Dice [OOC] The Best Laid Plans of Gods and Men

[Rykon]

I don't mind the wait. I've been a bit out of pocket cause the office got a little hairy this week, but all's well that ends well I reckon.

 

[Random Word]

Ah, would we prefer to wait for everyone to get their first post in before we move on? I can always write the next one but hold off on posting it.

 

[Empyreal1]

Sorry! I'll try to post something today for you. I thought we were still waiting on the Flag you mentioned?

 

[Random Word]

Nope. Sorry, I've clearly confused you . Let me try to clarify again. Let me know if you understand.

Flags are a set of narrative goals or objectives you as a player want to achieve in the story. They're scenes or plot elements you would find fun, and that would explore or show the character concept you've envisaged well. You write a few down, let me know, and that tells me what kind of story elements I can include to help you have fun, which will naturally make the game more fun for me. When you hit them, you clear then off and make new ones.

We're only waiting on you and Epiphany to post. Flags are things you want to happen in the future. Think of them as free Sidereal prophecies if you like , unless that confused you more.

 

[Empyreal1]

Oh okay. Well in that case, future flags for Cinerea would be:

Her sudden new standing in Heaven and among the Fellowship, given her relative youth and inexperience, combined with the powerful allies and patrons she's collected.
Resolving Heavenly disputes with style and elegance.
Her ongoing attachment to Sonata and Gem.

 

[Random Word]

Her sudden new standing in Heaven and among the Fellowship, given her relative youth and inexperience, combined with the powerful allies and patrons she's collected.

This is close! This is a bit too vague, though. This is a thing you want to explore (though remember your youth and inexperience is shared with the rest of the PCs! It's only relative to other Sidereals), but I want to know how you want it to be explored. Examples might include:

"A scene were Cinerea is obviously out of her depth at the table she's managed to secure herself a seat at - the intrigues of the Court of the Despot of Gem pale before the intrigues at the highest levels of the Celestial Bureaucracy."
or
"A scene where Cinerea pulls heavenly strings to get a friend out of trouble."
or
"A scene where Cinerea makes a blunder that jeopardizes the mission."

Resolving Heavenly disputes with style and elegance.

This would be, "Cinerea resolves a Heavenly dispute with style and elegance." This one might be tricky, since we're immediately leaving Yu-Shan, but if you extend it to "Cinerea resolves a dispute between Gods with style and elegance." that becomes much more tenable.

Her ongoing attachment to Sonata and Gem.

What about it? Again, this is a thing you want to explore, not how you want to explore it.
I could imagine,
"A reunion between Cinerea and Sonata." Optionally in a specific context. This will require some serious contortions to realize, since Sonata getting to the far West, and specifically here, is wildly implausible if she isn't herself supernatural or backed by the supernatural. It all but guarantees Sonata has the backing of Hell or a powerful organization that's either taken an active interest in you personally, the situation you've been assigned to fix, or something else going on nearby.
or
"Cinerea meets someone who looks uncannily like Sonata in some way, and reminds her of her distant love."
or
"Cinerea meets emissaries or travellers from Gem, a taste of the familiar in this very foreign land."

 

[jaydude]

Seen the post; just wondering where to go from there.

 

[Random Word]

It's really helpful when you let me know when you're feeling stuck! That indicates I've failed to present a good scene. That's okay. I'll let you know my thinking, and you can let me know how to do better next time:

Is the problem that you don't know how to do what you want to do, or that I haven't given you incentive to do anything at all?

You're Sidereals, and being Sidereals is all about knowing a lot about what's going on, and making a plan to manipulate events so they come out the way you want them to. Sidereals have so much freedom to just walk into any scene or situation and belong, that trying to railroad them is even more futile than typical Exalted, so instead I just presented everything interesting going on in the city and left you to come up with a plan amongst yourselves for how you wanted to manipulate events. There are a lot of you, so I figured there had to be a lot of different things going on. You can ignore any of the information you have, try to follow up on everything at once, or ignore all of it and come at things from a different angle entirely. Not every piece of information is immediately relevant to your mission, but you may find ways to make use of it later, and can declare facts to make things more useful for you.

So basically, in my mind Sidereal missions are extremely open ended. You're given a lot of information, broad discretion, and told to make a plan and get something done. In this case, it's to ensure the contents of the Eternal Storm remain secret, contain the damage Bright Pearl's unexpected promise of ancient Anathema treasures is doing to the plans of destiny, and then investigate how this happened to begin with to ensure it doesn't happen again. I'd expect that the characters would confer and agree on an approach, divide the job up amongst you, and get to work, reporting back in regularly on new developments to adjust the plan.

Does that make sense?

 

[jaydude]

It's all good. Been a LONG time since I last played a Sidereal game.

Well, given the objectives assigned to us in the first post, my plan of attack would be to kidnap Bright Pearl, thereby keeping him from personally adding to the hiccup in the loom, and also giving us the chance to question him on how he was able to get through the storm. But I am open to further suggestions from my fellow players.

 

[Esbilon]

Great opening, Random Word ! I'm really loving both the general Exalted vibes and the specific Sidereal ones. Sorry about my radio silence the last several days, but life has been busy.

I'm thinking that our first order of business is to make a plan of some sort. My experience from other pbp games is that while it can be narratively satisfying, making plans IC is almost impossible so I say we take a stab at hashing out our first steps here and posting in the IC with only more fluffy things until then.

The crucial part for all of us, as I see it, is finding out more about Bright Pearl, so at least some of us should probably go talk to him. Going after whoever put a hit out on him (not necessarily to oppose that) might also very well be informative. I don't know how strongly each of you feels about the more caste-specific plot threads, but Breath is not too fussed about random murders and dying princes, but she'll be happy to take a look if we have the time.

 

[jaydude]

I don't know how strongly each of you feels about the more caste-specific plot threads...

I'm planning to play Shi-Vash as focusing largely on the objectives given to them by Heaven. She's only going to be interested in her caste-specific threads if she feels they're relevant to the mission at hand.

 

[Random Word]

Sorry about my radio silence the last several days, but life has been busy.

It looks like everyone is busy. That happens. We'll give it a few days and do roll call to see who still wants to play, and figure out where we go from there. If we've misplaced a few players along the way, we'll adjust for those who would like to continue.

 

[Random Word]

Alright, it's been a few days, let's see who we still have:

Esbilon jaydude Rykon Sherwood Epiphany Empyreal1

Who is still around and would like to continue playing? I hope no one's fallen ill or been otherwise stricken by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If this just isn't as fun as you thought it would be, if you'd like to see things changed, or if you just don't have time to play anymore, let me know. We'll carry on with whoever chimes in, and tweak destiny as necessary.

 

[Esbilon]

I'm still game.

 

[Rykon]

Likewise

 

[jaydude]

Still game.

 

[Random Word]

Alright, it looks like we have three survivors! Excellent. We'll just amend destiny to pretend the others don't exist . Now, unless there are any requests for changes, what do you need from me to continue? I assume you're stuck - you have a desire to kidnap Bright Pearl and ask some pointed questions, but what's standing in your way? Would you like me to just jump you to the docks where he's rabble rousing?

 

[jaydude]

Can't think of anything. I say we go and grab Bright Pearl.

 

[Sherwood]

I've had a really busy week, and I'm just now getting caught up on my backlog of posts. I still wish to play Garret, but I'm not sure how well he'll fit in with the rest of the group if Epiphany doesn't post some, too.

 

[Random Word]

Understandable! Yes, I agree, Garret's position without Amahle is tricky. We haven't heard from Epiphany for a while, would you like to take over the Chosen of Journeys slot? It would have been nice to have Amahle, she's a very interesting character, but life takes precedence.

 

[Sherwood]

It will take me a little bit of time to hammer out a good Journey's concept, but I'm willing to look over the materials and see what comes to me. I have tomorrow off of work and I'm just doing some household chores, but in between various honey-do items I should be able to get started on it.

 

[Random Word]

Sorry you have to go through all the extra work of making another character! I can't see any easy solutions here to save you the effort, other than you playing Amahle directly with Garrett as a 5 dot Ally or something, and playing someone else's character might not be as fun for you as making your own.

 

[Sherwood]

Its no trouble. I like making characters, and doing this will be the best way for me to get my feet wet in the Sidereals book.

 

[jaydude]

In terms of plans, I'm kinda thinking one of two things:

1. We let Rough Hewn Wisdom grab Bright Pearl, take him away for questioning, and then Shi-Vash puts on a disguise so that she can question him herself.
2. If Rough Hewn Wisdom's not likely to be interested in asking questions, we let him and Bright Pearl fight, then snatch Bright Pearl ourselves while everyone's distracted by the chaos.

Do either of these options sound appealing? Are they even plausible?

 

[Sherwood]

Making progress on my sheet, but I still have a bit of work to do.