Unless you want spoilers on your current game, Jhiaxus, don't read further.
...................................................................................bbbbb
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb............................... .................bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbbbbb............................. .................................................bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb............................................... ...............................bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb............. ......................................................................................... .......bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb............. ......................................................................................... ............................................
Jhiaxus in my game is about to marry Tessa, a verser, a former worker on the Ship of Worlds, and a botanist in one of its Doorway Teams which explored alternate realities. They are about to do this in a world where about thirty versers are pretending to the local populace to be gods. The locals are poor in magic being modernists, and poor in psi also, despite having high universe biases in both. The local political situation is that the North is controlled by the Irish Imperium, a decent society, and the South by the Mandarin Republic, which while not as decent, still is not a true horror like the Communists. The local time is 1973.
J is pretending to be Odin, and Tessa is pretending to be Freya, and his drow buddy Siljonic is pretending to be Loki.
The versers thirty include the following:
1. Fluffy aka the Doom of Tadeusz aka the Wonder Bunny aka Cyberbunny
2. The frat boys from Gamma Tau Phi from the U at Toronto in a timeline where macho Canadians scare the dickens out of the Soviet Russians. These frat boys are not the best representatives of their civilization. They've managed to destroy three civs so far playing their game of 'I'm a god', and one survived because the locals assasinated them.
3. The Three Furies
a. Psi Grandmistress Lisabeth Collins. She's scary good at what she does. Multiple 3@ expert.
b. The Unnamed One, a powerful and ambitious sorceress. Creepy. Uses True Name magic among other types.
c. Jack-b-Quik is a Street Sam from NeoTokyo.
4. Roger the Sword. He's got plastic muscles, a fair hand with a pencil sketch, and a sailboat he's taken to a dozen worlds. He spends most of his time at sea. He's passively accepted this 'god game'.
5. The Gardener. He has gardened in seven worlds in the last more than a thousand years. His current garden is only twenty years old, and he's hoping it will really begin to produce in the next twenty. 3@8 Gardenning. He tends to find a powerful local noble, etc., and garden. Most nobles are quite happy to get the best tasting tomatoes they've ever dreamed of eating in exchange for a few acres of land and protection. He's nice in a distant and uninvolved way. "I learned a long time ago, I can't fixt the world, but I can make it nicer with a good pumpkin."
6. Aprhrodite was Miss World in one universe, and she got 'given to the gods'. Now, with bioscuplt she's even more lovely in look. But she's starting to get tired of being the playmate of 'a bunch of frat idiots' and looking forward to finding herself a nice stellar empire she can become sole goddess of...like Aphrodite-Kali of the Federation or something.
7. Bellerophon's quest to find his tormentor is a very large part of why there are so many versers in this world. He's buried under Utah, and goes by the nick of Kronos.
The thing is, all of these people, and others are going to want to come to this wedding. Add in the Imperial Governors of 'America' and 'Europe' and 'Russia' and so forth, plus at least a royal prince of the Irish Imperium, and Mandy dignitaries.
For the versers, its a wedding among their kind. For the locals, its the gods Odin and Freya getting married.
All of a sudden, everyone who is important in the world lands in Reykavik. Some are scheming against each other. A few want Revolution Now! of varying kinds.
Tessa is probably at some point going to freak,and run away.
Imagine Princess Diana and Prince Charles' wedding attended by a bunch of people with superpowers.
Now, any ideas to make it unpleas....I mean interesting for Jhiaxus?
edited for formatting--MJY
Ask him seemingly innocuous questions about wedding planning (minor details about timing or seating, or indoor or outdoor, or whatnot) and use what he gives you to generate the problems. No matter what happens, this is likely to be a disaster, but it's more fun if he can look back through the thread archive and see how it's all his fault.
(Also, one approach is to make the wedding itself go smoothly, but for all of the seeds of the player's and/or the universe's destruction to be sown during this event - that is, nothing bad happens to disrupt the wedding, but every bad thing that happens for the next ten years can be traced back to something that happened at the wedding. If you've read Neil Gaiman's Sandman, think Morpheus and the key to Hell.)
I'll see about going for the first because I doubt he's going to be in this world ten years of gametime from now.
Thanks.
Any more?
Add Lilandra, Gamemastah, and/or the Queen of the World (all jolly good friends of his from his previous Worldwalker worlds) to the guest list, and you'll have more unpleas....I mean interesting possibilities to choose from than you'll know what to do with... :p
To take a step back, hasn't Adam already introduced a potential disaster here? He's in Iceland, in a Nordic empire, posing as a Norse Aesir god planning to marry a Norse Vanir goddess, and someone must know that Odin is married to Frigga.
Obviously, the versers don't care--they're all in on the secret that none of them are who they pretend to be--but this could upset the mortals, and if it comes out of this that the gods aren't the gods, that's got to be bad for the versers.
--M. J. Young
So Frigga is different than Freya? Interesting. And also already married...might cause some fast-talking.
Lilandra could. Gamemastah is an evil deity. The Queen...hmmm....
Indeed, I believe Frigga, like Odin, is Aesir, and Frey and Freya are Vanir--they're not in the same family of gods, as it were. Loki is Odin's son by Frigga, which makes him Aesir. But I'm out of my depth already, relying mostly on AD&D's Deities & Demigods book for details.... (My wife was just commenting last night that Ed and I are both so well versed in the minutiae of that game.)
--M. J. Young
In the mythology (as I understand it), Loki is half-god, half-giant; he's Odin's "blood-brother," and thus Aesir, but I don't believe they are blood related.
The rest of MJ's AD&D-derived intel is Wikipedia-confirmed.