Crakkerjakk, and Ladyarcana55, Martin, Sir_pudding (a.k.a. Nathan, Anna, Martin, and Cole) are the starting line-up for the Sunday Survey game, with (I suppose) Icelander on the bench praying for an injury.The game will be played in a Skype conference call, once per month on the Sunday after the third Saturday, starting at 17:00 California time and ending about 21:00–22:00 California time. (That is to say: the game schedule will shift compared to UTC as California switches from and to daylight saving time.)
The campaign concept is that the player characters will be Imperial servants aboard an Imperial starship, a Survey frigate visiting a series of habitable or terraformable planets to discover the things about them that you can't see through an astronomical telescope: in particular how the Empire, the Eichberger Foundation, and the New Worlds Realty Corporation ought to relate to them. The campaign will be played "troupe style", with each player playing four characters: one Colonial Office multidiscplinary field researcher in the Survey Team; one Imperial marine qualified for multiple MOSs in the Security Section; one Imperial Navy officer with a significant role to play when the ship is at battle stations; and one Imperial Office "diplomat" with a role in official negotiations with local governments. In particular, each player will play the head of one of those teams and junior members of the other three, so that there will be a fifth PC group: the senior officials who discuss policy decisions will all be PCs.
It seems likely that the Survey folk, the field researchers, will be the main characters, and the idea is that most adventures will be primarily about their experiences in contact with colonials on newly-discovered planets. There may well be a heads-of-departments meeting in every adventure. There will be an action sequence for the marines every now and again. The diplomats will probably tend to attract less attention. And though you might eventually get a space combat sequence if you are good, the naval officers apart from the Captain might as well be behind a pane of glass marked "in case of emergency".
Party design in this case is considerably simplified by the fact that the character's duty will keep them together in adversity, and by the fact that the campaign structure itself answers a lot of the usual questions about what each character ought to be able to do. But this is perhaps a small compensation for the fact that each player has to conceive and generate four characters.
The first step is to share out the four leadership roles:
- Mission commander
- The mission commander is an Imperial Navy captain and has the ultimate buck-stops-here responsibility for everything that happens. Imperial four-stripers are exalted figures with sweeping authority and terrible power, and only people with the very rightest of right stuff, demonstrated in long service, are promoted so high. Anyone who makes captain IN before the age of sixty is on track to make full admiral before he or she retires. A captain usually commands a capital warship, and disposes enough firepower to wipe out a civilisation: and he of she is expected to use this power if necessary, also, to make sure it never becomes necessary.
- Ambassador-at-large
- The ambassador is a middling-high civil servant in the Imperial Office, with a service grade equal to the Captain's (but not in the military chain of command, and not in the mission-commander billet). The ambassador has the political authority to decide what governments to treat with and to enter into treaties on behalf of the Empire. In theory his or her exercises of these power are subject to ratification by Parliament (the Senate and Board of Trustees), but political inertia is such that there is a lot of pressure to get it right first time.
- Head of Survey
- The head of survey is a Colonial Office scientist with qualifications to supervise field research in both social sciences and life sciences. Although in charge of the biggest team and the bulk of the work, he or she bears far less responsibility for awful decisions and the exercise of power. So there is no need to appoint one of the Empire's rare and fearsome heartless philanthropists to the role. The Head of Survey is a three-striper civilian scientist equivalent to a full professor.
- Security Section Leader
- The section leader is an Imperial Marine in a corporal's billet. But it's an unusual corporal's billet in that there are no marines officers within a very long coo-ee. Military responsibility will lie with the Mission Commander, but the section leader will have have some responsibilities like those of a platoon sergeant babysitting an inexperienced platoon leader, even staff-NCO-like duties. So the section leader could be an experienced or very promising corporal close to promotion, perhaps even someone the Colonel has an idea of sending to the officer candidate school. He or she could even be a newly-promoted sergeant waiting for a platoon-sergeant's billet to open up.
So. Who wants to play which?
