Current Campaign Summary
An ex-player of long ago asked me what's been going on with 6/7 so I figured I'd do an info dump.
The game right now is very existential - the Nothing challenges the very right of the unreals to exist. There is no known path to defeat it, no known weapon, no known weaknesses. The threads are forbidden from offering assistance in gaining the knowledge to defeat the Nothing. Thus the players have been gaining allies, but it is unclear if they have a plan that will work or not.
Current players (these descriptions are dashed off the top of my head):
Dr. Joe: Dr. Joe is one of the four unreal children - the son of Piltawer, the Original, and Sonja Olsen, the counterpart of Olsen and terrorist leader of the League of Crossworlders. Joe left the unreal world to study medicine during the rise of the Nothing and survived. Much later he reawakened his interest in the unreal world and embarked on a quest to restore unreality and defeat the Nothing. He is the unacknowledged leader of the group. As the child of Originals, he possesses a strange privilege of rank that gives him insight into the threads motives and political struggles ... but also curses him terrible burdens that he refuses to share. Over the course of his quest a darkness seems to be growing around him.
Nikki Odessa: When Dr. Joe first reinvolved himself with the unreal community, he bumped into a literary theory student on the way... whatever the true meaning behind this encounter Nikki found herself turning unreal - an act thought impossible in the age of the Nothing. She has bonded with Dr. Joe through the use of a mindshare incursion and is a key motivator and consensus builder within the group - she brings a kind of hope and comfort to their struggles and shows a wisdom with things unreal impressive for her experience level.
Brynn Shields: Brynn is the other survivor of the four unreal children: one of a set of twins born to Shields and the clone of Tina Bradshaw. As a spirit she started a quest to stop the Nothing on her own but fell victim to a incursion plague - which only was treated by Dr. Joe's expertise. Her physical body was mangled before the full rise of the Nothing - her spirit passed on and Dr. Joe revived the corpse as the zombie android "Adrynn" -- since then Brynn has managed to reintegrate with the decayed body, but it has not been restored. Brynn possesses many ideas and opportunities and is instrumental in writing a new plan- a constitution for what to do with the unreals once the Nothing is defeated.
Kira Shields: Kira is an old-school trained Shields Stalker, a veteran of the original Hidden Wars. Her physical body was trapped by chance inside a time bubble created by the Nothing to trap a separate powerful unreal -- and thus she survived the purge of the other unreals. There are some strange side effects of the time-loss - threads (and the Nothing) do not seem able to perceive Kira. Along with this she brings a determined spirit and the emotional baggage of her time as a house agent.
Patrick: Patrick's spirit played at being a photojournalist in the unreal afterlife until he ran into Dr. Joe on his crusade. Since then he has aided the team in investigating many of the lost legacies of the unreals - including a mysterious key which emulates the Key from the Lost Room - and a host of other special incursion artifacts. He currently is involved in the major "The World Ends With You" incursion the party is using to recover the essence of lost allies.
Rob: Rob was an engineer with the JPL in Pasedena until the Mars Phoenix Lander started sending back signals - years after Rob remembers it crashing into the Martian surface. The dissonance, a byproduct of the unmaking of unreal effects on the timeline by the Nothing, led Rob to the investigation into the remnants of the unreal world by real humans. One of those investigators turned unreal due to exposure to the artifacts, and was killed by the Nothing. Rob turned shortly thereafter and was threatened by the Nothing but survived by encountering Dr. Joe. Rob is a passionate optimist and believer in the future... and believes in the capacity for unreals to make lives better.
???: A schoolteacher who turned unreal upon discovery of a mysterious videotape. Has not encountered Dr. Joe's party yet.
Also asked by an ex-player: "Sounds like the universe has changed substantially in terms of both player scope and setting geopolitics since the RPI days, eh?"
On one hand a little bit, not as much as it may sound. The game post 2004 has just run in super slow motion. This is all still one campaign idea (the Nothing) and one story arc.
On the other hand yes, it changed dramatically. The world was cleansed of almost all traces of unreal influence. Apart from a few scattered and forgotten bits, there never was an time when unreals ruled the world in secret.
Almost all of the spirits of those who were once unreal are trapped midway between fully living and fully dead. Some sleep, others live in dream-like states in the endless virtual worlds of pure unreality.
If the Originals and the Counterparts have a role to play in this, or even if they ever did in any part of it, remains uncertain, with signs pointing to "no." The Nothing in particular seemed to not fear them. No one had heard from them in years, starting before the unreals started dying out.
As to what it all means and where it's all going, you must look to the players to answer those questions. Unreality (apart from the Nothing) has been guardedly silent on the topic.
The Nothing's answer is simple, and best illustrated via a poem; namely "The End of the World" by Archibald MacLeish
"Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all."
The game right now is very existential - the Nothing challenges the very right of the unreals to exist. There is no known path to defeat it, no known weapon, no known weaknesses. The threads are forbidden from offering assistance in gaining the knowledge to defeat the Nothing. Thus the players have been gaining allies, but it is unclear if they have a plan that will work or not.
Current players (these descriptions are dashed off the top of my head):
Dr. Joe: Dr. Joe is one of the four unreal children - the son of Piltawer, the Original, and Sonja Olsen, the counterpart of Olsen and terrorist leader of the League of Crossworlders. Joe left the unreal world to study medicine during the rise of the Nothing and survived. Much later he reawakened his interest in the unreal world and embarked on a quest to restore unreality and defeat the Nothing. He is the unacknowledged leader of the group. As the child of Originals, he possesses a strange privilege of rank that gives him insight into the threads motives and political struggles ... but also curses him terrible burdens that he refuses to share. Over the course of his quest a darkness seems to be growing around him.
Nikki Odessa: When Dr. Joe first reinvolved himself with the unreal community, he bumped into a literary theory student on the way... whatever the true meaning behind this encounter Nikki found herself turning unreal - an act thought impossible in the age of the Nothing. She has bonded with Dr. Joe through the use of a mindshare incursion and is a key motivator and consensus builder within the group - she brings a kind of hope and comfort to their struggles and shows a wisdom with things unreal impressive for her experience level.
Brynn Shields: Brynn is the other survivor of the four unreal children: one of a set of twins born to Shields and the clone of Tina Bradshaw. As a spirit she started a quest to stop the Nothing on her own but fell victim to a incursion plague - which only was treated by Dr. Joe's expertise. Her physical body was mangled before the full rise of the Nothing - her spirit passed on and Dr. Joe revived the corpse as the zombie android "Adrynn" -- since then Brynn has managed to reintegrate with the decayed body, but it has not been restored. Brynn possesses many ideas and opportunities and is instrumental in writing a new plan- a constitution for what to do with the unreals once the Nothing is defeated.
Kira Shields: Kira is an old-school trained Shields Stalker, a veteran of the original Hidden Wars. Her physical body was trapped by chance inside a time bubble created by the Nothing to trap a separate powerful unreal -- and thus she survived the purge of the other unreals. There are some strange side effects of the time-loss - threads (and the Nothing) do not seem able to perceive Kira. Along with this she brings a determined spirit and the emotional baggage of her time as a house agent.
Patrick: Patrick's spirit played at being a photojournalist in the unreal afterlife until he ran into Dr. Joe on his crusade. Since then he has aided the team in investigating many of the lost legacies of the unreals - including a mysterious key which emulates the Key from the Lost Room - and a host of other special incursion artifacts. He currently is involved in the major "The World Ends With You" incursion the party is using to recover the essence of lost allies.
Rob: Rob was an engineer with the JPL in Pasedena until the Mars Phoenix Lander started sending back signals - years after Rob remembers it crashing into the Martian surface. The dissonance, a byproduct of the unmaking of unreal effects on the timeline by the Nothing, led Rob to the investigation into the remnants of the unreal world by real humans. One of those investigators turned unreal due to exposure to the artifacts, and was killed by the Nothing. Rob turned shortly thereafter and was threatened by the Nothing but survived by encountering Dr. Joe. Rob is a passionate optimist and believer in the future... and believes in the capacity for unreals to make lives better.
???: A schoolteacher who turned unreal upon discovery of a mysterious videotape. Has not encountered Dr. Joe's party yet.
Also asked by an ex-player: "Sounds like the universe has changed substantially in terms of both player scope and setting geopolitics since the RPI days, eh?"
On one hand a little bit, not as much as it may sound. The game post 2004 has just run in super slow motion. This is all still one campaign idea (the Nothing) and one story arc.
On the other hand yes, it changed dramatically. The world was cleansed of almost all traces of unreal influence. Apart from a few scattered and forgotten bits, there never was an time when unreals ruled the world in secret.
Almost all of the spirits of those who were once unreal are trapped midway between fully living and fully dead. Some sleep, others live in dream-like states in the endless virtual worlds of pure unreality.
If the Originals and the Counterparts have a role to play in this, or even if they ever did in any part of it, remains uncertain, with signs pointing to "no." The Nothing in particular seemed to not fear them. No one had heard from them in years, starting before the unreals started dying out.
As to what it all means and where it's all going, you must look to the players to answer those questions. Unreality (apart from the Nothing) has been guardedly silent on the topic.
The Nothing's answer is simple, and best illustrated via a poem; namely "The End of the World" by Archibald MacLeish
"Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all."