war table scouting/research misson: operation WARSHIP.

[propulsion]

Operation WARSHIP is a joint effort by the Research and Scouting divisions to identify scholars who are assisting the Venatori in their pursuit of the Seven Gates, so that Riftwatch can watch them, figure out what they're doing, and ultimately get ahead of them.

Stage One of this mission involves building out the list of scholars whose work might be relevant.

We'll be doing this by searching information about personnel from sources like Circles, the dwarven Ambassadoria, or university archives—particularly those in the Tevinter Imperium. These will be infiltration missions conducted by small teams with maximum secrecy to make sure that the enemy doesn't become aware that Riftwatch is doing this. Because these missions require both spy skills to get into these places and nerd skills to find the right information without tearing the place apart, we'll be pairing up members of Scouting with members of Research. (Members of other Divisions with relevant skills are welcome to sign up, but we will be prioritizing Research and Scouting. Characters who have not actually joined Riftwatch and are not members of any division will not be permitted on these missions.)

OOCly, our plan is to tailor these assignments somewhat to fit the skill-sets and interests of those of you who sign up. We'll provide each team with a location and its unique risks and challenges; it will then be up to you two to tell us how you want to approach it and we'll let you know the likely outcomes (and, depending on how things shake out, possibly offer a little GMing/NPCing). You can then go forth and RP whatever parts of it are fun for you.

Sign-ups will close end of day Thursday, 9/9. We'll be getting the initial write-ups out by the weekend, with the goal that you can be ready to start RPing by mid-month. Reports will be due no later than the end of October (but the earlier the better!).

These assignments are designed to lead into a Stage Two, which will have separate sign-ups but build on the work your characters do here. The overall aim is for Riftwatch to eventually get a grip on a major part of the mod plot by acquiring new sources of information about the Gates and what the Venatori are up to so that they can start working directly to stop them. Because this is key to on-going plot and meant to be built on, we're going to be pretty strict with report deadlines and keeping things moving, and will do what we can on our side as well to support you!

Sign ups can be found in the comments below. And you'll have to ask Tony personally what WARSHIP stands for.

Comments

[cozen]

Player: MJ
Character: Bastien
Division: Diplomacy

Spy skills:
[ X ] Breaking and entering
[ X- ] Forgery and/or disguises (but he can only do 2 accents)
[ ] Interviews and interrogation
[ X+ ] Social engineering (deception, cover identities, cultivating connections, etc.)
[ X ] Surveillance (places, people, etc.)
[ X-- ] Parkour (he does his best)
[ X ] Hypnosis (this is a joke)


Nerd skills:
[ ] Alchemy
[ ] Ancient (Thedosian) languages
[ ] Archival research
[ ] Fade and/or rift studies
[ X- ] History (cool story history only)
[ ] Magical artifacts and/or devices
[ ] Magical theory

[propulsion]

Congratulations, you've been selected for an impossible mission! Your partner is Richard.

The Orentius University of Minrathous is hosting a triennial conference, the Society for Premier Thinkers in Natural Philosophies and the Arcane Sciences, that invites a wide range of Tevene and international academics. It had been thought that it would be cancelled due to the wars and invasions and coups and so on, but the representatives of Orentius, it being a point of pride in having won the claim to host the conference, insisted that it should go ahead anyway, and so there's been a bit of a desperate scrabble to secure attendees, panelists, and lecturers.

Riftwatch has managed to procure two invitations through some diplomatic leveraging, and Richard and Bastien will be using these invitations to go undercover and attend the conference. You may confer and invent your undercover identities, and some tips include that it is not necessary to be able to speak Tevene to fit in, as Common is the wider dialect, but it wouldn't hurt to brush up on some basics. That said, the Society is also open to anyone from anywhere, mage or no, but there will be pros and cons to how obscure and foreign you make yourselves.

The objective will be to use the conference as cover to gain access to a couple of locations and people of interest.

One location is the secure archives of Orentius, which will require you to spend some time to see what you can find on the subject of the Gates, if there is anything to be found. You can leverage this via your identities or through simply breaking and entering.

A person of interest, which they will discover for themselves in review of the program for the Society, is a professor of Orentius, Nastasia Sellic, a Laetan mage who will be speaking at the conference on the subject of revisiting pre-Chantry Blight narratives in the context of recent developments in rift research. The lecture itself will be quite dry and boring, but some later surveillance and eavesdropping during a mingling event will hint to Richard and Bastien at her frustration that the convening Society council had heavily censored her presentation.

Making direct contact at this stage is not advisable but also no one is here to stop you. They will also be supplied with a sending crystal that can be planted in a location and set to receive audio in a constant live stream to a second crystal, requiring extensive listening in and surveillance.

Please respond to this comment after conferring among yourselves about how Richard and Bastien will approach these two tasks, as well as with details around their undercover identities, or with further questions you may have to inform your decisions. We will respond with further information (or answers), at which point we can decide what parts of this you wish to RP.

[cozen]

They're going to disguise themselves as Chantry scholars who have been excommunicated (or just silenced and had their research heavily suppressed, if the Chantry doesn't do excommunication? unsure.) for their hot takes on rifts. They'll concoct some plausible academic conspiracy theory nonsense in advance, with help from some magic nerds if necessary, and they can use Bastien's printing press to produce some materials that look like genuine efforts to publish papers.

Their initial approach to the secure archives will be to attempt to get in using their identities.

Their initial approach to Nastasia Sellic will be to try checking wherever she is staying/living to see whether she has any written notes or records of what was censored, as well as using the sending crystal bug to listen in and see if she mentions anything further about her ideas and/or what she's into, personally, in case Richard has to seduce her (with Bastien's help).

[hassaran]

Sorry for how late this is, I'm the worst, time is fake, the usual song and dance, etc. Does the Chantry do excommunication? Unsure, probably something like it at least for big stuff? But for this let's just say that they've been kicked out of lay orders and had their work silenced and repressed. This plus their irresistible powers of Charm and Acting will be enough to get them access to the archives, where they will find several promising-looking entries in the card catalog, but no corresponding books.

A bored librarian will be happy to be given a chance to gossip about how a number of books, including some very old volumes from the most secure sections, have been removed from the library over the last year in compliance with a government order. He won't recall precisely what justification was given, only that it was a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that he found suspicious and thinks is probably some well-connected scholar trying to get a leg up on rivals somehow, which is a thing that's happened before, like in 9:42 when Livian Harestim tried to have his uncle destroy every copy of Orrenti's Florinarum because it disproved his thesis on— etc. He'll also mention offhand that they keep getting annoying letters from some bureaucrat because there are a few volumes included in the demand that they weren't able to find. He'll give them the related cards, and they can make note of the names of the scholars who last checked them out—one of whom is Nastasia Sellic, the other a Haroldus Locrusin.

Nastasia is not one for socialisation and in fact by all accounts (including their own after observing her presentation) is extremely socially awkward, and tends to stay in and write and read and research and avoid talking to people directly. But she possesses a dog whose breed resembles an Afghan hound, named Riabald, who is her pride and joy. She walks him twice a day and occasionally attends kennel club-type gatherings, so this could be a great meetcute as necessary. As for potential seduction (if you were serious about that, we're unsure) she is, as we said, quite awkward, but a dog lover who is also some sort of renegade scholar-monk will turn out to be a romance novel forbidden passion set-up she could get into. If you'd like to do some Cyrano-style shenanigans with this, we can also offer a brand new beta version set of discreet earbud crystals for them to test drive.

Nastasia lives in an apartment in the middle of Minrathous with only the most basic security (locks on doors, nosy neighbors, etc.), so getting in to poke around and/or plant bugs won't be tough for them. Her full lecture notes can be easily found there. It will be hard to immediately piece together what exactly she's on to, if anything, because they're both esoteric and very scattered. But they can at least also find a marked-up copy she received from the committee detailing precisely which portions she was to cut from her presentation. These too are hard to follow, but it will be clear that a significant portion deals with recent research findings related to the study of rifters and some other magical experimentation, including a reference in a footnote to work by "Volaris" conducted at a place called "Ascalon." There are also some sections cut that are incomprehensible without a strong working knowledge of Ancient Tevene, but which appear to relate to the volume she's kept from the Orentius library, "Dumat's Children, or An Accounting of the Reigns of the Archons of the First Blight and Their Deeds," which they can find "hidden" behind a stack of other books on her shelves. It's very old and not in great shape, with some fun illumination-style illustrations.

While getting crystal bugs into her office on campus or home won't be too hard, it will be kind of a temporal needle in the haystack to get a useful conversation out of it, so they may want to try to prompt her in some way, either through interactions with her, or getting her nervous somehow, or whatever. Or, if you'd like to focus on other stuff, you can also just say they dug deeper into her schedule and find a convenient upcoming meeting with another name of note to listen in to.