The random episode campaign game!

[SheliakBob]

I do this when I get bored. Which is often.
I like to select a disc at random from a season boxset and then select a random episode. The idea is to design a campaign with a primary focus drawn from that episode.
For instance, last night, I popped in the randomized disc and hit "play" and got..."Deathwalker".
oh damn. too easy!

Anyone could do a Dilgar campaign! They're Nazis in Space. Everybody loves Nazis in Space!

So...looked around, and found Abbut!
A Vikkers game!
Now that would be a challenge!

Here's the bare bones:

It's "Crusade" era. Desperate efforts are underway to find a cure for the Drakh plague. Then someone has a "mad scheme".
The Soul Hunters have thousands upon thousands of souls, remarkable souls, sometimes very very talented and knowledgible souls, in their collections. They won't just hand those over to be browsed, but the answer to the cure might just be contained in one of those orbs.

A team of Vikkers are assembled from any race willing to offer their services, along with a delivery and support team. The idea is to find a Soul Hunter or Soul Hunter stronghold, get close to their collection, then fast scan them for potentially useful "souls". When one is found, the Vikker records a copy of the soul, then the team splits.
This avoids having to fight the Soul Hunters (most of the time) by not damaging or stealing their collection. Minbari would prefer the other route and might just take the orbs with them, or smash ones left behind. That's for the teams to determine.

You get a recurring opponent and a basic formula for scenarios; Find a place where people are dying that the Soul Hunters might be drawn to. Find the Soul Hunter, get access to his collection and get out. Myriad variations on that theme could be run.
(how much mileage did the "Highlander" tv series get out of "Duncan encounters another Immortal. Has a flashback to show us how bad this other guy is. They fight, Duncan takes off his head and has fake orgasm."

You can have a recurring Soul Hunter as an antagonist. Raids on their "libaries" for the Big Adventures.

Even got a built in final episode!
Earth's five year life expectancy is up. The planet is poised on the brink of total extinction. The Soul Hunters arrive en masse to harvest or "save" the bulk of humanity worth saving. ISA and other forces probably try to stop them.
Without a canonical end of the Plague solution, I'd try the following. Soul Hunters make it to earth! The team realizes that this is...interesting. The Soul Hunters have no fear whatsoever about catching or dying from the plague. When investigated, its' discovered that the Soul Hunters encountered this sort of thing in the distant past and long ago devised a cure so they would not be denied souls because of the disease nanites.
The cure is found with the Soul Hunters after all, but in their veins, not in their orbs!

big finish. enemies become allies. sacrifices are made. earth is saved. there is much rejoicing.
yay!

 

[Gabriel_Luna]

I've been kicking around the idea for a Vicker prestige class for a long time. It appears to be a biotech mod that's possible without Vorlon intervention. How would a party of Vickers work in practice? For that matter, how would a Vicker function? Would it be a series of feats? A PrC?

Alternately, you could have a Vicker be the thing the party has to protect. The party does all the breaking and entering and gets the Vicker to the center of the stronghold and then holds off the defenses long enough for him to scan the souls.

Additional alternates include trying to find a specific Vicker for something he recorded (or to translate something, as I imagine they have some pretty specialized formats for their data), or even a MacGuffin crystal from a Vicker. Everyone wants it, the party has no idea why, but it turns out to be of vital importance.

Finally there's a plotline I'm planning on putting into my game somewhere, with the group tasked to find that crystal that has an image of Talia on it to help restore her personality after she broke. Last seen in the possession of Kosh...so either it's on B5, the Vorlon homeworld/Vorlon colony, Morden handed it off to someone after they whacked Kosh, or somewhere in between. I imagine the end of that plot would require a sympathetic telepath and a Vicker to restore her. Just the idea of having my PCs hire Abbot makes me chuckle.

 

[Swampy]

The rules for the Vikkers were in The Coming of The Shadows book IIRC. I don't have my books to hand at the minute and so can't check it out but I do know that it has been in a book and that one seems the most likely.

 

[Shadow Queen]

page 207 - 208 signs and portents 1st edition b5 rpg for Vickkers

 

[Gabriel_Luna]

Well I don't have any 1st edition material...care to share for those of us who have no interest in buying 1st edition outdated material? Did they take a PrC route, feat for the biomod, or what?

 

[Mongoose Gar]

This is absolutely rocking. You could adapt it not to use Vickers at all, and just have EarthForce launching black op telepath raids on the Soul Hunter archives.

For those without the 1st edition book, here's a quick synopsis of the Vicker template. They were created by Humans in the 22nd century, but are now mainly used by League races. Six months of _very_ expensive surgery gets you the following traits:

Bio-rhythms & Thought Patterns: The Vicker can make a Concentration check (DC15) to detect the thought patterns of those around him. It functions as a Surface Scan.

Comms Interception: The Vicker can, with a Concentration check (DC20) pick up any communications frequency they are in range of.

Enhanced Vision: They have low-light and darkvision.

Telepathic Immunity: When using their VCR ability, Vickers are immune to telepathic scans.

VCR: As a standard action, a Vicker can go into VCR mode, where they automatically store everything they perceive with their other abilities. The VCR has one day of onboard storage space; a standard data crystal can only store one hour of the VCR's sensory data. VCRs can download intercepted data onto a crystal as a standard action; accessing a Vicker crystal using a computer not specially built for the purpose requires an Electronics check (DC20).

Skills: Concentration +4

Feats: Iron Will

The Vickers are up there with technomages as one of the weirder elements of B5. Their level of cybernetic integration suggests that they're probably based on alien technology in the first place, or maybe are connected to the artificial intelligences formerly used by humans. (Maybe a Vicker is an AI in a human waldo.)

 

[Gabriel_Luna]

All that stuff from 1st edition

That's pretty close to what I came up with in my first few passes at it. I was looking at it as a 5 level PrC, with prerequisites in Alertness, Notice, Investigate, etc, as well as expensive surgery. Progressively gain control of your new abilities as class features, such as scanning the EM spectrum, or enhanced storage capacity, and finally recording thought patterns. The template is easier though, so I can just go with that.

The Vickers are up there with technomages as one of the weirder elements of B5. Their level of cybernetic integration suggests that they're probably based on alien technology in the first place, or maybe are connected to the artificial intelligences formerly used by humans. (Maybe a Vicker is an AI in a human waldo.)

Given we see the Vicker associated with Kosh in the show, maybe they were an early offshoot of the telepathy research they were doing. They might have been an attempt to counter some of the sneakier servants of darkness by giving the "good guys" a way to detect them.

However, just going with my gut, I think the Vorlons ought to be as surprised as anyone else. Not everything ties into the War, after all.

I also really dig the idea that it might be an AI or something else. If it's not something a PC could do (because if it is then it's just a mean trick to play on them), imagine the screaming, Wisperer in the Darkness-esque (anyone?) horror you could generate by having someone go in, get the surgery, and only then find out the last step is being downloaded out of their newly enhanced brain so this other entity can have a home...

(which of course leads to lots of plotlines, such as the PCs discovering this, or tasked with covering up for a new Vicker as he gets used to his new home, or even a displaced human finding a way to communicate with the PCs, with a quest of finding his body and evicting the entity that is wearing it.)

I'd more or less forgotten about these things, this is a good thread. Lots of weird potential here!

 

[Traveller-61]

I'd more or less forgotten about these things, this is a good thread. Lots of weird potential here!

Me too!
And I agree - lots of potential for a great campaign; and one that could easily be adapted for any period or any race:-
"There is a secret that was lost when the last of a famous line died. The legend is that his/her soul was taken by the Hunters, and many fell in the futile attempt to hold them back.
Now that secret must be unlocked or millions will die / an empire fall / a star blow up / etc, etc. A crack team is assembled to breach the lair of the Hunter, find the soul, gain the information and get back safely.
In place of a Vicker you could have a specially trained telepath who will scan the soul for the answer.
Of course the soul may not give up the secret, or maybe it turns out not to be what everyone expected, and the Hunters will not give up their prizes easily."

DW

 

[SheliakBob]

I'm still toying around with ideas for this one. Won't get to run it in all probability, but its still relaxing to "doodle".

Ideas for Vicar characters. (okay. "Vikkers"=machine gun. I knew that. really I did. was just tired that night. I swears it! "Vicar" seems to be the most popular version on the 'net.)

"VIC": Formerly a vicious, dangerous psychopath with a significant body count, "Vic" was sentenced to the "Death of Personality". The telepath carrying out the sentence was "unusually thorough" leaving Vic little more than mindless. As part of his retraining, since he'll never quite be back up to full speed as a functioning personality, he was given the Vicar treatment so he could contribute in some manner.
Vic is normally calm, unemotional, almost childlike in a Zen sort of way. Unfortunately, some of his violent tendencies seem to be more biological in origin than behavioral and he is still prone to the occasional burst of violent rage. Worse, some of his physical prowess seems to be preserved through "muscle memory"--giving him sometimes frightening combat abilities. These flashes of dangerous ability are not predictible, however, and cannot be triggered deliberately, so they are not dependible for field work. (IE: When subjected to extreme stress, or when one of his few "friends" are in danger, make a WILL save. If failed, he uses his enhanced HTH and weapons skills. He'll also bite for 1D3 damage and use his fingers as claws for 1D2. Not terribly lethal, but very unnerving.)

VICKIE: She used to be the personal secretary of a very wealthy, very jaded, very egocentric entertainment star. Her previous employer talked her into the Vicar operations so that she could perfectly record the activities & experiences of her employer--creating an incredibly, and unnecessarily, detailed biographical database. When her original employer died suddenly in a vehicle crash, in which Vickie herself was seriously injured, she dumped the biography and hired herself out for other Vicar assignments. She is in her early 40's, jaded and quite world-weary. She's seen all the worst of mankind's behavioral quirks, and a lot of those for other species, and now she's thoroughly cynical and disillusioned. When not working, she drinks heavily, takes any intoxicant she can get her hands on, and screws indiscriminantly--all without any observable sense of passion or even enjoyment.

ORENN: One of the last surviving Markabs, Orenn was far from the homeworld when the Drafa Plague broke out. He was at a distant monastic station out on the Rim, recording the entire religious, philosophical, and artistic texts of the Markab monks living at the station. He has only recently returned, to find his homeworld and almost all of his species dead. Innoculated against Drafa, he suffered from despair and lethargy until the Drakh attack on Earth. Now he has sworn that he will not sit idley by and watch as another race is wiped out by an uncontrollable plague. He has uploaded the repetoire of a Mutai master fighter to enhance his mission usefulness and carries the last copy of obscure Markab scriptures inside his head. Quiet, ascetic, contemplative and determined, he's the kind of operative that does not take flamboyantly heroic action on his own, but is a rock-steady support for all his teamates.

hmm. Time at the desk running out. The other characters I'm toying with in my mind include:
a Minbari Religious Caste Vicar who is secretly dedicated to releasing as many of the Soul Hunters' "captives" as he can, thereby causing no end of trouble for the others.

An Abbai diplomatic aid who is way out of her depth. She's trained to record negotiation sessions and speeches for the League, but has had very little experience outside diplomatic circles.

A Lumati inferior who works for his Superior master and is treated as a "sometimes useful tool" that can be lent out to the Lumatis' Human allies "in the spirit of enlightened cooperation". Assuming someone is willing to consumate the deal after it is negotiated. On a case by case basis...

"The Dirty Vicar"--a thoroughly degenerate rogue whose main job up to now has been to carry a copy of almost every interspecies porn holo created to a galaxy of high-paying fans. Very high Streetwise and various unsavory skills, the ironic thing is that he/she? is actually an "IRL" virgin. All the recorded perversity the known galaxy has to offer, and absolutely no first hand knowledge of even kissing.

etc.

 

[SheliakBob]

a couple other Vicar character ideas (rough)

A Vree accountant--no emotions, utterly by the book rational. Can store enormous amounts of financial and social information. No good in a fight but an excellent pilot. Best poker face in the known universe.

Llort Data Exchanger. This Llort believes in extending the principles of the Exchange to databases and information. He has interlink plugs, and multiple crystal recording tracks. He is a datathief extraordinaire. Genuinely, truly believes that "information wants to be free!!" Has been pretty shaken up after discovering that the old human data-meme "All your base are belong to us" is actually a clue to an ancient Drakh conspiracy to restrict human literacy...