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PLOT ENGAGEMENT (ARCHIVED)
What is Plot Engagement and how does it work within Meadowlark? This is the page where players can come discuss with us how to facilitate plots within the setting. However, there will be occasions where a plot doesn't work within Meadowlark's world, and we'll suggest alternative routes. For small worldbuilding or gameplay details, please direct your question to the FAQ. If you're ever not sure if you're at the right page, don't worry—we'll help you get it sorted out. We know we have a load of info!
WHEN WILL YOU HEAR BACK?
◉ All Plot Engagement answers go out on Sunday, except during events.
◉ The deadline to submit a question and ensure you'll hear back from us on Sunday is 11:59 PM UTC on Saturday.
PLOT ENGAGEMENT INCLUDES
◉ Player plots! If you'd like your character to become a mafia boss, this is your place to start. Typically, this involves anything that could impact the setting or other player characters.
◉ Character career advancement that gives the character additional power or status within the setting.
◉ Metaplot exploration and information! We plan all events to give characters something to explore after the event ends. This is the place to do it!
SUBMISSION TIPS
◉ Specify what your character is looking for when they're investigating. What questions are they asking and what angle are they trying to explore?
◉ If you have a specific goal in mind but don't know how to reach it, please let us know.
◉ If you link a thread to us, please summarize it! That helps us process the plot in question.
◉ Don't worry about not knowing the setting like the back of your hand before you submit the plot—that's up to us! We're here to help you with any adjustments to get you on the right track.
NOTES & THINGS THAT YOU CAN HANDWAVE
◉ Characters always start out in entry level positions. Characters can update their skill sets to the 2512 standard through paid apprenticeships or internships.
◈ If a character is advancing within a major corporation (as noted on the Setting or Locations page) or one of its subsidiaries, we will need to approve this advancement.
◈ If a character becomes a supervisor at a local bar or other small business, we do not need to approve this advancement.
◉ Joining the police force within a city requires three months of IC training (six months OOC).
◉ We'll approve whether someone has social media fame, but we will not be providing social media follower counts. Once you have a plot for how to use those followers, that's where we step in!
◉ All Morningstar business goes on our Morningstar page. Please feel free to discuss specific plots here (including joining), and go there for signups and anything else.
◉ Characters getting jobs, finding apartments, participating in the fighting rings, getting married, making workplace friends, the creation of minor NPCs, etc. do not need to be run by us. Please let us know if these expand into player plots or other plot bits!
QUICK LINKS
◉ FAQ: For small worldbuilding or gameplay details.
◉ Setting: Our setting page! We'll update as needed.
◉ Jobs: A reference for who's working where!
◉ Locations: Both major and minor locations within New Amsterdam, as well as outlines for other megacities.
◉ Mod Contact: For wider game concerns.
◉ The Story So Far: Gamewide plot events up to current (your CTRL+F best friend!).
◉ NPC page: Includes NPC blurbs and inboxes.
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at its current form, damian doesn't really know much in regards to how the dog was obtained or any specifics about the animal. he didn't ask very many questions because he a) honestly didn't want to know and b) trusts that jason has the sense to not endanger them too badly and wouldn't take something from where it belonged without good reason.
damian at present has no concrete plans. he intends to get involved with the underground and underground fighting to line his pockets, and intends to move out of the building he's been squatting in to somewhere more secure once dick is also out of the safe-house. he's resigned to working insane hours and eating nothing himself if it means providing for all of his siblings and the animal, if the animal should need to eat.
jason claims to have obtained it from a russian roulette game in a wealthy area from a man who appeared to be pretty drunk.
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Sorry for the delay, both in getting back to you and re: communication. I did not have an absolute solid "this needs to be how this was done" plan, so if any of this doesn't work out with what you were thinking, I'm happy to change any part of it up. Additionally, Jason wouldn't care what kind of dog it was, robotic or not.
The idea was getting into one of the more higher-end bars (Jason can bluff it with the best of them, he's pretty well-known for conning everyone from low end street dealers to people way up the food-chain) to do some investigative work, seeing a (very drunk) gentleman trying to coax others into some very risky games of "let's drink this and see what happens" (russian roulette, without the guns part), and Jason betting him every credit he had while getting the man to put up the dog.
While Jason is used to dealing with some very advanced Tamaranian alien tech back home, he wouldn't check a dog for much more than an ear chip. Given that he himself was fairly inebriated, if the plotline was okay to roll with, he'd be smart enough to ask about ownership rights but probably would not push it too far.
He's also the kind of guy who would just steal a dog if he wasn't happy with how they were treated without thinking anything after that initial "liberate the animal" through so.
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The plot will go as Jessi described, with one exception: the young rich guy at the bar didn't have ownership over the dog. The young man's name is Hideki Maeda, and he's the son of a rather well-known business woman by the name of Aoi Maeda. Hideki would have sent a request to his mom for the dog's ownership to be passed over, and Jason would have had proof of this. But this request would be denied by Aoi, who's listed as the actual owner of the dog.
El and Gaby will look into this dog's ownership thanks to its tracking chip, and will find out that it belongs to Maeda, who's a high-level executive at Giles Bell. Maeda would have already reported the theft of the dog to the NAPD. Thanks to this, Gaby would tell Damian that they have to bring the dog back to the NAPD. We're happy to continue the Gaby and Damian thread to play this out. Gaby will make it abundantly clear that El will verify the return of the dog when Gaby parts ways with Damian.
Maeda has a lot of connections thanks to her job, and corporate impropriety runs rampant in the city. Wrong the wrong person, and bad things happen. Thanks to her connections, she'll get a positive ID on Jason off surveillance cameras from the bar that night, and she'll manage to find Damian, as well. Before long, both Jason and Damian will be cornered before the end of August - either at a fight club, a bar they frequent, or even a place dangerously close to their base of operations - by Maeda and a group of men to send a message that they messed with the wrong person. Maeda's goal here won't be to kill; she would have given her people explicit instructions to rough them up but nothing beyond that. Whether the goons succeed in sending this message is up to you, as we are well aware that Jason and Damian are very well-trained and will be able to hold their own even in a situation where the odds aren't in their favor. Please let us know how this scene would play out.
Please feel free to follow up with any additional questions! We intend to unravel the rest of this plot over an extended period of time, and we hope to factor it into a lot of what Jason and Damian do in game.
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i've got a few questions!
.> what kind of a company is Giles Bell? i've seen it mentioned in the faq here and there but just wonder how much characters should know icly regarding it. as in, what is common knowledge and what isn't. would they recognize her face from any media and interviews? i know some characters recognize that giles belle may be involved in something shady but is it common knowledge among the populace? would anyone in the fighting rings be talking about them? or are they typically known for being on the up and up?
-> probably a moot question but merits asking as he'd make an attempt, but would they respond to any attempts to de-escalate the situation or warnings to not engage in a fight?
-> are they going to be targeting jason and damian when theyre together, or going after them individually? i read it as together but i wanted to be sure.
-> damian's going to be pretty inseparable from dick grayson for the foreseeable future. they're not going to be glued together 24/7, of course, but he'll be with him more often than not. would it be possible to include him in this as well, or would they ensure they were alone before they made a move? i can absolutely work with either.
-> are they going to have weapons of any kind, or just bare fists?
-> how are they going to respond to lethal force? will they scatter, or will they try to respond in kind?
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Would there be a way to convince Maeda to get the dog from Jason himself, instead of dropping her off with the NAPD?
Jason would use this to try and establish a connection, make it obvious he was the one who decided to take off with the dog (trying to get rid of Damian's connection to it entirely) as well as establish the whole thing as more of a "look I got her, now I'm giving her back, if I can con your dog off of your son just imagine what else I can do" kind of thing, to see if he can get any ins with Maeda herself.
He'd also use the fight to establish that too, pending on how it went. So I'll wait for an answer to the above questions before asking further.
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1. GIles Bell is one of the three big corporations in New Amsterdam, and is one of the oldest established in the past 500 years, which means it has its fingers in a lot of stuff. The only time it's been mentioned IC by any characters would be the Scott post about the monster research, and any further information about their activities will seem like it's on the up and up. Morningstar in particular will have pointed them out because of Morningstar's anti-capitalistic stance, but that's the bread and butter of their organization.
Maeda is on the board of directors, and while she doesn't make media appearances, they would be able to find this out about her just by doing a standard internet search. As a point of clarification, while the dog belongs to her, she wouldn't appear to either Jason or Damian until the shakedown we described.
2. No, this wouldn't work out! Maeda would be very clear that this is a lesson she wants taught, and will not be persuaded to any other course.
3. They would aim to get them together for the sake of it being tidy, so they would survey them and find the best and most likely time to find the two of them together. The surveillance would be done via the city's cameras, making it difficult for them to be aware that someone's keeping tabs on them. It would be this same surveillance that would help them identify Damian's movement between his base of operations before he disappeared off the radar into Morningstar's safehouse.
4. Yes, it's absolutely fine to include Dick in this! As a note, that means that all further progression on this plot would include him as a factor.
5. Maeda's people will be armed with knives and guns. If they have opportunity to use the knives to inflict some deliberate pain, they will, but otherwise will not use them to wound too severely. Similarly, they will only use the guns for intimidation and pistol whipping - they won't fire them.
6. Maeda's people would be very trained, almost to the same level as Damian and Jason. Given the numbers involved, they would be difficult - though not impossible - to overwhelm, but killing would be extremely difficult, and they would experience a fair amount of push back as Maeda's people tried to regain control of the situation. As a result, it would be very difficult for them to begin to use lethal force. If they go after Maeda herself, her people will prioritize getting her out of that space, and there would be the sense that this would not be over.
7. No! Because the dog has been reported as stolen, she would need to be returned to the NAPD themselves. It would only be later that Maeda would look into surveillance to find who had her dog.
As a note, for sake of ease, we've decided that Gaby will be calling in Morningstar agents to get the dog to the NAPD - they'll be able to do it without anyone showing their faces and potentially getting arrested.
8. It would be easier for Jason to establish this during the fight! Maeda won't be outwardly aggressive/vindictive until Jason and Damian (and potentially Dick) are cornered, though at that point her grudge will become very evident. The dog drop off would go relatively peacefully for the Morningstar agents.
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So now that I've caught up on reading this- I'm just curious as to how this further plot progression would affect Dick in the future, before I agree/decline his involvement. I know you'd like to unravel the plot as you go, but he's really rather new and hasn't had a chance to create a niche for himself. So I'm mostly looking for clarity as to whether or not this would end up limiting his ability to get involved in certain things- (like events or if he wanted to try joining Morningstar in the future, etc).
Thank you!
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This would not prevent any of the three brothers from participating in the game as a whole, as we would never want to lay down those restrictions - especially since the game is very young! Our design behind this plot is to give the three of you a lead to chase, and that lead will be one that occasionally - or frequently, depending on further actions taken - bites back. Any of the three would be able to go about life as usual. Consider it a case of making a very powerful enemy in a surprising place, but we would never want to inhibit agency on the part of anyone involved. In fact, we would be happy to work with you on just how inconvenient Maeda and her connections are in game, though that inconvenience will ramp up depending on the response in return to her after that initial confrontation.
Primarily, we want to do something that is more fun for everyone involved. We're not being vague for the sake of being vague; instead, it's because we have the barebones of a future plot laid out. It's one that's flexible beyond the initial choices that already took place.
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Skikki, Gaia, and I are trying to figure out about how this would go down. It'd change a bit pending timelines, so just to verify before we tl;dr possibilities and swap ideas:
Did Damian and Jason spend an amount of time on house arrest in the safehouse?
The log was for August 8th, if they were--how many days were they on lock down?
Additionally, could we get an approximate date range for when the fight with Maeda's thugs would go down? You stated before the end of August, but is there a specific date frame you had in mind?
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1&2 We had no intention of having Gaby keep them on house arrest. Primarily, she wanted to keep the dog and Damian there while she and El figured out what to do with it. This would be figured out before the end of the day on the 8th!
3. We're flexible on this! We would like it to go down before the end of December (OOCly). It's up to you guys how long it will take Maeda to get them together in one place. We left this open-ended so that you two (or three) could figure that out yourself.
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Shikki, Gaia, and I have talked about this a bit and hope that this works with what you had in mind:
The dognapping incident occurred on August 8th, with Damian carting her off to the safehouse so he wasn't leaving Dick by himself in there. Jason would show up and tell Gaby that he was the one fully responsible for the incident and that he was fully intending on just using Damian as a scapegoat for the whole thing. Obviously, this wouldn't stop Maeda from seeing Damian with the dog at all, but he'd want to make sure that, regardless of how it went down with whoever owned the dog, that Damian didn't have any part of it as far as Morningstar is concerned.
We'd like to time the fight itself for about August 20th ICly. This gives Maeda time to track them down, and gives Jason more time to heal up. Maeda's goons will find Jason and Damian heading back to their cruddy warehouse they're trying to lay claim to on the far side of the city, where Dick's waiting. The fight breaks out, Dick hears the commotion and jumps in to help resolve it. While they're all three pretty heavily trained, Damian is the best fighter of the three, with Dick a close second and Jason not too far behind--that'll become evident enough in the fight.
As their goal is to just hurt rather than kill or seriously injure, there won't be any murderous intent coming from any of the three boys; Jason and Damian fight a little. . harsher, don't hesitate to break bones but won't go for the killing blow as long as the fight itself isn't being directed that way. And they wouldn't go after Maeda herself, because that's clearly a Bad Idea just waiting to explode in their faces.
Damian would make sure to make some comment about how shit her goons are, because he's a snarky little shit. And literally offer to train them because clearly whoever is doing it isn't doing it good enough. And Jason wouldn't be far behind him.
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