Agents Of Empire/Scuttlebutt

Weekly Poker Match

Rick Starfarer has scheduled (perhaps retroactively as of a couple months ago) a weekly game of six-card hyperstud! All of the top local colonial movers and shakers are invited (i.e., the PC's). Just dial your holovidwave set to 55-epsilon-673-double-mauve to log on (and have an IC excuse for sharing OOC information).

• Rick is in, of course.

Transcripts

If you have transcripts of the rpg elements of this game you want to share (either in-character or out of character), send them to me (lpsmith) and I'll put them up on the transcript page. Thanks!

Strange Dreams

The next time you and Reig chat in person, you chat for a while, and then Reig says, "Listen, uh, I'm not sure if this means anything, but I had this strange dream when I last visited Iavo. Just in case you experience something similar, I thought I'd tell you about it." Reig's dream.

Rescue Proposal

Representatives of one or more Houses have been individually considering mounting a rescue attempt on Turn 7 to retrieve a certain unnamed individual. If this individual is successfully retrieved, she will need a place to work. Thus, I propose a joint rescue operation, wherein any House which participates in the operation will also contribute equally to constructing a new research institution, and any research that comes out of it will then be shared equally by all the Houses involved.

• Aramin is interested in taking part in a joint operation. We have a wheelman (Jude, great vehicles) and the extraction guy (Reig, Good Stealth), but it might be nice to have a ship that could actually fight if need be (instead of having to steal one) and some way to pin the blame on another house (so Jayce (a Gwynne vassal) doesn't come after us).
  • Possible houses to pin it on: Taba (mercenary/stealth house, if they were hired); Grazene; Tipno or Topni, though they wouldn't do it well. On balance, Taba seems like the best bet.
• Intrepid is also interested (and has already taken the precaution of safeguarding the contact, Professor Winth). We can bring in a pirate ship, some tough soldiers, and Seve, who can act as a world-class distraction when necessary. Some kind of diversion and possibly fake pirate attack seems called for, allowing Reig and Jude to sneak in.
• Prime may be up for pinning the blame on Taba. Possible activities to do so:
  • The serial numbers on the shuttle we used to get there were filed off (and the ship exploded), but may still be readable with the right technology. When they finally get it, it would be cool if that number was registered to Taba. Or you can infiltrate the investigation and lead it to Taba that way or something.
  • ...anything else?

Environmental Protection Act

Shockingly, it seems that House Gwynne left behind all sorts of hazardous garbage when they abandoned their various colonies. The Houses who graciously stepped in to assume control of these environmental disasters are left with the heavy financial burden of cleaning up the mess.

Surely the Imperial Parliament cannot let such injustice stand. Several prominent politicians are currently in the process of drafting a resolution that would levy significant fines against House Gwynne and distribute the funds to the affected Houses.

Prime Tax Reduction Act

Prime is heading up an effort to reduce taxes on all of us by 15 megacredits each. To do this, they need to sway up to nine houses:

• Reeft: Large house with many votes, so either need to sway neutral, plus sway all the rest of the list, or sway them to support, in which case we need only sway 6 of the rest. Something going on between them and Gwynne; may be able to use this to our advantage.
  • Status: Working on it: Advantage (working on research to consider a vote for the tax to be a vote for Gwyne) / Prime (helping with the spread of rumor via the medium of cocktail parties)
• Kresht: military-emphasis House
  • Status: Current supporter! (Prime)
• Falus: ship-builders. Wants this text added to bill: "a provision containing tariffs on external ship building such that the price of all ships (cargo and military) is raised by a mega-credit"
  • Status: depends on whether we add that to the bill. (By default right now it is going in as is; if someone wants to negotiate better they can try, but they can be considered to be a supporter.) (Prime)
• Tipno or Topni: They hate each other. Something that gives a military advantage of one over the other would pull their votes. Tipno's about agriculture and slave labor and Topni's about food synthesis and robots.
  • Status:
    • Topni: Supporting the Bill
    • Tipno: Supporting the Bill
• Iavo: Buddhist/Amish house. Usually uninvolved with politics
  • Status: Current supporter! (Aramin)
• Canterina: 'Woah/tripper, dude! You know what would be awesome???' house. Has three demands
  • A bunch of different materials. Status: see 'Canterina Sampler Pack', below. Status: Working on it (Aramin/Everybody)
  • For us to beat their champion in a dance competition. Status: Working on it (Reig/Aramin)
  • For us to invent a new color. Status: Working on it (Advantage)
• Grazene: Wants to take over SCA-style planet; we should probably vote for their bill.
  • Status: Current supporter! (Everybody)
• Vegas: Economic dudes.
  • Status: Pay them off, or go with Reeft. Working on it. Intrepid
• Krazybuys: The nemesis we created.
  • Status: Pay them off, or go with Reeft.

Running Totals. We need a total of 50:
(Getting to 50 is needed, but we can drop Falus and their tax rider if we can get to 56.)
Good to go:

• 8 Us
• 4 Iavo (retreat center on Aramin's Elvis)
• 6 Falus (our shipbuilding more expensive)
• 10 Krescht (Dark's convincing)
• 8 Grazene (votes for votes established)
• 6 Topni
• 4+ Reeft (researching way to exploit Gwynne rivalry)
• 6 Tipno
• 4 Canterina (need to finish sampler, but have dance and color!)
• =56+ subtotal

In the works:

• 4 Vegas
• ==59+ subtotal

Nothing in the works:

• 5 Krazybuys

Canterina Sampler Pack

One of the conditions that Canterina gave for voting for our tax break was that we need to send them a bunch of different commodities. To that end, we're going to be assembling a sampler pack of cool colonial stuff that we can send to them. But to do this, we'll need everyone's help: we need one unit of each of your raw materials. If things work out with Vefna, we believe that they'll let us use their cargo ship, so we'll be sending it around to everyone's planets to collect them, if there are no objections.

• House Intrepid can contribute a batch of hyperidot.
• House Advantage is willing to provide a silo of premium Savage Corn.
  • In order to ensure the greatest variety possible, House Aramin offers to pay Advantage 1Mc if they also include a unit of Food.
  • House Advantage accepts, and sets aside one unit of Indecent Squid.
• House Prime can give one kelp and one chemical unit.
  • We do have enough to produce the full set of samples without this unit of Chemicals, but Aramin would be happy to purchase it for 1Mc ourselves if Prime is amenable (and there is still one open slot on the cargo ship, so Prime doesn't need to deal with shipping).
• With Raix's Frozen Gas (and Advantage's Food), that should give us enough resources to produce a twelve-commodity sampler pack for Canterina (including six raw commodities and six refined ones).

The Vefna Issue

Reig contacts you by extra-secure ansible, and says, "As some of you no doubt know by now, Grazene is trying to gain support of a bill that would dictate how defunct colonies could get taken over by other Houses. They want the bill passed for their own purposes (to take over a nearby SCA-equivalent planet), and have been playing us off against each other, telling each of us that we could be the new proud owners of Vefna (Raix's now-defunct colony). Gwynne is also a supporter of this bill, no doubt because they want to take over Vefna, too. Now, trying to administer governance of Vefna collaboratively would probably be a nightmare. And having only one of us in charge might lead to an imbalance. So, we have a proposal: we are about to transport a group of would-be homesteaders from the Empire through the wormhole. We had intended that they come to our planet to help us harvest resources and explore. But they are an otherwise neutral third party: what if we collectively supported them as the new holders of Vefna? They would no doubt be in our collective debt, and would help prevent Gwynne's intrusion back into this area of space."

"One effect of this would probably be the support of Grazene for a tax-reducing bill for colonies that Prime is in the middle of trying to negotiate through the senate. I'm also trying to help in other ways on that front; contact Dark for more details."

News from the Empire Turn 3 Followups

• Pirates:
• Loans:
• Transportation:
• Covert Military:
• Grazene Politics: House Aramin has a representative in the Core prepared to talk with Grazene on Turn 4 (after getting more information about the vote on turn 3). Depending on the nature of the vote, he is prepared to negotiate on behalf of any other House that wishes to join with us in exchange for reducing or delaying the tax burden on all of us. The more houses that join, the better deal we can probably negotiate! Who's in?
  • House Intrepid whole-heartedly supports the amendment of the current tax regime. Seve will help out with Socializing (Imperial).

The Industrial Revolution

Your raw materials may only be worth one megacredit apiece to you, but they're worth much more than that to someone with the right industrial infrastructure to make use of them. That's why House Aramin would like to partner with other houses to start mass producing valuable refined goods at a profit.

If you bring us a shipload of four units of your raw materials, then we'll process them with our own special blend of Unsorted Crystals to produce a unit of rank-2 refined goods (worth five megacredits on the Imperial exchange), which you can pick up when you return to drop off the next load of raw materials. If you're interested in this deal, let us know!

Join the League of Champions!

House Intrepid is forming a new interplanetary Astro-Polo league, the League of Champions! Seve Ballesteros and the Krazybuys(tm) Arabian Knights are on a pre-season tour to help drum up interest. If you'd like to like to host an exhibition match in the next few turns, let us know!

(What that means mechanics-wise: our cargo ship visits your planet with my PC aboard. No military units. If you want to trade goods on the side, great. If you join the League, there'll be another match later on, perhaps with an Imperial visit and some real money involved.)

• To foster community spirit between colonials and natives, House Advantage are doing their best to put together an amateur team, the Fort Tomorrow Tree Squid. The Tree Squid place a high emphasis on image marketing, after-game banquets, spray-on uniforms, ambiguous rough-housing, xenophobia and, indeed, virtually any aspect of sport that draws attention away from the actual gameplay.

• Huzzah! House Intrepid's (de facto) flagship Titanicus will drop by Hrobaj on turn 2, in time for the Trade and Politics phases.

• House Aramin proposes a combined polo match and commodities exchange: if Intrepid brings N units of (rank 0) Warp Crystals, Aramin will trade N units of (rank 0) Unsorted Crystals for them. And play a game of polo to celebrate! (Another option: four units of (rank 0) Warp Crystals for one unit of (rank 1) Fancy Crystals.) (Or we could just do the option described above, under "The Industrial Revolution".)

Using this page

Let's keep the in-game stuff here, and use the related Discussion page for meta-game stuff. Oh, and put new stuff at the top!