Mad Max: Fury Road is a masterpiece of Australian cinema, that makes the rare achievement of building on its predecessors in the series to bring post-apocalyptic film-making to what must, surely, be its apotheosis. Visually stunning, with a brilliant sound-track, incredible pace, and a simple joy in hedonistic old-school road wars violence that is deeply infectious, this movie immerses you in its insane world from the very beginning and doesn’t let you escape until the credits roll. It is thorough in its vision of a grim, wartorn post-apocalyptic wasteland, unrelenting in pursuit of heady, dizzying action and absolutely frantic. But beneath its simple patina of gorgeous landscapes, sweeping chases and exciting stunts, it is also a movie of many layers, combining an uproarious vision of a freakshow post-apocalyptic death cult with a powerful homage to Australia’s alternative and bush culture, and a subtle nod to an eco-feminist critique of the societies that are driving to their own destruction. This is one of those movies that you can appreciate for its visual splendour and action sequences, but also that you can enjoy for its crazed Aussie clowncar humour, and contemplate afterwards in the light of its ecological and feminist politics. This, in my opinion, is the perfect balance of themes for a post-apocalyptic movie. It doesn’t make the mistake of unrelenting hopelessness that characterizes some movies like The Road; it doesn’t dull you to sleep with the empty spaces and silences of an empty world, like The Last Man on Earth or Legend; and it offers something more uplifting than the empty survivalism or post-human cynicism of much of the zombie survival genre. Through the post-apocalyptic setting it offers both excitement, gore and social critique, all couched in such a spirit of over-the-top, raucous and invigorating fun that surely only a zombie couldn’t help but at least slide into the scene and get that rev-head spirit going.
The introductory scenes of the movie leave us with a bewildering array of visions of craziness and freakish people that are confusing and overwhelming, as the scenes of Max’s capture are played through the tunnels and byways of what looks like a massive underground punk/skinhead garage. It will be some time before we figure out what’s happening to him or why, but before we do we’re given a sumptuous feast of the sick, the freakish and the mad as we watch the elite of the citadel lording it over their filthy crazed masses. This 10 minutes is like Peter Greenaway on speed, without purpose or sense, but then we hit the open road and get a few minutes to start putting it all in place – oh, that‘s why the women are being milked, that‘s why the freaks are running the circus, those women are running away from him! Then the trouble starts again and we’re back into chaos, but with a few sentences of expository dialogue (finally!) and the dawning realization of the trouble Max is in, and all of it set against a backdrop of classic 1990s Aussie sub-cultural monuments: the punk styling, the rev-heads worshipping V8 with their elaborate steering wheels, the skinhead warboys who’re whiter than Aryan and go all chrome and shiny to die on the Fury Road … In a couple of minutes of frantic action we’re shown an ecosystem, the skeleton of an apocalyptic death cult, and an entire aesthetic to go with it. Then the chase starts and we’re still absorbing it as Mad Max is roaring (or, more accurately, being roared) onto the Fury Road, which in this world is basically anywhere wheels can turn. But the freakshow doesn’t subside – just when you think you’ve seen it all, come to terms finally with the internally consistent madness of it all, new craziness pops into the scene, and tears up the desert with more chaos, and then makes sense again. What you see on the trailer – some dude in a harness with a flame-throwing guitar, a gigantic dude with oxygen tanks, that scary dude with the mask – that seems so over the top and stupid, it all makes its own brand of crazy sense before you’re even twenty minutes in, and you haven’t even met the object of all this craziness, or even the worst of it all yet. Then when it’s all said and done and you’re reading the credits and seeing who these people were – the Doof Warrior, Rictus Erectus, the Organic Mechanic, Nuks the Warboy – you realize you still didn’t get all of it because nobody told you their full name but every detail of their names is a homage to Aussie subcultures, especially the doof scene but also punk, hardcore and all the tattered, dreadlocked, bullet-studded chaos of the 1980s and 1990s underground. Here it is, flying out of your cinema screen in one last glorious death rattle of insanity, road-rage and revhead joy.
Beneath this infectious ecstasy of the open road the main characters are laying out an ecofeminist thesis. The basis of the story is a group of women – called the Wives – who are apparently genetically perfect (and very beautiful!) fleeing from their tyrannical husband Imortan Joe, with the help of his best road warrior, a one-armed woman called Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron). Joe hopes to have healthy babies by these women, and keeps them locked up for his use until he can get a male heir to rule after he is gone. But they don’t want to be things, so they leave, and his warboys have to chase them. This is a pretty basic feminist plot, made stronger by a couple of narrative devices. First of all, the alleged hero of the show gets fridged at the very beginning – as in literally, nearly – and only gets drawn into the story by accident. He manages to fight his way to Furiosa’s side but his role in the story is just luck, he was meant to be just another thing back at the citadel and it’s pretty clear first, at least, that Furiosa isn’t particularly comfortable with the idea of bringing him along. He’s the passenger for much of the first quarter of this movie, and the chicks are driving the car. Then, these women are not helpless – they are agents of their own destiny, and act with all the tools, strengths and wiles at their disposal to make their getaway. They don’t know how to fight and they aren’t strong (and one is about to give birth) but they don’t let any of that stop them doing all they can to take charge of their situation. These women are also the expositors of the film’s ecofeminist thesis, using their few moments of dialogue (no one in this movie wastes breath speaking!) to drop a few choice eco-feminist koans. The crux of it all comes when one of the Wives is trying to push Warboy Nuks out of the truck, and they are arguing about whether she is one of the citadel’s folk or not. Nuks says that he is not to blame, but she demurs, and yells “Then who killed the world!?” before tossing him overboard. At another point one of the women is credited with calling bullets “anti-seeds”: you plant one and watch something die. These are classic tropes of eco-feminist thought, being delivered by strong women whose presence on the screen is inextricably tied to their femininity and their fertility, and a war being fought to control their powers of birth, that are so precious on this planet that (the implication is) was blighted by men like Imortan Joe. They don’t stand up to expound on a manifesto or to make demands or philosophical claims but every time these girls speak they say something linked to an eco-feminist creed. Even the first time we meet them, one of them is cutting off a chastity belt with teeth built into it, freeing herself of patriarchal sexual shackles, and the perverse vagina dentata fears that the patriarchy brings with them.
I must confess I love it when a good movie works an ideology into its very bones, but does it so well that even though you know it’s there you just get sucked along with it anyway. I have no care for Mal’s simplistic libertarianism in Serenity but I did love watching him righteously defend it; I can’t stand the authoritarian violent message underlying 300, or the way it elided Spartan slave-holding and paedophilia, but I loved watching those men fighting for their worthless cause. When a movie saturates itself with an ideology but does it so well that you either don’t notice or don’t care, or – best of all – everything makes sense in the context of that ideology, that is when you know a movie is well crafted. And Mad Max: Fury Road has carried this off brilliantly, with the rollicking plot and the rollercoaster of stunts and enemies and explosions and madness carrying you all the way to the eco-feminist oasis – and back again.
With this movie I think George Miller has drawn together a few ideas he was playing with in the first three Mad Max movies, but wasn’t quite able to pull off. We see hints of a feminist agenda in Beyond Thunderdome, with the powerful Aunty Entity running the town and trying to use Max as a pawn in her schemes. We see here too the role of oases and lost places as signs of hope, but in Fury Road Miller has been able to better combine them with the narrative of judgment on those who brought the world down that he played with in Mad Max 2. The whole thing is also carried off with a remarkable creative continuity: the names, the punk styles, the language of speech have a certain similarity to them, as do the baroque car designs and the hard scrabble economics of theft and hyper-violent rent-seeking. Even the actors are in some cases the same: Imortan Joe is Toecutter from Mad Max 1. This is a full campaign world Miller has created over the past 30 years, leavening it over time with better production values and now a much stronger environmental message, and maturing some other themes (like the role of power-mongers), but that campaign world has been remarkably consistent across all that time.
For all of these reasons, Mad Max: Fury Road was a movie well worth waiting 30 years for. Later this year Star Wars 7 will come out, and we have to hope that there, too, we will finally see continuity with the original legend after 30 years of lost chances. I am not holding my breath on that, but I can assure you, dear reader(s), that Mad Max: Fury Road is something special, and will redeem this year of cinema – and possibly this decade – no matter what happens at christmas. Watch it, and ride eternal, shiny and chrome!
Addendum
If you’re into post-apocalyptic road trip fiction, please consider reading my novella Collapse Vignettes: Road Trip, which is available free at Royal Road.
When last we met our heroes they were in Research 003, trying to decide how to handle negotiations with this strangely cooperative and peaceful arctic society. At first the PCs were unwilling to share too much detail with Connor about the purpose of their mission, but after a few days in the comfort of Research 003 they could find little reason to hold out on him. Their limited exploration of the research base suggested that if they really needed to they could probably take it – most of the resents were clearly incapable of serious combat, and for much of the day mostly outside, and they could relatively easily take on the people who did show any semblance of military skill. However, their hosts seemed remarkably unconcerned by security, which worried our heroes inordinately, and they also realised that, knowing nothing of the harsh environment here, there would be little chance of survival here if they had to flee – or even cross the ice back to the Vladimir Putin – without help from locals. Furthermore, they soon realised that the ice was huge, with many communities scattered across it, and they would never find the Ziggurat if they had to search it all themselves – and why should they when they had such amenable hosts to help them?
So they asked. On the third day they told Connor the situation, and asked if he or his allies knew anything about the Ziggurat. They described it in detail, carefully eliding some of the more salient information about the riches it held, and asked Connor if he knew anything of such a community? He did not, and nor did anyone else in his community. For a few hours he contacted other communities by radio to ask, but none of them knew of such a place. However, the westernmost of the known communities, a frozen-in ship called the Oiler, had experienced occasional raids over the past 30 years by barbarians who came from the west, primarily hunting for people to abduct. They only came in summer, and they must be coming from far away on some kind of reliable conveyance, because it was beyond the Oiler’s resources to track them back to their origins. Most raids were not successful, but on occasion the barbarians had carried off a small number of prisoners, to no one knew what fate. The Oiler lacked the combat experience to take them on effectively, or the resources to adequately pursue them. Perhaps these were the residents of the lost Ziggurat? It seemed likely: the Oiler had itself been trapped in ice some 50 years ago after drifting up from the old Atlantic, and since then the ice pack had expanded, and could have captured the ziggurat further to the west.
The Oiler was west of Research 003, perhaps a week’s travel, and perhaps another couple of hundred kilometres from the western edge of the ice. No group was planning to travel there from Research 003 for at least another week, and from the Oiler it would be impossible to head west over the ice, as the Oiler would not be able to spare equipment and guides for such a task. However, there was another way to find the Ziggurat. If raiders were coming from the west they must be near to the sea at that edge, and so it seemed the simplest way to find them was to travel around the pack ice to its edge directly west of the Oiler, and search for the Ziggurat there. Either the Ziggurat, or some fishing base attached to it, must be there, for there was no possibility a large community could sustain itself in the ice without access to the sea.
The characters decided to head back to the Vladimir Putin and take this course west. Before they left they made a trade agreement with Connor: they would return next summer with a squad of workers from the Gyre, along with supplies for them, and they would work here during the summer, returning to the Gyre when the freeze began. In exchange Research 003 would share some of its bounty with them: soil, glass and batteries from its stores for starters, and seal oil and skins. They took some samples with them when they left, including a polar bear skin to present to Dilver as a rug, and with the rise of the sun the next morning began the return journey to the Vladimir Putin, accompanied by two guides from the research base.
The Outpost
After they returned to the Vladimir Putin they set off west, skirting the worst of the ice pack and heading as fast as they could to the place they thought they might expect to find the Ziggurat or one of its outposts. It took them over a week to reach the area, and another week of careful scouting with airborne drones, but eventually Quark was able to identify what they were looking for: columns of smoke rising above the ice near its edge. They took the Vladimir Putin to a location near but out of sight of the shore, and let slip their submarine. Taking all their marines with them, crammed into the hold, they set off for the ice pack’s edge. When they were close to it they rose to within a safe distance of the surface and Ryan slipped out, rising up to the edge of the ice to investigate the outpost.
It was a typical fishing and seal-hunting base, similar to the outpost Research 003 was maintaining. Two small fishing boats, perhaps converted from the lifeboats of a larger vessel, were resting against the pack ice. Nearby a couple of large drums were being used to render seal fat, and it was the smoke from their fires that Quark had seen from his drone, rising high into the still air of this cold, clear day. A couple of rough igloos had been built further back on the ice, and amongst them sat some rundown snow-mobiles, including a very large one that looked like it was used for transporting goods.
The camp itself seemed to be occupied by three distinct groups of people. There were some people getting into one fishing boat who looked cowed, beaten and exhausted; they were sitting at placements for oars, and as Ryan watched someone standing behind them on the boat started hitting them with a stick. Two more men got in the front of the boat and a few more of the poor, tired-looking folks pushed it away from the shore, obviously heading off on another fishing expedition. On the shore, some men tending to the fires appeared to be in this middle class of weary but unbeaten workers; one broke off from the fires to approach the men who had pushed the boat out and begin beating them with a stick. The whole thing was overlooked by a group of armed men, carrying whalebone crossbows and savage-looking clubs, who might be some sort of guards or soldiers. Everyone looked tired and angry, and everyone was working very hard. Their clothing was rough and savage compared to that of the folk from Research 003, and it appeared to be made of different materials, with more fur and less sealskin. These men were all smaller than the people of Research 003, who had been large muscly – these people, bar one or two soldiers, were short and looked like they must be lean. They also did not look as comfortable either in the cold or with each other, and it certainly appeared as if some of them were slaves of the rest.
Ryan had seen enough. He slipped below the waves and descended to the submarine. This time he had timed it poorly, and by the time he was back inside he was shaking and in shock from the cold. As he recovered, they planned their attack. First they would take the boat, surfacing the submarine beneath it to overturn it and capturing the crew. Once they had the crew and knew what they were facing, they would make a plan as to how to attack the camp.
They found the boat and tipped it. The submarine rose perfectly out of the frozen waters, emerging beneath the converted lifeboat’s keel and tipping it into the water. Ryan was riding the deck of the submarine and was able to slip into the water as the boat tipped, watching as people fell out. One man – the one who had been beating the slaves – sank like a stone, probably wearing iron armour, a trail of bubbles drifting up behind him as he screamed his last, panicked curses to the darkness. The other two were able to swim for the surface, though slowly, but the slaves, Ryan realized, were chained to the seats of the boat and would drown unless freed. He saw that the boat had trapped a pocket of air that the slaves were not aware of, so he rushed up beneath the boat and pushed them, one by one, up into the air pocket. As he did this one of the free-swimming men emerged from the water near the submarine, and Crimson offered him the end of his spear, telling him he could live. The man grabbed the spear and dragged Crimson for the water, so now Crimson was forced to let it go. Leviathan, at the conning tower, fired at this man and killed him. The other man emerged, a marine shot but missed him, and realising he was in trouble he dived and tried to swim under the submarine. Crimson, the marine and Leviathan were shooting the other man in the water like a floundering whale, so Ryan finished saving the slaves and then set off after the remaining man under the submarine. Using his drone he soon caught the man, stabbing him in the leg with a spear and then using the embedded spear to drag the man, struggling, back to the ship. By the time they got him on the deck of the submarine he was nearly dead but they soon revived him and asked him about his fellows.
They turned the boat back over to rescue the slaves, and everyone returned to the Vladimir Putin to make plans. The non-slave they had captured declared that he was “a Freeman” and would not be bullied, but the slaves soon explained everything. Yes, they came from the Ziggurat, yes they were slaves. Their society consists of slaves, freemen, warriors, experts and the leaders, and they were here as slaves to help the freemen with fishing. There were 12 warriors at the fishing base, about 20 freemen and 15 slaves, and the warriors were led by a man called Everard. There were no communication devices, all messages would be taken back to the Ziggurat with the next fish transport, due in a day or two. Attacking the base would be easy – they simply needed to wade in.
They left the slaves with the freeman at the Vladimir Putin, and prepared a two-pronged attack. Quark and Leviathan took a squad of marines in the submarine to land a little distance from the base on the icepack and crossed overland to attack from the rear, while Ryan and Crimson took the fishing boat and four marines directly to the front, assuming that their use of the fishing boat would confuse anyone who saw them.
Their assumption was correct, and the raid passed off without any serious problems. Everard and six warriors were sleeping when they attacked, and although they managed to join battle they were too late and ineffectual, and the fight was soon over with the loss of just one marine to concerted crossbow fire. During the fight Ryan distinguished himself by killing a freeman who was beating the slaves, and by handing Everard over to them for execution – by flensing – when the battle was done. This gift of their greatest oppressor ennobled Ryan in their eyes, and they each presented him with a handful of Everard’s still-warm fat, prostrating themselves before the rider, and declaring him to be the Stormwarden. From this the PCs saw their way into the Ziggurat opened, and they began to make plans …
Taking the Ziggurat
Speaking with the slaves, they soon learnt the layout and structure of the Ziggurat. In summer most of its workers and warriors would be outside, the freemen and slaves labouring over farms dug into the snow and the warriors beating them. A few of the leaders and their guards would remain inside the Ziggurat, but not so many. The slaves would go inside and begin unloading their transport of fish, but if they arrived at night they would be essentially unsupervised. The PCs could leave the transport at the base of the ziggurat and explore the outside, then slip inside at night and come to the slave quarters. From there they would be able to learn the layout of the ziggurat, and take it. By the slaves’ estimate there were about 36 slaves, 120 freemen, 45 warriors, 25 experts (who ran the reactor and other specialist functions) and then the leadership: Old Prime the leader, his warrior chief Gunnard, three warrior captains called Fist, Stone and Salt, and the slave master Rack. These men would all be gathered in the leaders’ area, except Rack who slept near the slave quarters. During daylight 30 or so of the warriors would be outside, but it would be harder to approach.
They also discovered that the entire ziggurat society was held together by a strange religion of the storm, led by a priest called Pyro, which held that the ziggurat was the only bulwark against a worldwide storm, and anything except complete obeisance to the gods of the storm would lead to the destruction of the ziggurat and all of humanity, of which they were the last sane remnant. Anyone who didn’t believe in the storm gods and the ultimate power of pyro over them was doomed to die, and become a slave. It was through these religious teachings that the strict hierarchy was enforced. Unfortunately for the leaders of the ziggurat, Ryan had been pronounced storm warden …
The PCs decided to go in at night and explore before the raid. They left in the snowmobile, the slaves dragging it across the ice as they always did. The journey took two days, and when it was done the slaves were exhausted but jubilant. They rested out of sight of the ziggurat and headed in after the sun sank below the horizon. The slaves dragged the snowmobile through fields of snow and ice that had been cut into big farms. Pits had been dug into the ground in great arc around the ziggurat, and covered in glass. Cables snaked between the pits, carrying warm water from the reactor, and between each set of farms a small igloo had been built to house the freemen who would till the farms in the morning. The slaves who would do most of the hard work had been returned to their quarters, but the freemen would sleep in the igloos until dawn, when they would rouse early and return their digging and tending. The slopes of the ziggurat itself were not covered in snow, like the landscape around it, but steamed with warmth, and seemed to be encrusted with lichen. Scraggly goats hopped over the steps, grazing on the lichen, and bright lamps stood on poles above the slopes, lighting them up with a surprising brilliance. The Ziggurat glowed in the dark plains of ice like a wedge of hospital-lamp sodium brilliance.
You know you want to cast someone down here
The snowmobile slide between the farms and up to the ziggurat itself, stopping at the base of a huge ice ramp that had been built on the north face. This ice ramp led up to the ramparts far above, where two guards stood lazily watching over their sleeping landscape. Here the PCs jumped down from the transport crate and slipped into the shadows beneath the ziggurat, to scout the outside. The slaves resumed hauling, dragging their load of fish and seal fat up the ice slope to the waiting guards.
The PCs explored around the base of the ziggurat. They saw old, rusting cranes standing on the north side, and on the south side another ice ramp. In the shadows of the ice ramp were three large boats that had been converted into snowmobiles. They were resting on the snow on huge wooden skis, and had masts that obviously were used to propel them across the ice. Ryan crawled up into one, followed by Leviathan, and found inside three small snowmobiles, a machine gun on the bow and a locked room at the rear. Quark broke the lock and they slipped inside, finding a cabinet filled with ammunition. They couldn’t pick the lock of the cabinet but Crimson was able to force the door, and they pulled out grenades, a grenade launcher, carbines and ammunition for the machine gun. They took the machine gun, slipped back out, and headed off to the slave quarters.
It was easy to slip inside. Guards had only been placed on the ice ramps, because their main purpose was controlling the slaves, not seeking strangers. Anyone approaching the Ziggurat would be seen from kilometres away during the day by guards and pickets, and no one expected anyone to approach with the help of the slaves, so no guards were set on the east or west slopes, away from the ice ramps. The characters climbed the slopes of the ziggurat and slipped into the nearest door once they passed the parapet, taking the direction they knew would take them to the slave quarters. Even the slave quarters were unlocked – where could the slaves go, and what could they hope to achieve? – so the PCs simply slipped inside. Here they made their plans.
The slaves told them that there was a soldiers’ barracks on each corner of the ziggurat, and the experts slept above them, near the top of the ziggurat, unarmed and protected only by a few guards. The leaders were far away, on the opposite side of the ziggurat, but likely one of either Fist, Stone or Salt were awake and on duty. Rack was just down the hall, in his quarters, which were always locked. There were cameras on some hallways but “the spirits of the cameras have left, and the experts cannot bring them back.” This place, clearly, had lost any ability to renew itself.
They decided to pay a visit on the slave master, Rack. They took the slaves with them and gave them simple instructions: once they had dealt with Rack the slaves were to take any weapon they could find, run up the stairs to the experts’ quarters and kill them all. Without his experts, Old Prime would be lost and unable to control the place, and even if they lost in battle the PCs might be able to negotiate on that basis. They dispatched Captain Azel with one team of marines to the furthest corner of the ziggurat to deal with the soldiers there, and another team of four to the other corner. Azel took the machine gun with him, while Quark carried the grenade launcher.
They knocked on Rack’s door, expecting him to answer, but nothing happened. After a moment of waiting, from far away, they heard the sound of a siren, a powerful electronic buzzer, springing to life: obviously Rack had realised what was going on and did not want to open his door. The PCs told the slaves to go to the experts, fast, and cleared away from the door. Quark fired a grenade right at it, blowing the door in, and they charged into the room. Rack was there, but he was unarmoured and couldn’t put up much struggle – he went down almost immediately. In the corner of his room they saw a screen with a cctv camera pointed at his own door. Obviously he still could speak with the spirits of the camera …
The PCs now knew that trouble would be coming to them. They charged down the hall towards the nearest barracks, and before they arrived they could see that the soldiers had gathered outside, and were listening to someone talking. As they ran, Quark fired a grenade from his launcher straight into the assembled ranks, and Leviathan threw another. Crimson and Ryan charged in, and they found Stone there, injured but rallying his troops. Combat was short but brutal, with a few crossbows fired and one bolt hitting Crimson but no serious damage done. During the battle Ryan and Quark both invoked “Storm” when they killed someone, although Ryan isn’t very good at languages and got it wrong, yelling “Slut” instead. They took down Stone, but as they finished him off they heard more soldiers coming. Leviathan and Quark hurled and threw grenades down the hall, killing the first two ranks of men – Quark’s grenade hit one man full in the chest and redecorated a portion of the corridor – and then battle was joined as the remainder hit the room. They prevailed in this battle, but as they were fighting Quark heard the sounds of people coming down stairs from above. Guessing it might be Fist and Salt, he alerted the others and took a position near the stairs. While they fought behind him, he fired a grenade into the stairwell, doing serious damage to both of the warriors as they came down. Ryan slid stealthily up to the stairwell and Crimson charged in, and Leviathan finished off the soldiers behind them. Somewhere far away they could hear the roar of the machine gun in the ziggurat’s corridors. Fist and Salt surged out of the stairway to take on the group, but as they came Ryan stuck a spear in one, and Crimson smashed down the other. They died, and in truth no one amongst the group knew which was which. Nor did they care.
It seemed the battle had been done. After a short while Azel and his marines came running up, to report that all soldiers were dead and no marines lost. The second marine squad had gone up above and pinned down the remains of the leadership – Gunnard was dead and Old Prime was holed up with his priest, Pyro, on the ramparts.
At the ramparts they found Pyro and Old Prime hidden behind some steel cabinets in a room facing off with the four marines. The 36 slaves were gathered behind the marines, holding various precious items belonging to the experts and jeering the leader and his priest. The area around the ziggurat was in uproar, with freemen running around on the ground unable to understand what was going on, and no one coming down to tell them. Old Prime was broadcasting something over the public address system but they didn’t have time to check with their linguist, who had managed to stay out of the way during all the fighting and had conducted herself with all the aplomb they had been warned to expect of her when they had been given her by Dilver. They marched forward, Quark pointing his (empty) grenade launcher at the cabinets, and Pyro the high priest emerged slowly, looking terrified. As he came forward Ryan stepped out amongst the slaves and told him “Bow down before the stormwarden,” translated in a booming voice by their linguist. Pyro looked back briefly at Old Prime, who was shaking his head furiously, but then he looked at that (empty) grenade launcher, and bowed down before Ryan.
As the marines stormed Old Prime’s position, Ryan dragged Pyro to the ramparts of the ziggurat, the slaves following and crowding around him just below the ramparts, in full view of the freemen below. Ryan held Pyro up by his priestly robes and in his biggest voice, he yelled
“I am the stormwarden! See what happens when false prophets go against the will of the storm!”
and threw Pyro to the slaves, while the linguist translated. The slaves tore Pyro apart with their bare hands, throwing pieces of him down the steps of the ziggurat. The marines dragged Old Prime away to a secure spot, and the freemen cowered.
The ziggurat was theirs.
Aftermath
They enlisted the freemen to help them loot the ziggurat, and carried all that they could across the pack ice to the Vladimir Putin. It took time, and they were there for most of the summer, but during this time Ryan cemented his role as the stormwarden, dispensing judgment and wrath amongst the freemen. By the end of summer, when they left, the society of the ziggurat had changed irrevocably: they had formed trade relations with the communities of the ice pack, had given up on their slaving ways, and were terrified of the future. When the PCs left Ryan told them: I will come back in the spring, and if you have survived this winter of wrath I will rule you.
They returned to the Gyre by winter, and Dilver met them at Pier 18, Arashi by his side. He was pleased with all their reports, though disappointed in them for not freeing the ziggurat from the 10m thick ice in which it was held fast. He agreed to the trade mission with the other communities of the ice pack, and also agreed to Ryan’s unusual request to be allowed to return to the ziggurat the following spring as stormwarden. “Has the Gyre not been good to you?” he asked, as he watched Ryan hugging Arashi desperately. “Why would you want this time away?” But he granted the request. “Of course you can take Arashi with you,” he said, “we will arrange a way to carry him there in the Vladimir Putin – why, I even have a big metal tub I don’t need, that you can use!”
For a couple of seasons Ryan spent spring and summer in the arctic, returning with the Vladimir Putin in autumn, but the appeal soon wore off. Not only were the responsibilities of storm warden exhausting, but he could only ride with Arashi in the arctic sea occasionally, and when he did the rides were short due to the cold. He also had to keep a constant eye out for Orcas, which love sea lion fat, and after one particularly vicious encounter he decided the tropics might be better. He abandoned his converts, and returned to the sun. Here he was given his promised home in the Arc, and put in charge of a squad of riders who would play a key role in the raising of the arc that he and his fellows had made possible in their first adventure. Unfortunately Quark, Leviathan and Crimson’s mistakes during a mission to the Himalayan Kingdoms made the raising of the arc a much more complex job than it should have been, and they all had to show exceptional bravery during that breathtakingly chaotic mission. But that is a tale for another day …
Summary of events
For the faint-hearted:
The PCs found out about a community of raiders west of Research 003
They went there, found a fishing base set up by this community, Ryan spied on them, and they ambushed a boat
From the boat they caught some slaves, who told them about a community of slaves, freemen, warriors, experts and leaders
They attacked the fishing base and freed more slaves, learnt that this fishing base was the outpost of a community that was definitely their ziggurat
The slaves believed that Ryan was some kind of religious redeemer, the stormwarden; the ziggurat community is held together by a religion of storms
Using the information from the slaves they infiltrated the ziggurat
They ambushed the slave master (kind of) and killed him, then all the ziggurat’s soldiers
Ryan used his position as stormwarden to overthrow the ziggurat’s priest and take control
At the end of the last Flood adventure the PCs had met a small squad of traders at the edge of the sea ice, and were stunned to discover that the people they were dealing with were vastly more civilized and trusting than the typical piratical thugs they experienced in the tropics. The next session would be the tale of their attempts to find the Ziggurat and discharge their mission, while also understanding what was happening up here. Unfortunately Ryan’s player is leaving Japan soon to live overseas, so I wanted to finish this adventure before that player left – given the threat hanging over Ryan’s head it would be disappointing to finish the adventure without Ryan’s rather essential input – so to move things along ready for the adventure I ran a short downtime (on Facebook chat, as we always do). The downtime wasn’t really a downtime as such, more of a brief description of the major information they need to know to understand the world before the session. This post describes the salient points of that downtime, and is essentially how I imagine the arctic might play a crucial role in the world of the Flood.
Having met Richard, the captain of a coast guard vessel that seems to be trading diesel – diesel! – to other communities in the arctic, the characters have established that there is a larger community called Research 003, built in an old semi-submersible arctic research base, that might be the best place for them. A squad from Research 003 will be meeting Richard at the edge of the pack ice, a few days’ journey seaward from the base, in about a week, and he invites the PCs to travel there and meet them. He gives them coordinates and suggests they go by submarine – so trusting! The downtime was primarily occupied with their journey to this base. The coast guard vessel needs to wind its way through the sea ice, but the PCs can go by submarine below the ice, faster and safer, so they decide to head there first and investigate the It starts below.
——
You head off to the icepack. You travel underwater but things are a lot scarier than you expected – you are worried about some large iceberg hitting your submarine, which is not ice-strengthened at all, and although your sonar seems to be good enough you aren’t convinced. Quark has managed to jury-rig a camera, connected to the battery of one of your underwater drones, but it’s operating on a remote connection and you have battery fears, so its pictures are patchy and you can’t have it on all the time, so when your sonar worries you you turn it on and the bow lights, and peer through the murk of plankton to try and see what looming shadow in the dark might tear you apart and send you down to the lightless, frozen depths. Those of you not responsible for driving the ship and running the camera – ie everyone except Quark and Leviathan – crouch near the conning tower or the forward sea lion bay, hoping you might be able to get to the surface and cling to whatever ‘berg wrecked you before the cold takes you down. It’s a vain hope you know, but fortunately you don’t need to depend on it- you make it to the Vladimir Putin successfully.
Of course, surfacing is its own exercise in undersea delights. You have no camera to look up and your sonar is confused by Vladimir’s overawing bulk, so you can’t tell if you’re going to bang into an iceberg as you rise into the sunlit zone. To solve this problem, Ryan is sent out with a hammer, and sits on the deck of the sub close to where he knows Leviathan will be, holding a light in one hand and tapping on the hull – very gently – with the hammer to signal all clear, left or right. He watches as his bubbles drift gently up into the distant sunlight, slowly getting colder and colder through his dry suit, wondering if perhaps planning has not been done sufficiently …
You make it to the surface. Recharge at the Vladimir Putin, whose rusting expanse you have never been happier to see. Then you repeat the whole nail-biting experience for another few hours, as you sail the submarine close to the icepack.
This time you don’t surface, but go up to 20 m below the surface and send out Ryan on his undersea Arashi-substitute. He rises easily to the surface and breaks through a thin film of ice close to the coordinates. It is snowing on the surface and it must be near midnight (you have long since lost track of time) since the sun is near the horizon and the light is grim and grey. A thin film of ice – maybe 1cm thick – has formed on the surface and near the ice pack it has been pushed by wind and waves into slushy lumps, amongst which it is easy for Ryan to hide. He realizes maybe it’s a good thing that he didn’t bring Arashi, since he surfaced near three seals and they would probably attack Arashi if they saw him – but they ignore Ryan’s black wet-suited head. He can hear voices and smell a strange smell which, thanks to his efforts on Mount Arashi, he is now able to recognize as … diesel
Drifting around the edge of the ice, he sees a remarkable sight: a small fishing village. There are maybe 10 or 20 people with a couple of igloos set up some distance from the edge of the ice. They also have a small boat, from which they are unloading large fish. Near the shore, two of them are skinning and flensing a couple of seals. A way back from the shore between the igloos are a couple of snowmobiles (Ryan guesses this; you guys obviously know what such a thing is). The diesel smell comes from a small fire that is being used to render down seal fat. The men are talking cheerfully. In amongst them are two men with large rifles who stand looking out over the ice, but they seem to be taking turns at this task and not looking towards the sea. The ship is small – maybe 20m long – and has a harpoon on the front and a large gun, but it looks like a single shot grenade launcher or something similar, probably wouldn’t seriously harm the sub except on the surface at close range. None of them look warlike or dangerous. You have been sent to meet a fishing and trading delegation, which has enough rifles to cause you trouble but not enough to justify mounting an attack on you.
Ryan watches this as long as he can in the frozen water, then sinks back down to the sub. He manages to get back inside without incident and sits on the floor shaking with cold.
Since you don’t see any reason to hide, and you have an armed submarine, you surface it after a few hours. The men and women working at the beach are interested in your arrival but were obviously expecting you. One of them comes out to meet you in a small inflatable motor boat, that strange smell of diesel hanging around the engine as it guns up to you. He introduces himself as Connor, head of trade. You notice that like the other people you’ve seen so far, he’s physically larger than you, and sleek – you guess it helps to be fat around here. He’s wearing a kind of life jacket / heavy weather coat combination, carrying a vicious-looking knife at his waist and he has a rifle in the boat. He steps easily onto your submarine deck, shakes hands, and speaks with your linguist briefly. She’s getting the hang of their weird mix of “English” and “French” and “Russian,” and is able to understand most of what he says. He points out that leaving the submarine here for a week would be quite dangerous, as the ice near the pack moves around a lot and can freeze in a ship or crush it if left unattended. It might be better, he suggests, to return the sub to your mother ship and come back in something you can drag up onto the ice. When you reveal that you don’t have something of that kind, he suggests you come with him to the ice now and send the sub back to the Vladimir Putin – you don’t want it frozen in. That’s how many of their remote habitations are formed, he tells you – old ships that got frozen in.
You don’t have any other ideas so you follow his advice. At the shore he and a few people look askance at your trade samples, but he doesn’t ask any questions. You are shown inside a cozy igloo and left to your own devices for a while. The igloo looks pretty temporary but you are struck that it has real glass windows. Looking out of them you can see those snowmobiles, which have real tracks and skids and powerful-looking diesel engines. There are some larger ones with trailers that were out of sight before. No sign of heavy weapons.
Richard and his team arrive after another 18 hours, and spend the next 6 hours pumping what you guess is diesel from the hold of their ship into some waiting tanks that are connected to the larger snowmobiles. Men and women – all large, heavyset people – pile your samples onto some sleds, then everyone takes a rest for a few hours while the sun dips below the horizon. When it rises again – perhaps at 5am? – you are roused and offered seats in the cabs of the larger snowmobiles. Again, everyone is polite and friendly but it’s a worry to be separated from each other in the company of armed strangers, but again there is no choice – each snowmobile only has room for 2 or 3 people in the cab. Connor joins you, and you set off slowly over the ice, the snow falling gently around you as you slide off to the north.
You travel for about 8 hours non-stop, then the snowmobiles pull into a circle and everyone decamps, sets up tents and crashes. You sleep until you are woken by the sound of rifle shots. Surging out of your tent in a panic, you almost die of shock when you find a grizzled, blood-covered animal head facing you in the snow, its eyes staring blankly at you. It’s a white bear the size of a large shark, dead on the snow. Someone you don’t know apologises for waking you, says they weren’t expecting such a beast so far inland. The others are already setting about the grim task of butchering it. In the drifting snow and dim half light, lit by a couple of lamps, it’s a horrific scene, but they don’t seem to want to waste any of it. You go back to bed, unsettled, and when you wake in the morning even the blood from the butchery has been covered by fresh snow. The remains of the bear are packed in ice on one of the snowmobiles. You have never seen any mammal on land that is larger than a cat, and it’s shocking to think you are sharing this icy world with such a monstrosity. Are they going to eat it?
You travel for another 8 hours. The sun is again setting for its brief rest below the horizon when you arrive at a strange place. It is a field of shacks, just their roofs protruding from the ice, many of the roofs made of glass, laid out in a ring like fields in the ice. Between each of the shacks are fields of solar panels on little stilts, with pathways between them that you drive through. There aren’t a lot of shacks but there are a lot of solar panels. They’re arranged in a ring around a central fortress-like structure of grey steel and glass that rises out of the ice, perhaps 20m above the surrounding empty plain. A couple of red and green lights flicker on its roof, and welcoming orange glow is cast from its windows. A cold, constant wind is blowing loose snow across this strangely welcoming scene, and beyond the fortress and its furthest fields of solar panels there is a cluster of wind towers, surrounded by growths of ice like hills, turning majestically in that constant wind. They are barely visible in the gloom, but as the sun sinks behind the ice their huge, silent blades glow with its weak red light.
You are led inside the fortress-like place, which just as they said looks like it might once have been a research building. You sleep in a narrow room carved out of the ice and connected to an ice-fast outer door of the research building – it’s cold and damp but safe, and in the morning you have a small breakfast of fish, potato slices and more of that “coffee.” Then Connor comes to meet you, takes you on a quick tour, and finally introduces you to one of their “treasures.” You take tunnels carved in the ice through several turns, that lead you perhaps 30m away from the entrance to the fortress, and end in a heavy door. He opens the heavy door and you enter a warm, dimly lit room that is perhaps 40m long, 4m deep and 10m wide. The roof must protrude above the ice because it is made of steel and shaped ice like an igloo, but the base must be beneath the ice surface. The room contains five racks, each 2m high and 1m wide, and into each rack are slotted four identical square shapes. The four shapes neatly fit the width and height of the rack, and they are each about 10cm wide. There are thousands of these objects slotted carefully into the racks, stretching all the way to the back of the room and all connected to a single cable running along the floor in the middle. On the nearest of them you can see “TESLA” written in a fading, ageing script.
“Batteries,” Connor says, “four of them store enough to power a pre-flood home for a week. There are hundreds of thousands in the arctic. Maybe millions, we don’t know. They feed us in winter.”
And then he takes you back for more “coffee” and tells you a sad story of ingenuity, desperation and conflict that ended with a couple of thousand people eking out a precarious existence in scattered settlements across the polar ice.
Before the flood started consuming the world, global warming was the greatest threat facing the planet, and civilisation was forced to rapidly shift away from carbon-based fuels. They switched to solar, and to store it they developed batteries that could be installed in homes to store the daytime sun for evening. Most developed nations and a lot of poor nations had huge programs of rooftop solar power and batteries in place when the world started to flood. When the lowlands of europe and America began to flood, the governments of France, Denmark and the USA made a secret plan. They tore up homes that were threatened by the flood and moved the most valuable resources up and away from the waters, storing them on higher ground at first just to try not to lose so much material to the flood. But when they realised the flood wasn’t stopping they conceived of a grand plan to save the world’s resources. The growing oceans were absorbing much more carbon dioxide, and the collapse of arctic ice had been reversed, but now it was growing rapidly as the lands that used to impede its spread were submerged. The governments of these countries realised that in the future this might be the only solid land on earth, and was certainly the only stable land they could conceive of in the immediate future. So they moved all those batteries, solar panels, glass and copper wires to the arctic and stored them in caverns in the newly-thickening ice. As the situation in Europe and America became more desperate, people fleeing the floods were told the only way to get into refugee settlements on higher ground was to strip their homes and bring the key materials with them: batteries, solar panels, wiring, steel pans, garden soil, glass. This was all gathered together and shipped to the arctic, to be stored there until the water level stabilized.
When the governments realised that the waters were not going to stop until all the earth was consumed, they changed their plans: they began constructing settlements in the ice, which they would use as a base of operations and storage for post-flood communities. They kept the plans secret to prevent raiding and conflict, but unfortunately they kept their plans too secret – governments collapsed long before the end, and took knowledge of the plans with them. But the coast guard, and some arctic researchers, remembered, and as the world turned to cannibalism and piracy these people took their ships and families and friends and headed north. After a period of desperation and conflict they settled into roughly the pattern that they are in now. The batteries were linked together and the solar panels set up to be rolled out in summer and rolled away in winter. The batteries would charge up, and were laid out around settlements in their thousands and thousands. In summer they charged, and in winter they ran lights, heating and most of all hydroponic gardens – hundreds of square metres of gardens dug into the ice, growing potatoes, strawberries, cabbages and sometimes even oats and beans. In winter the communities settled in for the long night, living off fish and seal meat harvested in summer, and potatoes and strawberries grown in the hydroponic gardens. Then as soon as the sun rose, they ventured out, rolled out their solar panels, and began recharging. They also opened up gardens in the ice, heating them inside with a combination of greenhouse glass and solar power, and growing more food to prepare for the following winter. Every winter was a close call, because they always ran out of food near the end, and every summer was a season of furious work, but over 70 years no community had failed. In summer they traded with each other and worked together; in winter they settled into their dens and waited out the frozen dark.
“We have riches up here,” Connor told them. “There is glass, soil, copper, and so many batteries. But we are living hand to mouth for a simple reason. We don’t have enough people to expand our farms and panels in the summer, and so we can’t allow our population to grow because we can’t feed the new mouths. We’re working flat out to prepare for the next winter and maintain things as they are, we don’t have time to build new things. If we could just get a group of people up here for a summer, working for us and helping to build new farms, new battery stores, new solar setups; but if they then left before the winter came. A few seasons of that and maybe we could get the space we need to grow. But as it is we’re fighting entropy up here, with nowhere to go.”
He looks at you all. “We don’t need a lot of the stuff that’s been dumped up here, maybe you do. But maybe we can trade? You are here for trade … right?”
And that is where we will start the adventure tomorrow.
After the Vladimir Putin left the borders of the Gyre and was past the point of turning back, Ryan received a private message from Captain Dilver, which he took a little bit away from the other characters, where he could view it without disturbance. Yesterday we played out the final session of this mini-campaign, but before I write the report of that adventure, here is the content of the message Ryan received, as Ryan’s player was given it.
—
Message sender: Captain Dilver.
Status: Emergency
Contents: single view video message will delete after viewing.
[NOTE TO PLAYER: If Ryan decides to stop viewing the video halfway through, please screw up the paper and throw it away AT THE POINT where he decides to stop viewing. Be dramatic if this is your choice!]
There is a brief flicker and the video starts. It has sound, and a time stamp on the bottom left. It shows a sea lion floating in water, looking calm. For a moment you think it might be Arashi but then you see it doesn’t have the patch of darkened skin over one brow, it has a scar behind one ear, and it doesn’t have his eyes and flares its nostrils slightly differently.
The camera pans back to reveal that the sea lion is floating in a kind of huge metal tub, perhaps 10 times its size, filled with water up to about 2/3 of the way, with a cage around the top. Strange black metallic rings loop around the metal casing.
The sea lion is floating happily in the water. From out of camera someone throws it a fish, which it catches and eats comfortably. It floats about, showing that casual and uncaring abandon that sea lions have when they’re comfortable. Occasionally it looks at a particular point off camera, suggesting it recognises someone there.
Someone who sounds like Captain Dilver says “Okay” and after a moment the strange iron loops around the capsule begin to glow red. You hear a gasp off camera. The sea lion floats on, rolling onto its back, oblivious.
[1:10]: Apparently it’s a time lapse video. It flicks forward to 1:10. The sea lion is looking a little worried, because in the background someone is making a keening sound and yelling and begging: “This was my fault, don’t do this!” “He had nothing to do with it, let him go!” “You’re a monster Dilver, punish me not him!” followed by Dilver calmly saying “Oh don’t worry, I’ll punish you.”
[3:30]: Soft gasps in the background. The sea lion is floating still, looking worried at the sounds from the gallery.
[7:10]: The iron rings are still glowing bright red. The sea lion is starting to look a little agitated, moving around and sniffing the air and regularly diving to inspect the base of its bathtub. When it comes up it looks quizzically over at the gallery. At one point you hear scuffling, and a grunt of someone being hurt.
[10:10] The sea lion is starting to get really upset now. It is moving around in circles, gasping and splashing, trying to hold its fins above the water, barking occasionally. It has stopped paying attention to the gallery and is focused on its surroundings
[15:00] The sea lion is thrashing now. It tries to crawl out of the water but the sides of the bathtub are too steep. Every time it flops back in it whines and thrashes desperately, trying to look for a different way to escape. After about 10 seconds of video, it shits itself in the water.
[17:00] The sea lion is barking in distress. You can barely hear it though because someone in the gallery is yelling again, close to the camera. The water is starting to bubble, like water in a giant pot.
[18:00] The water is bubbling and heaving now, obviously near boiling. The sea lion is rolling around listlessly, barking and screaming in a way you’ve never heard such an animal scream. In the gallery someone is keening softly, and repeatedly begging Dilver to stop.
The video cuts away. It is replaced by a video of Captain Dilver, looking calmly at the camera. He speaks.
“Hello …” [looks down at a piece of paper] “… Ryan.”
After a moment the background flickers on to reveal a video of three men dragging the supine body of the boiled sea lion out of its tub. They proceed to cut it apart on the decking next to the tub, obviously not wanting to waste anything.
“Thanks for opening this message. Don’t worry, the video’s not Arashi, though I guess you knew that. It belongs – belonged – to another rider called …” [looks down at a piece of paper] “… Virago. He betrayed us. Badly. Rest assured he deserved what he had coming to him.”
“No doubt you think his sea lion was innocent.”
Behind him the sea lion in the video starts twitching. Evidently they didn’t boil it long enough. The guys call out, though you can’t hear them because this video has no sound. They scuffle, then run off. One comes back with a boat hook. After a few brutal seconds they manage to finally kill the poor beast, and resume slaughtering. Dilver keeps talking.
“Now, I have no reason to distrust you or your friends, Ryan, but I thought the same about this …” [looks at piece of paper] “… Virago … but still. You can see what happened. I am a careful man, Ryan.”
“I don’t know what you’re going to find up north, but there’s a very small chance you’ll find a functioning community. If that happens, it’s possible that you or some of your fellows may decide that mutiny is a good idea. Maybe you’ll see a chance at your own little kingdom, and decide to renounce the Gyre and stay up there.”
“I just want to make clear to you what will happen to Arashi if you do that.”
“And more importantly, I want to make it clear to you what will happen if you allow anyone else to betray the Gyre. Don’t let that happen, Ryan, for your sakes and Arashi’s. You’re on your own up there Ryan, but you can still be loyal to the Gyre even if everyone around you is planning something bad. In fact, Arashi expects you to.”
“But even though you’re alone, we’ve still got a bit of help for you. In cargo hold 7B, behind the water reclamation unit under a bunch of old tires, there’s a locked box containing a satellite relay unit. The key to that box has been hidden in your luggage. The relay unit contacts a satellite that passes over the arctic every two days, you can bounce a message to us from there. If you value your sea lion’s life, I would recommend you use that relay box if you think anything unusual is happening. We can send the Gunfather to help you. But don’t rely on the relay box. If people are starting to plan mutiny, I suggest you get to them first and … change their minds.”
“If this mission goes wrong, Ryan, because you let your colleagues let you down, then you won’t just be disappointing me, you will be disappointing Arashi too. And I think you have seen just how disappointed a sea lion can get. So don’t let me down, Ryan, and Arashi will be just fine.”
Rumour has it that the US Supreme Court will hand down its decision on Obamacare this month, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the health care system in the USA. Various supporters of Obamacare are either optimistic about the damage a decision to gut Obamacare will cause the Republicans, or pessimistic depending on how cynical they are about Republican motives. My personal opinion of Obamacare is that it is a vast improvement on the status quo, it is working to achieve its stated goals, and though it could be a lot better it is obviously an important reform to the health policy landscape in the USA that needs to be retained, so a decision to gut it by the Supreme Court would be a disaster for America. I also get the impression that a decision to gut Obamacare would have long-term negative consequences for the general political environment in the USA, since it sets a precedent in which a minor technical vagueness in a statute can be used to undo the statute even when everyone involved in framing, writing, debating, opposing and passing the statute was clearly aware of the plain meaning that the erroneous text supposedly makes unclear. This basically will lead to a long-term shift away from open political debate over policy to a process of Supreme Court gotchas, in which the opposition party finds some tiny detail in very large statutes that appears to be wrong, and uses the Supreme Court to smash them, and that doesn’t seem like a good governance outcome.
My guess [I won’t honour it with the word “prediction”] is that the Supreme Court will reject the plaintiffs’ case and keep Obamacare un-gutted, which leads to some interesting questions about the political situation as the presidential election nears:
Will Republican states start to break with the national leadership and the tea party, and start setting up exchanges and taking the Medicaid expansions? What implications will this have for national Republican policy?
Will the Republicans finally give up their opposition to this bill, accept that Obamacare is the law of the land, and start thinking about ways to contribute positively to health care policy?
If they don’t, will the Republicans continue to find sneaky administrative and states’ rights workarounds, or will they try to fight openly on the politics?
If they choose to fight openly on the politics, will they actually go to the 2016 presidential election on an explicit platform of repealing the law and taking away 6 million people’s insurance?
How will that work out for them?
My guess is that a failure to convince the Supreme Court that a single misplaced pronoun on page 666 is the devil in the detail will leave the Republicans politically stuffed. They have made their opposition to Obamacare very clear but they don’t have the spine to make an explicit declaration of intention to repeal, and they don’t have the policy knowhow to craft an alternative. If they did, they would be running that and getting lots of help from their right-wing media friends, rather than pulling shameless stunts in the Supreme Court.
But will a Supreme Court decision in favour of the plaintiffs, which basically destroys Obamacare, be a political disaster for them? There are many questions to ask about the fallout for the Republicans in that case:
Will the media spend months talking about the Republicans took away 6 million insurance policies? There was wall-to-wall coverage for months of Obama’s failed promise that noone would lose their plan – will we get the same coverage for the Republicans if they achieve exactly that outcome through a deliberate challenge?
Will the media blame the Supreme Court, the people who launched the case, the people who funded it, the Republicans who supported it, the people who drafted and passed the law, or Obama?
Will the Republicans bother to propose any solutions to the problems this decision would create, or will they literally just shrug and say it’s not their problem, as some expect them to?
Will the Republicans then bother to go to the election with any alternative healthcare plan? They clearly don’t have one and haven’t been putting any effort into trying to prepare one, so it seems unlikely.
Is there anything Obama can do in the current situation to fix the problem, even temporarily, through administrative means or will he have to go back to congress with a new bill?
Is there any way that the Republicans can support any attempt to fix the problem, or are they actually seriously planning to remove 6 million people’s health insurance and then just stand back and do a golf clap?
My guess for answers to these questions is in order no, Obama, no, no, no and no. The Republicans actually believe that the situation before Obamacare was a better policy outcome, and they want to go back to that. Even if they thought otherwise, they don’t have the ability to develop nuanced policy on anything as boring and non-warlike as healthcare, so they can’t provide any alternatives anyway. Legislatively they are a joke, at which nobody is laughing.
My guess is that the next election is going to be a showdown between Jeb Bush and Hilary Clinton, which is itself such a deep and shocking indictment of American “democracy” that it’s hard not to laugh. The Republicans are going to go that election forced to make some really outrageous statements about their health policy plans, already dragging the deadweight of their “latino problem,” and after a long and bruising primary campaign in which they embarrass themselves repeatedly. Hilary Clinton is very popular and will remain popular, and it’s going to be really really hard for the Republicans to beat her. If they lose the Supreme Court case, they’re going to be fighting against her against a backdrop of this threat to remove health insurance from 6 million people. Do they have any chance of winning in 2016 if Obamacare is still in place? And how much damage can they do to the country if they do win?
This is a level 7 cleric spell that does 10d10 damage per round (no save) to a single target. It also instantly grants the caster a profound insight into the psychology of everyone who witnessed the death of the target. After receiving this insight, the caster must make a save vs. death to avoid losing all respect for those whose mind she now knows.
[Warning: this post contains spoilers for both the TV show Game of Thrones and its associated books. Don’t read on if you haven’t yet got to season 5 episode 9]
So last night Stannis Baratheon did what any sane viewer of this show should expect him to do, both on character grounds (he’s a murderous arsehole) and metaplot grounds (George RR Martin is a murderous arsehole). But reading around the traps this morning it appears that a lot of people are shocked that Stannis – the man who killed his little brother with an abomination born through adultery to a psychopathic witch, and cut off his advisor’s fingers, and burnt Mance Rayder alive for shits and giggles – is willing to sacrifice his own daughter to the lord of light’s [insatiable] blood lust just when his entire life’s goal is going pear-shaped. Others are shocked that a show that threw a kid from a window in episode 1 – and allowed the incestuous arsehole who did it to redeem himself later! – and burnt two farmboys to death because of reasons, should somehow murder a noble child that everyone loves.
The Guardian has an excellent episode-by-episode blog of the show, with generally excellent above-the-line posts and great below-the-line banter, including by some dude who writes only in the voice of Stannis Baratheon. The blog writer, Sarah Hughes, declares that burning a child to death may be a step too far for her, in the same episode that we are shown another character paying to fuck a child and making it pretty clear that the child is going to be severely damaged by the affair (“you’ll have another one for me tomorrow,” he warns the brothel madam). This is not the first child we’ve seen burnt to death, or thrown from a window; it’s not the first barely-adult teenage girl we’ve seen murdered (though usually they’re raped first) and her fate is hardly special against the general backdrop of violence and murder in this show. What about that horrible little tete-a-tete north of the wall, where a bunch of men in black find a community in which a single man rapes all his daughters, murders their male children and raises the girls as sex slaves; and what do the crows do? They rebel against their leader so they can take the guy’s place. But burning some girl you were starting to like is a step too far? Lots of people in comments are complaining that this is outrage for the sake of it, suggesting that it’s just done to lure public attention or something (because the most pirated TV show in history really needs more press!) Have these people been watching the same show as me or is there some kind of politically correct, heavily pixelated version that Guardian readers can download? Because I can’t comprehend how anyone would be surprised that a man as cold, driven and vicious as Stannis Baratheon would burn his own daughter at the stake, or that burning a child at the stake is somehow a step further in any direction for this show. In response I can only think of that great Raul Julia line from Streetfighter: “For you it was the most important day of your life, but for me it was just … Tuesday.” This is not a show where a single extra dead child is going to tilt the scales. Especially when you consider that the week before everyone was singing the praises of a 20 minute long battle scene in which multitudes of children died and were reanimated, and one excellent character was attacked and murdered by undead children.
There’s an obvious class analysis to be had here: how is it that some rich, educated girl in a dress dies and we are all up in arms about it; but no one notices the way that Sansa was completely relieved and happy to learn that two boys burnt alive were not her brothers. They’re just two farmkids, irrelevant in the scheme of things, their deaths a hapless accident that brings her joy because it confirms her brothers (real people!) are still alive. And of course wildling children aren’t even human, right? By now we’ve all become so complicit in the vicious intrigues of the elite that we’re now thoroughly indoctrinated into their code of combat: only rich people matter, and though their lives are expendable they should only be expended for a purpose. To channel Drew’s dialectical ephemeralist for a moment, quoting the Falcon:
Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal.
In my opinion one of the great joys of this show is that it gets us complicit in the brutality and bloody-mindedness of the ruling elite that we should be despising, so that we even feel horror and indifference when they do. Sure, you burnt a few farmboys but I’m much more well-disposed towards you now I know they weren’t important; and sure, you raped and murdered a girl but rich boys will be boys, eh?
Which brings us to the obverse of this, which is the shock that many people on the ASOIAF reddit are apparently feeling that the show would lead Stannis to this bitter and barren path. I can’t read the reddit, because it contains spoilers (I tried and I think I just found out Jon Snow’s fate which is really annoying) but the word on the Guardian blog (and expressed by a few people directly there too) is that the reddit is up in arms about how the show “broke” Stannis’s character and goes against his character in the books. The latter argument is easily dismissed since apparently the show’s makers have revealed they got this little bbq party straight from George RR Martin; but the former is interesting. There are actually people out there who believe that it’s out of character for this murderous, devious, sinful man to kill his own daughter if it suits him – and worse still they don’t like him anymore. They’ve been led so deep into the psychology of the books that, I guess, they actually think his previous horror shows – the mass burnings, the satanic rituals, the fratricide, the prisoner-killing and the ruthlessness of his war tactics – are all signs of a good man. Presumably if he had just ordered all the guards on the picket tortured and hanged (which he did) and then held off burning his daughter everything would be a-okay … The truth, of course, is that there is nothing about Stannis’s conduct that is morally acceptable, and he is a deeply evil man. His daughter even said this, that picking sides was the reason for all the trouble in the first place and if everyone just stayed home none of this shit would hit the fan in the first place. I guess we’ll never find out where this logic would take her, since her dad decided to burn her alive in order to ensure the side he picked won.
It’s interesting that the readers of these books seem to be prone to picking up the psychology of the psychopathic ruling class to the extent that they can accept Stannis despite his many evil deeds; but they haven’t picked up the cosmology of the show that they can accept that the sacrifice of Shireen is obviously essential to the success of his mission (because of magic reasons). Because once you accept his religious fanaticism and the undoubted efficacy of his red witch’s powers, it’s obvious that when you’re in a bind you should burn whoever proves handy to her. It’s only morally beyond the pale for a man of Stannis’s sterling qualities if it’s useless, and it’s clearly not useless. But many people on the Guardian blog were protesting that it was senseless savagery, and many on the ASOIAF reddit appear to have the same view, and they can get behind a man who commits deeds too foul for words if they’re useful but they can’t accept a man who murders his own daughter because they think it’s useless. Is this ability to engage readers in the psychology of the books, but fail to bring them into the cosmology, a failure of George RR Martin’s? Or is it a failure of his readers’? Having not read the book I don’t know but I’m inclined to the latter because the people protesting this “senseless” savagery on the Guardian blog hadn’t all read the books, and so presumably had also managed to accommodate the ruthless logic of the TV show but not its magical cosmology. Is it a problem of the low-fantasy genre that we don’t believe the power of magic? Or is it just a problem when lots of people not steeped in the fantasy genre watch a fantasy show?
I think it takes special skill to get people to accept a deeply flawed and immoral world view so completely that it takes the burning alive of a schoolgirl to get us to snap back to our normal frame of reference. This is great work by the TV show’s creators, and really shows how far they’ve sucked their viewers into the horrible world they’ve created. Let’s hope next week they reward us for our complicity with a river of noble blood.
I’ll finish by quoting someone from the Guardian blog:
Mood: Confused but secretly satisfied. Boys are so confusing! When Goliath raided our hideout we were keeping a little goldfish called Bobo, but when we got the hideout back last week Bobo was gone. I remembered how Ghost used to stare at Bobo in his little bowl, and so I thought as a thank you present for all his efforts with the goldfish and the sunken whaler I should get him a replacement. I got a little fish bowl and spent some of our new stash of nuyen on a real goldfish – not a synth job but a real one with a mother and father (or whatever messed-up family arrangements goldfish have that make them into maneaters) – and put it in the bowl. I also found a little plastic replica of a skyscraper to put in the bowl, and I remembered I won a tiny Space Battleship Yamato last year at a festival so I put that in there too. The goldfish has these weird bobbly eyes that only look up, so it keeps bumping into the little plastic floating battleship, which is hilarious because it’s just like what the goldfish under New Horizon were doing to Ghost’s whaler. Cute, right!? I called the goldfish Bobo Too and took it to show to Ghost but he got that weird stern look he gets when he thinks I’m asking stupid questions about why sometimes he makes such big mistakes, and told me to take it away, and I thought maybe he didn’t want the hassle of looking after a real live (not synth!) goldfish so I told him it was a real one so it would die eventually and then I said it probably eats human meat cause that’s what the goldfish he met yesterday were into, and that’s not so much a hassle really ’cause we’re always surrounded by bodies and we could just get offcuts from Madame Chu’s Body Bank now we’re practically on wholesale business terms with her, and I told him that Bobo Too was a thank you present for his great work with the goldfish, and that’s when he started shaking and screaming at me about don’t I have any sense and can’t I just fucking google this shit goldfish don’t eat people they don’t eat people they DON’T EAT PEOPLE and then he slammed the door on me and I could hear him crying on the other side of the door, and so now I have to keep Bobo Too which I guess means I’m gonna have to go to the bodybank, though I’m not sure if Bobo Too eats human flesh because I found a bit of goo in my body armour and he didn’t seem to want to eat it so maybe I should google this stuff. Anyway I don’t understand why Ghost was so upset, I mean I know it was nice of me to get him a thank you present and Pops is always saying I should be nicer to my crew but it was just a cute little goggle-eyed goldfish that kept doing silly little impersonations of the big goldfish trying to eat Ghost’s whaler so I don’t know why he was so touched by it that he had to cry. I swear, sometimes the girl’s magazines I read don’t know anything about boys at all, because they are always talking about how boys don’t have feelings and just like sex and stuff but just giving Ghost a goldfish made him cry. Maybe boys are really just as tender as the magazines all say girls are! Anyway, now I have a cute bobbly-eyed goldfish, he’s fun to look at and so I’m kind of secretly satisfied that Ghost didn’t take him. I’m also secretly satisfied that my secret job for Goliath got our hideout back, and we made lots of money salvaging a whaler and killing the guys who tried to stop us. Today was a good day!
Outfit: Just sloppy joes really, because we’re cleaning up the hideout that I arranged to get back from Goliath, and they really messed it up so we’ve spent lots of time recently cleaning out their mess, so it’s just sports suit and hello kitty slippers until next week. I had goldfish-scale nails on but since Ghost is so touchy about these things at the moment I switched for plain blue to match my rifle.
Sometimes having a bit of a reputation is a good thing, not like when a Goliath goon noticed me, and last week I managed to get a different Goliath guy to notice me and he was very interested in paying me for some work in connection with my reputation, so in exchange for a few details stitched up I managed to convince Goliath to wipe our criminal record, give us back our hideout at Ragut’s place, and pay me 3000 Nuyen cash. Everyone was really surprised, and they’d have been even more surprised if I told them the other offers Goliath gave me that I didn’t take them up on (though maybe I might mention them to Winter next time I play baseball with him, because he might be able to oblige). Even Coyote looked vaguely impressed for a moment, and he’s a fixer so he’s not easily impressed. But 3000 Nuyen is not really that much money when you keep doing jobs for free, so we had a bit of a council of war [<-that’s what Pops calls these meetings where the boys drink too much beer and we all eat bad pizza] and decided we needed to do some actual paid work – you know, like a real team, rather than the charity outfit we’ve been running up till now.
So Coyote went out looking and found us a couple of really easy jobs we could do. Well, “easy” is relative I guess but compared to killing an FBR on a train the size of an apartment block I guess lots of kinds of work are easy. The first job was real simple: some guy he knew wanted us to track down someone called Andrew who had this weird cyberarm that “contained something he was interested in studying.” All we had to do was find this guy, who lives on the docks, and get his cyberarm. We had a cyberarm of our own (from back when we iced Lima) so all we need to do is find this dude Andrew (who was once on a tv show about freakish cyberparts or something) and convince him to swap arms. Which could be costly if he doesn’t have a quick mount for that arm, but Coyote’s guy was offering 4000 Nuyen for this arm so maybe we could arrange a cheap swap job with Madame Chu’s body bank if we really needed too.
The second job was also pretty straightforward: another guy that Coyote knows, by the name of Tofu, needs a crew to go down to the docks and find a crashed whaler, which is submerged beneath the docks in the area where the mutant goldfish are causing trouble. This whaler is said to be holding a valuable cargo, which he wants, and he’ll split the proceeds of selling it 50/50 with us. Since Ghost has some goldfish-hunting friends down in the docks we figured we could do a bit of sub-contracting, find that whaler, and get it out fairly easy. And Ghost is good at dealing with goldfish, so what could go wrong?!
Off we went to the docks!
The Case of the Mutant Arm
We knew Andrew had been on some low-grade tv show about freakish body parts so we jetted down to the broadcasting studio on the docks to ask them where he was. The broadcasting studio was in this run down crashed up apartment block that looked like it was about to sag in on itself, a real shabby place. There was an AV on the top where we landed, with two security guys, but the AV was obviously wrecked and the guys too, and when they saw me and Ghost getting out of the AV in full armour they just kind of gestured for us to go on ahead, no problems at all. We had to take this kind of ladder into the lower levels, where we got into the studio, and there was this small room packed with broadcasting gear and these scared-looking people who were looking at us like we were gonna kill them, and Coyote showed them a picture and they called over the producer and she was a bit timid but she told us what we needed to know. It’s weird everyone says that the docks are dangerous but whenever I come down here people are real timid and helpful. I guess some people are just prejudiced against poor people, because they all seem harmless and nice to me …
Anyway, the helpful but scared-looking producer lady told us that Andrew had been in an area that Goliath recently cleared out, which meant he had to move on from his home, probably to one of the areas set aside for the internally displaced. Goliath were down here in force recently, cleaning out lots of the poor and homeless and making everything all messed up, but they didn’t have the people to be able to properly empty the docks, so people would just move away and settle somewhere else, which would get all crowded and rough, then move on to a different part of the docks, so basically all that was really happening was that Goliath were forcing people out of one established part of the docks, and then they were moving off to disused and derelict parts and revitalizing them. So Andrew had joined the flow, and we would too. We thanked the nice producer lady and headed off to the area we thought he might be in. This was an area conveniently near to Madame Chu’s body bank, but it was really chaotic and confused from all the refugees. Goliath had a big force around the perimeter, with Goliath AVs overhead and lots of patrols running around, we even saw some FBRs on duty, and it was obvious that people from all around the docks were coming into this section to escape the clearances. We were going to have real difficulty finding him so we decided to visit Madam Chu – after all, he’s got a cyberarm, and she likes to keep an eye on such things. So she tells us straightaway that he came in a while back with this monstrous arm, desperate to get it removed, but he didn’t have the money so she told him to get gone. She’d be willing to swap our cyberarm and 800 nuyen in exchange for an operation to remove his arm and replace it with a cheap, semi-functional arm she has left over. That would leave us 3200 nuyen better off, minus an arm we don’t need, so we agreed and went off to find him at his last known address. He was there alright, high on military-grade painkillers and an absolute mess. His arm was this huge monstrosity of buckled metal and swollen human flesh, laced through with what looked suspiciously like goldfish scales, and hints of fins and even teeth growing out from the swelling wreck. He was obviously in a lot of pain and not happy. We took him back to Madame Chu’s and cut the deal, and she cut the arm. Seems like she doesn’t need much in the way of consent forms for work like this … She told us that a few years ago there was a new line of cyberlimbs that were meant to be built on genetic technology, some experimental technique called the MAGE, but the limbs turned out to be defective, with a high risk of cancer and sometimes problems with regrowth. It looked like Andrew might have got himself one of these arms cheap on the black market, but the genetic slip-ups had combined with his diet of mutant goldfish meat to create this monstrous arm. Once she had it off she told us it looked like he had a lot of cancer growth inside, and though she had tried to separate it all from his shoulder he probably wasn’t going to live too much longer.
Still, now he could at least wipe his arse[1]. We paid her, checked he was alive, and left him to recover. Coyote even flicked him a vial of quick heal. Who says charity doesn’t pay? It paid us!
Bobo’s world …
Salvage and Wreckers
We did a quick run topside to get the arm back to Coyote’s guy, rest a night, and then back down to the docks. We went straight to the area where Ghost’s goldfish hunting friends were and laid out our plan – 30% cut of our share of the loot if they would help us with their equipment and goldfish expertise. We needed to get Ghost into the water in a salvage whaler, and needed the hunters to distract the fish until we found the lost whaler, then help us lift it out. They were dubious but the money convinced them, so off we went. The task was simple: they laid some baits in the water, and when the enormous goldfish had gathered they fired harpoons into one, lifted it out of the water and hung it, still struggling, in the air between two AVs. Then a third AV hovered up and a guy with a long pole cut open the fish’s belly. It’s guts fell into the water and the other goldfish went into a frenzy, leaping and swarming to get to the guts. They then started moving away, dropping the fish closer to the water to lure the goldfish, and soon the area was clear as the fish swarmed after their stricken brethren. At that point the salvage whaler hit the water and started descending, with me and Coyote hovering in our whaler up above the water, on guard duty. I was strapped to the side of the whaler, hatch open, a whole bunch of assault rifles ready just in case, and Coyote was trying to keep look out because maybe if this sunken whaler was valuable someone would come for it. Ghost started looking for signs of electronic life and after about 20 minutes he found a tiny emergency beacon, on its last batteries, beeping somewhere in the inky night. By now he was something like 100 or 200 m underwater and drifting carefully through a ghostly world of ancient skyscrapers and structures from before the Crash, all swarming with underwater life. The whaler was there, crashed on top of a jumble of collapsed buildings, and somehow the whaler was hanging on this fragile webbing of wires in between two buildings and sending out this hopeless signal. Up close Ghost could see that the windows had been smashed in, probably by goldfish, and the whole thing had sunk after it was attacked.
The goldfish hunters did their thing, attaching salvage balloons to the top of the whaler and setting them off, and then their salvage whaler started moving up, faster than the wreck, moving to the surface to try and get out before the goldfish came back.
And that was when the two AVs came out of nowhere and attacked our whaler, flying past in front of it and sending a fusillade into the hull. One bullet hit me in the arm but didn’t do any serious damage. Coyote hadn’t seen them coming, probably because he didn’t know the area very well and there are lots of tunnels and hiding places, so they got the drop on us, but Coyote got us moving up fast to try and counter their advantage. They were two rough, cheap-looking AVs, with gangbangers riding in the hold firing submachineguns from open side doors, hanging onto straps like they were on a commuter train and leering at us as they shot. I fired a short burst into the compartment of each AV and took down two men in each compartment[2] – they fell out of one, and into the other, and Coyote was already yelling at me about body banks and profit. I guess he earned that name for a reason. We then started this weird spiral dance in the air as they tried to get in a position to shoot without being shot at, but it didn’t work and I managed to kill another two guys in one AV, that then did a runner.
As all this was happening Ghost was rising steadily from the depths in his whaler, and of course this is when the goldfish returned and started banging on his whaler. He kept rising though, and the goldfish hunter tried to avoid the goldfish, but more started gathering and slowing down his rise. Before he got to the surface he managed to warn us, though mostly he was screaming incoherently about “goldfish goldfish everywhere!” and telling us self-evident stuff about how he didn’t want to die. Sometimes Ghost is too poetic for a hacker, going on about crushing darkness and being swallowed whole by the depths in his most unnecessarily dramatic voice. We managed to convince him to stop play-acting and hack into the second AV, which he did, freezing it from movement, but now the guys had closed the hull door so I couldn’t shoot them and someone was trying to get control of the AV back.
That’s when Coyote recommended I should jump through the front window of the AV. He moved the whaler close enough that I could jump easily but my rippers didn’t smash the glass and I started sliding. Ghost was too busy screaming about goldfish to pay attention to remote-hacking the AV and so the guy got control of it and tried to do a barrel roll to tip me off, but Coyote got our whaler beneath the AV just in time so I didn’t get to practice my diving, just my confused landing, and then I was sliding off the top of our whaler[3] but somehow I managed to get a grip and then Coyote dragged me in. So I strapped myself back in and now the guy in the other AV tried to ram us side on, which gave me a great opportunity to shoot through the hull – I could hear the dude on the other side screaming in terror and yelling at his friend to leave so I shot through and yelled at them to surrender or die – just as Ghost’s whaler came roaring out of the water and he regained control of the AV remotely, which pretty much sealed the deal for the two guys in there who were now unable to do anything except wait to die.
We let them live, and took their AV down to a quiet spot to wait for the salvage to come bubbling to the surface. While we waited we looted them, and they told us they had heard that Tofu had a salvage job going so they just followed us here in hopes of ambushing us when we were getting the gear out. We told them they should rethink their approach to crime, and then Coyote got the phone number of their friend. He called him up, and they had a short chat during which Coyote tried to convince this dude that he were coming to get him and he should just drive the AV to a place we told him, put it down and leave it there for us. Ghost was tracing the call while Coyote had this conversation, so he was able to finally find out where this guy and his AV were, and he was also able to ping some messages from the guy to one of his friends – he was sending a message to his friend telling him he had an AV to sell in a hurry and could his friend come pick it up immediately at exactly the place Coyote was telling him to drive it to. Ghost told Coyote that, and Coyote told the dude to not be so uncooperative, and then the dude got real chilled out and agreed to everything, even sent a cancellation message to his friend. So we drove over there and picked up that AV too. We now had two AVs and the bodies of five guys I had killed, and a couple of credit sticks from the survivors. We let the survivors go, drove the bodies to Madame Chu’s [like I said, we’re getting on wholesale terms] and then returned to the salvaged whaler, which by now the fishermen had dragged out of the water. We cut the proceeds of the body bank and the cred sticks, and put in a call to Tofu. He came down to get his gear, and once we dug through the salvage it became pretty clear that this whaler had been on a drug smuggling mission of some kind – probably about the time that the mutant goldfish scourge started, which was real unfortunate for the people driving this whaler. There used to be lots of secret smuggling routes through the waters beneath the docks but now they’re most death traps, as the crew of this whaler found out.
Which was good news for us. All up our job netted us maybe 10,000 nuyen, 7000 after our cut to the fishermen. We bumped fists, shared some booze, and went our separate ways, leaving one of the AVs for the fishermen to use. Once we totaled up all the money we’d made – my job with Goliath, the weird arm dude, and the salvage mission – we had 16,000 nuyen! So we spent 10,000 on paying off a bad debt Coyote incurred when some gangbangers smashed up his car, and then we were still 6000 clear.
Money! I feel like a real mercenary again, actually killing people for money rather than a mission! It’s kind of refreshing, and if we do another couple of jobs like that we might have some space to breath. Which, Ghost kept telling us all the way home, is a real important thing …
I don’t know what we’re doing next though. I have to go on a mission to the crash zone or the scary guys are going to come to take back my precious gown, and Pops has started talking about setting up some kind of gang and territory of our own, which sounds like more unpaid labour to me but probably a good idea in the long run. The war between Goliath and Arasaka is starting to heat up so it might be a good time to get out of New Horizon for a while. Or maybe we could stay where the heat is, and see how much money we can make running freelance in the middle of it all … we’ll see. But for now I’m off to watch Bobo Too bumping his stupid little head into that little floating ship…
—
fn1: On the approximately 1 in 6 occasions when his arm worked – it was a real cheap arm.
[Faustus’s note: this is another enormous adventure, that unfolded over 2 sessions. I’m going to give Drew’s overview here and try put a few fragments of other moments in other posts. This battle was so epic that it’s impossible to summarize in any reasonable blog format. Scroll to the end for a brief summary of events (culled from my EIGHTEEN pages of notes)].
Date: 22nd October, 2177
Weather: Rainy
Mood: Satisfied. We went in and did our job almost perfectly, and I got a really high kill rate and my Ghost came back, but this time it felt like it was a he not a she, and it was kind of angry, and I think it didn’t like it when I killed the FBR, but I killed an FBR so I don’t care what anyone thinks. Even my Russian Ghost. Which I’m a bit worried about, because it’s inside me and it comes out to help me but it seems to be angry. What is it? What did I buy? Anyway, I got it under control so it’s okay … right, dear diary?
Outfit: Hospital gown. I am getting my cyberware repaired because an EMP destroyed my eyes and half of my neuralware, and my contraceptive implant which apparently is electrical which is news to me because I thought all that stuff was chemical. So here I am in a hospital bed barely able to see, narrating this part of my story in a whisper to you, dear diary. But I’ll only be here a few days and I’m taking lots of pictures of the eye patch … I guess I’ll be able to see them properly once the repairs are done.
After we raided the topside mental asylum and liberated Hog, we owed a favour to some American dude called Blacklist. So it was time to deliver on that favour. We got a two week break before we got our job, and during that two weeks we mostly just recovered and bought some new stuff. Coyote spent a bit of time stalking the markets on the docks and came back with this old-fashioned grenade launcher thing that Pops calls Betsy, because Pops gives names to every technological item more advanced than his pacemaker (our espresso machine is called Angela). Coyote couldn’t buy me a decent sniper rifle because he’s too ugly to trust, but he made up for it by modifying this old Nomad Bolt Action rifle I have, to make it electrothermal. It’s my little personalized railgun, it doesn’t have a name or a gender but it’s really bad news if you meet it. It’s also pastel blue, so it goes with most of my outfits. I took it with me on our mission.
Our mission was pretty simple. There was a train, a Titan train, returning from the Indo Zone carrying gear for Arasaka. Blacklist wants something on the train. The train is a 10 storey high, kilometre long monster straight out of hell, and we have to break into it, steal the cargo, and get out. There are three teams: one to shut down comms across the whole train line, one to destroy the engines and stop the train, and one to extract the cargo. We got the extraction team, which is a mixture of us and a bunch of Blacklist’s American dudes, who are all flakes. The extraction was supposed to be simple: once the train stops we land on the roof, put down laser cutters, cut a big hole that falls to the bottom of the carriage, drop in on special zip lines, make sure anyone in the area is dead. Then some engineers put EMP charges on the crate, we all clear the area, the charges go off, they attach magnets, and the crate is lifted up out of the hold to a waiting AV. Then we all zip-line up, get into an extraction AV, and leave. The tunnel the train is in is tight but there’s an area where it comes out into a larger set of caverns, and that’s where we do the hit, coming down a kind of dropshaft that is maybe ventilation for the whole thing. Blacklist isn’t there but his main man, Winter, tells us this is a routine repatriation train and we shouldn’t expect trouble.
Of course he was wrong. But that’s why he wanted us, right?
Before we went in we had a one day long lockup in Blacklist’s base, preparing gear and getting familiar with each other. I spent the time introducing myself to the other Solos and their teams, memorizing who was doing what and what they can do, and making sure everyone knew my job. Coyote and Ghost spent it preparing equipment and vaping, but Pops spent it picking fights with younger men, and he even found the brother of that dude that Coyote murdered back when we first met. Understandably the big brother was upset about that but he somehow got the idea that Pops did the killing, even though a cyber chainsaw is completely not Pops’s style (he’d have used a baseball bat or some other oil age anachronism) and anyway it was Coyote who got all blood-happy on that job. So I broke up the fight and of course now it’s me and Pops that are in this punk’s sights, and Coyote is saying it’s not his problem, even though Pops is telling him to clean it up. But it’s pretty obvious that at some point on this train job this older brother is gonna turn vengeful when we least need it. I guess I just have to put a bullet in his head, but Pops told me to time it carefully, and frankly I didn’t want to do it – I’ve never shot a member of my own team before and it doesn’t feel right.
Human relations! What a burner! Anyway, then the job started.
First we got to see feed of the other teams while we waited in the AV to do the extraction. The engineering team was all buzzing bikes and crazy angles, but the control team were much nastier. They spent hours crawling through tunnels and air ducts into the control room, and managed to drop down into this room that had a thin wall between it and the control area. Switch to infrared and they can see everyone in the control area, and they pop them all in a couple of seconds of controlled shooting, then blast through the wall and clear out the room. Very professional. Then it was time for us to jump, and down we went …
The train was an amazing monster of steel and carbon, it really was the height of an apartment block! It stopped about a kilometre outside of this narrow tube tunnel, in a wider tunnel that had room above the train but still not much room each side of it. Even the tunnel was staggering, like half a kilometre high maybe and criss-crossed with access tunnels and maintenance shafts that have their own little maintenance and security transport trains in them that are the size of a normal metro train carriage. The Titan came screaming out of the narrower tunnel a kilometre away and it was throwing up this great cloud of smoke and sparks as it slowed down, brakes on full. The gigantic wheels were all locked up and the carbon fiber body was melting and catching fire from the heat on the tracks. The tracks are enormous, more like two roads more than rails, and they were being torn up by the train as it braked. It was like coming out of that tunnel it was doing an atmospheric reentry, and burning from the rails up. Spikes of metal the size of cars were being thrown up from the rails, red hot from the friction, and we could feel the noise of it stopping from half a kilometre up through the baffles on our AV. We all watched in awe as this dragon the size of a city came roaring out of that tunnel into our battle zone, screaming like an army of demons and burning up in its own rage, until it came to a kind of shaking, flaming halt just a bit past the target point. Then we dropped like a stone, the entry was hard, and the AV came to a hard stop maybe 10 metres above the train, and we were all tumbling out before we even had time to get nervous. It wasn’t hard to land on the roof – there was nowhere else in sight – and we landed right on spot, setting our laser cutters and yelling “clear!” well within our timing. We all stepped back and looked away as they burst into life, and 3 seconds later there was this huge bang, then a second bang, and a big cloud of steam and super-heated chemicals washed over us. We turned back to look and a huge section of the middle of the train roof, maybe 30 metres in radius, was gone. The edges of the hole it fell from were glowing red hot from the laser cutters for a depth of half a metre but we didn’t have time to let them cool – we latched on our zip lines just outside the hot zone and then took running leaps in – me and Pops first, with Coyote and then Winter’s team members behind. Ghost stayed on top to hack anything that interfered with us, and above us the AV was already getting up out of fire range, to hover there in place with two other AVs – the extraction AV and this giant insect-like cargo AV that was going to lift the target crate out.
We fell straight through that hole into this steaming, clammy pit of hell, and nothing in there was what we were told. The carriage was 10 stories high like they said but it had been divided into mezzanine levels, all of them kind of looking down onto the cargo hold. The biggest crates were stocked in the middle on the ground floor, but these mezzanines also had cargo stacked in them. Near the top though, right where we had cut through, they also had people – soldiers – sitting on guard duty in seats like a normal train. Our laser cutters had sliced through some of these seats and the guards in them, and had made holes in all the mezzanine levels. The ceiling then fell through, crushing anyone between it and the floor and bringing all the flooring of the mezzanines with it. That ceiling and the mess it took down with it had landed on the cargo hold 10 stories down, crushing a bunch of crates and shattering, and was maybe a metre high and broken apart – perfect cover for us. Most of the soldiers in the room had either been cut in half or crushed, but there were a few who were still alive and starting to struggle out of their harnesses. Some were already out and opening fire on us as we went down – I killed one during the descent, perfect head shot with my new rifle, but there were more down in the basement level. Pops dropped a burner grenade on them and I shot one, and they kind of broke down and hid in cover quick, I think one was stripping his armour off to get out of the flames, haha.
So much for “there shouldn’t be any resistance.” Winter needs to get better spies, or is it just that these Americans can’t do anything right?
Insufficient
We hit the deck and took cover, while up above Winter’s team started trying to clean up the guards on the higher levels and set up some machine gun nests. We had barely reached our cover when Ghost contacted us to tell us there were more men coming down corridors on the edge of the carriage. These corridors had doors entering the carriage in its middle, not far from us, and there were maybe five guys in each, we weren’t sure. Pops put a burner grenade on each door, one was really good and destroyed the door but the other one was a bit late. At the same time Coyote unloaded his entire kalashnikov cartridge on them, and that got them real scared. Five men were coming through then, but when the grenade and the gunfire hit two of them ducked back and one leapt into the room, shotgun in one hand, trying to pull the pin on a grenade with his mouth. I took him in the head as he came in, and hit the grenade, blew him up and made sure he wasn’t going anywhere. So there were two guys burning behind that door and two unhurt, and these guys were serious Arasaka soldiers, in some kind of cyber-enhanced full body armour with good gear and tactics. We were crouched behind cover when they opened fire on us from behind the wall, using infrared for targeting, and me and Pops were okay but the fire was so heavy it completely shredded our cover – we had to move. While we moved Coyote laid down a grenade, that kind of helped, but we were feeling pretty worried when one of Winter’s teams came down, loading suppressing fire and grenades down on those dudes. Somehow one of them got a shot off and one of Winter’s guys went limp but the other two finished the job. That got us a bit of a breather – until the cargo crate came hurtling out of the darkness and nearly smashed us all down!
While we were killing all the resistance we weren’t meant to meet, Ghost was busy hacking into systems, trying to work out what was going on in the rest of the train. He locked the doors to the carriage so no more troops could come in, then identified some kind of signal traveling down the train. He followed it to see if it was a warning, and found it was targeted at a specific cargo crate, and seemed to be intended to activate something. Going inside the crate he found a functioning cyborg activated, and entered its video feed. This was bad news – the feed activated just long enough for him to get jerky vision of a full body replacement (FBR) cybersoldier getting out of some kind of storage harness, stepping forward and smashing its fist through the chest of whatever cyborg Ghost had hacked. The cyborg died and the feed cut off, so Ghost tried another, and saw the same thing. Some kind of signal had caused the FBRs to attack each other in that crate – that crate, it turned out, was the crate that Winter wanted. Ghost told him what was going on and Winter started screaming for action, telling his engineers to come in and ordering Ghost to get the crate under the access hole fast. Ghost obliged, and accessed this kind of automated loading system on the train that moved crates around on their levels. He did it super fast, so he didn’t have time for finesse; the crate came hurtling out of the darkness and came to a screaming halt right under the hole. Engineers threw some EMPs on the crate, and we all had a couple of moments to get as far away as possible before they went off. I got that horrible tingle in my eyes that happens when an EMP goes off near me but I was just out of range, but the Arasaka marines who were coming out the other entry way were not so lucky – it hit all of them and fried their armour and they dropped on the spot. Then everything went real quiet, and the engineers came down and put magnets on the crate, then started lifting it up into the air. While it was being hoisted up I broke cover and started putting down those stunned Arasaka dudes, because hey, they’re Arasaka and plus I didn’t know how long an EMP would fry their special armour. Coyote was already starting to loot what he could from the bodies – we were all looking at that armour with a greedy eye, I think, but I am not going to wear anything that has a stupid Arasaka logo on it, so I kept my eyes on the job. I don’t count coups de grace, but outside of them I killed three men with five shots during that engagement – one of them an Arasaka marine. A good couple of seconds’ work!
I am NOT wearing this armour!
But things didn’t go so smoothly with that crate and whatever was inside it. It was nearly at the hole, being dragged up towards the cargo AV, when everyone heard a massive bang inside the crate. The cargo AV stopped lifting it, and it hung there in the air at the centre of the wrecked carriage, these big bangs coming out from inside it, and it was slowly rocking in the air from the ferocity of the bangs. We all stared up at the crate, everyone thinking the same thing: FBRs inside, trying to get out – and us trapped on the ground floor …[1]
We didn’t have time to care though. We’d had a few moments to gather our wits (well – everyone else did. I was walking through the rubble shooting paralyzed Arasaka dudes in the head). But now Ghost contacted everyone again to tell them that more soldiers were coming from the end of the carriage. They must have regrouped there or something, because they hadn’t come through the doors, which Ghost was now lowering so that the engineering team, led by a Solo called Carbon[2], could get through. They were coming through on multiple levels: 10 troops on the ground floor and another six coming through doors on each side of a higher level. These weren’t Arasaka monsters but still, more than 15 guys with automatic weapons is kind of nasty, not my idea of the best way to rob a train. This Winter guy probably needs to improve his methods, because in the next 30 seconds a lot of his guys got slaughtered …
So thanks to Ghost we had time to prepare. Me and Pops took cover, and Coyote kept looting. Pops laid down grenades while I put out headshots, and up above Carbon was firing these exploding arrows that do really nasty things. Ghost joined in, using the automated cargo-loading system to shift crates fast, in order to knock people off of balconies or crush them, but he was distracted by one of the soldiers, who was some kind of weekend hacker and kept using his hacking to try and shut Ghost out of the train’s systems. Our hacker oscillates between incompetent and glorious, and this was one of those days when he was glorious, so he shut out the stupid soldier and crushed some guys (who were on fire anyway, because Pops was being a grenade master even though his eyesight is fading and his hands shake), Pops went to work with the grenades, some of Winter’s team were doing heavy machine gun cover, and Carbon was doing the Robin Hood thing with incendiary arrows. While we were fighting these guys, the engineers were trying to fix EMP grenades onto the crate to try and calm whatever was inside. One got shot down by the incoming troops before Carbon could pacify them, but the other one got an EMP grenade on. We all cleared the area but this one guy got shot down as he was fleeing, one of those stupid Arasaka guys got him in the leg, and so I had to run back and grab him even though the EMP was set. I ran as fast as I could but he was too heavy and too badly hurt, and we both got caught as the EMP went off. My eyes went haywire, but he was worse off – his neural processor and nerve boosting was connected to his muscle system, and he had a nose filter that went wild, so first of all he couldn’t breathe and then he was kicking and spasming. I was blind and my eyes were going crazy but my legs were still working so I just kept dragging him out of the zone, because I had a real fear that that crate was going to fall.
And that was when my Russian Ghost started to come out. Just like when me and Pops were under pressure at Lima’s place, it started to rouse. I tried to fight it, but I was fried. Exhausted after all that fighting, I’d taken hits to both my legs during the second push by those 16 guys, and now my eyes, a bunch of my fashion cyberware, and probably some stuff deep inside of me was wrecked, just so I could save this spasming guy who I was pretty sure was soiling himself because his body was completely wrecked. The Russian Ghost knows when to come out, and now was a pretty bad time. But I wanted to get out of here, not run off into the shadows on the whim of some insane cyberware, so I thought I should try and fight it down.
And that was when the crate burst open. Before the EMP went off something had smashed a hole in the crate and stuck its arm out, but the EMP temporarily paralyzed it. We (except poor blasted me) were cut into a feed showing the vision of the engineer on the crate, who was investigating this arm. We saw x-ray vision of the crate, lined with FBRs, and different images of the thing that had its arm stuck out of the crate. The engineer was leaning over the edge of the crate, looking more closely at the arm, when the arm twitched, then grabbed him, smashed him into the crate and threw him to the ground like a rag doll. Then it tore its way out of the crate, and hauled itself out onto the top of the crate. It was an FBR. A full and complete Full Body Replacement, in Arasaka corporate logo.
Sufficient
This was kind of unexpected for us, because FBRs are meant to be the exclusive technology owned by Goliath, and Arasaka is not meant to be taking on any security role in New Horizon – they have an agreement that ensures Arasaka keeps its military assets out of New Horizon. But here it is shipping military assets it isn’t meant to have into a city it isn’t meant to be investing …
Not that we had much time to think about the geopolitical ramifications, because the FBR tore the crate apart like paper, climbed out on top, and leapt the 20 metres from the crate across to the level Carbon was on. We only had one way out – up – and this thing was in the way, so we all went to work. I was standing near Pops, blind and both my legs bleeding, but I could feel the Russian Ghost coming up inside me. I knew what was coming, so I handed him my rifle, whispered, “the Ghost is coming,” and moved away from him, falling down as I went. I could feel it coming up, rushing through me like a wave of fury with an almost human voice, yelling “Brother! My brother!” at the FBR, and clamouring at me to let it out.
I let it.
From that point on I don’t know what happened. Pops told me later. The FBR tore into Carbon’s team but Carbon stood its ground, fighting hand to hand using its capoeira when things went wrong, but before the FBR could get fully into battle Pops managed to get a good shot into its leg with my rifle, tearing the leg apart and really slowing it down. I somehow managed to leap up onto the crate and then onto the back of the FBR, and it turned around to face me while it was fighting Carbon so I started trying to punch my way through its chest, to remove the chipset that we had seen being torn out by other FBRs on Ghost’s feed. Inside me my Ghost was going crazy, yelling at its “brother” in rage and joy, and that’s all I remember from the fight. Winter’s team were shooting the FBR and laying down suppression on the ground floor to make sure no more soldiers tried to join in, and Pops was firing more shots from my rifle to try and get a second lucky hit. With me pummelling the FBR, Carbon was able to shoot arrows into its legs, and at some point it realized we were going to smash its leg and bring it down so it leapt down from the balcony and disappeared into the shadows. At this point I managed to wrestle control back from my Ghost, and collapsed to the decks. Carbon started dragging me back to the zip lines, and everyone started retreating. While we had been fighting off the FBR that crate had been lifted out into the tunnel and the waiting grasp of the cargo AV, and now the extraction AV was getting ready to lift out the soldiers; all we had to do was get on the ziplines. While Carbon helped me and Coyote started lifting out, burdened under the weight of our loot, Pops moved to help the guy I had saved from the EMP; he was starting to recover his function but still couldn’t move himself. When Pops grabbed him and latched him onto a line he whispered, “Thanks man. You gotta know, as soon as you get to the top En plans to put a bullet in you.”
And then we all lifted out, with Pops dropping a line of burner grenades behind us as he went, to stop that FBR from coming after us. Me and Carbon got to the top first, and by now my sight was slowly returning, the EMPs wearing off, and so I could see En standing near the extraction AV, rifle in hand, waiting for Pops to come up. But worse still, somehow I could see the FBR. It was creeping up out of the side of the train, it must have cut a hole or something, and it had some kind of cloaking device on so no one else could see it. I don’t know how I could see it but I could still feel the Russian Ghost inside me, raging to get at it, so maybe it was helping me[3]. The FBR was completely oblivious of me and Carbon – it had the AV in its sights, and why not? The AV was hovering just above the train roof, its main access doors open, and it was full of troops, some of them already injured, most of them just standing there panting in their full body armour, waiting for the rest of the team to come up. They couldn’t see it, they were just there, sacks of flesh and blood waiting for it to come and rip them open like birthday presents. This FBR had a radline, which is this new electromagnetic weapon that messes up cyberware, and if it hit the right part of that AV with the radline it would short the controls and bring it down. Then the FBR and all those soldiers would slide off the deck and down, and at the bottom the FBR would be free to rip them all apart. And there at the front of it all was En …
What’s not to like?
I waited. I was thinking about it. Carbon was behind me moving forward. I put in a message on our team’s private line, telling them not to get on the AV and telling Coyote to get off, but Carbon wasn’t on our private line. It was gonna get on that AV for lift out, and the FBR was gonna get on with it. I could hear Pops coming up, nearly at the top, and En was there waiting … I just needed to wait a few more seconds. But between me and the FBR there was a machine gun set up on a tripod, just in case, but it was halfway through being dismantled and recovered, and it was facing the FBR. All I had to to was step forward, grab it, and open up.
I’m not the kind of girl who shoots people on her own team. I stood there watching for a moment, everything blurry and dazed through my messed up cybereyes, and I thought I could let it all happen, but then I thought about the kind of Solo I am, what happens to my rep if I let my team be slaughtered because of some kind of stupid human relations problem between some idiot whose brother was dumb enough to throw himself on Coyote’s tender chainsaw mercy, and I decided that my rep is more important than saving Coyote from his past mistakes. And Carbon was right there with us when this monster was trying to rip our hearts out, so I can’t just let it get on that AV and get dragged down to its death. I figured up until now Pops has survived a few gunshots, so I should do what is right for a Solo.
On the open channel I said to Carbon, “don’t get on the AV, the FBR is right in front of you,” and stepped up to the gun. The FBR somehow heard that and turned to face me, dropping its cloak shield, but it was too late. I hit full auto on the machine gun at close range, and just kept squeezing. At the same moment Pops breached the hull, and he and En opened fire on each other at the same time. En missed but Pops got him right in the chest and he went down like all our targets do, limp and gone. Guys poured out of the AV and grabbed him, yelling their fear, but they all just assumed he had been taken down by the FBR. Pops, Carbon and Ghost ran for the AV, I grabbed the machine gun and ran too, Carbon dragging me along, and the FBR lay there on the train roof, twitching and thrashing, cyborg ichor spurting out of it, completely useless.
I killed an FBR. Me! I am the DRUID. Dedicated Retribution Unit. No one will demobilize me again. Not even an FBR.
The doors slammed shut in the AV and we were all off. Me and En, we sank back in the hold and collapsed, him shot in the chest and me exhausted, ghosted out, clutching the machine gun like the only lover I ever had (I have never had any lovers, unless you count men who paid someone else for the use of me). The AV was roaring out on an insane trajectory, and we could all see why on the feed. While we were playing at arcane solo games with that FBR, Arasaka security had been closing in on us, in force. They took down the control team and came roaring up the tunnel, and they were riding a wave of wrath. A wall of lead and missiles was coming down on us and it was all we could do to haul out of there. It looked a lot like we were gonna die in the hold of that AV but then someone yelled “Engineers up!” and we all felt that strange, tingling feeling you get when a serious EMP goes off near you. We were entering the exit tunnel at that time, and it turns out the engineers had mined the tunnel with a whole ring of EMPs. They went off just in time and the pursuing AVs fell out of the sky like Icarus in that old oil age music video, tumbling back down onto the distant train.
We did it! We were out. We smashed a Titan train, and came out smiling.
Nothing can stop us. Nothing. I am coming for you Arasaka, I am coming for you. Your corporate boys in their suits, with their special measures and their business plans and their smug conquerors’ joy … I’m coming for you. You aren’t going to be so smug when this little shipment of FBRs explodes in your face, when the video goes across every news channel. And that’s just the start, because after your precious corporate reputation goes down the toilet I’m going to come for your worthless souls. I’m going to collect them like Anguta, so you better start locking your doors and checking your guns. You can swim with the beasts, you can flee with the storms – it’s nothing to me. You’re mine. I will destroy you. I am the Dedicated Retribution Unit, and I will destroy you.
—
The short summary
We had to do a train heist for some American dude called Blacklist, as payment for our venture topside
While we were preparing for the heist, Pops discovered that the brother of a guy Coyote killed long ago is on the mission and wants to kill us. This idiot is called En
The train is huge
We hit the train, dropped in, had a big battle with some soldiers – killed them all
Ghost got the cargo we were looking for out into the right position to be robbed
The cargo contains Full Body Replacements – it appears Blacklist was trying to steal Arasaka FBRs
Why does Arasaka have FBRs? They’re strictly Goliath tech
At the same time as the cargo got into extraction position we had to deal with another 20 soldiers
We dealt with them
An FBR in the cargo was not quiescent, it broke out
We fought it. My Russian Ghost came back, and we beat the FBR. It fled
We evacuated, but a guy Pops saved told us that En was gonna put a bullet in Pops as soon as he emerged from the train
I got topside first and discovered the FBR creeping up, invisible under a cloaking device, to our extraction AV
There was a machine gun right next to me. I grabbed it and destroyed the FBR
At the same time, Pops hit the deck and he and En had a stand off that En lost, but En wasn’t dead – just stunned
We all piled onto the AV, En’s buddies rescued him
We got out. Mission successful.
—
fn1: This is actually the point where the first session of this train robbery ended!
fn2: This crazy capoeira-fightin’, exploding-bow wielding intersex maniac played by a guest player!
fn3: Actually I rolled a massive critical success, three 10s in a row, on my awareness check. This has got to be the best-placed critical awareness check in the history of role-playing because that FBR is an absolute actual monster, and there were guys on that AV we wanted dead …
Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets
– The Falcon, dialectical ephemeralist revolutionary, talking about lackeys
Our recent train heist involved a serious number of low-ranked enemies, the full complement of which hasn’t been described yet (Drew’s breathless reports take her a lot of time to write, even if they might seem like a rant she spat out over the phone to a friend in 10 minutes). During the latter part of this battle (after Bob Millet got naked) we had five PCs taking on 16 soldiers in a rather drawn out and exhausting gun battle, which was only a taster for the main event. We soon discovered that this makes battles slow and exhausting, and you spend a lot of time resolving rules for people who, though potentially fatal, are largely just going to serve to wear you down a bit. Cyberpunk doesn’t have any special rules for handling this, so you just have a huge number of different people making complex shots, rolling hit locations, doing damage, keeping track of armour, etc. Cyberpunk doesn’t really have a style that is suited for minions in the sense that e.g. Warhammer 3 or Iron Kingdoms have them, but we often find ourselves dealing with gangers, grunts or low-level cannon fodder who really should be treated as just that.
We have also begun to run up against the problem of the nihilistic arms race that I described a long time ago. We have good armour and we’re dangerous, so if our GM wants to put in enemies who can kill us – or even just hurt us – he needs to give them powerful weapons that he really doesn’t want our team to get. Not only does this really up the lethality of every adventure, but when we win we will get those weapons. Drew has been salivating over the possibility of getting a military-grade sniper’s rifle, that does 7d10 or 9d10 damage and gives her a +5 to hit – she can take down anything with that. Our GM obviously wants to stop us getting that, but if he wants to stop us he needs to deploy some serious grade stuff against us. So we also need to find a way to derail this arms race.
Rules for minions offer an opportunity to smooth down combat and slow down the arms race.
The basic principle of the lackey
The lackey is the Cyberpunk version of a minion or mook in fantasy RPGs. They turn up in groups, armed with the kind of military cast-off stuff that no PC wants, and they aren’t individually dangerous but if you don’t mow them down they’ll take a piece out of you. They serve to distract team members while the big boss is setting up the rocket launcher, or the real solos are mainlining their combat drugs and getting ready to wade in. You could probably ignore them because you can tell each of them is a scrawny boosterhead, but en masse they might just get a lucky hit.
The way this works in cyberpunk is simple. Lackeys come with base stats for attacks, damage and armour, but they get a +1 to hit and +1 die of damage (up to the number of dice their weapon delivers) for every additional member of the group. To further simplify things, they don’t have hit locations – their bodies are a single routine armour type. They also don’t have a Body Type Modifier (BTM) or hit points: for every four points of damage you do over armour, one lackey gets it in the neck. They don’t roll skill checks for e.g. awareness/notice, dodge/escape or other challenged actions, but have a simple single difficulty level for all actions against them. Thus, hitting them involves a single attack roll followed by a single damage roll, and then a count. They also don’t vary their attack type except for narrative fun – you don’t worry about giving them three shot bursts or single shots or whatever, because they just make a single attack each round. The sole exception to this is if the GM decides to give them grenades or have them lay down suppressive fire – in the former case the standard to hit rule for weapons applies, while in the latter case anyone who fails to avoid the suppressive fire simply takes damage equal to the level of the lackey multiplied by the number of them firing, minus BTM (armour doesn’t apply). This damage doesn’t hit any particular location – the lackeys are firing huge numbers of bullets so it is spread evenly over many areas. High level lackeys in large groups might deliver enough damage to knock a solo down, but they won’t take out any of her limbs because they delivered it through a wall of low-grade lead.
Stats for the four levels of lackey are given below.
Because no weapon can be boosted beyond the number of dice it rolls, there is no benefit to increasing lackey groups beyond a certain size: shit kickers don’t benefit from having more than 4 in a group, since they can’t do more than 3 extra dice with their weapon. This reflects the fact that people this useless can’t coordinate actions in large numbers; while corporate dogs can be up to 7 in number, which is a truly terrifying squad. Lackey squads can be larger than this (if some arsehole down in the docks can dose up 100 losers on enough ghostshock and set them loose then yes, you will find yourself having to gun them down by the dozen), but they won’t do more damage than twice the original damage of their weapon, because of reasons.
When a PC does damage on a squad of lackeys, they can’t kill more than the number of bullets they have fired. So Drew’s beautiful blue pastel rifle, damage 9d6+3, is a waste of time against lackeys because it only fires one bullet. However, if she switches to her FN-FAL, she can fire 3 shot bursts and take down three guys at a time.
When using multiple shots against a gang of lackeys, don’t waste time rolling multiple damage. Just add one die to your weapon damage for every bullet after the first. This applies to full auto, where every point of success above the target number indicates one bullet hits. Usually you would roll each of these bullets separately, but with lackeys you don’t bother; instead you just add one die per success. This rule doesn’t exist to benefit the lackeys or make them more dangerous, it is just intended to speed up combat.
When a leader is standing amongst his or her lackeys, area effect attacks do not harm the leader – the lackeys soak it up first. So if someone drops a grenade on such a squad, it might kill all the lackeys but it won’t harm the leader.
Grenades have no frag limit. If you drop a grenade on a group of lackeys, and you roll enough damage, it kills all of them. Don’t be a lackey!
Note lackeys have a fixed initiative. Shit kickers will probably react after your hacker, and you can rely on the higher level lackeys to act fast but not fast enough. You wanna kill corporate dogs, you gotta have at least a little bit of combat sense.
Example
Pops, Drew and Coyote need to kill a man because of reasons. The man has holed up in an abandoned warehouse down in the docks. It’s some oil age shitheap, so they go in the easy way – Coyote attaches a strip of explosive to a wall and they walk through once the dust is cleared. Inside the warehouse there are a bunch of crates that they immediately take cover behind, but not before they come under fire from a squad of five gangbangers. Because the gangbangers were lying in wait they get the drop, and lay down a curtain of suppressing fire on the huge hole Coyote made. The difficulty to avoid this suppression fire is 15 (the target difficulty for all actions against gangbangers), and Coyote and Drew make it but Pops just misses it. He takes 2 points of damage multiplied by the number of gangbangers (5), so 10 points of damage, or 7 after BTM. He is injured but not badly.
Now they are through the curtain of suppressive fire they are able to roll initiative. The ‘bangers don’t roll, they get an automatic 12. Pops rolls 14, Coyote 11, Drew 19. Drew switches weapons to her FN-FAL, pops up and takes a three shot burst at the gang, but it’s dark and this is her second action so she just misses. Pops throws a grenade at the squad, rolling a 15, so it lands, but it’s only a 5d6 damage frag, one of the crappy ones that Coyote picks up cheap from his “friend” Twitch. Pops rolls 18, which is 6 more than the gangers’ armour, so he manages to kill one. Four remain. These four now have a chance to shoot at Drew, who had popped out; they roll 15 but with four gangers they get a +3, so hit her with an 18. Their weapons do 4d6 damage but with +3 dice, so 7d6. The GM rolls 34 on the right leg, which after Drew’s armour of 28 and BTM of 3 leaves just 3 points of damage. She shrugs it off. Finally Coyote rises up and fires two shots at the gangers from his pistol. His first shot hits and the second misses. The first shot does 6d6+2 damage, and Coyote rolls a mighty 33, enough to go through 5 gangers (33-12 armour =21), but he only has a single shot pistol, so he can only kill one. Three remain.
The round ends. Drew doesn’t bother dropping under cover; she squeezes off two three-shot bursts, hitting with the first. She rolls d3 for the number of bullets, and gets three hits! However, rather than wasting time rolling multiple damage rolls, she simply adds 2d6 to her weapon damage, for a total of 8d6+2. Damage total is not so great, just 30, but that’s 18 above the gangers’ armour, enough to kill four gangers. Having fired only three bullets she can only kill three, but there are only three left, so down they go.
The squad is gone. Pops pulls out his grenade launcher and pumps a couple of frag grenades up to the higher level. Drew returns to her beautiful blue pastel Nomad rifle, and takes cover in a corner facing up the stairs. Pops and Coyote head up the stairs to the upper level, moving fast and low. The man they have come to kill is out of lackeys, and out of luck …
I have never been able to argue with authorial authority
In a recent discussion with my regular role-playing group one player was complaining about the plethora of super-hero movies being released recently, and her increasing exhaustion with this genre. Another defended it partially on the basis that he has always really enjoyed superhero comics so seeing good movies of them is fun, but yeah maybe there are a few too many. I chimed in to this essential conversation to observe that I’ve never been able to get into super hero comics by Marvel and DC (and I guess Vertigo too) because I find the text so incredibly frustrating to read. The way they put bold/italic emphasis on almost random words in the text – in almost every piece of text – really distracts me from what I’m actually reading and drives me crazy. The original complainer agreed that she, too has always found this off-putting.
As an example, consider this blog post at Lawyers, Guns and Money about what a superb comic artist some guy is. It gives a long, detailed dissertation about how the action within the frame is juxtaposed with the flow of the panels to inculcate in the reader the same sense of discomfort and challenge experienced by the character the panels are about. This seems like a fairly plausible interpretation of the effect of this particular set of panels but I just can’t care about how great this makes the artist because the entire scene is so devastatingly annoying. What is with all that emphasis in all the text? Why emphasize the word “lightning bolt” and the names? It’s distracting and annoying.
I’ve felt this way for years of course but never really investigated, so I tried a bit of googling to see if I could find anything on the topic, and a brief search revealed nothing – possibly because including the words “Marvel”, “DC” or anything similar in a search term drowns out the rest, but possibly also because no one writes about this stuff. So what is going on? Why do they have to put emphasis in comic book text at all, let alone randomly throughout every second speech bubble? Is it something about the reading age of the audience? Is it meant to add dramatic tension? Is there no one in either of these quite large companies who reads this stuff, finds it annoying, and occasionally considers maybe not doing it? Are there two types of people in the world? As far as I know the method isn’t used in manga, at least not in Japanese and I don’t remember it in English either. Why do these comics do it? And is there a legion of haters of this stuff out there? If you do hate it, is it possible to enjoy the comics at all or are is it always overwhelming?
Compromise and Conceit 