Tech Infantry Season Eight: The Middle Kingdom

[Big Brother]

For those that don't know, this sub-forum is for my own pet fanfic project. It's not a HP fanfic, although I once toyed with the idea of having one sequence take place on a "Mt. Dumbledore" on the planet Avalon. It's a fanfic that's also an RPG that's also a PBEM game...well, it's hard to explain.

Perhaps the easiest way would be to show you the stories we've got so far:

www.geocities.com/tictionary/results/results.html

Chop everything after the "/" before the first "results" in that URL for the main page of my Tech Infantry site.

I had a much longer post written, but trying to also carry on an AIM chat with our own Lorpius Prime (also a player in the TI game), I bumped the backspace key or somesuch when the cursor wasn't in this gtext window, and I lost the whole darn thing. Ugggh. I'll recreate it at some point, but it's almost 3am here and even I need to sleep sometime.

Let's see if I can sum up a bit more quickly:

"Tech Infantry" is a futuristic spin-off of the popular "World of Darkness" line of tabletop RPG's from White Wolf Publishing. The World of Darkness includes the games "Vampire: The Masquerade", "Werewolf: The Apocalypse", and "Mage: The Ascension", as well as a couple others about Wraiths and Changelings and Gargoyles and such, but the Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf ones are the real biggies. "Tech Infantry" takes these fantasy RPG's and cross-fertillizes them with the Robert A. Heinlein novel "Starship Troopers" to create a fun (but odd) cross between fantasy and sci-fi. Think of werewolves in power armor fighting large insectoid aliens. Throw in liberal amounts of Babylon 5 and other Sci-Fi mishmash for flavoring, and you've got Tech Infantry. (The name comes from the Technocracy, a subset of Mages, who founded the Technocracy Infantry to fight the alien Bugs after a suprise Bug invasion of Brazil in 2001, which at the time we first thought this up was still a couple years in the future).

This is the 8th "season" of the game. The game is organized a bit like a TV show: Each handful of intenet-play orders/results cycles or one multi-hour evening of tabletop play is considered one "episode", and each semester of play at college (or several months play online) is one "season". This is the second season to be played online, the other six seasons were played in college, or shortly post-college at the home of one of the game's original creators, "Bax".

We've just finished the first "episode" of this particular season. This season is subtitled "The Middle Kingdom" because the many planets of human-settled space have been conquered by the Eastern Bloc, a small empire of a few planets settled by colonists from Eastern Asia back on Earth. With all the core human worlds now in the hands of the Eastern Bloc, the Emperor of the Eastern Bloc has declared himself Emperor of a new state, the Middle Kingdom. Several of the players control characters who seem determined to overthrow the Middle Kingdom and either take it over themselves, or somehow restore the former Earth Federation government (whose downfall in a bloody civil war was chronicled in the last play-by-email game). Meanwhile, the alien worlds of the Jurvain, the K'Nes Tor, and the Horadrim on the fringes of human space are eager to crush the upstart humans once and for all, and the insectoid Bugs threaten to invade yet again as well.

Anyone interested in playing, send me an email, and I'll put you in touch with Marcus, the Storyteller for this season of Tech Infantry.

[Lorpius Prime]

I couldn't elaborate on what BB said if I wanted to, I just play out a Han Solo fantasy and name the episodes.

Fun game though.

[Big Brother]

Um, Lorpy, maybe you should leave the fantasizing about Han Solo to the female members of this board. Seeing as you and I are the only males registered so far.

Which hopefully will help dispel the myth that all sci-fi/fantasy fans are males. Most of us still live with our parents, indeed, but we're not ALL males. ;D

[Lorpius Prime]

Bah, you know perfectly well what I mean. At least I didn't name my character "Icarus".

[Big Brother]

Like most of my characters, "Icarus Hicks" is a literary allusion. To a poem, no less.

ICARUS
by Edward Field

Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
Drowned, but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.
That nice Mr. Hicks the neighbors called him,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake: What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.

He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And now dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,
Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.

It's all there. Being declared dead, the cops ignoring the odder aspects of the case, the years after a fall spent in quiet ignominy in suburban oblivion, the basement workshop...

Meanwhile, your character is named after one of your LEGO action figures.

[Lorpius Prime]

Big said:

Meanwhile, your character is named after one of your LEGO action figures.

Come, Mart, you can do better than that. Trying to cover up the obvious lameness of your name pick. All my LEGO men simply work for my character, whose name I spent the better part of 2 days trying to invent. And at least James Welthammer will spell his German curses correctly.

btw, I may not be home, but I've found a suitable computer terminal for my needs, so I'm watching you this turn.