Image source.

Looks like my nascent Psi Wars campaign has gathered attention from the highest of circles, by which I mean Mailanka himself is following the game. So hey, no pressure.

I only noticed the above post today, since I was a bit behind on my RSS reading. It contains a very detailed summary of my recruitment/character creation thread, with links to relevant posts and an analysis of some of my campaign decisions. That’s a better summary than I could have written myself, so go read it! I’ll use this post to provide some additional context on my decisions.

First of all, a small nitpick: It’s “Bira’s Octopus Carnival” :). Bliss Authority was indeed the one who had the idea for a Psi Wars game on the RPG.net forums, but the blog is mine. It’s all good, though! Let’s move on to the good stuff:

On Communion

Mailanka comments about my stated view that True Communion is good, and Broken and Dark Communion are bad. Indeed, I know that things were meant to be more ambiguous than that in the Psi Wars text, but this is my first time actually using the material! I wanted to keep things simple both for myself and for any players who weren’t familiar with Psi Wars as its own thing.

So, for this specific campaign, I adopted a stance more closely aligned with that of Star Wars itself. A game more focused on exploring Communion would certainly benefit from the more neutral view.

There was also the more practical reason that it looked like we were headed towards a party which included followers of conflicting Paths, and I wanted to avoid that in the first game. This ended up not happening, as no one spent points in Communion to start. Jatuu the former gladiator might still end up going either True or Dark in the future, if the game lasts long enough.

Robots and Cyborgs

I denied lordmcdeath’s wish to play “a robot who pretends he’s a cyborg” for a couple of reasons, the main one being that I wanted to limit the amount of template surgery in this particular game. There are no ready-made racial templates for PC-level robots, and while something could be arranged by taking the base Android template and tweaking it into a usable racial template, the ensuing discussion would have added more time to the already lengthy play-by-forum character creation process. Reality Glitch’s character had already gone through an extensive round of such discussion, and they ended up leaving the game.

Mailanka’s discussion on whether it’s thematically appropriate to have robots pass themselves off as organic is another reason why I disallowed it for this game - it’s not a theme I wanted to focus on.

That said, I might end up working on a “playable robot” racial template to post here in Octopus Carnival, possibly even with an “organic disguise” lens. Just because I’m not focusing on that in my current campaign doesn’t mean I don’t like the concept!

In Closing…

I’m very happy to see this game has been noticed by the setting’s author and I hope I don’t disappoint in my execution :). If you’re interested in following the game as it happens, the out-of-character thread is here and the in-character thread is here.

Next up: Golko himself!