• OldSessionPlanning

1/23/08

No game. Brian is gone.

1/16/08

The saga of the airships continues. What we've accomplished/learned:

• Learned something about Meskelyne's past dealings with the Immaculate order, involving some disagreements about figureheads.
• Fast-talked the King into signing over his support for trade missions using airships (but not providing any money).
• Convinced the local god to neither aid nor interfere with our business.
• Comissioned Meskelyne to construct two airships, re-purposing existing ships for the sake of speed.
• Agreed to provide fabric for gas-bags, and liquid-fire (kerosene) fuel.
• Lost track of Hyena's hopping puppeteer, which was instructed to weave cloth for gas-bags.
• On the matter of kerosene we have:
  • Successfully fought off an attack by kerosene elementals, but with the loss of one demon and a Guild Factor, and the serious wounding of several party members.
  • Learned that the elementals have a labor dispute with the Guild, and that their leader is Vladislaus.
  • Negotiated a deal with the Guild by which if we can get production back to normal, we can keep anything else we can talk them into producing.
  • Waited long enough to partially heal, so that we're now ready to begin negotiations.

Remaining things we need to do:

• Negotiate a settlement which obtains our necessary supply of fuel.
• Other tasks before the ships can depart:
  • Finish gas-bag construction.
  • Make sure construction goes smoothly.
  • Hire crews for the ships.
  • Faction-supporters can do their own thing or not with respect to Maskelyne accompanying a mission.
• Make sure the trips succeed and accomplish what they need to accomplish:
  • Do we go along personally?
  • Do we give them Astrological aid?
• Make the Realm start building ships on Meskeline's designs:
  • If he came along, he might stay behind and do so.
  • Otherwise make sure someone else picks up his ideas.
  • This probably requires personal intervention, even if we're not on the entire trip.
• Make some progress on all our other outstanding missions in the mean time.

12/19/07

The party just returned to Heaven, in the process of work on this mission: Application of Novel Transportation Developments on the Northern Sea

What we've accomplished/learned:

• Met Maskelyne as Immaculate Monks, confused him, found he's willing to build airships if funded, but there may be some question about figureheads - which the Immaculate Order considers blasphemously iconic.
• Fast-talked the King into signing over his support for trade missions using airships (but not providing any money).
• Met the local Immaculate Missionary. Learned about Meskelyne's trouble with some visiting monks recently - Meskelyne lost a race, had to agree not to put figureheads on any boats intended for the white sea. Learned the names and personalities of some local captains.
• Informed the local God (insert name here) of our intentions. Failed to win his support. He challenged us to a Walrus hunt - which Ania accepted. I'm fuzzy on the exact conditions - I think if we win, he goes along with our plan and helps, if we lose we can't do it.

Things we need to do:

• Deal with the local God:
  • Win the Walrus hunt. Suggestions so far:
    • Ania can use Bridle of Mercury to get a Walrus familiar to present as her "catch".
    • Hyena can send a Demon to scare away all the walruses.
    • Can we arrange some Astrology on ourselves, the God, the town, or the walruses to help us out?
  • Or find some other way of either getting him on our side or at least keeping him from interfering. Ideas:
    • The party makes it clear they intend to start the trade from another town nearby (begin travel preparations, etc) - Twisted Stone, Kaet's Landing, and Bertran's Ford are all nearby. Meanwhile, Morinas (negotiator) goes "behind our back" (not really) to talk to the God again, accompanied by Crow outside of Fate. Goal is to convince the God that since this plan is going to happen regardless, it's in his best interest that Icehome bacome a major trade city. Morinas' charm and Crow's Charms are hopefully enough to pull this off.
    • Dragon Star can go behind the party's back (for real - he's not sharing this backup plan with the party) and try to negotiate with the God. His bargaining chip is making an official agreement on behalf of the Immaculate Order which favors this God over other local gods, and gives him more than his share of feast days.
• Fund the construction of 2 ships and ensure the expeditions we want occur. Current plan seems to be to deliver the funds through an RD of a wealthy merchant prince.
• Convince Maskelyne to go along on the trip to the Realm. Social Attacks plus Force Decision. (This may become controvercial if Emma comes along this time.)
• Make sure the missions succeed:
  • Do we go along personally?
  • Do we give them Astrological aid?
• If Meskeline arrives in the Realm, ensure he stays, and the realm starts building ships on his design.
  • This probably requires personal intervention, even if we're not on the entire trip.
  • We need to ensure the ship returns with the necessary info without him.

tmack:

• Why is the figurehead thing a problem? It looks like we're the only Immaculate monks in the area at present, except for the one easily-handled missionary you mentioned above. We can just grant him an indulgence to keep it in place; we can even extort some favor (like sailing to the Realm first, or doing something clever with trade) in exchange. I can't imagine the Order would summarily shoot down (with their giant anime-style plasma cannons, I suppose) ships that happen to have icons on them; at the very least, ships do manage to make it to the Realm, and we can just do what they do. If the Order's gangs of icon-sniffing monks patrolling the harbor complain about iconography, we can just throw a tarp over the damn thing when it sails into port.

  • AT: For the ships flying around up here there's unlikely to be any problems. For the ship sailing to the realm, there may be complications. They may or may not be serious complications. DragonStar is also a strong believer in the value of the Immaculate Order (different from a strong believer in the Immaculate Philosophy) so is pushing for doing things their way whenever possible.

    • I know DragonStar is a strong proponent of the order, but NamelessCrow has no interest in the order and its philosophy whatsoever. They work for us, not the other way around. There isn't even an obvious way of doing things their way here; they're just setting up a roadblock to the most obvious solution. So, what do you want us to do? You said there was a problem with the figurehead; do you have a problem with it beyond possible reprisal from the Order? Like I wrote above, we can copy whatever ships entering the Realm do to handle that problem, or you can use your influence to get the Order to make a special dispensation for airships.

• The god didn't seem particularly receptive to your financial advances. So what? What's he going to do if we bring trade to the town anyway, and why can't we just Terminal Sanction him when that comes (since hopefully someone will be picking that up soon)? We don't need his permission to let trade into his city. We're apparently unable to do anything useful to gods or demons, but there's no reason why we can't bluff about it.

  • AT: See my note on the LessonsLearned page where I wish I hadn't involved a major NPC we could've just ignored. We probably can't totally ignore him anymore, given Ania accepted the challenge. But we can certainly try to convince/muscle past him. He may or may not be able to keep us from accomplishing this mission, but he can certainly cause trouble long-term for the development of the Haslanti League, so it would be better to have him as an ally than an enemy.

    • Sorry, didn't read that page before commenting. Anyway, if he takes actions blocking trade in the region later on, we can just get rid of him for obstructing official Sidereal business. Respect my authority! (We need Terminal Sanction badly.) Do we need to do something about the situation now?
• I can't go Outside of people whose Essence is (strictly) larger than mine.
• I doubt Emma would want to fulfill a mission at the behest of the Bronze Faction. At player-level, I also don't want Kat to lose a point of backing in the Gold Faction just because she couldn't make it one of the runs.
• Convincing Maskeyline to go to the Realm is trivial. This isn't something we need to plot out; we just do it. At the very least, the mission statement does not specify that Maskeyline go willingly or be conscious for the journey or not be locked in the brig for the duration of the trip. I think six Sidereals can handle one mortal, whether through social manipulation or charms or violence.
• Again, convincing Maskeyline to stay in the Realm is trivial. Set him up with a sinecure or a mistress or something. Lock him in a tower somewhere. Put a suitable astrological effect on him.
• I'm not convinced we need to bother with the walrus god plot. We're doing it to get back into Heaven to fetch the physreps for Resources 4. Why do we need them? If you want to round up merchant princes to finance the project, we don't need to supply the money ourselves. If you want the king to do it, we can remind him of his obligations or just take the money from his treasury ourselves. Even without fiat currency, I doubt merchant princes have gigantic money bins full of silver that they use whenever they want to complete a transaction; why can't we just use whatever instruments they use? For that matter, we can trivially take money from people, whether through robbery or deceit or Force Decision or whatever.

  • AT: At this point it's not a question of what we could do, but of what we did to. I thought getting the God on our side would be easy. I was wrong. We've already had our interaction with him and gone back to Heaven. Need to make plans from that point, not alternatives we should've done instead.

    • <strike>We did? I thought we were still back in Creation waiting for the walrus hunt.</strike> Oh, right, I remember now. Now that we've made it back to heaven, what do we need the walrus hunt for?

      • AT: I believe we agreed to his terms before he opened the gate for us.

        • I suppose we have to go through it now to avoid making an enemy unnecessarily, but I'm certainly not going to punt the trade mission if we lose the hunt. (If we were clever, we would have come to him and asked him to help prevent trade in his region, deliberately botched that plot, reneged on our agreement to come back for the walrus hunt, and watch him promote trade himself to get back at us.)