The Gaming Den

The world of Darkness is full of factions that secretly control all mortal governments.

The Camarilla secretly controls all mortal governments.

The Technocracy secretly controls all mortal governments.

Pentex secretly controls all mortal governments.

The Earthbound secretly control all mortal governments.

I'm pretty sure that other lines probably have antagonists that also secretly control all mortal governments. Does Mummy have an enemy that controls all mortal governments? I don't know, but I'd presume so.

In In Bureucrat: The Paranoia, you're that guy in government that every Ancient conspiracy secretly controls. You're under the influence of so many mutually incompatible mind control methods with so many mutually contradictory orders that they all cancel out and you actually have more free will than the average human. That doesn't help much, though, because if any of your masters ever got a hint that you were less than 100% loyal to them and only them, then they wouldn't hesitate to terminate you with prejudice.

And thus, you have to fulfill all of your mutually contradictory orders from various conspiricies without letting on that you're also working for all the other conspiricies.

I dunno about all this, but here's your tag line:

A man with two masters answers only to himself.

this has promise.

I think I'd downplay the threat of death if any of your many masters got the impression you were disloyal, because that's going to happen a lot. It seems like two key parts of game play are going to be persuading various masters that you had no choice but to do something they didn't like (because obviously that's true) and finding ways to pervert their orders so that you're technically in compliance with Master A while actually fulfilling Master B's wishes. The third theme of the game would be turning the tables on your masters, by fulfilling their orders in such a way that a different master dies and gives you some more breathing room.

How do you visualize this working mechanically? It seems like you should have a list of masters each with a perceived loyalty meter that ranks how loyal they think you are, and a pile of orders that, if enacted, will increase and decrease various loyalty meters. You also have some kind of budget that limits how many orders you can enact. Play involves scheming to increase your budget, investigating to find out how your various masters will react to the various orders, plotting to figure out ways to get them to kill each other, and occasionally enacting orders.

Do you want this to be a board game like Elder Sign or an RPG?

This kind of sounds like a reskin of Paranoia to a gothic horror comedy game rather than sci-fi comedy. I approve.

You'd have eight clans - The Congress, The Pentagon, The House, Langley, NSA, CDC, FEMA and Goldman-Sachs - with absolutely no reason given for people from different clans to do something together. Then a sourcebook would suddenly points out there is a world outside of North America and introduce a completely different sect called the Trilateral Commission, with the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (which would be actually made of Goldman-Sachs clanmembers that split for no reason) and the World Trade Organization.

Nath wrote:You'd have eight clans - The Congress, The Pentagon, The House, Langley, NSA, CDC, FEMA and Goldman-Sachs - with absolutely no reason given for people from different clans to do something together. Then a sourcebook would suddenly points out there is a world outside of North America and introduce a completely different sect called the Trilateral Commission, with the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (which would be actually made of Goldman-Sachs clanmembers that split for no reason) and the World Trade Organization.

But in reality, the World Trade Organization has an inner circle, called the True World Trade Organization, whose real mission is to defeat an alien space virus that secretly infects the CDC. Because reasons.

mlangsdorf wrote: Do you want this to be a board game like Elder Sign or an RPG?

RPG, certainly.

It's basically a reskinned Paranoia with your many competing masters replacing Friend Computer.

Do you have extra lives like in Paranoia? I like the idea that each of your masters has given you a way to cheat death that doesn't work against them (so they can reasonably expect to kill you for your failures), but you have so much redundancy that you really do just have six lives. You only have to remember to put on a fake mustache and accent when a previously-annoyed overlord calls.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Do you have extra lives like in Paranoia? I like the idea that each of your masters has given you a way to cheat death that doesn't work against them (so they can reasonably expect to kill you for your failures), but you have so much redundancy that you really do just have six lives. You only have to remember to put on a fake mustache and accent when a previously-annoyed overlord calls.

Yes. Either that or you just get 6 interchangeable office drones who might as well be the same person.

...now I sort of want to do a direct Paranoia rip into WoD using the Drone (weaver-spirit possessed) splat...

hyzmarca wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Do you have extra lives like in Paranoia? I like the idea that each of your masters has given you a way to cheat death that doesn't work against them (so they can reasonably expect to kill you for your failures), but you have so much redundancy that you really do just have six lives. You only have to remember to put on a fake mustache and accent when a previously-annoyed overlord calls.

Yes. Either that or you just get 6 interchangeable office drones who might as well be the same person.

Why not be the supervisor of a team of 5, and each time you get offed one of the underlings gets the dubious promotion to supervisor.