No time for prayers
Great Forks City Noir
I tried running a Heroic Mortals/Godblooded game in January 2013. The game fizzled before lifting off the ground. This is me resurrecting the game, because I felt I had a strong pitch and a story to tell. Here is the original pitch.
The Scavenger Lands have been pitched into bloody war! Thorns has invaded the Range Towns of Marukan, forcing the Realm to fight a proxy-war across the Inland Sea. Nexus is the Mask of Winter's next target, and the future of Creation is uncertain. Great Forks has become a Casablanca of sorts, filled to the brim with refugees trying to flee into the Hundred Kingdoms and beyond. But the City of Temples is rotten to its core, and all of the Ministers are on the take. Proper documentation must be provided to gain safe passage on the gargantuan steamboats that run down the Yellow River toward safety, and the warmachine of Thorns has its agents and pawns in place, choking the movement of refugees.
The players would be operatives in a secret organization led by a mysterious philanthropist by the name of Roual, who helps refugees gain safe passage through Great Forks. It is a dangerous mission in a dirty city, where nobody trusts anyone but everyone has to trust somebody.
-A World War II noir story in the City of Gods. Corrupt divinities smoking hooka pipes and denying refugees safe passage through the city. Godblooded femme fatales, sticking it to the man. G-men from Heaven, making shadowplays behind the scenes. Nazi Thorns soldiers patrolling the streets after curfew. Seedy dive bars and underground piano lounges act as the hideouts of rebels and rugged individualists of a golden generation willing to make a change in an age that has no time for prayers.
I've always wanted to run a film noire heartbreaker set in Great Forks. For No Time for Prayers I would want to limit PCs to be Heroic Mortals, minor Gods and Godblooded. If there is a general outcry to play actual Exalts I will allow Dragonblooded, but I thought it could be fun to explore the lower tiers of the power scale for this one. '
Dark Secrets
I will be accepting Heroic Mortals, Godbloods, Faebloods, Daemonbloods and Ghostbloods. Tapeworm pitched a half-caste in the original game, and I will make an exception to that rule if he still wants to play in the game. In addition to a starting level character, I want each player to PM me a Dark Secret. This can be something incriminating or defaming from the character's background. At the start of play, each character will know one other player's Dark Secret. This is to create a level of paranoia and tension, not necessarily to create irreconcilable inter-party problems. Use these Dark Secrets responsibly to create interesting situations and scenes, not to screw the other players over.
I also want a quick pitch of what kind of jobs you see your character carrying out for Roual. This should be a paragraph or two, and will be the basis for an additional background points set up by me the GM, to represent your ties into the War Refugee Board, which has been appointed to Roual by the Ministers of Great Forks.
Roual and the War Refugee Board
Roual is a civil engineer who lost his wife to the battle of Mishaka and his son to a wasting disease. He is an elder man who dresses in somber, well worn robes. Messy silver-gray hair, ears studded with nondescript jewels, and angry, sad, wounded blue eyes.
Roual has been recruited by the Minister of Other Matters to lead the War Refugee Board, a secret commission appointed by the Talespinner himself. The mission of the War Refugee Board is to secure refugees through the City without intervention by the pro-Thorns agenda.
One of the first steps for Roual was to place spies within the bureaucracy of the Minister of Diplomacy. This was to covertly speed up the process of acquiring proper documentation, and planting fake reference documents to help in the falsifying of papers. A few of Roual's spies have recently been placed on supervision after some dubious behavior in the offices, and so the leader of the War Refugee Board has called for his spies to slow down with the busy work and merely keeping an ear out for him.
Another much more decisive move by Roual has been to purchase slaves, and tobacco and qat fields. Its one thing that the WRB now has dummy locations to send their refugees to where they can hide out and then flee onward into the Hundred Kingdoms. More importantly, Roual has realized that it is a hell of a lot easier to ship slaves as property rather than obtaining proper documentation for refugees. The WRB has been establishing lines to the Guild to further this line of thinking, and is also about to expand its operations.
The Ministry of Other Matters
This Ministry has a thankless job. The Ministry of Other Matters is technically set up as a tie-breaker/catch all Ministry but in reality it has become the a re-occurring scapegoat that gets thrown to the sharks whenever something unexpected goes wrong in the City. The current Minister, Vandereth Senzak for example, only gained his seat after the battle of Mishaka was blamed on his predecessor.
This risky expansion in operations by the War Refugee Board will be in the care of the players at the start of the campaign, and it is also your characters first real test as Roual's trusted inner circle. You've done some good work for him in the past, but things are about to get crazy, and dire times call for dire measures.
I am looking for ties into the War Refugee Board for your PCs. Either you can have a shared history with Roual, or even Vandereth Senzak. Another possibility for a maximum of one character would be that you have been chosen by the Talespinner himself to represent him on the Board. You don't necessarily have to know anyone in particular to be accepted onto the Board either. You can have gained your position through hard, earnest work.
