The Jovian Republic chapter comes to an end! With the Exhuman terror cell broken, the Firewall team must do what it can to keep the population safe as as other Firewall agents attempt a silent coup d’etat. Riots break out across the habitat, the remaining exhumans attempt to pull off the Fall 2.0, and paranoid security agents are gunning down every threat they can find. Will the team survive? Will the Jovian Republic survive? Find out in this thrilling chapter conclusion! (Please note that there are some problems with the audio in a few places in this AP. I have no sure idea what caused it nor can I remove them. Sorry!)
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Woo! Sympathetic robot!
Woo! EARTH!!!
Maybe I just missed it, but what did Ross say happend to Bartleby after takeover?
Cell radio interference, it sounds like. Insufficiently shielded mic/mic cord. Keep cellphones off or away from the mic and its cord and you should be all good.
I agree with Caleb at the end. While this might have been the best portion of the Duality campaign so far, this particular chapter really could (should) have been a campaign on its own.
Still, it was a lot of fun. And it’s better to be left wanting MOAR than to have a particular chapter drag.
Also, EAAAAARTTTHHHHH
I think I missed it. How does restructuring the Jovian Republic fit into the mirror Earth plot discovered in the gatecrashing arc?
Loren Kristol (the target of the Mirror Earth investigation) provided the Exhumans with information on how to reach the singularity via mass ego harvesting and merging. He inspired the terror cell to attack the Jovian Republic.
Firewall discovered this when they raided the exhuman asteroid habitat (erasure squad one shot). This chapter is technically a side story but the PCs did recover data from the raid on the exhumans that will aid in the investigation. I wanted to do this chapter not just because I wanted an adventure in the Jovian Republic, but to show that Loren Kristol has been sowing chaos throughout the solar system. This is just fallout from his actions.
The next chapter, Extropia, switches back to the Mirror Earth plot.
Ah I see. And the opportunity to restructure the Jovian government allows the players to make the Jovians a harder or softer target for exhumans/xthreats in the future.
Thanks Ross!
Honestly, the Jovian Republic probably is the hardest x-risk target in the solar system (outside of like, RKV/Mass external WMD use). It’s just their official x-risk plan in case of a BLACK FLAG scenario would involve flipping the big bird to Transhumanity, which would mean everybody ends up dying quicker.
This was a really cool arch of the story. Would make a great stand alone campaign as Caleb suggested. Would love to see the final attack by the ex humans extended into multiple sessions. Ross, you should consider writing it up.
I liked the resolution here. I think it was a good design choice to have the PCs running all over the place trying to do a bunch of sub-missions in the middle of the chaos. I liked the core mechanic of giving them bonuses on their final “revolution roll” based on how successful they were on their various missions. This seems like a really good way to structure an elaborate political coup game.
I do think that maybe it turned out to be a little too easy for them to succeed on all of them; one of the nice things about having a cluster of sub-missions is that it makes it narratively possible to have some real PC failures without seriously altering the entire narrative arc. But that’s just a game balance issue, which is very hard to get perfect without playtesting it through. Basically, I’m just saying Ross could have stood to have been a bit more of a horrible monster here (though scapegoating Chappie was pretty classic monsterhood — my hat is off!).
If I were to recommend development to the scenario, I’d say make some of the missions harder (and don’t let the PCs know which ones, so they don’t avoid them). And maybe split the final roll into two rolls somehow, with varying results based on the success or failure of each. So with both succeeding, they’d get to pick the outcome they want. But if one succeeds and one fails, things only partially work out according to plan. That way they’d have to make one final decision about how to distribute their accumulated bonuses based on which “partial failure state” they find more acceptable.
Anyway, great scenario.
All good points – I used Duality to try out a lot of different ideas – everything was run as a rough draft. I posted the coup rules for Patreon backers here: https://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=2183603