we should totally just stab caesar

[groundrules]

Hi, everyone! Still a bit of The Channeling event to go ( til 18 November ), but a wild plotting post appears to transition us into the last phase of Arc VII.

Plotting for anything requiring mod feedback is open til a hard deadline of 23:59 GMT on 19 November. A summary of everything planned & approved follows on 20 November.

You can play out everything agreed here til 4 December — and will receive the setting and CR opportunities for your one-month cooldown event on 5 December. December is historically a crammed month, so expect a classically haunted winter wonderland and small-scale plot opportunities. An obscure teaser.

WHAT WE KNOW

Ephes struggles to decide on undead Lady Messalina’s request to receive the elite army of the Hand and vanquish the undead Brotherhood abroad. Senate leader Caius Justus calls to refuse Messalina and says the citadel’s divine patron, the apocalyptic Chained God, would want Ephes itself to conquer, without an intermediary.

It emerges that Caius Justus, who created the Hand, and cultishly devoted Hand leader Narula have been supernaturally enhancing recruits by feeding them ‘dark water,’ a sinister magical medium that always appears where the undead are, like the mysterious Matthias. Dark water is revealed to desperately want a shape, much like the Chained God once did. The black liquid has been slowly absorbing Ephes, reanimating corpses and trying to consume the Chained God — before Mo Ran killed him. RIP Chained God.

…meanwhile, a young boy claims his ‘friend’ Matthias must cut off parts of himself and leave them behind, to anchor the dark water on a premise. Matthias has been receiving sea shipments of grain infested with dark water from the Hand and Caius Justus. The child still wants his umbrella.

STATUS QUO

The Senate votes to give undead lady Messalina the Hand, with 53 in favour. Messalina comes to the Senate to gratefully accept command — only to be apprehended by Hand leader Narula on orders of Caius Justus, who accuses her of manipulating the vote through witchcraft, bribery and intimidation. The Senate is divided between his overwhelming faction, that of Caelius Silvanus who wishes to investigate, and Messalina’s own supporters, led by Maximus Faustus also known as the shapeshifting demon Alir.

Bounties are hereby issued on anyone previously assigned to work for Messalina, or seen consorting with her. Your choice if your character qualifies!

Aggressive curfews, frequent weapons searches and crowd controls are imposed on Ephes, with businesses finding their activity highly surveiled and restricted, while daily clashes take place in the streets, and the Hand roughhouse civilians to impose discipline. Assassinations of politicians and business figures who supported Messalina — much in the style of the murders that took place at the banquet of Maximus Faustus at the start of the Arc — are frequent. Rebel Senators plot in utmost secrecy. Civilians turn conspirers.

Meanwhile, Mo Ran’s… dismissal of the Chained God has crumbled his temple: this has fortunately revealed the beacon in the levels below… which is being slowly unburied from debris. Anyone seen at the temple in days prior is sought for arrest on suspicions of blasphemously injuring the temple. Your choice if this applies to your character! God-killer Mo Ran may enjoy nightmares of chaining and captivity for a few weeks.

MISSION GOAL:

■ Survive til 4 December when Karsa calls the party to the Chained God’s ruined temple in secret, to activate the beacon and send otherworlders home.

■ Characters that drop or fail activity in November go home through the beacon. You can also canon update your character through a beacon malfunction.

OPIUM POWDER, TREASON & PLOT

Rescue Ephes from its dire political straits or pitch anything else you’d like to do! The options with the most player support will be implemented, so please +1, collab and figure out what your character can do! Please note: you’ll be expected to play out rather than handwave what you commit to.

Players will have to sort out their own logs / posts, unless a mod-led log is requested.

QUESTIONS

Comments

[mustact]

Considering Caius Justus's response to this, Ratonhnhaké:ton thinks that the only correct response is to assassinate him.

In order to weaken Caius, he'd aim to take out Narula first, and though his instinct is to go for the assassination here too, he's not opposed to a less bloody solution such as Lockwood's pitch above either. But Caius has got to go permanently. An eye for an eye and the world will be a happier place. :D

[blackscales]

Wrathion is in favour of this, and would prefer to kill Narula (who he thinks is too unstable to try and control) and set the veteran Lucius Meridius in his place. (A member of his team of Widows, Orphans and Veterans!)

In the spirit of 'go big or go home', he'd also be in favour of killing Caius Justus, and would suggest he could try and pull strings to elevate his own patron, Procula Avita, to replace Caius! She always supported Lucius, after all, a Veteran now in charge of the Hand potentially? She loves widows, orphans, and veterans?? He is willing to do PR to help her cause.

(I just personally think it would be funny, tbh, for Wrathion to punt this woman straight into power after she asked him to be ruthless. Be careful what you wish for!)

[recklessenough]

Would there be room for two birds with one stone?

Set up Caius Justus to make it looks like he "betrayed" Narula, then nudge Narula to do the actual assassination? Nothing says instability like having the head of the military murder the head of government.

Obviously with Plan B being that if Narula doesn't get the job done, Wrathion, Ratonhnhake:ton, and or others pull off the assassination of Caius Justus? I guess the big question would be if Lucius would be willing to work with Messalina.

[blackscales]

So Wrathion is largely anti Messalina and thus doesn't... care... if either of his two NPCs would support her or not. But that's not because he's anti undead as a whole, just he doesn't feel he's been given a good reason to trust her. He thinks her story is suspicious.

That said, he's willing to set up Narula to kill Caius Justus if they still then go in all "oh no, how could this happen?? We must avenge Caius Justus" and kill Narula

[groundrules]

Ah yes, good ol' "GASP Narula has GONE BERSERK we must stop his menace" after he crushes Caius Justus...

[recklessenough]

Lockwood doesn't have any strong feelings about Narula's survival.

He doesn't trust Messalina as far as he could throw her, BUT he sees Mattias as the bigger threat, so you use what weapons you have at hand and tackle the next step as it arises.

That said, if Wrathion DOES have people he trusts, who could then fill the voids being made by some of these machinations, Lockwood's not going to argue those placements.

[mustact]

If we can pull that off I love it.

[groundrules]

Right you are, just quickly coming back to this — if I approve PCs killing Narula after he betrays and in turn kills Caius Justus — would you be okay to organize playing out some aspect of the, ah, murder? Coming to you, since the coup was your idea :'D I've asked if the Lockwood player would be okay to organize the part about convincing Narula he's being betrayed by Caius Justus, galvanizing him to kill.

I'd prefer if the opportunity for Narula's murder were opened to the game, so some kind of open log or network post, but I'm not fussy how. Let me know if sounds workable your side.

[mustact]

Yeah, totally!

[groundrules]

Awesome! Let me just see if all three pieces fall in place and the other folks are okay with everything, and I'll come back to you with confirmation and further details :)

[groundrules]

All right, looks like all three anchors are on board! What I'll do is mention in the summary that there'll be a Connor post or log handling organization for this — please try to get it up three-four days after the Lockwood post (by looks of it, Mon or Tue) if you can! My advice would be to go with network for anything to do with organization, because lazy man's rp, but do w/e feels best!

[mustact]

Yeah that's a good shout, I'll prob do that. Ehehehehe excitement.

[groundrules]

Okay, so! Just to check in — if we go with Narula killing Caius Justus, would you be cool to organise your end of things (aka figuring out a way to make Narula think Caius Justus has betrayed him and implementing)?

Obviously, other people can help, and you could use things like idk, purely for example: Wrathion's NPC being touted in the markets as set to replace Narula (Kamala Khan is a news shouter, or you could have people just spreading it by word in the market!) — this is just an idea, ofc, my only check-in is whether you'd be open to anchoring the Persuade Narula He Is Being Betrayed aspect of things! If so, you'd probably want to get it done by Dec, so next 11 days. Handwaving some elements of this is totally fine, just not all of it!

If that can be done, I'm okay to give you Narula killing Caius Justus.

[recklessenough]

Hello!

Yes, I have a quiet Thanksgiving holiday (I don't host a huge family gathering or have to attend a huge family gathering) planned so I will be here to run IC threads for this.

I don't have a huge OOC list of other players on my Plurk, but I am happy to put up an OOC post on the comm and do an IC network post of Lockwood pitching what he learned (that Narula would react BADLY to being "betrayed" by Caius) and that Lockwood feels this is something to be leveraged, and use that post to help coordinate some of what others have planned for assassination attempts.

[groundrules]

Oh sure, don't worry too much on that — what I'll do is, in the summary going up tomorrow, I'll say that you'll be doing that IC network post this week, and people can look out for it — it's more to make sure there's someone doing it, haha! But okay, amazing, tku!

[recklessenough]

Thank YOU!! I will pencil in a network post for tomorrow, or Tuesday, once you have time to get the summary up and running. I say Tuesday so that you don't feel pressured!!

[groundrules]

Yepyep, Tuesday sounds great, tku!

[groundrules]

Right, okay — so, I've asked Lockwood's player if they're willing to play point on organizing the reasons behind Narula's betrayal and murder of Caius Justus, then if Connor's play can organize the murder of Narula.

Assuming all that's okayed, would you be cool to tackle efforts to name Narula and Caius Justus' successors? I'll take a network post, a log, anything you want. Yes, you can rope Emilia into it for the grand announcement.

Would that sound workable?

[blackscales]

A Black Dragon playing kingmaker? What could go wrong.

[groundrules]

Awesome - let me hear back on whether the other two pieces can fall in place on this, and will revert with confirmation and further detail!

[groundrules]

So, 3/3, we're good to go, by the looks of it! What I'll do is, I'll mention in the summary that Wrathion will be handling the... political machinations / announcement of the beautiful proceedings. Your job timing-wise will be to get something up over the next two weeks, but after Lockwood and Connor have started doing their bits for logistical reasons, no need to wait on them to finish.

[blackscales]

No problem! A solid chance he'll be involved in at least one of the other two parts anyway, so he'll have a claw on the pulse so to speak and thus so will I.

[massrez]

The death of one might save the lives of many. It's not his favorite plan but Anduin might be in a position to help if this is the way things go.

Something quiet, like poison, might be a way to go without causing too much chaos. And the healers here have a suspicious amount of knowledge on the subject.

[mustact]

He does like the sound of poison.

[northerndragon]

Jon would agree that Caius Justus needs to go and would be cool with this concept or with Lockwood's.

(Apparently he doesn't do assassinations -- until he does. He just really has a huge thing against Matthias and thinks he needs to be stopped however possible. The Hand are victims.)

Idk how he can help, but he can help if he's needed.