My game: Vigilance

[dindenver]

Hi!
  It makes sense that there should be one High Inquisitor for each main tenant of their rules. So, if there is 5 main rules, 5 High Inquisitors.

  It seems like you really need to work out what the typical play should be:
1 ) What will the players be doing?
2 ) How will their characters interact with their superiors?
3 ) How do they get missions?
4 ) How do they get rewarded more Shares?
5 ) How do they interact with other factions?
6 ) How do they interact with other Inquisitors?
  It seems like there is a disconnect, you want little or no nsupervision for the chars, but they need to be rewarded and possibly directed into their missions. You want the factions to be completely polarized and incompatible, so the chars have no one to interact with but their bosses. The reality is any time 3 or more personalities are involved, there will be disagreements. The web of relationships between the members and external groups could be very interesting and varied. For the sake of meta-plot, GM toolbox and player interaction, you should think about your game world in more varied shades. Not more solid factions, but the same factions with more internal variation.
  Still, sounds like you have a solid game world in mind, keep at it man.

[Jaochai]

You know, I actually had this halfway answered, and then I crashed.  Let's see what I can do here again . . .

1)  The players will explore such themes as power over others, authority, and the ramifications of might making right.  The players, or at least the characters, will have power over others in both a legal and physical sense.  They are now higher up on the feudal totem pole then they were previously, and they must learn how they'll deal with this.  They will examine the relationship between themselves, their superiors, their subordinates, and people on whole other branches of the feudal tree.  They will find out what it's like to stop being human or resembling being human - kind of like Vampire.  In fact, if I were to summarize the game, it would be the combination of Vampire, any Samurai game (L5R?), and a kind of Cyberpunk / Warhammer 40K setting.

The characters are a combination of law enforcement, feudal samurai, and secret agents.  The characters can do mostly what they want, but if they want to advance in life, they have to make good on their position as the chief law enforcement agency of the city.  "Making good" is pretty ambiguous, but different High Inquisitors have different schools of thought on the matter and have formed fairly coherent schools of thought.

2)  Their ultimate superior is the actual IC, father of the 4 brothers and generator of all shares and power.  Nobody speaks to him except his 4 sons, though, and the Hateful has his 5 High Inquisitors do it for him (the Hateful is in self-imposed seclusion for metaplot reasons).  The High Inquisitors present to the IC a report about what the Inquisitors have been doing, and the IC then awards or removes shares or doesn't.  The Inquisition gains and loses shares as a whole based on the actions of its members.

The High Inquisitors run the Inquisiton in day-to-day matters, such as there are.  In actuality, their main job is to decide what Inquisitors recieve shares - in addition to usually vast amounts of personal shares (which the High Inquisitors, who don't generally go on active duty, dole out to their personal favorites), the High Inquisitors control the purse of the agency as a whole and give out shares to those who have earned them.  They decide this amongst themselves, of course.  The High Inquisitors, being the 5 oldest, are also available to help younger Inquisitors and give them advice and spiritual guidance.

3)  Missions can come from 3 and a half places.  The easiest way to get them is to go on patrol, either undercover or blatantly, and simply cruise around until you find trouble.  This is a favorite method of young Inquisitors looking to prove themselves, and they also like it because it gives them a chance to do good works, rather than just kill bad people - some Inquisitors become sort of folk heroes, and other ones live very successful domestic lives among humans with or without revealing who and what they are.  (I hope I've established by now that it's utterly easy for Inquisitors to disguise themselves flawlessly as ordinary humans and even still keep some of their powers).

Another way is to answer petitions - the equivalent of 911 calls.  While these calls get filtered through the Hungry's own ducal law enforcement agencies, some of them get filtered through to the Inquisitors.  The question of which ones get passed through is the subject of various arcane treaties between the High Inqs and the Hungry himself, but usually the Inqs are called on to take care of the big heavy stuff - mad Enceps, Thirsty causing trouble, big consortiums, that sort of thing.  Or jobs that are too far away from their ducal cop shops to rush off and take care of it.

The last way to do it is to work for the High Inquisitors directly.  Old and powerful that they are, they have extensive networks of contacts, and they often have extreme interpretations on their duties that causes them to have their own interests.  (The 5 High Inquisitors can be roughly described as the pro-human constructivist, the Legalist Noblesse Oblige guy, the Homicidal Zookeeper [ignore humans until they get out of line, then kill them], the Parental Protector, and the Kissinger-like Swing guy).  Because these High Inqs have their own shares, they can reward the people who follow them, and because each one doesn't begrudge the other the right to plot like this, there's no real intrigue - this is a war for hearts and minds, not over actual ground or turf.  Still, each High Inq has his or her 'honor guard' that gets their shares primarily from that kind of patronage.

The actual last way is to go out and do work for other factions, like the Dukes or even the Insurrection.  This doesn't pay shares, but many do it because they're sympathetic to their causes, have old loyalties from their living days, or are being given other perquisites.  Since the Inquisitors can't read each other's thoughts and it's so easy for them to hide physically among humans, this is tolerated, if not openly talked about.

4)  Remember first of all that anybody who has shares can anonymously give them to another.  In other factions, it's impossible to keep this hidden, but among Inquisitors, it's possible to be on the dole to somebody else who has shares (a Duke, or even a Cyb!) and nobody else will know about it.  If a Duke gives shares to an Inq, then the Hungry will know, of course - but if there's a good reason, then he'll let it slide or even reward it.

Illegitimate ways aside, there are two ways to get shares - the good way and the bad way.  The good way is to generally act to the greater glory of the Inquisition - patrol, answer petitions, go on quests and right wrongs.  As Inquisitors do this, the Inquisition as a whole gets more shares, and there's generally a kickback for the ones who have been doing great things.  This is the right way to get more shares.

The wrong way is to toady up, so to speak, to the High Inqs or any bigger Inquisitor.  The 5 High Inqs keep extensive personal supplies of shares - a fifth of the Inquisition's total purse, evenly divided amongst them not counting kickbacks from lower Inquisitors and other bodies - and hand it out to the people who follow their particular philosophies with zeal or who do things for them - once again, for the greater glory of the Inquisition and for that particular methodology, winning hearts and minds which creates more glory and more shares and more kickbacks and more followers again.  The High Inqs do this extensively, and it isn't considered plotting or duplicitious or weakening the Inquisition from within - it's simply natural selection to see who has the best ideas about law enforcement.

5)  Among Inqs, there's party line when it comes to dealing with outsiders, and then there's what actually happens.  The most important group that the Inqs interact with are the Dukes - servants of a rival lord, so to speak.  It is imperative that the two groups be polite to each other and allow each other small concessions - Dukes allow Inquisitors to work in their domains and step on the toes a bit of their own private cops, and Inquisitors stay away from any major accusations against the Ducal inner circles - otherwise there would be a giant gang war that neither side really wants.  Still, both groups, at least at the upper brass, ultimately want to destroy one another, so there's considerable tension between the two, over how heavily the Inqs may trod on toes and how much the Dukes can get away with.

The Insurrection is a real bugaboo.  Regular rebel groups - humans with homemade weapons - are swept up like so much trash by the Inqs, but since actual ex-Inqs joined the Insurrection, there's always a tendancy to want to talk to them and see what they're about.  The groups are supposed to be KOS, but there's considerable leeway with this in execution.

Cybs are the enemy, traditionally, and working with them is an absolute devil's deal.  There are no good Cybs because they take after their owners.  Thirsty Cybs are cruel and duplicitous as a rule, just like their creator, and have no regard for others as anything but tools to achieve power or as symbols of their own failure to be cowed and destroyed.  The Envious's Cybs are sometimes helpful but always petulent, easily offended, and dangerous - the Envious himself is little more than a spoiled child, and his Cybs reflect this.

The rest of the human world is up to the Inq in question to deal with as he finds fair or foul.  The nature of "fair or foul" is ambiguous - the actions of total authoritarian Inqs and those of total humanistic ones seem to be rewarded equally.  As long as they're doing something, it seems.

6)  Inquisitors can't really harm each other.  They can muck each other up in the field, but since they don't really own anything (their shares are held in trust), they have no means of damaging one another or their interests.  If Inquisitors have grievances, then they can submit them to the High Inquisitors, along with the relevant memories (Inquisitors can give their memories out to others at their leisure, like to prove something happened), and the High Inquisitors can give satisfaction by removing shares.  Other than that, if two Inqs simply don't like each other, their only recourse is to talk it out or just avoid each other and carry a grudge.

There is a long time between Inquisitorial "generations."  As part of the treaties between the Hungry and the High Inqs, there may only be so many at a time on active duty, and they must be created in waves with time in between - a clause the Hungry worked in to give him a predictable timeframe for his plans.  To this effect, Inquisitors may increase in number every 50 years and they may do so by a number related to the growth of the COTH's population.  New ones may be created out of this lockstep only when an old one retires or (gasp) is given the Danny Deever treatment.  Therefore, the latest crop of Inquisitors will always be the same age as each other and be 50 years apart from the next group, thus sort of forcing them into a group that figures out life together, at least at first - eventually, Inquisitors tend to drift towards people who have the same legal philosophies as them.