Interlude - Summer's Desires

A meta side trip for The Handbasket Ride

Last week, I talked about the need to know what it was that characters desired, and how that can provide direction to the story. I also talked about how because I've added Summer and Albey as major characters in the story that are going to be travelling with Eamon for a while, I need to know what it is that they want.

So, this week, I'm going to figure that out, using a bunch of different Oracles, and see where we end up.

Summer Byron

At the moment, Summer is perhaps the least developed of any NPC I've introduced into the game, She's ended up with very little spotlight time since she appeared as the result of a random roll, and I've struggled to find a handle on how to play her.

I decided fairly early on that she was 42 years old, and was rather naïve and gullible. I also felt that she was basically going to be using the Devotee archetype, but that was about as far as I had gotten with developing her.

So, it seemed to me that a perfect place to start with her is to figure out what it is she's a devotee of. People who place a lot of belief in a cause often have that faith as a central part of their personality.

Because I'm using the Mythic Game Master Emulator 2nd edition, I initially started off using the Description Meaning tables to see if I could define what cause Summer was devoted to. But my initial dice rolls came up with "Carry Prison", and that didn't make any kind of sense to me, so I sat on it for a day or so before deciding to try something else.

So instead, I dug out my GameMaster's Apprentice Base Deck cards, and used the random event generator on those to see if that sparked any ideas. Here's the three card draw that I got:

The three word prompt from these cards was "Trap Diabolical Lies" (the words are ringed in red in the above photo). This immediately started conjuring up all sorts of ideas, about a QAnon-style "prophet" who is broadcasting a call out to people, and who is bringing them to some place for some cause.

Now, I did not want to use the whole QAnon script of cabals of paedophiles sacrificing children and all that crap. But the idea of some mysterious figure broadcasting somewhat cryptic messages trying to get people to believe that there are evil forces at work in the world? That worked well for me, considering the state of the world in the Electric State. It worked doubly well considering I'd already decided Summer was somewhat gullible.

I needed a name for this mysterious prophet, and shortly thereafter, the name "Mardom" sprang up out of the depths of my subconscious. It's as good a name as any, and a subsequent Google check turned up the fact that it's a Persian word meaning "people", which feels highly appropriate.

I felt I needed a little bit more about Mardom's posts, so I used Mythic's Character Actions, General Meaning tables, and rolled up the following word pairs:

• Block, Weapons

• Punish, Block

• Amusing, Helpful

Now, it made more sense to me to swap the order of the second set to turn it into "Block Punishment". This gave me the idea that Mardom is riffing on a lot of the hippy ideals of peace and free love from the late 1960s. This ties in with Summer's age: she's 42, and would have been 15 during Woodstock in 1969. I'd always envisaged Summer as a bit of a hippie anyway, so this fits well for me.

So: Mardom is all about stopping the weapons used in the war (even though it's already been over for years), and he preaches that the virtual world of the neuroscapes is a lie, and punishment for humanity's abandonment of the natural world and human relationships, and the way to block that is to tear down the neuroscapes and bring more joy and love into the world again.

I'd already established that Summer wants to get to Santa Clarita, so I decided that Mardom has called his faithful to him there, to further his goals towards helping humanity recover.

My mind kicked into overdrive at this point, and started wondering if Mardom is on the level. Given the "Trap", and "Lies" in the original card draw, it struck me that Mardom could be a load of complete bollocks, and is actually an AI or a Drone Construct luring helpless victims into their web. But I decided to hold off on making that decision for now, and let the details about who or what Mardom really is develop during game play.

I also went ahead and made Summer's starting Talent "Dreamer" (which gives her +2 Hope). I set her Dream to be "Find a way to bring hope to the world again", and her flaw is "Naïve and gullible".

For now, that gives me enough to run with for Summer, and we can flesh out the rest of the details as the game progresses.

I think I’ll add “Mardom’s Prophecy Broadcasts” to the Threads list, and Mardom to the Character List, because I want them to become ongoing elements in the story as it continues to develop.

As this piece is already running longer than I originally anticipated, I’ll tackle Albey’s desires next time.