Sidereals and the Celestial Bureaucracy

P

Persell

Ten Thousand Club
do Sidereal characters have to be in the Celestial Bureaucracy? i have been wantingto play one and have the book, but i dont want to throw in all the complications and politics of the Celestial Bureacracy. Can characters play Sidereals like other exalts, just running around and what not acomplishing their own agendas and goals, outside of Heaven?
 
do Sidereal characters have to be in the Celestial Bureaucracy? i have been wantingto play one and have the book' date=' but i dont want to throw in all the complications and politics of the Celestial Bureacracy. Can characters play Sidereals like other exalts, just running around and what not acomplishing their own agendas and goals, outside of Heaven?[/quote']
Not really. They can certainly ignore their duties, or take a sabbatical for a few decades, but they're all automatically part of the heavenly machine.


-S
Click to expand...
 
You can certainly have it both ways.  Be in the Celestial Bureacracy, but be on an assignment that requires you to be down in creation following leads on something longterm (like developing the Solars into a united fighting force or setting up a new Emperess) or that requires you have to stay down in the midst of because danger keeps popping up (playing a game of Demon hunters).  You only have to deal with as much actual bureacracy as your ST wants to involve.
 
One loses a great deal of the flavor of Siddies if there isn't at least a minimal sense of being cogs in a machine, doing things every so often for the sake of obeying the people who give you your marching orders.


 Kinda like Shadowrun, except the Johnson rarely thinks of you as an expendable resource...
 
I run sidereals as fully capable of opting out of the Celestial Bureaucracy; however, weather or not a sidereal considers themselves a part of the Bureaucracy or not, they can still be subject to audits (and, of course, pattern bite). In addition, those who opt-out find it much more difficult to petition the pattern spiders on their own. (Existing mechanics take care of this pretty well; that is, few will co-sign petitions or sponsor, etc.).
 
The Celestial Bureaucracy really isn't that hard to get your head around.  There are departments for everything in creation, from "Geoff's Spoon" who'd answer to "The God of Spoons for Geoff's Village", who'd answer to "The Spoon Lord of Geoff's Area", who's superior would be "The Mighty Spoon Master of Geoff's Direction" (a pretty damned powerful spirit... after all, there are a hell of a lot of spoons around) who might then answer to the "Almighty God of Spoons", who's probably Venus :P


Basically, everything in creation has a God/Spirit attatched to it.  Even the grains of rice in your bowl.  The more of whatever that item is there are, or the more significance they hold in society or the more prayer a God gets, the more potent it is.


I mean sure, the God of Wagon Crashes doesn't get as many occurances of his area of influence as the God of Spoons does, but I've never heard anyone pray for a spoon, but when your business rival just happens to be taking a trip to Nexus by wagon...


And at the top of the Hierarchy are the Celestines.  Never forget that! :P
 
only problem im having is understanding the damned politics. im not one for it in general, and even for games i still dont understand most of it. now i do know the whole "there is a god for everything" bit and so on and so forth. i just think the whole politics thing in the CB is confusing, mainly because i dont understand politics in the first place. and there seems to be alot in the Sidereal's world.
 
Then perhaps a Sideral game isn't for you.  S'okay if it's not.  There are other Exalts to play with, and other styles of games to mess around in.  


A good part of the theme of the Siderals is being part of that machine, of being an agent for the Heavens.  You might want to try something else, and be happy that you know what you don't want to mess around with.
 
I think if there was ever a Sidereal without a head for politics, he'd certianly be used and manipulated by his brethren, and probably be more of the type to take orders, rather than give them, but it's still a viable character.


-S
 
Rip.  Go to Lookshy and find this man.  Give him the enclosed message.  Thanks.


Remember, no peeking. Brownies when you get home.


Kisses,


Your pal, Chejop Kejak
 
only problem im having is understanding the damned politics. im not one for it in general' date=' and even for games i still dont understand most of it. now i do know the whole "there is a god for everything" bit and so on and so forth. i just think the whole politics thing in the CB is confusing, mainly because i dont understand politics in the first place. and there seems to be alot in the Sidereal's world.[/quote']
 Hmm...LT, what do you do for a living? I'm trying to come up with a real-world example that you can relate to.


 Oh, and if you're a kid, what do your parents do, and how much do you know about their jobs?
Click to expand...
 
well, im just a 17 year old metal head roleplayer. my moms a vet tech and my dad works for boeing as a sales manager, i think. In the real world, i know jack sqaut about politics, to me its complicated, annoying, and appears corrupt. that may just be me being a teenager but hey, what can i say.
 
my veiw on politics is just what the media throws out and thats what the politicians use as a weapon, the media to gather people to their side. all i know is that Bush is a flaming hick idiot, but he was barely better than the other candidate that would have done nothing for this country. i studied on both sides for a class assignment and bush did all the things kerry wanted to do.


but hey, im just an angry american teenager listening to music that fuels my ideas. so either i could have a point or im just a teenager with crazy ideas, like everyone else seems to point out.
 
Don't think of Siddie politics as government politics; think of it as...hmm, does your dad ever talk about how he lands accounts, and what he does to out-manuever his competition? Or even within his company, how he competes with his co-workers for raises, promotions, assistants, a corner office, etc.? Bureaucratic infighting, in short.


 It's a combination of protecting your own turf from others, while sizing up your colleagues for weaknesses and expanding your own turf.
 
Imagine for a second that all the dumb rumors about metal are true. Everyone really does worship Satan. Ozzy songs really do intentionally tell you to kill yourself with subliminal messages. Judas Priest really is responsible for killing a kid. Metal really is corrupting the morals of society. Also, video games really are responsible for the shootings at Columbine. Aliens landed at Roswell and helped kill Kennedy and MLK.


Behind it all is a small group of shadowy figures, the secret puppetmasters of the world. Playing with peoples lives and manipulating their brains. Cultivating a cult of deathmetal-heads for their own nefarious purposes. The metal bands are key to their plans, the secret vanguard of their vast conspiracy.


These are the sidereals.


But, there is a problem: a scism has developed. The original master plan was the creation of the Metal Gods, like Metallica. But a large part of the group realized that, left on their own, the Metal Gods and the Corporations would become lazy and corrupt, destroying metal itself and wrecking the Plan. A revolution was created, with newer, hungry bands and peer-to-peer file sharing, unseating the Metal Gods.


The part of the cabal that sees the peer-to-peer and electronic download future now controls the cabal, but there are still those that back the Metal Gods, and conspire to retake control of the cabal by returning them to glory. And, some of the fallen Metal Gods, like Metallica, remain.


Both sides of the cabal need to avoid overt action, instead maniuplating things like the press, media companies, financial companies. Sometimes, they will both want influence over the same thing, maybe a new band, or the board of a company, or a politician. Rather than fight directly, they use their other assets to maniuplate things. For example, the peer-to-peer side wants to influence Disney. Using their influence over the music industry and the years they spent developing the public's appetite for what becomes the iPod, they elevate the fortunes of Apple, and therefore, Steve Jobs. They are more interested, however, in Steve's other company Pixar, knowing the Disney might be willing to buy it. They force Jobs to think about his own mortality by infecting him with a form a curable cancer. Convinced (breifly) that he might die, he thinks about what he will leave behind for his family, and realizes that there isn't much. This convinces him to sell Pixar. Meanwhile, the cabal has been influencing things so that Disney is the only logical choice for a buyer. They make a deal, putting their man Steve on Disney's board. The Metal God Faction didn't even see this coming, still trying to derail the iPod part of the plan with lawsuits and knockoffs.


As all this is going on, though, here is the important part: every one of the members of the cabal have some agenda, or pet project, or opinion they want to push. Privately, they think that they (or the people they follow) have a Better Idea than the other cabal members, even members of their own faction. But, while they can make things happen by themselves, over the long term they can't do much alone. This means that most play nice in public, but back stab and manipulate in private. It's kind of like high school, but with the fate of nations instead of prom. Everything runs on favors: I'll help you push your agenda if you help me push mine. Some consider it a great game. Some are there only for power. Some really think they are doing the Right Thing, but must suffer playing in the cesspool only to see their vision realized.


Running politics in a game is really a question of dealing with knowing the answers to five questions:

  • Who are the players?
  • What do they want?
  • What are they willing to do to get it?
  • What are they capable of doing to get it?
  • Who's help will they need?
  • What can they offer those who could help them?
If you answer these questions for three or four major "players" in your political world, then just follow the motivation trail, you'll have a political plot that pretty much writes itself.


Caution: once you get into this, you'll be tempted to make things as complex as possible. Resist this, because it will be lost on your players more times than not. A little complexity is great. Planning eight levels of cross and double-cross will probably never see fruition and will just confuse your players if it does. Games are like movies, in that you can summarize the major plot point of any scene in one sentence. At the end of the movie, you'll have maybe thirty or fourty sentences. That just isn't enough to describe eight levels of cross and double-cross coherantly. (This, BTW, is why really complex books don't translate well to film.)
 
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