My game: Vigilance

[Jaochai]

Those who haunt RPG.net may, distantly, remember me from many aeons ago, when I submitted a few details about my dream RPG, which I tentatively entitled Vigilance.  Anyway, long story short, that got back-burnered until recently, when I got a cheap PDF of Cyberpunk 3rd.  I realized then that it blew (IMHO, of course).  Thinking back to Shadowrun 4th, which I also didn't care for, a thought crossed my mind.  All presently available Cyberpunk was bad.  I sprung unto action and re-tapped out, mostly from memory, my magnum opus.  My original plan was that it'd be a GURPS or HERO System setting, but it could work with any generic point system.  This is just a copy-and-paste of part of my master document - I will, of course, be ecstatic to provide more information on request, and I have much, much more written.

1.   The End:  Human civilization was torn to shreds by nanotechnological warfare.  A brilliant scientist whose name is now unknown to man had created a great dome, in which a few parts of humanity were allowed to stay.  After many thousands of years, he let them out.  They built . . .
2.   The COTH:  The City on the Hill.  With its old triumphs brought low by anger, envy, and pride, humanity really had nowhere to go.  So, they just camped outside the Dome, building a rudimentary city there.  Over what seems like thousands of years, the population of the city exploded, and soon, the COTH became much larger than any previous human metropolis.
3.   The IC:  Within the dome lies the Infinite Computer.  Perhaps the creation of that brilliant scientist or perhaps the reincarnation of him, the IC is the city's great enigma.  Depending on how far you live from the Dome, the IC may have more or less power over your life.  What is known, however, is that the IC is functionally omnipotent, at least within its own realm.
4.   Uploading:  The Infinite Computer is a uploaded consciousness.  So are the sons he had before he did it.  Uploading of consciousness is a big deal here in the COTH – people do it for all kinds of reasons.  Machine is better than meat.  The Infinite Computer uploaded the brains of his 6 children into himself so as to keep them with him eternally.
5.   The 4 Brothers:  If the Infinite Computer is still alive, then he never speaks to anybody.  The IC in all his eternal majesty is represented by his four living sons, who have surpassed human names and have become instead more of archetypal figures – the Hungry, the Thirsty, the Envious, and the Hateful.  These four brothers run the various things that people think are the domain of the IC; to humanity at large, they are a monolith that doesn't exist.  They are all that survives of the original 6 – the other two died, one as a human being and one after uploading.
6.   The Cybs:  They are nothing resembling monolithic.  The four brothers themselves are playing a bizarre game with each other by which they curry favor with their father.  Each of them creates servants, called Cybs, that serve as their sort of hands and eyes – these Cybs in turn play games with each other to curry the favor of their creator-brother.  These cybs may again create more cybs, and so on unto many generations, all jockeying for power with one another for the favor of their superiors.
7.   The Maximum:  Let it never be said that the IC did nothing for humanity.  Immediately outside the Dome is the Maximum District, where humans live in a sort of technocratic splendor.  Life is perfect as long as you don't ever ask questions, disapprove, or wonder what's happening outside the Maximum.  Unhappiness, as a certain other Computer noticed, implies treason.
8.   The Dukes:  Even with all this happening inside the Dome, there is still a lot of mortal authority to be had.  This is present in the form of the Dukes, a group of human beings, distinct and separate from the IC, who levy taxes, raise armies, enforce the law, and contract public services.  They've built a series of towers and fortresses that roughly denote their physical spheres of influence, called Ducal Zones.  In return for a sort of fealty, they receive special technology and information about the world before destruction, which they use with varying amounts of corruption.
9.   The Consortiums:  There are some Dukes who are not approved of by the IC but have nevertheless obtained enormous power.  The IC considers them threats and the Consortiums, though too smart to make open war, realize full well that they have nothing to lose – hence organ harvests, sweat shops, racketeering, and slavery.
10.   The Enceps:  Go back up to number 4.  The COTH is currently infested by an army of people who have uploaded themselves or had others upload them into cybernetic bodies, and as is so often the case with idle hands, have turned to violence, racketeering, gangs, and organized crime.  When you take a modern-day street thug and make him strong as a crane and bulletproof, you're walking in dangerous territory, but when you drop him into an environment where dozens of people are waiting to give him work, you have on hand a social nightmare the likes of which can only be sorted out by . . .
11.   INQUISITORS:  The boys and girls in blue and yellow, the Inquisitors are one part of the 4 Brothers Death Dance.  Whereas the first 3 brothers are content to play their teacup plots with one another, the last one, the Hateful, for reasons unknown, has decided to step outside their stupid game.  He has thus created a legion of Inquisitors, human beings encepped into the IC's fold at the moment of death, and given them mighty, unstoppable robotic bodies, as many of them as they want.  He has then given them the power to enforce their sense of justice on the city gone mad.  Inquisitors answer only to the Hateful, and the Hateful answers only to the IC himself, who seems to support his judicial mission.
12.   The Insurrection:  It's not morally impossible to claim that the IC is a bad thing.  After all, the IC produces Cybs, and Cybs are nothing but trouble for humanity.  The IC also empowers Dukes, who are if anything a coin toss on the virtue/evil scale.  So it's not surprising that there are movements in the poorest parts of the cities, outside the Ducal Zones, to get rid of the IC and create a sort of human emancipation.  These efforts are no more successful than would be a rebellion of housepets.  There is, however, one spot of hope in the capital-I Insurrection – it has renegade Inquisitors, and every Inquisitor at times feels its siren song.

Please respond - any input at all is appreciated.

[TonyPace]

This sounds like a cool setting, but not all that cyberpunk. It's got a lot of fantasy elements, from the AI pagan god family to the dukes and the 40k sounding inquisitors. The potential tech level seems very high.

Cyberpunk as I understand it focuses on the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the godlike in a familiar setting, with grocery stores and cars and street vendors and jobs and hulking cyborgs and nanotech and the like. On that level, even Shadowrun is closer in spirit than this is.

That said, I still like it and it sounds like a fun place to get into trouble in, but even as a setting for another system, we need a better idea of what kind of game will actually be played there to get a better idea of where you you could use a little guidance.

What do you see the players and their characters doing? Of course, the answer could be "whatever they want - there's lots to do", but in another way that's kind of unhelpful. If you had a solid group of players wanting to try this out, what kind of situation would you want to put them in? What kind of characters would you want them to play? What parts of the setting do you think they would have the most fun with?

Traditionally, all that gets wrapped into two classic questions:

What do the characters do (in this setting)?

What do the players do?

Again, phrased in terms of the cool ass campaign you must be planning in your mind's eye, not as some sort of straightjacket that ALL CHARACTERS AND PLAYERS IN THIS GAME MUST FOLLOW.

Once we can see it as an actual game, I promise you'll get more relevant feedback.

[Jaochai]

Thanks for your feedback, Tony.  (By the way, Jaochai is, in fact, my real name, or at least the name on my passport)

I see players playing either as Inquisitors or as members of the Insurrection.  Though the game could concievably support people who want to play other kinds of characters, most of my thought has gone into playing Inquisitors.

In the game, an Inquisitor is a person who lived their life in the COTH and died, usually violently.  If the Hateful thinks that they'd make a good Inquisitor, then their still-twitching bodies are spirited away to have their brains sliced up and their memories and thoughts reproduced in digital form.  (Transhuman Space was a huge inspiration for me.).  They are then granted robot bodies (which they can liquidate, freeing up the points invested in them to make new bodies).

From there, Inquisitors are assigned to a group (which is a setting as well as gaming convenience), and are basically let loose to track down and deal with the various troublemaking elements of the city, as well as work out their new lives and their places in the world.  Previously, the characters were just part of the endless throng of humanity - they were on the punk side of the cyberpunk universe.  Now that life is dead and they've become the bad guys, and it's up to them to decide how they're going to deal with that.

Inquisitors are basically at the top of the pseudo-feudal society they live in.  Only in the rarest of occassions can a single human or even a group of humans oppose a Cyb/Inquisitor, and in any case they have no legal recourse for doing so - if a Cyb walks into your house and takes your child, then he's theoretically within his rights to do so.  Even the Dukes, who have been granted sanction by the IC, have to defer to Cybs and Inquisitors within some limits.  When two Cybs or a Cyb and an Inquisitor cross paths, then their only recourse for solving problems is naked force.  The entities above Inquisitors (the 4 brothers and the IC) do not, as a rule, interfere with their affairs.  This is not to say that Inquisitors just go around shooting up everything - not only would they recieve an official reprimand for it (escalating the war, see below), but because violence alone simply doesn't solve problems, and Inquisitors are more than just walking guns - they have human judgement behind them.

(I see the Dukes as kind of analogous to corporations in the Cyberpunk frame, a cross between corporations and government.  They're responsible for the day-to-day running of the different city sections.  The Dukes and the Inquisitors are sort of members of rival gangs, since they're both sponsored by one of the 4 Brothers.  As such, in order to provoke an all-out war, there's a general understanding that each side is to leave the other alone.  This is especially true among the Inquisitors, since the Duke brother (the Hungry) is 4 times the size of the Inquisitor brother (the Hateful).  Since the Hateful is, in fact, the smallest brother, he tries to keep his Inquisitors as subtle as possible when acting against his brothers so as they turn most of their efforts towards each other)

If I were to run a game of Vigilance, then I would ideally have four players, in sets of two who played off each other.  The theme of my game would be something to the effect of, "behold the effect that power over others has on people."  The players would go through the world and interact with people on different levels of power, from physically powerful Enceps to politically/financially powerful Dukes to evil Consortium Cybs who had all kinds of power.  The characters spend their time seeking, tracking, and destroying what is repugnant to them.  In one mission, they can track a rape-gang of Enceps and tear down the racket that supports them - in another, they can go undercover inside a slave labor camp and incite a revolt.

I think players will have fun with this because it's a sort of wish fulfillment.  In Vigilance, players don't have to passively observe injustice - they can react to it, repair it, and prevent it.  They can distinguish between right and wrong and impose that on the world, with all the responsabilities that brings.  Inquisitors, like superheroes, have the power to change the world - and unlike traditional superheroes, the way they do it can be messy, violent, and troublesome, and they can learn from it.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  I did get the Cyberpunk idea you were going for before you explained it a second time. I do think you are off the mark a little in the sense that in an ideal Cyberpunk setting the characters "seem" powerless to effect the society that they are rebelling against. Hence the dystopia transfers INTO gameplay.
  As to your setting, it feels like a mix of Exalted, WH40k, CP2020, Judge Dredd and some good creativity. I wonder if you need as many levels between Inceps and IC? I am not sure what all those levels add/do for the setting. Some elements (like the Dukes) seem well thought out, others seem half-baked (Cybs for instance).

It's not morally impossible to claim that the IC is a bad thing

Seems a little poorly written to me. FYI

  Depending on what you want with gameplay, your Inquisitor-centric game will be even less Cyberpunk and will have the players constrained as to what their characters can actually do. So, if I understand your setting, IC has Empowered The Hateful, the Hateful uses their power to make the Inquisitors. Then the players play Inquisitors and fight for justice. But is there room for an anti-hero Inquisitor? Corrupt Inquisitor? How much freedom of choice do Inquisitors have? How many types of missions are there for Inquisitors to really do? Don't get me wrong, not every RPG has to be a freeform roming world of exploration. But I did want to point out that in a hierarchal, well-organized group, the player's options will be limited.
  Sounds like you have a good foundation to buld from, good luck man!

[Jaochai]

As to your setting, it feels like a mix of Exalted, WH40k, CP2020, Judge Dredd and some good creativity. I wonder if you need as many levels between Inceps and IC? I am not sure what all those levels add/do for the setting. Some elements (like the Dukes) seem well thought out, others seem half-baked (Cybs for instance).

I suppose it's a little detritus from when I first started planning the game, where it was nothing but battles between Inquisitors and Cybs.  I should mention that the core idea came to me in a dream; where the idea was that the conflict between the four brothers became a conflict among lots of people, and then it ruined the lives of lots more.  I dunno; it seems to work on paper.  It remains to be seen, of course, how well it works in practice.

A surprisingly big influence on me was L5R, just for the way Samurai interact with peasants.  That's sort of what the Inquisitors and Cybs are - they're good and bad samurai.

But is there room for an anti-hero Inquisitor? Corrupt Inquisitor? How much freedom of choice do Inquisitors have?

Inquisitors have total freedom of choice.  They can be anti-heroic (they're almost expected to be, because they can shoot their problems away rather than solve them constructively.)  It's hard for them to be corrupt, because there's nothing really that humans can give them that they want, but they could concievably sympathize with somebody and turn a blind eye to them.  But there are Inquisitors who have given up on humanity, or think that they're powerless despite everything.  They might even consider themselves zookeepers and become totally dispassionate to the whole thing.

Inquisitors don't have to enforce any kind of civil law.  They're doing what they think is right, which ideally is at cross purposes to the kind of Insane God stuff that the other brothers are about.

[Adam Dray]

I'm gonna plug my own system here. Check out Verge, linked in my sig. It's essentially Settingless, so you can plug all your really nifty cool ideas into it and get a fun game. Verge isn't done yet, but it's playable and it'll give some thematic crunch to your "what would you do with godlike power?" premise. It'll handle the player-vs-player stuff you want to do, too.

If you're still interested in writing your own game, rather than writing a setting for someone else's game, let us know and we'll start asking more questions and guide you through the process.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  I understand what you are saying from the Inquisitors perspective, BUT If the Hateful created their robot bodies, then it would be all too simple to keep tabs on them. Therefore keeping the Inquisitors in line with their agenda would be a simple matter. Furthermore, wouldn't it be possible to install overrides to those mechanical bodies?
  Also, the Inquisitor's mind is of human origin. Therefore, they may still have desires and hatreds. And corrupting them would be as simple as tapping into those drives. Sure, their transhuman nature may find them detached from normal human drives, but even in that case. Their past personalities might be unlocked.
  Maybe you are trying to create a situation where Inquisitors are more like Ronin or Knights Errant. I think you are real close. You just have to work out how the political power interacts. I dig the L5R vibe too, but that probably won't come out til you detail the different Dukes and their themes/mottos/agendas.

[TonyPace]

Who are the Inquisitors?

What kind of training and rough ideology do the Inquisitors have? Even if you decide that 'no one judges the judges', what would be the social parameters of a group of Inquisitors? How would they be chosen to work together? What official resources could they draw on beyond their mere status? What accolades could they hope to earn? What standards are they sworn to uphold and redeem when they become Inquisitors? How do they find out about potential injustices? Do they just wander the streets looking for trouble, or are there bulletins and official missions and stuff? Do they have a civilian staff that takes phone calls and tips? Is there a big Inquisitor central where they pick up info and banter with other Inquisitors and do stuff like that? Is there someone who is at least empowered to scold them? I'm thinking Bad Boys II here, where the boss is a constant authority figure, but all he really does is comment on the PCs progress in a very amusing way.

How are Inquisitors different from one another? What makes the Hateful decide on this guy over that one? What kind of bodies would he make for them? Can you give us some seriously unique examples?

In short, how do you organize and direct the play group in such a way that they get the feeling of a relatively serious Judge Dredd, where it's a tough corrupt world and it's your job to decide what can be lived with and what is irredeemably corrupt?

I assue that's sort of what you're aiming for here. But, there is that other sort of game where we just let the hell loose and act whacky, shooting people for sport, ignoring the 'mission', and rather quickly devolving into intra party action. That's good fun, but I get the feeling that's not really your intention. In my experience, SLA always turned into this. I remember it fondly, but for obvious reasons it didn't see more than very occassional play.

[Jaochai]

Tony, these are all very good questions, and I'm deciding on them officially as I write them, so please forgive the listy format.

An Inquisitor is a person who died a bad death, and the Hateful decided to turn their anger and dismay at the conclusion of their lives against his enemies (who, in his mindset, probably caused the problems to begin with).  It's a kind of self-weeding process.  People who would make bad Inquisitors don't become them.  The general idea that is subtly pervaded to the Inquisitors is that the city is in havoc because nobody with power is willing to use it for anything but self-aggrandizement - there is a definite strain of antagonism towards the city's other power groups.

Inquisitors have no 'training,' per se; skills such as marksmanship, close combat, negotiation, and the like can simply be downloaded into the brain.  Their moral education, for the most part, comes from elder Inquisitors, and from the other members of the group they're assigned to (Inquisitors are assigned to groups, usually of four).  Everything an Inquisitor has is represented in his shares - these are analogous to points in the HERO or GURPS systems.  The Hateful himself interferes with his Inquisitors only at the minimum that is absolutely necessary.  This is because his other brothers know him so well that they can anticipate his actions.  His best plan (and how good a plan this is can be debated) is to create the Inquisitors as an entity as separate as possible from himself so that his brothers can't predict what it will do - unpredictability is why the Inquisitors are humans rather than Cyb.

An Inquisitor is sworn, upon his first Reboot, to protect the people of the City on the Hill and serve their public trust, and to never act maliciously towards another Inquisitor.  It's left intentionally vague.  Status in the Inquisitors is decided by shares - the more you have, the better (and more trusted) an Inquisitor you are.  Older Inquisitors always have the power to scold younger ones, and a few of them (the top 5 old ones) can give and take shares.  To the random young Inquisitor, the old Inquisitors are the real heads of the organization.  Only the four brothers, the IC himself, and a few top-level Cybs know the real truth behind the war between them.  Random Inquisitors are fed a line about free will.

Young and lone Inquisitors generally have to go and seek out trouble, but older Inquisitors (those who have learned how to compromise) usually have contacts amongst the seedy parts of the city and can direct their young compatriots.  Considering how perfectly Inquisitors can blend into human society, it's usually pretty easy for them to find trouble.  While there are no official bulletins, Inquisitors in reasonably safe parts of town are in constant radio contact with Inquisitor Central and thus can easily relay APBs to others.

When not out looking for trouble, Inquisitors can hang out in digital form inside the vast computers of the Dome.  They do have a physical hangout place, though - it's called Foundry 6, or just the Foundry, and it's where their bodies are made.  Anybody who walks in can get the Inquisitor's attention right quick.  Speaking of the Foundry, an Inquisitor can walk in and have any kind of body made, as long as it's shares (point value) isn't too expensive for you to afford.  Say, in HERO system, you walk in with a 200 point body.  You can liquidate it and replace it with any body worth up to 200 shares, which you can either design on the spot or pull from a pre-existing portfolio.

Inquisitors are differentiated from each other by their personalities and experience.  An Inquisitor can assume any body that's within his price range - if Jim is ordinarily  the front line fighter, Tom is the long-range sniper, and Cal is the sneaker, then they can change bodies for next adventure to whatever they think they'll need.

You have hit spot on the head what I want to accomplish with Vigilance in your last line or so, by the way.

[Jaochai]

Hi!
  I understand what you are saying from the Inquisitors perspective, BUT If the Hateful created their robot bodies, then it would be all too simple to keep tabs on them. Therefore keeping the Inquisitors in line with their agenda would be a simple matter. Furthermore, wouldn't it be possible to install overrides to those mechanical bodies?
  Also, the Inquisitor's mind is of human origin. Therefore, they may still have desires and hatreds. And corrupting them would be as simple as tapping into those drives. Sure, their transhuman nature may find them detached from normal human drives, but even in that case. Their past personalities might be unlocked.
  Maybe you are trying to create a situation where Inquisitors are more like Ronin or Knights Errant. I think you are real close. You just have to work out how the political power interacts. I dig the L5R vibe too, but that probably won't come out til you detail the different Dukes and their themes/mottos/agendas.

You know, I honestly did not see your reply between the others.  These, too, are insightful questions (not inciteful questions), and it will do me good to answer them.

The Hateful is capable of eavesdropping and overriding his Inquisitors, but he chooses purposefully not to do so.  This is because he is possessed of certain beliefs, however bizarre, and chief among them is that the Inquisitors need to do their own thing in order to stay loyal to him.  For one thing, since he (or rather, his helpers) decides who does and who doesn't become an Inquisitor, nobody who's too radically out of the fold will become one.  Eavesdropping is easy (he has access to all their memories, after all), but for the most part, he elects consciously not to do it, relying instead on his High Inquisitors (the 5 eldest) to tell him everything he needs to know.  He chooses to run his organization "human-style" rather than "computer-style" because he feels, perhaps rightfully, that his human Inquisitors will react harshly to it.

This cult of "human-style" is one of the most pervasive aspects of the Inquisitors - the Hateful celebrates everything that he percieves as "human" even as his brothers move towards "computer-style" methods.  (Aside from pointing at the existance of Inquisitors as evidence of "human-style," this distinction has no real meaning.  All brothers give their Cybs supreme autonomy much as the Hateful treats his Inquisitors.)  This includes a healthy dose of self-resentment for not being "human-style" enough.  The only practical outcome of this is that he relies on his subordinates to have personal or at least professional relationships with each other and with their own subordinates - he pays great respect to the idea that the contents of one's head are one's own, and this serves to keep him respected by his High Inquers and by the corps at large.

This is where the Insurrection comes in.  The Insurrection came about because of the cult of "human-style" - the Hateful and his High Inquisitors (most of whom are thousands of years old and are almost as mechanized as the Hateful himself) deliberately choosing strong-willed, rebellious people with a powerful sense of justice.  This, of course, backfired terrifically.  The reason the Hateful hasn't stamped them out (they stole perhaps 1/100th of his shares) is because they're so good at hiding themselves, and plus because of their human supporters.  The Insurrection actually has popular support, and it's a powerful asset indeed - the Outlands* are damn large and full of places to hide.

(The Hateful and his Foundry cannot make an infinite number of bodies.  They can design an infinite number of bodies, but can't have more than so many shares worth running around at once.  There's a reason you lose shares if you lose your body - because the Hateful loses them, too.  When a fully-functional Inquisitor body vanishes, it's a severe blow to him.)

(*The outlands are one of the three districts of the COTH besides the Dome, and they form rough concentric circles.  The innermost is the Maximum district, which is like Scary Computer Disneyland and is the Hungry's private fief.  Around that is the domains of the various Dukes, and while their influence runs everywhere they can only make open displays of strength in a limited area.  Outside that is the no-man's-land, not administrated to by any particular Duke.  This is called either the Dayp (Do-as-you-please) or the Outlands.  The COTH is big, and the Outlands is the biggest part of it - the whole city extends perhaps 600 miles away from the Dome at its farthest point, all the while over absolutely flat, featureless terrain, and the living situation is as dense or denser than Hong Kong or any other big Asian city).

I'm hoping this is internally consistant, makes sense, and is compelling.  Please tell me if it isn't.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  OK, it seems like there is a potential for the Hateful and the Insurgents to get a long and even more room for the Inquisitors and insurgents to get along. I think if you want the game to be a little open-ended, you can write the metaplot with enough opening for a new Inquisitor to ally with a Duke, The Hateful, another Brother, Insurgents or lone wolf style. Then come up with advantages to each approach.
Maybe Ducal Inqs get more/better cooperation from local cops, but are identified as sympathizers by Insurgents or something.

[Jaochai]

If there was reconciliation between the Insurrection and the Hateful, it'd remove one of the major conflicts of the game.  Your idea that there might be differently-aligned Inquisitors is good, but if they aren't working for the Hateful, they aren't really Inquisitors - if they were aligned with one of the other brothers, they'd just be Cybs.  An Inquisitor or group could concievably go lone-wolf, though.

Mixed groups can exist, of course - with HERO and GURPS you can be anything - and brain-downloaded Enceps (seldom as strong as Inquisitors) can be found most everywhere.  But if you weren't an Inquisitor, you'd have to take into consideration your parts, and how much they cost, and how they could be repaired - and if you just hand-wave that away, then you lose the major power of the Inquisitors and Cybs.

If you were playing in this setting, what sort of character would you play?  What aspects would you want to explore?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  OK, that's my point, the Hateful is the boss, no other allegiences allowed. And if the GM catches onto that, they have near omnipotent power to enforce it on the Inquisitors. So how much freedom do the Inquisitors actually have?
  If the Hateful digs the whole human vibe, how come there isn;t a secret alliance between the Hateful and Insurgents?
  Don't get me wrong, you don't have to make a game where you can make any character and that character can do anything, but if you are going for freeform gameplay, the inquisitors don't leave a lot of room for personal freedom/choice.
  All I was trying to say with that last post is, maybe set the meta-plot with enough wiggle room so that the players and GM can work with different political struggles and plot twist combinations.
  For me, I would want to rage against the machine, take the lowest power, highest denominator group, like the insurgents. Think about it, they have the most to gain and the least odds of achieving it. They have dukes, cybs, inqs, bros and who knows whatelse arrayed against them. Plus, the characters aren't pigeon-holed into a particular format or archetype. Anyone/anything could be a insurgent, Norms, AI, Cybs, Inqs, etc...

[Jaochai]

This might tear up what I've written previously, but I'm going to attempt to explain it like this . . .

The Hateful and the Inquisition are 'human-like' in that the Hateful and his helpers don't pry into the minds of the other Inquisitors.  On the other end of the coin, none of the Inquisitors are told the real story behind why they're there.  The only explanation the Inquisitors get is that the IC has named them his personal debuggers - at all times, they speak with the IC's authority.  As long as they respect the 'table of ranks' - never to bring judgement down on somebody who's higher than they are - then they can do whatever they want.  (the 'table of ranks' is a convenient fiction to keep the Inquisitors from going straight after the Dukes.  The Hateful and the Thirsty are already in open war with each other - the last thing the Hateful wants is to bring the Hungry (the Brother Bigger than Any Other) into a sort of gang war with him - the Hateful will lose)

The true story about the 4 brothers is simply not known.  The rank-and-file Inquisitors don't know it, the Dukes don't know it.  The Cybs don't even know it.  Only the Four Brothers themselves and their highest assistants know it.  The Insurrection is a revolt against the supression of information that the Hateful does amongst his own ranks.  The question of how concerned with justice the Insurrection is, is up to the individual gamemaster (I am purposefully not making any moral judgements) and whether he wants to portray them sympathetically.

Inquisitors are mostly free.  They're not entirely free - they're still part of a larger organisation and they have to kowtow to it.  But once we get past the thou-shalt-nots, the Inquisitors are free to do anything that's permitted to them.  I suppose the control on this is that people who wouldn't make good Inquisitors don't often become them . . .

[Jaochai]

One thing that I'm not yet really happy with is the penalty for dying in the game.

Initially, I though that the penalty for dying would be a little dock of your shares - maybe a quarter of them.  But then I realized, or rather, somebody pointed out to me, that if this penalty is too large, then one member of the group will instantly become useless upon death - and if it's too small, then death is no big deal.  Plus, I like the idea of there only being a small number of Inquisitors, and they get bumped out only because they're incompetant - the good ones have stayed on for centuries.

The idea that was given to me was that the characters would have a static number of deaths allowed to them, and that this was mostly non-negotiable.  This sounded good, since the really slick ones could survive seemingly indefinitely.

I'm also concerned about factions.  One idea (again, not mine) was that the Hateful had 5 immediate subordinates, and that each one had a different sort of philosophy, and that a given Inquisitor would be aligned with one or the other.  I didn't initially like this idea because it would impose splats on the players, but I'm warming up to it.  What do you think?