Solace: Reconstruction

Currently ongoing

The great game has begun, as groups and factions crawl out from the rubble and start the process of inflicting themselves upon the city. You can track the progress of repairs here: Game Summaries

It is Talus Kisaturna 347. The city lies in ruins, and Winter is Here.

Prologue

Solace is not what it was. For roughly eight hundred thousand souls living within the city, the world ended on Taldus Kilovis. Tens of thousands died at the direct hands of the armies and otherworldly horrors assaulting Solace. An unknowable number perished in the sudden devastation and destruction of the Collapse of the Temple District into the city below. Many more will die at the slow but no less lethal hands of cold, starvation, and injury. Solace's population is a fraction of what it once was, and the city has been reduced to an ashen, rubble-strewn shadow of its former glory.

But the city endures. The survivors will need to heal and rebuild, a process which will be neither simple, nor easy. Forces stand ready and determined to bring about its final destruction, or to profit off of its fallen state. Efforts to improve conditions are hampered by the deaths of many of the mages and priests the city relied on for magical solutions to its problems, and divergences in the behavior of magic in the city. Parts of the city are cut off from one another due to the rubble choking the streets, and the loss of critical infrastructure. But the city endures. Just as it was once before, when another ancient horror rose from the depths and brave forces rose to challenge it, Solace will be reborn.

The city will rebuild, but questions remain. What shape will the city take when the rubble is finally cleared? When the souls are laid to rest, whose prayers will send them to the hereafter? When new buildings are built over the ruins, who will own them, whose people will use them? The city is full of groups seeking to see the city rebuilt. Each has their own goals and agendas. Few align perfectly, and collaboration risks giving way to conflict. New heroes will rise to take on the challenge of, not saving Solace, but restoring it up to and beyond its former glory. But whose vision of the city will prevail?

The Setup

The players each play a dual role in this game: of a faction with a vested interest in the restoration of the city (within their own vision of how a restored Solace should look) and a character acting as an agent on behalf of that faction.

How This Works

We're going to be trying something new and somewhat experimental with this game. The campaign will be split into two phases, an asynchronous Faction phase handled via Slack, and a Character phase which will constitute the live sessions. The city of Solace is divided into multiple regions following the collapse, with the destruction and fall of the Temple District creating divisions in the city that hinder the free-flow of people and resources. As such, the process of surviving and rebuilding the collapse can be treated as separate and distinct issues for each section of the city to resolve, with crises and problems that need to be handled individually and separately appearing throughout.

Faction play is intended to involve a fair amount of roleplay but will be fairly structured to keep things moving. The goal of each round of faction play is to expend resources and effort to improve conditions in the city, by boosting Infrastructure through the use of a faction's Influence, and resolving Problems that present threats to that infrastructure and attempts at progress and reconstruction.

Each faction's turn will take the following format:

Step 1: Spend Influence to make improvements to the city

Step 2: Identify Problems that need to be resolved around the city

Step 3: Declare Approaches to dealing with these problems (Ex: Overcoming known challenges, Creating Advantages to increase your faction's influence in the region, Attacking identified threats etc.)

Step 4: Resolve Actions (roll dice, invoke aspects, get results)

Step 5: Collect Influence, update Reputations

Step 6: Advance Unresolved Problems to the next step of difficulty (Basic, Heightened, Critical)

The character-level play will be a more straightforward adventure. Critical Problems present issues that the factions cannot deal with through mass action, that require the personal attention of gifted members of the respective organizations with a vested interest in the region. The player characters are engaged to resolve these issues.

Getting Started!

The faction-based gameplay and the abstract nature of the game, with an emphasis on character interaction, roleplay, and non-combat problem solving, means that we'll be using the FATE system, specifically Fate Core