In a previous article I introduced the concept for his series, in which I will consider books I have read and how to adapt them for use in games. The first of these books has fallen into place somewhat randomly, as it was the book I had just finished reading when the idea was presented. I do not expect future installments to be any more orderly.
The book was originally published as Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, one of several books the author has written in her science fiction universe. The copy I have is bound with a later title in the same series, the Hugo Award-winning Barrayar, under the collective title Cordelia’s Honor, which continues the story for the characters. This analysis will address the first book as a stand-alone.
The challenge with this book is it is very much about the relationship between the protagonist and another major character, officers in the space fleets of two planets not exactly at war with each other but definitely on opposing sides of a conflict. Circumstances force them together and they fall in love with each other, and the book shifts from the clash of enemy alien cultures akin to Enemy Mine to the star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, ultimately resolving with their marriage. All this, though, is against a backdrop of political infighting and interplanetary war, which is where the external story lies. The question is how to get the player character involved, and given the peculiarities of the story it would be extraordinarily difficult to replace either of the major characters with the player character. There is, however, another way.
To get there, we need to establish the major events on a timeline.
The timeline begins with the fact that the government of Barrayar is planning an assault on Escobar, and in preparation for that they have stashed a supply cache on a planet that happens to be near several jump points to other planetary systems. The government of Beta is unaware of the Barrayaran presence on the planet, and sends a scientific survey team to scout it and begin the process of cataloguing its life forms and features. The Betan mission, under the leadership of Commander Cordelia Naismith, is camped on the planet.
Their presence as a survey team poses a threat to the intended surprise attack by the Barrayarans, and so a ship commanded by Captain Aral Vorkosigan has the job of eliminating the intruders by whatever means will prevent word of the Barrayaran presence from reaching Escobar. Captain Vorkosigan leads a force to attack the Betans on the ground. Unfortunately for him, certain factions see this as the perfect opportunity to execute a long-intended mutiny, stun and kill the captain and abandon his on the planet’s surface, framing the Betans.
It seems that the Betan survey teams are equipped only with stunners. The Barrayarans have much more powerful weapons, but if they wish to get away with the mutiny they can’t use their weapons against their own captain, in case a later inquiry finds his body.
At the moment of the attack, Commander Naismith is out of camp with her geologist Dubauer on a survey. Her first officer manages to draw fire to give the rest of the team time to board their ship and launch. She hears the ruckus and rushes back to camp, too late to see the fight or join her crew, but she finds her first officer killed by nerve disruptor and gets a message to her second officer that he is to rush back home and report what happened–her ship can outrun but not outfight the Barrayarans. She then sees a Barrayaran soldier, Sargeant Bothari, who fires a nerve disrupter at her. Her geologist pushes her out of the way down a ravine, taking the shot himself but knocking her unconscious.
Bothari, who is a bit of a sociopath, was instructed to disembowel Vorkosigan to make it look like Betan work, but Vorkosigan is not only a captain and a former admiral, he is also a member of one of the noble houses of Barrayar. Bothari would not lift his hand against the man without better cause. Thus Aral Vorkosigan was stranded, but not executed.
Naismith awakens to find herself stranded with her severely injured geologist and the captain of the Barrayaran ship, who has all the weapons. The camp has been reduced to slag; they are lucky to get any rations at all from the stores (they get a case of each of dehydrated oatmeal and bleu cheese salad dressing). Captain Vorkosigan suggests that their only hope is to make the trek across the wilderness to what he calls a supply cache his people have on the planet, and he expects to take her as his prisoner but knows that he is going to have to work with her to get there. She agrees to give her parole (that is, her promise not to attempt to escape) on the two conditions, first that they take her wounded geologist with them, and second that she be permitted first to bury her dead first officer.
They cover about forty kilometers per day for five days, and are at one point attacked by carnivores. Along the way they bond. Reaching the supply depot, Vorkosigan takes command, arrests those whom he believes to be complicitous in the mutiny, and retakes his own ship. Koudelka appears here as the guard Vorkosigan can trust. Securing the cache, which is much more a full-scale fleet depot, they then return to the ship.
He asks her to marry him before they leave the planet, but gives her time to think about it; she doesn’t answer at this point.
It is significant that at one point Bothari is assigned to guard and protect Naismith. She treats him well, and he responds well to her treatment.
There are additional complications on the ship, in which Vorkosigan’s crew is still dealing with mutineers who have control of engineering and Naismith’s crew have managed surreptitiously to dock and board in a rescue effort. Naismith manages formally to withdraw her parole, cleverly to defeat the mutineers to return full control of the Barrayaran ship to Vorkosigan, and surprisingly to escape with her crew. End, part one.
Part two begins when the Barrayarans attack Escobar. Now Commodore Aral Vorkosigan is not in charge of the attack, but has been given the position of organizing any necessary retreat. Now Captain Cordelia Naismith is commander of a decoy ship, a small craft that has a top secret image projector that will cause enemy ships to detect and see a much larger battle cruiser nearby. Her job is to come through the jump gate and lure the enemy after her so that Betan transport ships can deliver new equipment to the Escobar fleet, the plasma mirror field that reflects Barrayaran energy weapon attacks to hit their own ships.
There is a significant layer of political intrigue at this point. Prince Serg Vorbarra’s father, the Barrayaran Emperor Ezar Vorbarra, has recognized that his son is not fit to lead the empire, and has determined that Serg and the war-hungry Admiral Vorhalas must be eliminated. The purpose of the war from the Emperor’s point of view is to get these two men killed, leaving his grandson as heir to the throne; once that happens, Vorkosigan is supposed to return the fleet to base. Before all of this happens, however, Cordelia Naismith’s ship is captured, and she is held prisoner.
Vorkosigan does not know this. Vice-Admiral Vorrutyer is a sick pervert who regularly tortures and rapes female prisoners, and unaware of her identity he has her brought to his quarters. He begins his torture by commanding his lackey to rape her; but the lackey is Bothari, and he recognizes her as Vorkosigan’s woman, who treated him well previously. He thus refuses to harm her, and when Vorrutyer decides to assault her himself, Bothari executes him. Vorkosigan arrives seconds later, figures out what happened, protects both Bothari and Naismith and reports the unexplained attack. The ship is being searched, and Vorkosigan is under house arrest pending investigation, but the war continues and the Emperor’s plan works effectively, putting Vorkosigan in charge. Naismith is moved to the brig and returned to Beta via Escobar in a prisoner exchange. At first she is hailed as the hero who executed Vorrutyer and defeated the butcher Vorkosigan, and when she objects that they have everything wrong she is subjected to treatment to counter the brainwashing to which she was supposedly subjected. She manages to escape and get to Barrayar, where she finally marries now Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, retired. In the denoument, Vorkosigan is pressed by the Emperor into agreeing to act as regent for the four-year-old prince who will inherit the throne upon his imminent death, making Naismith Lady Cordelia Vorkosigan.
That’s the outline. There are many side stories, including infants in artificial uterine devices (one of whom is Bothari’s), injury to Koudelka, the interaction of several other key characters, the fauna of the unnamed planet on which the story starts, all of which would require attention; I recommend that anyone intending to run this story read the book and have a copy handy for reference. On the other hand, the plot just outlined may be sufficient to run something like the story for a verser.
The obvious starting point is that the verser will arrive on Vorkosigan’s ship shortly before the attack on the Betan exploratory team. He will land in a secluded area moments before two men enter to discuss their planned mutiny. Bothari should not be one of them, but they might mention their intent to order him to do the actual killing, one probably assuring the other that the sociopathic Bothari is reliable because he enjoys killing.
This puts the verser in a position of being a stowaway with information valuable to the captain. It is unlikely to change anything, really. If he contacts the captain, the captain will probably put him in the brig for safekeeping and lead the ground operation anyway; he has the awkward position that he can’t arrest senior officers for plotting a mutiny based on the word of a stowaway, but if he attempts to catch them in the act they may succeed all the same. He can’t really take the stowaway with him, because on the one hand he can’t be certain the stowaway is not part of the plot, and on the other hand if the stowaway is present on the ground he makes too good a scapegoat for the mutineers to ignore. Once the mutiny is successful, he will be questioned by first officer and acting captain Korabik Gottyan and political officer Radnov, attempting to learn which planetary government managed to smuggle him aboard and how it was done. They might attempt to use a powerful truth drug to obtain the information from him, but his answers will undoubtedly confuse them. When Vorkosigan returns, he will release the verser and question him in a more civilized fashion, and probably offer him a job.
If the verser is caught by the consipritors before he reaches the captain leaves the ship, they might decide to use him as a scapegoat. The plan would be to kill the captain and frame the verser for the murder. This seriously disrupts the story if it happens, but the captain is quite aware of the danger of mutiny and who is likely to be involved, so he will not be unprotected at any time. It would be a very messy assassination, since they will have to deliver the verser to the scene before investigations begin, and kill any witnesses who could contradict their story.
If the verser hides on the ship through the events of the landing, he will have to stay hidden for a long time, at least until Cordelia’s rescue if he can find a way to escape with her crew, or possibly longer. If at some point he escapes to one of the planets, the referee will have to play it by ear from there.
The alternate entry point is on the planet itself, probably setting his arrival at the point at which both Vorkosigan and Naismith are unconscious, the camp has been reduced to slag, and both landing parties have left. The verser will have to explain himself somehow, as both captains would realize this was not a member of either crew (if only because he is out of uniform), but an extra hand on the journey would be welcome, and he could attach himself to either of the main characters if they all get through alive. This requires more detailed information about the indigenous life of the planet, but makes more of the book’s adventure useful. The interactions of the third character, though, will have to be carefully considered, as it is unlikely that Vorkosigan will be able completely to disarm the typical verser (we tend to carry some surprising weapons), particularly if the verser is already conscious when he revives. On the other hand, if the verser arrives unconcious, Vorkosigan probably will have seen him arrive (stage one unconsciousness is brief), and will want an explanation for that sudden materialization.
In general, the plot tells you what will happen if the verser does not impact the story. To the degree that the verser becomes involved, he derails aspects of it. His direct involvement can be tracked by skill and attribute checks; his indirect involvement falls to general effects rolls. The story reforms to the degree that he changes it, but remains the same where he does not.
The tech bias is clearly a high 14@, with interstellar travel a commonplace technology but no evidence of interdimensional work. Although there are some unusual creatures on the first planet, nothing is outside the norm for earth normal body. There is no evidence of psionics or magic in the book, but a low level high intensity bias in either or both of these would give the player character some options to make him exceptional, particularly if his tech and bod skills are not extraordinary.
Overall, tying the verser to Vorkosigan is the best play. Naismith is the center of the action in the books, but her movements would prevent an unexplained outsider from tagging along. Vorkosigan is in a position to name his own staff, and if the verser gets his approval he will remain connected to the story well into the next book.
The next book is a different problem, for a different article.
