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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

dindenver wrote:
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.

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.

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?

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...

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 . . .

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?

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.

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.