RB RPG: Responses to questions and comments

Rhoadan, your proposal for a Mage game really got me thinking. How would the Technocracy respond? This is THE nightmare scenario for them, a Code Ragnarok that goes to eleven. Do they go psycho-killer on the Reality Deviants or husband their forces until they identify the threat? To be decided in game.

Has the Event altered consensual belief so that Mages can operate with less fear of Paradox? Yes, but that may not be obvious right away.
Has the loss of the RTC's (excellent tools for control) affected their hold on world affairs? To be honest, RTC's are better tools for the Weaver than the Technocracy. The Weaver only cares about order, any order. The Technocracy cares about a specific kind of order that the RTC's reject. Still, that doesn't mean that there's no effect.

What relationship did Nicky Appalachian and Stonagal have with The Syndicate? As noted in my original recruiting post, I'm not using the exact characters from the books, but rather analogs. Nicky White Mountains analog is definitely NWO although he may have Syndicate advisors.

One other thought on the Mage game. The Event was a supernatural attack resulting in casualties that are best measured in gigadeaths. EPIC FAIL. Heh. I've figured out why they failed. It's their own bleeding fault and I'm even using something from the White Wolf canon to explain it. What I haven't figured out yet is how I'm going to handle the reveal and whether or not it's too late to fix the problem. It didn't come to this overnight and it's not going to possible to fix it instantly either.

The entire raison d'etre of the Technocracy is to prevent that sort of thing. Yep. But it's one of their prevention measures that set this up.
I'd expect a lot of traumatized Technocrats to resign, go the John Courage route and carry out their own agenda by any means necessary. Wouldn't surprise me if some of them went rogue, but I don't get the John Courage reference. Could someone please enlighten me?

Even if Control hunkers down until they get a clear target, there will be plenty of agents attacking whoever is "clearly responsible" for this disaster. Let's just say that Control's response will have an impact on the action.
Which would be a common, human reaction even if you weren't using a suave, sophisticated, ultra-now, super-tech conspiracy of global defenders as a setting point. True, that.

Thoughts from Inge: Nicky Harz: If I were GM I'd probably make him a rogue NWO agent who is taking advantage of the Event to implement his ideas. There are red herrings pointing to him as a reality deviant with delusions of grandeur (crossover potential here), or (of course) a Nephandus. Nick is playing a double game, he uses the war of the Powers That Must Not Be Named against humanity to further his ascent to power, yet he knows that in seven years the Powers will come and eat him alive until Earth can fight them off. He has to get Earth ready for war, he has to ferret out and destroy enemy agents but must not be obvious about doing so, and the player characters could even be on his side... if Nicky wasn't batshit insane to boot. Bear in mind that at most, I'm using analogs of the characters from the books, not the characters themselves. Yeah, if Nicky Blue Ridge were actually a character in the game, he would be nuts. His analog, however, need not be. Of course there's always the option that this whole thing is some Marauder's Quiet and the PC's have been pulled into it.

From TechnocracyGirl: Another Mage-esque question...what happened to the children and/or clones under 13 out on Darkside Moonbase, Copernicus, and the other deepspace stations? They weren't on earth, so would they have been raptured? Heck, the entire apocalypse is earth-based -- could the mages in deepspace bunker down, cut off all contact with earth and ride the Apocalypse out? Well, the way I figure it, if it's inside the Horizon, it was affected, ergo Darkside could've been hit, but the Cop wasn't. But then the Cop might have problems of its own. How much communication can there be between Earth and the deepspace stations? That leaves plenty of room for the Deep Universal Constructs to be under siege by something.

Frankly, I'm ruling that there are no children at Darkside Moonbase. Too hazardous, no one would bring them there, and anyone who became pregnant would either terminate the pregnancy or transfer off the base.

Clones are a bit more complicated. A clone being held in storage in case the original person dies has no soul, therefore it is of no interest to whatever caused the Event. A clone that's housing the soul of someone whose previous body died will get grabbed based on the beliefs of the occupying soul, not its age since it's effectively an adult. A clone made for some other purpose, e.g. to replace a Tradition mage for purposes of espionage, I'm going to treat the same way I'm treating bioconstructs. If it has more than 95% human genetics, and a soul (i.e. the capacity for Awakening/Enlightenment) then it's human for the purposes of the Event. Bioconstructs don't generally start with any kind of sense of self and will start out with some kind of programming. Such an entity would get raptured. Once it develops a sense of self and becomes a moral agent, its beliefs come into play. The probability of a bioconstruct becoming an RTC is vanishingly small, so it's probably a safe assumption that if it's a moral agent, it won't be raptured. Bioconstructs are generally created as adults, and I assume would take considerably less than 13 years to develop a sense of self if it does so at all.

Edit: Okay, I've been reading the NWO convention book. Evidently John Courage was an NWO op who went rogue in the Victorian era.