The Setting
Joss had her space legs, but none of the younger crew would ever acuse her of being a natural. She had simply started all of this ‘call of the vast black frontier’ business far too late in life.
Honestly she was surprised she was allowed into the HalCon mining outfit at all, but people willing to ship out to ExRem (Extreme Remote Operations) were in very short supply, and she had military experience. Hey! Go figure! Not everyone wants to live a year away from their loved ones in a space the size of a couple apartments.
But like so many other in the operations, Joss had her reasons for coming out to the far edges of the solar system. She has had a… complicated life.
Primarily it comes down to ‘the blackouts’. She misses time, will wake up in an entirely different setting and try to be as nonchalant as possible. The fine improvisational art of ‘just roll with it’ is something she has a great deal of experience with.
They’ve been something of a norm for her as long as she could remember. Some have dismissed her as a scatterbrain, not remembering conversations from just hours earlier. She grew more and more cautious with age, withdrawing from close relations more and more, eventually looking for a home in space.
So, here Joss found herself, her 2nd month aboard the Tenebris class roid-raker named “Kraken”. The total commute was 14 months of travel, the last leg of which was 8 months to the nearest waystation.
Game Info
Joss has numerous personalities sharing her skull. She blacks out, one or more of them kicks in, some time later she wakes up and hopes nobody noticed.
The obvious intent is that every player in this story represents one of Joss’ personalities, and each of those personalities were forged during some stage in her life so far.
Joss’ personalities are aware of each other and may even converse from time to time. Joss’ current “real” persona is unaware (or unwilling to accept) these visiting personalities.
Most of her personalities come from some specific stages of her life. Being in her late 40’s, there have been quite a few dramatic chapters opened and closed behind her.
The table of contents in Joss’ biography might look something like this:
Early School
High School
The rebellious stage
A serious obsession
The arrest
Psych years
Leaving it behind, change ID
Military engineer training
The war, The injury
Recovery
The lost family
Signing up for HalCon (Current)
… but a life is full of moments, so feel free to add and color between the lines! The timeline is more a tool to allow people some space to claim as their own, and to give all the players a general view of Joss’ life to work with.
Guidelines for consistency
Character portraits are sort of “how Joss pictures herself in that mode”.
For consistency’s sake, Joss looks a lot like Carrie Anne Moss (google the name plus “movie stills” for great options), if you find some great image that’s not her, but close enough, great! If you’re playing a younger persona, find something that matches fairly close to her age of course.
Please don’t start your turn by recapping the scene that has already been described. Just keep flowing with it all smoothly and it’ll feel much more like one character.
I absolutely encourage sarcasm and wit! Above all this is supposed to be fun, even if it’s a little dark.
With so much happening in our character’s mind, it’s open season for internal dialogue! If she is actually saying something aloud, we just write normally; but when our character is ‘thinking to herself’ let’s just italicize (use asterisks before and after) the thought, and don’t bother writing “she thought” after everything.
Damn, that’s a really great idea! Plus, now I know how to make italics when I write!
When you name your ‘character’, please make it some variant of “Joss” or some nickname reflecting the character.
I’m SUPER chill about people affecting the story events, the history of the setting, and generally adapting to things that have changed based on player interactions. We’re not all just random dialogue generators… you want the character to do something that sounds awesome, do it, we’ll roll with it! Want to talk about how some NPC did something earlier, go for it! Want to put words in the “normal” character’s mouth, awesome! The improv nature of this is the charm :)
Once we get a general sense of the other characters, please feel free to write dialogue for what any of the NPCs are saying, or even the other player’s personalities. Turns with back and forth dialogue inside the turn are often pretty awesome IMO, so once we feel established a bit, I hope nobody is defensive about another player putting words in their mouth a little.
I’m not flagging the game as NSFW, but if you want to use some harsh language and an F-bomb sporadically, I don’t think we’ll offend anyone dreadfully… just keep it all in good taste ;)
We can swap around the narrator role as well, after we get this off the ground. We’ll just do it manually based on interest.
Lastly… You might notice that when I start typing a turn, I almost always type something like “I’m typing!”, submit the turn, and then immediately go back and edit the turn to its final form. I’m not saying people have to do that, just you might see me doing it and avoiding the old “clashing simultaneous turns” problem.
Hosted and narrated by:
Lee Perry (MrLeePerry)
Started 08/23/15.
Scenes played: 3
License: Community License
