Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

copyright by Kazuhiro Ueda

The Gryphon is involved in a local gamers group, PAGE, and participates in regular role playing games, some of which he runs. Another game he plays is run independently by a friend of ours, The Cheshire Cat and is based on a system he himself developed, called Confederation, or Confed for short.

I had been asked plenty of times if I wanted to join in a Confed gaming session with my friends, and I had always declined. I'm fairly certain this goes back even to my undergrad days, because I know The Cheshire Cat developed this game a long time ago.

One of the reasons I said no all those years was because I kept thinking of the role playing I did with my brother and his friends in high school, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that primarily consisted of battling one monster after another. After awhile, it got a little old.

I'd done my share of Live Action Role Playing (LARP), based on the WhiteWolf series, back in grad school, on the Penn State campus, but I primarily focused on the role-playing aspects of it and avoided confrontation as much as possible.

The Gryphon assured me I'd fit right into the Confed universe, because Confederation citizens preferred, likewise, to resolve things in a nonviolent way if possible.

I allowed myself to be convinced this time in part because I'd missed out on the July 4 gathering at The White Rabbit's house, in order to pick up some extra work to make up for the work I'd missed during my sister's wedding.

So when we arrived at The Cheshire Cat's house on Saturday night, his wife, The Paper, said to me, "I hear you're creating a character."

"Well, um, sure," I said, and The Cheshire Cat got me started. The first task was figuring out what sort of character I wanted to create. I hadn't gotten very far in this, because I couldn't get beyond thinking how funny it would be to have a character with narcolepsy, who every time she got in a stressful situation would have to roll against whether she would fall asleep. But they talked me out of this concept, and then of course, I was completely unsure what I'd be doing.

Since the game is set in the far future and there is space travel and numerous worlds where people could be from, The Cheshire Cat assured me I could create any character I wanted to. He suggested thinking of somebody I'd always wanted to be and then base the character on that.

I did some thinking, silently. The idea of an intergalactic encyclopedia salesman amused me, but I thought it would also be dismissed as annoying. But putting that together with the thought of being a belly dancer or a storyteller, I said aloud, "How about a gypsy?" This sort of character would have some performance skills and various useful talents, such as backcountry medicine and ship repair. After all, a gypsy would find it necessary to be self-sufficient. She could also be skilled in some underhanded abilities, such as lying, forgery, lock picking and fast talking.

When I suggested this idea, it turned out there was such a class of people in the Confed universe. They were called cheval traders. Not only that, but one of the players, The Martial Artist, was already playing one, a sort of engineering idiot savant named Taiwan McGuyver.

Then it was a matter of going through the various stages of assigning character traits and buying skills using a pool of pre-allotted points. The Cheshire Cat walked me through each step as the rest of the group got started on their adventure for the evening.

Their task was to repossess, for a private owner, a Confed spaceship which had wound up in the possession of an extremely paranoid, ultra-military culture. It was under lock and key at a space sport, and they were figuring out ways of locating the ship and stealing it.

The party consisted of Taiwan; The Gryphon's character, Jenna Starfall, who is a highly attractive weapons specialist and pilot; The Dormouse's character, Steve, who is a Shaolin monk who is strongly opposed to deadly violence; The Paper's character, Katy Swenson, the youngest of the party, in her early 20s and who was a princess on another world who had struck out on her own; and The White Rabbit's character, who was a large female cat creature, Alauzhi, who was the muscle for this party but was considered weakly by her own people.

They had managed to pick enough electronic locks to find their way into where the ship was located, but despite misdirection and forged documents, they still managed to attract the attention of the space station's security, probably not aided by Jenna's misguided attempts to chat up guards in the spaceport bar.

In fact, Jenna was trying to bluff her way out of the situation with an alert female security officer just as I finished my character, my last task being to find a name for her. I took a first and last name out of the phone book, and she became Carmella Maylock (coincidentally, using the first name of one of The Cheshire Cat's aunts).

Before I joined in, we had to figure out how my character could know all of them and be on the ship. The Martial Artist suggested I could be Taiwan's cousin, since they come from the same class of people. The idea was that they might have picked her up while on a previous planet, because she was on the verge of legal trouble, and she'd kept to herself up until this point. This sounded logical, so Carmella had instant family.

Having skills in fast talking and lying, I figured Carmella should jump in. Now, the ship's captain was out of commission because it was technically a character played by a person who hadn't been played in about eight years. When Jenna introduced herself to the security officer, she said that she was representing the ship, because the captain was indisposed.

After standing in the doorway for a little while and listening, Carmella strode forward. "Captain Maylock here. Can I help you?" The entire room collapsed in laughter.

The security officer said there had been some complaints about our ship messing with security codes. Carmella said, "Congratulations. We were sent here to test your security, and you passed with flying colors." But this lie wasn't so easily bought, as my die-rolling abilities would soon prove.

However, the security officer was apparently confused enough to accuse the ship of only attempting some sort of minor theft and had no idea of the actual plans. So Carmella said that she knew nothing of this but that she'd have an immediate meeting with her crew and put an end to any such shenanigans. This seemed to satisfy the security officer, and Carmella grabbed Jenna somewhat roughly and shoved her back in the ship, at which point the entire crew stood looking expectantly at Carmella, as if she, indeed, had just taken over the ship.

"So, what have you guys been up to?" she asked.

It was fairly easy to stay in character for the rest of the game, because Carmella was just as clueless about this crew and their tactics as I was.

Eventually, after more discussion, a plan was formed. They were going to put their own ship into the launch sequence so the security robots would get out of the way. The ship would fly over a manhole, drop members of the party down, and they would electronically pick the locks and make their way to the hangar. At this point, they'd deal with the guards and robots looking after the ship.

Now ideally, they would have waited longer to get some extra preparation done, but as it turned out, the hangar for the ship in question was being opened. They realized they had to act now or risk losing it.

By this time, The Paper had fallen asleep on the couch, so she went to bed and her character became a non-player character. But The Cheshire Cat said there was no reason the rest of the party couldn't participate in the mission, because she could get the ship into orbit, having some piloting skills.

They asked me if I was sure I wanted my character to go, and I told them not to confuse my own hesitancy with the hesitancy of my character. I was reasonably certain Carmella would have been all too happy to help her cousin succeed in something as daring as a spaceship heist.

At this point, our characters did get involved in a fight, dealing with the guards and robots minding the ships. But there were two main differences from when I used to play D&D. One, as Confed citizens, their priority was on putting the human guards out of commission by non-deadly means, such as stun guns. Secondly, everyone continued to role play their characters, saying exactly how their characters would engage in their action or throwing out occasionally amusing dialogue. It was a lot more fun than it had ever been fighting trolls or dragons.

A particularly amusing trend was that after your character hit an opponent, you had to roll to see what area had been hit. Then you rolled for how much damage you'd done. For some reason, on both robots and guards, people were hitting them in the left arm. The joke arose that they were a huge planet of crab-like beings with unusually large left arms.

Despite some admirable shooting and some dodging of incoming fire, a couple of the party members were hit. Fortunately, the damage was mitigated by their body armor. "You guys have body armor?" Carmella asked, suddenly aware of the fact she had none.

Together with Steven and Jenna, Carmella took over the ship from a very surprised guard, who was hit twice in the left arm by the shaolin monk's staff, dislocating it, before taking a blow to the chest and knocked unconscious with a stun gun, courtesy of Carmella.

When Jenna took over the bridge, finding three techies at work on the computer, unarmed except with wrenches, she shot one in the leg, a shot which could have led to death by bleeding in a relatively short period of time. Carmella stunned a second techie, and a third surrendered. While Jenna took over the bridge, Steven immediately moved to provide medical help to the wounded techie. Carmella also had skill in primitive medicine, but she didn't participate because they needed her skills with the ship's missile.

She did have a little bit of skill with a missile, but not very much. After all, she'd usually gotten out of previous scrapes by talking her way out of things, or simply to slip away before anyone knew something was wrong. But fortunately, these were nuclear missiles and you didn't have to strike targets so much as get near them.

Now of course, as Confed citizens, they did not want to resort to this, and Jenna tried some fast talking of her own to convince the enemy cruisers not to fire while we stalled for time. It was complicated by the fact that the techies had begun to disassemble the glimmer drive, which was the universe's version of faster than light travel. Taiwan had to put this back together, while Alaujah, the navigator, had to figure coordinates. This took a total of 10 minutes, plenty for the opponents to take action against the ship.

As it turned out, they were more than willing to injure their own citizens just to reclaim the ship. Jenna piloted it over a large football stadium, hoping this would prevent them from taking action, but they told her they were only too happy to take out the entire city if they needed to.

"Could you repeat that?" she asked, as Steven put the conversation on all channels. "Did you just say you'd be happy to kill your own citizens just to reclaim the ship?"

"Yes, I did." Talk about a P.R. coup! No doubt, it will come back on them later.

But for the moment, we had bigger problems. Jenna promised to return to the hangar, as the ship was targeted with nuclear weapons. At this point, Jenna had a brilliant idea and decided to fly into a minefield in order to lose our pursuers. In the course of doing so, she hit two mines and did damage to the sensors on one side of the ship.

Their cruisers started advancing, and firing, anyway. With a little nudging, Carmella realized now would be a good time to try her hand at the missile. She struck one and completely blew it up, and when the others didn't learn her lesson, she struck and destroyed a couple more, much to Steven's distress.

By now, it was time to get back to the coordinates necessary to enact the glimmer drive, now repaired. As Jenna prepared to fly back through the minefield, Carmella spoke up: "Couldn't we just shoot them?" And with a number of successful rolls, she took out the rest of the minefield. They flew to the coordinates.

Just as a flotilla of enemy spacecraft surrounded the ship, it went into glimmer drive and disappeared.

After tying up some loose ends, like giving medical attention to Alaujah, who had been gut shot, enough to help her until she got back to the medical robots on their own ship, Carmella and the rest were ready to call it a day. Steve made a general announcement that he was going to donate all of his proceeds from the job to the families of those killed on the enemy ships while we were making our escape.

"Is he always like this?" Carmella asked Jenna, and Jenna nodded.

It was a lot more fun than I had ever anticipated, and I'm actually looking forward to playing again. I understand that The Cheshire Cat, who's the G.M., of course, allots experience points to the players at the beginning of each session, based on their play the time before. Hopefully, I'll get enough to boost Carmella's skill in lying and weaponry, at the very least. Oh, and buy some body armor.

Further adventures from Confed:

Confed adventures index

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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