Solace: Reconstruction

The Setup

Solace is not what it was. Whether at the direct hands of the armies and otherworldly horrors assaulting Solace, the sudden devastation and destruction of the Collapse of the Temple District into the city below, or the slow but no less deadly hands of cold, starvation, and injury, Solace's population is a fraction of what it was, and the city has been reduced to an ashen, rubble-strewn shadow of its former glory. For roughly eight hundred thousand souls living within the city, the world ended on Taldus Kilovis. For the rest, the next desperate months will be ones of survival, healing, and rebuilding. Solace will be reborn, as it was once before, when another ancient horror rose from the depths. But how? What shape will the city take when the rubble is finally cleared, the souls laid to rest, and new buildings built over the ruins. Many factions have united to see the city rebuilt, each with their own goals and agendas, most in some manner of conflict with one another. Whose vision of the city will prevail?

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