarian government because the introduction of nuclear materials in power generation also introduces the possibility of theft and conversion of that material into nuclear weapons. I’m not going into this claim because this is a chost and not a paper, but it’s an interesting dilemma to build a factional ideology for a roleplaying game on top of.
So what does this mean for the game? Mostly that the vault has controlled access and that is an obstacle for players to engage with. How they handle this authoritarian control over arkentech and how they react to the NPCs with other groups like scavengers or imperials will be the kind of background ephemera that contextualizes their choices in this expedition.
It’ll be fun to see what they do and what they find!
