Scampir

my resolution for the next year is to play in an Operation Solstice Rain or Dustgrave Lancer Campaign. That'd rule imo.

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.

Winner 1980

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!

razzin frazzin player characters are on a mission and don't want any delays razzin frazzin some people charge into the vault when a player messes up a roll razzin frazzin my consequence just escalated the situation to the point that they charge down the vault to the bottom floor where an Relict Vessel Knight is imprisoned so now we're doing the boss fight FIRST and the rest of the dungeon afterwards.

No prep survives contact with the players but god damn. We played and found out what happened.

Fr though this was like, a great moment for me to realize that the players really do care about their starting town, and a good lesson for me on what I need to keep in mind when I prep in the future. I'm not some master GM here. I'm running ICON so I can take the steps to get there. I am trying learn and to hold on and find the interesting things we crash into and work from there. But god damn. What a lesson this is.

Oh yeah btw getting set up for Lancer has led me to the conclusion that “Grid-Based tactical combat tabletop roleplaying games are the fighting games of ttrpgs”

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.

Winner 1980

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!