[Loose Toys] Dilemma with Strong Adult Content

[knicknevin]

I'm using the little fears engine to run a short campaign called 'Loose Toys' at my RPG club: the premise is that intelligent, robotic toys in the year 2075 wake up one morning to find a) they are suddenly self-aware and b) the human race is missing.

The players took to this pitch well, especially when I said I wanted them to provide an avatar for their character, and they brought in whole bunch of weird toys to play:

Robin: came up with a plush octopus toy and its crab sidekick (which I named Crab Nebula)
Jo: she brought a cuddly Soup Dragon from the old Clangers kids show (that may be too British for some of you to know about)
Craig: he had a little plastic sumo wrestler doll
Jef: a lump of 'smart putty' which is like silly putty only with a slight metallic content that makes it a little magnetic.
Steph: a collectible doll from a range of 'ghosts of dead children': very creepy

Tonight, I'm planning to present them with a big moral dilemma: they've already skirted one when they found some humans who were insane and got the urge to dissect their brains to find out why they hadn't vanished along with everyone else. They ultimately resisted the temptation, but forgot to keep an eye on their charge, so some NPC toys cut her up: the PCs' response was to bomb the building and drive to Washington, where another lead was pointing.

Whats going to happen in Washington is that they will find another two mad people: one is a US Senator who approved a black ops project an has the security codes for it, but is too caught up in a cycle of self-harm and guilt to be of any real help. The other is a victim of years of sexual abuse who is now pretending that she is just a sexbot and not a human anymore.
So... will the players allow/encourage a dysfunctional sexual relationship just to get some information they need? Will they stand by and let an aggressive man use a vulnerable woman if it advances their own agenda? That's the planned dilemma anyway: I thought i would present it now, before the event, in order to make a better comparison later with what actually happens.

[Darkall]

Man, that is a great concept. I can't wait to hear the results.

I am curious, what sort of "Cycle of Self Abuse" is the Senator involved in? Is he abusing her (the pretend Sexbot), or something else. Will he be introduced to her, and the players be caught in the dilemma?

Finally, what made you choose the Little Fears System? Is it because of the link to the "plot" (children in Closetland), or just that you like the system itself?

[knicknevin]

Well, we never quite got to that dilemma, but we should next week; the party acquired a group of the sexbots and haven't figured out yet that one of them is actually a human! They are now on their way to the Pentagon, across a barricade of hostile alien vegetation, because they have been told that their is a Senator Black in there who needs rescuing...

I am curious, what sort of "Cycle of Self Abuse" is the Senator involved in? Is he abusing her (the pretend Sexbot), or something else. Will he be introduced to her, and the players be caught in the dilemma?

The Senator is weighed down by guilt over what he sees as his terrible failure: he authorised spending on an AI war computer, but then aliens attacked and it bombed itself rather than be caught by them! The stress, along with the disappearance of the rest of humanity, has pushed him over the edge and he goes through a ritual of physical self-punishment everyday. The Toys first task will be getting him to believe they are real and breaking him out of his cycle; what happens when he meets the sexbot woman will be up to the players...

Finally, what made you choose the Little Fears System? Is it because of the link to the "plot" (children in Closetland), or just that you like the system itself?

I picked little fears because I wanted a system that created characters as a broad sketch rather than as deeply detailed lists of abilities, skills, talents, etc. Also, the power level in little fears is about right for a group of toys, just as it is for a group of children. The clincher was that little fears embraces and deals with some very dark concepts in a mature way, showing how the innocent lose their innocence, which was a feature I really wanted to capture in my story.

[Darkall]

Thanks for the answers. That is a really sharp idea!
Can't wait to hear how the rest of the story goes. Keep posting....

[knicknevin]

Its all over now: the toys overcame the aliens by merging one of them with a powerful AI and giving it  a conscience about what it was doing; this spread virally to all the other aliens and either drove them mad or made them more human (bearing in mind that humans are quite capable of doing some evil things...)

The cool bit though was the final session,where we projected what might happen as the humans are released and civilisation returns to something like normal. I left it up to the players to postulate different solutions and outcomes, letting them choose a scene from any point in the future (they ended up ranging from 2 weeks to 50 years after current game events) and play it out, taking on whatever character roles they wanted to,as long as the player setting the scene still played their normal character.

The scenes they came up with were:
- Going Home: Of course, the humans had already legislated against AI, to prevent something like the toys from ever existing; plus, some of the toys had dissected human beings. This scene was short & brutal.
- Hiding the Truth: The toys obfuscate the evidence and pretend not to be self-aware; this lasts for about a year before they blow their cover (rescuing a young adult from a drug overdose) and saw them get drafted into a military coup that overthrew the government!
- Toy Nation: With the political support of the aliens, the toys take over the ghost-town that Mexico City has become and form their own state. 10 years later, there is a military confrontation with the USA and the PCs end up killing some of their former owners in battle!
- Nanny State: The toys persuade the aliens not to release the adult humans in this timeline, so it is up to them to raise the children as they see fit; 2 generations later, this culture is stagnant and lethargic as the 'children' are led by the toys in all things.
- Space Rangers!: The toys use the aliens to get into space and go back to one of the worlds they had previously assimilated; they 'liberate' it but one amongst them ends up being master of the planet!
- Being Human: The toys have their awareness implanted into human bodies constructed for them by the aliens and are inserted back into human society when all the other humans are released. They live out their lives as any ordinary person, but covertly watching over the human race and acting as guardians; some toys choose to remain hidden within the alien bases rather than become human. In the end, this conclusion became the actual outcome.

I must say, it was fun to take this approach and really explore the far-reaching consequences of the events of the preceding 6 weeks, plus I was impressed by the way the players explored the moral dilemmas and conflicts in each situation. As one of them commented, "We came up with lots of solutions and all of them were wrong!" but it was agreed that that was the truth and we couldn't just have some Deus Ex machina come along to hit the big reset button and return the world to the state it had been in prior to the aliens' arrival.