House of Cards GM Log

IMC: Classifying Shadows

posted by Ginger at 01:25 PM, November 04, 2004 | Filed under : IMC , Traveller's Guide to Shadow | Comments and Followups

Arref talks about how he classifies shadows in his campaign. We’re not big on classifying shadows; we tend to make each one a unique. But there are some useful things we can say about shadows and how to distinguish them from each other.

To the extent that we do it, we build shadows based on the Everway shadow creation method (virtue, fault, and fate) that we use for the players. That tells us what kind of stories we’re going to tell in the shadow when we toss the players in it. There are shadows for which we don’t have such formal writeups, but the GMs could tell you within reason what the virtue, fault, and fate of any shadow that’s been heavily played in is.

Distances from Amber are a function of story, as are timeflows. We’re getting more and more fluid with such matters as GMs because we’re not always interested in telling stories about shadow travel in and of itself. While the PCs may not know what they’re going to find at the end of their journey, we do. And we have no hesitation in putting people through left turns at Albuquerque in terms of what they expect and what they find.

Since we’re only just now beginning to deal with high-tech SF shadows, we haven’t had to deal with the difference between them much yet. I suspect we’ll tend to use high magic and high tech pretty interchangeably as GMs. We certainly degraded them equally in our Amber writeup, and Gerard has shown equal skepticism about them as healing mechanisms for his legs.

Since we use the Everway system rather than the ADRPG system, I think we’ll be up a leg on any tech constructs; we’ll cost them by Frequent-Major-Variable. The underlying mechanism in terms of magic vs. tech is special effect; the important question will be “does it work in a Pattern place?” or “does it work reliably?”.

Follow up: the trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.whiterose.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/4594

1 Comments

Michael
Nov 4, 2004 9:57 PM

The Star-City of Hope in the Hub Group of starstations is Esperance Station from CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station Universe, with a Black Road incursion instead of Cyteen/The Company Wars. With Everway virtue/fate/fault and a goal of making it seem like a place and not just "Generic TL 13 Shadow".

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