Vlad Molotov - the legendary scientist

[chrisvenus]

Vlad Molotov was one of my first RP characters. I started RPing when I got to university and the oxford uni RPGSoc was running a large freeform game called Inferno, a steam-punk game. People told me about the game and one of the GMs (Tony Short) enthused at me a lot about it and I decided to play a member of house Taurus, the classic mad inventor achetype who bodge together the most fantastic items out of next to nothing. I can't remember why I decided to play a russian. I think it might be because vlad was a name I often used for just any old thing. But a russian he was, vlad was his name and in looking for a surname he became Vlad Molotov.

During the game I invented a lot of things. It ran for 15 sessions and I invited (or turnsheeted for inventing) at least two new things each week, usually more. Such classics included my time machine which i spent the whole game working on, My High Energy Magic Assisted Really Original and Innovative Device ( I think this was my steam generated powered by a few magic demon thingys) is the only one I can actually remember the full name of (they all had most silly acronyms, I remember there was a THROWUP as well).

Notable inventions that I remember

Lazers
These focused candle light or any other light source using parabolic mirrors and lenses. The mechanism would vary the intensity of the beam (using the lenses) at a suitable rate such that the energy pulses would set the target vibrating and ultimately blow it up (similar to resonance). I ended up destorying (I think) the Japanese fleet (or part of it) with orbital versions.

Virtue Tech
Virtue energy was the energy that infused everybody and reflected how nice (or nasty) they were. There were many uses for this, for a start if you hit people with positive energy and they were fundamentally negative then it hurt like hell. on the other hand if you hit somebody with the matching energy they felt very good. Entities (ie demons) were generally composed of negative energy and so smacking them with lots of positive energy would kill them. This is in fact what led to saturating the north pole with virtue energy when we needed to try to kill the 500m tall demons up there. Also a link between virtue energy and cricket ability was found so virtue energy could be used to improve your teams ability (which led Vlad to be a cricket coach for a year or two).

Time Machine
The time machine was my big scheme for the whole game. House Taurus had no money and clearly te best way to make money is to build a time machine. And then play the horses a lot. I got the basic premise working quite early on. I was able to create a bubble separate from the rest of the universe and then send it forward in time. When the machine was powered off it would snap back to the present. unfortunately I had heat problems that caused anything inside to cook.

Rather than solving this problem I just invented workarounds including writing sport reuslts on bits of stone or metal which would survive the heat in a way paper wouldn't. It wasn't that easy of course since the future was not determined. However, if I got the results 100 times I could find out the actual odds of the horses winning and compare them to the odds given by bookies and win the money. It was great.

I was always very conscious of not creating any paradoxes that could rip apart the fabric of space and time which is why I got particularly upset when another inventor, also working on a time machine, went back in time and one of his colleagues fred joan of Arc from the stake she was being burnt on.


There were a lot of other things invented but off the top of my head those are the ones I remember. Some of my inventions failed miserably, others ended up taking on a life of their own and terrorising the seas (the russian fleet was upgraded with entity enhanced steam engines).

The great thing about Vlad is the amount I enjoyed playing him. The mad scientist is something I dearly love being a bit of a scientist and not being tied down to real world physics. I used to write huge turnsheets, stretching at times to ten pages and often giving sarah (my ST) the most horrendous headaches as she tried to understand what the hell I was on about. However, she did a damn good job and I loved every minute of it. :)

I often thing about re-running a vlad like character in another game, I almost did it recently but the setting wasn't really right. I wonder how much affect I had on other characters too. I worked for anybody that asked me to, and didn't screw over many people. I had bitter rivals in my house and I had some good friends elsewhere. I was manipulative and selfish but when it came down to it I saved the world at least once and tried to save it from some of the other doomsday machines too.

And what happened to Vlad after the game? Well, his time machine was actually finished and perfected using some very ropey paradox inducing techniques (send time bubbles into future and get the plans for the machine from 40 years time, then I get 40 years up on my research, repeat until workable time machine is invented). It is possible I went on to start a time travel policing service, especially after getting in a lot of trouble from a bunch of time travel policemen (who it is possible were from an organisation I was going to set up). I might have just settled back and enjoyed myself as one of the most powerful members of the illuminati, I might have just retired to inventing and building with all the resources i then had at my disposal. Whatever happened Vlad lived happy ever after, I'm fairly sure of that. :)

Anyway, sorry to have bored you with those reminiscences, its just that inferno is one of my favourite freeforms I have played.

Comments

Hurrah for virtue tech!

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

One of my fondest memories from Inferno was someone pointing a virtue detector at the Margravine and it not detecting any.

"See, that thing's quite plainly broken!"

And everybody believed her :)

S.
(Ruth 1 - and it went down)

Re: Hurrah for virtue tech!

[chrisvenus]

Ah, by the time I had got through wass'ernames notes I had a slightly better version. I could always detect virtue and tell whether it wsa positive or negative rather than just be able to tell the positive parts.

Virtue was fun since slow constant dosage of virtue could slowly change people's personal virtue fields. Did it on a few people (sold them virtue guns with leaky batteries) but never got anything too long term (apart from the cricket team). :)

Vlad Molotov - ruth 3 (IIRC)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Well you say Sarah did a great job, but actually there was a lot of controversy over the whole time machine thing.

Chris and John were a bit put out by the GMs ruling that it was effectively possible for you to nick their machine design from the future before they'd finished it !

Then again, that was Inferno all over - lite on mechanics, big on eclectic.

And I must say, Sir Maunder found Virtue Tech very useful. But then he would seeing as he had Ruth 10 and his allies were mostly mechanical !

[chrisvenus]

I understand that they might have thought that. There may havae been some misunderstanding though since for a start it wasn't their time machine design I nicked and secondly it wasn't the entire design, I had been working on it for ten turnsheets by that time and the only thing I was missing was a practical energy source. All I really found out was that I could tie in my virtue energy to power it without causing the associated heat buildups and to get back in time.

And I think one of the reasons that I got away with it is because I had spent about 5 turnsheets trying various things to do it and I put that one in as a "sod this, I really have no idea why you are telling me all the other ideas fail so I am going to just take the piss" kind of idea. Kind of like the guffinks [1] in that respect...

Thinking about it though I am fairly sure they had a *fully* working time machine before I did (by a turn, if that I think). I think I had a partly working one before them though. *shrug* I can't remember.

Anyway, I was thinking sarah did a good job mainly from the point of view that I thoroughly enjoyed the game and she kept up with all of my madcap inventions. I guess thinking about it she must have had quite a bad situation since I vaguely recall getting quite pissed off with being constantly told that what I was trying wasn't working. The trouble is they worked out the mechanics of it enough that my plans weren't working at all and my principle of time travel accelerated invention would have been quite hard to stop without a Deus Ex Machina since it was totally based on principles that had already worked. Oh well, I dunno. I'm sorry to hear that other people enjoyed things less because of something related to me but there's not much I can do about it now and I don't think even looking back it was that unreasonable. :)

[1] Guffinks - small intelligent sub-atomic beings that call atoms their worlds. Electrons are small guffink spaceships. Their existance fits in perfectly with all known physical phenomenon and their existance was proved to some people's satisfactions when some mages found themselves able to channel themselves through guffinks.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I never got the impression they were cheezed at you in the slightest.

It was more that their project had a combination of:

(a) Bigger total stats backing it (two of them plus big funding).
(b) They weren't doing anything else researchy during the relevant turns.
(c) Meticulously worked out plans each turn based on the GM feedback they were getting.

And it turned out in the end that the main factor governing the construction of time machines was that the GMs would give them out when they damn well felt like it.

Nothing special about time machines either. Exactly the same thing happened with 'computers' and various plot revelations (one person pursues an investigation for ages with huge stats, someone else with crap stats reaches the same conclusions in a single turn because it's one turn later).

But then, it's no big shocker - Matt famously hates system in all its forms.

Indeed, it's a little known fact that Sir Maunder's character concept was reverse-constructed around the idea of having Ruth 10 because it was so patently useless. My character in Inferno I had stats ideally chosen for his activities and got his ass kicked by Von Moltke again and again. So this time I thought I might as well stick low numbers in all the functional stats because they were only going to ignore them anyway.

And, indeed, by the end of the game Sir Maunder was in a very powerful position. For example, without a single science-related stat he had managed to end up in charge of a near-infinite army of self-replicating superintelligent robots (the Watchmen). Much better than Robin's character did, whose specialist area of expertise it was !

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

You would so love playing a Nocker. *plug* *plug*

[chrisvenus]

:) Maybe I would... but I'm not likely to play changeling any time soon (for a variety of reasons). I'll definitely keep it in mind though. :) I'm not sure I'd like to play that sort of character in such a magical world though. I think I'd prefer to play something that is a bit more with the fairytale side of things.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

But things don't get more fairytale than Changeling. It's set against the backdrop of the human imagination. Changeling answers the question "What if all the fairy tales were real?"

Sounds like you may have had a bad experience in the past. If you feel like coming down to Cambridge with Sarah one month to try out the game, we'd be happy to see you. I think you'd be pleasantly surprised, and if not, then no harm done and we'll say no more about it. *smile*

[chrisvenus]

My only game of changeling was at the scottish regional which was very fun to play. I played a pregen Satyr and had no idea about the game at all (which is why I looked very confused about two thirds of the way through when somebody asked me what magicy stuff I could do and realised that it said nothing about it on my character sheet ).

What I was really meaning is that vlad molotov wasn't the kind of person who would easily fit into anythign fairytale-ish so if I did play it would be unlikely to be a nocker. I do like the game (thanks steph and the rest of the team who STed up in scotland) and the reasons I'm not likely to play it are mainly factors of time and distance.

I think if I played I would be more interested in something like a sidhe, a troll or an eshu. But then I have very little idea about them in any more detail than the stereotype so more probably I'd sit down with an ST or somebody else knolwedgeable for ages to chat about it. :)