"The Opposition Brief"
Monday, January 15th - Preparation.
With the Ends and Means system, the supporting cast (NPCS) are determined by the Ends that players have chosen for themselves. So, Adam and I got together for dinner and to familiar ourselves with just what kind of world the players have created. (After creating the Opposition Brief, I have to agree with Adam, that Sanctum is a cold, cruel world!....AWESOME :)
We started by posting each and every Ends that was created by someone on a post-it note; one ends per post-it. It just so happened that the mini post-its that I had brought with me were mulit-colored. Adam ended up with blue and I ended up with pink and that's when Adam had yet another devious idea. "Let's sort them by gender" He comments, grinning at me. I start laughing and agree; sorted by gender it is! Adam takes the guys, I take the girls and both of us note that there is almost an even ratio of guy and girl in our beta-test. Once we're finished, we start sorting them into piles that suggest a theme, clumping similar Ends together until we feel it is about as organized as it is going to get. At this point, We grab a different colored post-it note and start giving each one a title that might best explain what the mean could be and when we are finished with that, we go about labeling it with the exact opposite as well. ie: Loved ones : Isolation. Create something of worth: Destroy things of value. The first title is what the players are attempting to achieve, the second title is the opposition.
When we finish, we then write down each of the opposition values on a sheet of paper, which are now "our" Ends and then we brainstorming for possible Means. ie, men of violence, disease, The list is almost a full page long, with two columns when we are finished, and so we start picking from among them. We want to match the number of Ends pretty closely, but do end up with a few more Means than Ends. It turns out this is okay for now; we may be creating more as we go, or changing the ones we have.
We now have a list of Stage-Hand's Ends and Means for use in making our supporting cast.
Keeping this list in mind, we begin to make some protagonists of our own, and end up with the following.
Sara - Vice Dealer, Prophet. -And coming later, The Match-Maker. (I reserve the right to change these before Friday)
Adam - The Librarian, The Dictator
And so we wrap up the night, Our Opposition Brief complete.
----Goals before Saturday----
Type up Character sheets, Census Descriptions and Atlas Descriptions.
Create and Type up Supporting Cast.
