Help with a threat

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Help with a threat
« on: April 25, 2016, 09:23:31 PM »
Hey all.. I'm still getting acquainted with fronts work and their peculiar flexibility. (Yeah, just in time for them to be replaced in 2E.)
I've got an Angel in my game. One of his infirmary crew is Shigusa, a junkie who's been toying with the bluish paste that's gotten popular around town and is becoming less and less reliable as an employee. If the Angel continues to do nothing about it, soon she's really gonna fuck it up and somebody's going die for it.
I'm making her a threat. I was just curious how you all would handle, as a threat, a so far good-intentioned junkie whose drug use threatens to destabilize the Angel's shit. Make her a Grotesque: Cannibal? Write up her addiction as Affliction: Condition? Just use her in other threats' countdowns?
I'm not sure what to do with the selection of threat types I have here. Thanks for any help!

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lumpley

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Re: Help with a threat
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2016, 08:02:31 AM »
"Unreliable employee" just says sybarite to me.

You can promote her to one kind of grotesque or another when her addiction gets that bad. Or, if she stays on top of it, consider promoting her to a warlord.

I would definitely write up blue paste addiction as an affliction, yeah. Could be a condition, could be a delusion, could be a disease, depending on the effects of taking it.

-Vincent

Re: Help with a threat
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2016, 04:35:33 PM »
Vincent, "Sybarite" is a type of Brute, which is very specifically a whole group of people per the rules. Would this lone employee be a Brute: Sybarite by herself, or would all the blue paste addicts in the holding be Brutes: Sybarites? If the other employees are good and loyal (or at least only fucked up in other, unrelated ways), then it doesn't make sense for the Angel's crew to be Sybarites as a whole. I mostly grok the threat system at this point, but every once in a while there are edge cases like this that throw me, so your insight is really appreciated.

I think I probably would have slotted this person in as a Grotesque: Cannibal, myself, since it sounds like the main way she threatens the PCs is by putting her addiction ahead of her other responsibilities (craving satiety). If she was a threat because she started introducing the drug to other characters, she might be a Disease Vector, where the disease is addiction (which, yeah, is probably an affliction of some sort on its own). Promoting her to a Warlord wouldn't have occurred to me, but I bet whoever's pushing this stuff is a Slaver.

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lumpley

  • 1293
Re: Help with a threat
« Reply #3 on: April 27, 2016, 11:31:16 AM »
Yeah, if you make this one NPC a sybarite, you're effectively making a group of blue paste addicts who are sybarites and saying that she's one of them.

It may be that she's the only one you've named yet, the only one who's been on-screen, but you are creating a group that she's part of, at least notionally.

-Vincent

Re: Help with a threat
« Reply #4 on: April 27, 2016, 12:00:33 PM »
Thanks all, this makes a lot of sense. I wanted to make her a sybarite, but thought, "Well, Shigusa is just one person."
What the game wanted me to do was figure out a context for her that will ground her in the world and create interesting situations. Who are her junkie friends, who got her into this shit, what other inconvenient people are compromised by the blue paste, what's gonna happen with the paster population when supply dries up, etc.

Now, I envisioned Shigusa as having her own countdown for her descent into paste-stupor, but having her a part of a sybarites threat means I want a countdown for their effect on the world as a population. But I still want to track her addiction separately because she's tied directly to one of my PCs. Is that the kind of thing that fits into Overall Countdowns?

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lumpley

  • 1293
Re: Help with a threat
« Reply #5 on: April 28, 2016, 12:44:54 PM »
Sure!

-Vincent