Suicide is Painless
I normally don’t talk about my house game here, but on my personal journal. Indigo uses a heavily hacked version of Adventure! set on a Dyson Sphere. The protagonists are posthuman members of the Fleet Syndicate: the exploration branch of an anarcho-syndicalist culture heavily influenced by mid-21st Century South Asia (as explored in its prequel, a cyberpunk-genre homebrew). It’s a sandbox game where I emphasize the characters’ freedom not only on the metagame level, but in the world. Ships are even run as collectives where people can come and go as they please. They’re free to fail too – fail utterly. They’ve done it before.
Tonight’s game was special enough to bring to Mobunited.com because it ended in a peculiar triumph: Four of the five PCs committed suicide, and the fifth was murdered due the the machinations of one of those suicides.
It was a matter of principle, you see. The characters were on a mission to either steal or suppress force field technology that belonged to their culture’s rival, the hypercapitalist Universal States. Tough job; the research lab was in an Exthreat Facility, designed to contain experiments that might draw the ire of the Transapient AIs who built the Sphere. The facility was a tetraneutron bottle suspended by virtual particle switching, which made it indestructible and in emergencies, collapsible, whereupon it would release lethal radiation and sink into the Sphere medium.
Our heroes wanted to avoid the deathtrap and steal its data from an overhead dirigible that contained hard storage of the US’ research. They bluffed their way in but were eventually forced to kill a number of surgically engineered warrior “debtors” (the US underclass) and officer-interns, until a chase speckled with brain/network hacking got their asses lasered and stunned.
I woke them up on the USS Manifest Destiny, an local enemy destroyer under the supervision of intelligence officers. Their enhancements were gone and their “brane” neural implants had been hacked to hit them with epileptic seizures if they tried anything violent. Their host Major Yamazaki told them their ship had been captured and that unless they answered her questions now (before their thoughts were converted to data – not an easy thing to do fast in this setting) she’d kill 10 of the crew (a lie – the Antipodean was safely hidden underwater).
Now I expected the PCs to hatch an escape plan by using their common culture and wits, or shift things forward to leave them on a prison colony in US territory, able to escape (or lead a revolt) and deal with the reshaped politics that came about due to their actions.
Instead, they chose to die. They viewed the situation as an abomination, against everything they stood for, and three of the five believed that any future duplicates would be them, even if they were out of date, memory-wise. One more believed she’d die, but her double would be “good enough” for the cause of total liberty.
Let me emphasize one thing: This wasn’t their reluctant last choice. They started killing each other after about three minutes of discussion, and were happy to do it. And another: It wasn’t a fit of pique, an expression of anger on the meta-game level.
Steve’s character Buck thought that was bull, but he didn’t interfere as Kearsley’s Mikhail, our anarcho-Kirk, rapidly broke three of his comrades’ necks and stomped on their skulls to ensure data recovery would be impossible, even as he shuddered through an oncoming seizure. Major Yamazaki ran in with guards and dragged the three bodies away (Sita, Aviva, Anton – the medic, XO and helm, respectively) in a futile attempt to suck some information out.
Yamazaki was going to salute Mikhail for his iron will, but Mikhail and Buck mocked her (a good thing – it was her gambit to get them to calm down, stun them while making them think she was killing them, and just suck the data out) but they mocked her and with the last of his strength, Mikhail threw her across the room. The insults cut so deep she put the brig in private mode and vaporized them.
They won. Holy fuck.
See, I had a certain vision about their culture and values, but I was gloriously wrong – I couldn’t have been right, because I set up an atmosphere where individuality was sacred and bound in a common hatred of bondage. They saw the debtors. They didn’t want that. After the session they talked to me about influenced ranging from historical anarchism to the Ramayana and were supremely satisfied with their decisions, from giving their necks to barehanded death to the sarcastic barbs they hurled at Yamazaki, where they disarmed even the notion of dignified last words.
Their successors – clones with out of date memories, half-compiled from public records and spun into a fragile algorithm of consciousness – are ordinary crew now, their own legal heirs, preparing as the Antipodean joins the Fifth Battle Collective to answer for the decisions of their forebears.
Freedom. Grim, incredible freedom.
We’re taking a break, watching a movie next week. Then Star Wars to lighten things up, while I figure out how we can possibly top what happened tonight.
You’re lucky to play with people who are able to be so productive with absolute freedom. It’s comparable to throwing a handful of sand into the air hand having it come down as a pair of dice showing sevens. I suppose that unity might be partly thanks to extensive group discussion on theme/setting/shared imagination space, except that you admit to not having been on the same page as them.
To say nothing of the decisions you made as to what kinds of intents were achievable: they were able to dictate the actions of their jailer with cutting words alone! That’s obviously not something explicitly permitted in the Adventure ruleset. You’ve talked on your blog about soak and stats and all, but I’d love to hear more about the modifications you use to seek this feeling of “freedom.”
You’re lucky to play with people who are able to be so productive with absolute freedom.I suppose that unity might be partly thanks to extensive group discussion on theme/setting/shared imagination space, except that you admit to not having been on the same page as them.
It’s not really luck. It’s developing our craft to a certain point and accepting the bumpy ride that got us there. This is something most groups could accomplish and many do.
Explicit consent and boundaries would have destroyed the veracity of the scene. It would have been a trite act under a model of explicit agreement.
To say nothing of the decisions you made as to what kinds of intents were achievable: they were able to dictate the actions of their jailer with cutting words alone! That’s obviously not something explicitly permitted in the Adventure ruleset. You’ve talked on your blog about soak and stats and all, but I’d love to hear more about the modifications you use to seek this feeling of “freedom.”
I roleplayed her.
To reply to this from a player perspective, seeing as I’ve gushed to numerous people about this in the past day (it got easier once I could send an URL)
Note here that a few details were consciously and deliberately changed in the telling.
The skull-crushing was a detail added in after the fact to reflect character knowledge of the world and the fact that the character was deliberately trying to do this to the best of his ability (inspiration and willpower were spent on killing Sita and Anton.)
Mechanics discussions, though brief, were excised in retelling as well, for the sake of narrative.
So, basically, this is how I recall the last minutes of their lives. Some details are fudged, and a few statements are reduced from 3-4 lines to 1. But, on a whole, I think it accurately reflects the pace, the immediacy and the finality.
After narrative, there was a list of post-game statements to sum up mood of stunned amazement, horror and shock.
What I was thinking, at that moment, as motivation for Mikhail, was how advocates of the philosophy of the Propaganda of the Deed, which, well, FTPD says we are, went to their deaths willingly, as death is an act of propaganda, and it is possible to win via one’s own death.
Hi. I played Buck, the fifth who was vaporized for being smug and mean to the shocked Yamazaki. Malcolm was twitching during this scene, I think because he was shocked at our actions and all of us were sunk deep in gallows humour at the time, a little shocked at our characters’ actions too. There was no system for how Malcolm played the NPC. She just freaked out and did what we lured her to do. In fact, when she looked horrified around the room at the carnage that Mikhail had wreaked before succumbing to a seizure, I helpfully suggested that she go into private mode so she would stop broadcasting the horrifying images to the rest of the crew of the Manifest Destiny. We made no rolls past the various combat maneuvers and since my character was a passive observer to all of that, I didn’t roll a die.
In my honest opinion, situations like that need to be handled honestly and without contrived “random” elements like rolls to keep your composure, etc. Malcolm handled it superbly and it’s a game session that we’ll be morbidly chuckling about for years.
Inspirational, thank you for sharing.
Hey all… I’m the aforementioned helm officer. My logic was simple, they would never let Anton fly again. Having clipped wings was worse than death, at least the clone would get to have the pleasure of the only thing that seemed to give Anton a feeling of worth and satisfaction.
Just made sense. Freedom or death.
And I’m the med officer from that scene. Given that my character derived heavily form the Indian-derived background of the world concept, it made sense to her to die, as it would facilitate reincarnation, and becoming a slave was horrific to every sensibility she had.
I think this was one of the best scenes I have ever roleplayed.. so very many kudos to Malcolm for seeing it through to its conclusion!