Felix’s Story - Star Master Log: Designing Character Focus Episodes

This Star Master’s Log was originally a Patreon exclusive! To get these logs two weeks early, bonus world-building posts, and behind-the-scenes secrets, join the inner circle at: patreon.com/DarkStarAdventurecast

Jeff has a go at Episode Nine, “Brother's Keeper: Felix's Story”, chatting about the chaos, character moments, and improvisation that shaped the story.

He covers:

• How focus episodes are structured, and his thoughts on nested narratives

• How much story structure was needed for a story that (technically) has already happened

• Scott's emotional performance, and Stephanie's excellent take on Nyx.

• Background on the ultra-urbanized night world Polyphn

New Star Master's Logs drop every other Tuesday, bridging the gap between our main adventure episodes.

• Show Transcript

  [00:00:00] Hey everyone, it's Star Master Jeff here back with my very special bonus series where I talk about how I planned the Adventure Cast campaign available exclusively for our Patreon listeners. In today's debrief, I'm giving you a look at how I ran Episode nine Brothers Keeper Felix's Story. What was planned, what surprised me, and how much I'm actually improvising behind the screen.

  If you're into jamming world building, or just curious about how the story takes shape, this one is for you. Episode nine is a very special episode of the Dark Star Venture Cast. It's beginning a new narrative experiment that I dreamt up where we are attempting to blend the nested storytelling device of the Canterbury Tales or Hyperion with live T-T-R-P-G play.

  So for those out there that may not have read either of those stories, they both revolve around a group of characters traveling [00:01:00] to a location. While they travel to that location, we get the story of them traveling and their trials and tribulations as they travel to that location. But also, each character takes a turn to tell a, a story from their past that ties into what is happening in the present.

  So in Hyperion, all the characters are traveling to Hyperion and to a final destination on that planet. No spoilers. Don't worry. But along the way, they each take a chance to tell their story of why they're on this pilgrimage to Hyperion. And similar in the Canterbury Tales and now similar in the Dark Star Adventure Cast, each of the characters will be having a focus episode where they tell a story to the crew that ties into why they are here, perhaps why they're with the group on the scapegoat, or why they decide to take this mission to.

  Travel to the hidden Promethean base at the far reaches of the galaxy, and as they start telling that story, we [00:02:00] will enter into a flashback sequence. Where that player will be playing a younger version of their character and all the other players will step into new roles within that story. So in episode nine, we have Felix played by Scott.

  We have Nicks played by Stephanie and so on. They play their original characters at the beginning and the end of the episode, and they play a different character in the middle. And I thought that was a really exciting opportunity to allow the players to. Stretch their role playing muscles a bit and get off of just playing the same character while also expanding character histories in a way that is very show and not tell.

  I don't want to have pieces of history just cropping up and being like, oh yeah, I fought in the red rice wars. Cool. That's very cool to have that tip of that iceberg. But I wanna know what happened in the red rice wars, and I don't want to just hear it through snippets of conversation. I want to go back and experience it.

  So that is what we are doing for the first time in this episode with Felix and the orbital data vault and his relationship with his brother, and why Felix took this [00:03:00] job in the first place. So I'm actually very excited about that. I've been looking forward to the focus episodes for extremely long time.

  I finished reading Hyperion for the first time about a year ago, and this idea has been percolating around in my head ever since. And I, I read the Canterbury Tales in College. I have a creative writing degree, so I had to read a lot of English literature to fulfill the requirements of that. Canterbury Tales was one of those.

  I wouldn't say that I particularly liked the Canterbury Tales. I actually found it kind of a difficult read as a modern reader, but Hyperion was an excellent translation of it for a modern audience, especially one that loves sci-fi like me. So it spoke to me quite a bit. I really, really loved Hyperion, and I love that I get to incorporate this very nifty storytelling device.

  Into a live T-T-R-P-G podcast. I think that's just such a cool idea and I hope that you do too. So the way that I plan this episode is obviously some things about Felix's past are immutable things happened, you know, Pete's death and you know, and what [00:04:00] happened to PD are all locked in concrete. I'm not gonna change those things.

  But every other detail is quite hazy. So I came up with the broad strokes. I matched him against Felix's backstory. I worked very closely with Scott to make sure that the pieces I filled in made sense for how he envisioned his past. And the rest of everything. 90, maybe even 95% of the adventure was all fill in the blank.

  Scott and I didn't make any decisions about any of those details, and we allowed Stephanie as Nick's, Doja as Jet, and Brian as PD to fill in those blanks for us, and it helped keep things authentic because although Scott knew what the ending was going to be like, he didn't know exactly what was going to happen.

  And I think that led to some very interesting scenes, especially that final emotional scene with Felix screaming for PD and, and, and begging to be taken instead. But Scott did an excellent, excellent job. His, his role playing was so emotional and came from such a real [00:05:00] place. I am so blessed to have such a talented and emotionally intelligent group playing with me so often and helping me create this excellent podcast.

  It's, it's incredible. I've re-listened to Scott's Emotional Please over and over again while editing, and they get to me every single time. And his log at the very end of the episode where he keeps it short and bitterly asks for more whiskey, it just really hits me right in the fields, you know? So on a lighter note, other things that kind of surprised me about this episode is Jet and Nixon not really getting along, kind of butting heads like brother and sister.

  That's a constant thing with Doja and Stephanie. Uh, it's part of their relationship as friends in real life, and it's why Hailey and Robert also kind of act like two siblings, where both sibling is the younger sibling. I, I know it doesn't make sense, but it makes sense for them. And I didn't exactly envision that Nixon Jett had that sort of relationship, but of course everyone makes up their own relationships and [00:06:00] and injects their own personalities into these characters, and I think it really worked really well.

  I really enjoy seeing the two of them bounce off of each other and. And it was nice to see Stephanie take charge with a character like Nick's, where Hailey is very physically opposing, is usually taking more of a backseat when it comes to making sure that she gets her way. Nick's was a lot more headstrong and sardonic with her role playing, even if she couldn't just go and like punch a face and take care of business that way.

  So it was nice to see that flip happen. We do see her capabilities come out in the really cool laser dance scene, which I really, really loved. Stephanie came outta nowhere with that after having an excellent skill role. She came up with this crazy monologue just off the cuff about what her character was doing as she danced through the lasers, and we said to some awesome music.

  You know, Redshift Revelry is always sitting there by gravity, well, in my playlist so that I can grab it. It's sort of become my go-to whenever I need music. I'm like, ooh. Can I get Redshift Revelry [00:07:00] in there because it's like the number one hit across the sector apparently at this point. So always with these types of episodes, things end up on the cutting room floor.

  Uh, sometimes there's a little bit too much lore or role playing, or I have notes written down that I may or may not incorporate into the session, but they're still true for the sector and the story at large. A few of the things that you as a Patreon member get to know that didn't quite make it into the episode is a slightly fuller picture of PolyPhen, omnitech, Raddy and Promethean.

  PolyPhen is the ultra urbanized planet in which the data vault is rotating around. It's a night world. They have a sun, but it's quite far away. They are on the extreme far reaches of its gravity well. So although they are rotating around the sun, they get so little daylight that it really doesn't even register as a daytime.

  And with all the smog produced by the [00:08:00] dense collective of corporations and industry on that world, any UV that may be reaching the surface is filtered out into just a general glow. Of course the streetlights, the neon blasted signs means that any glimmer of sunlight you may think you see is probably just your imagination.

  We will see more of PolyPhen later in a future focus episode, and I'm really excited for you to learn more about PolyPhen and what the surface of that looks like for now. Suffice to say that Omni Tech's headquarters is on PolyPhen, as well as several other headquarters. It's one of the inner planets where a lot of corporations are clustered.

  Omnitech is a major player. Of course, they are a subsidiary of Raddy and Rady's headquarters is also on this planet. Raddy owns about half of this planet and Omni Tech's urbanized area is within Rady's borders, and they kind of have like their own fiefdom inside of that Raddy kingdom. And then Promethean is also subsidiary of [00:09:00] Raddy, and they are the ones with the secret base where they do gene splicing experiment and dark matter experiments.

  That is where the data vault is. That is where the data vault seems to have migrated to at the end of the episode, and that is why Felix is so hellbent on staying on this mission and making his way out there. So Androids in a state of AI are another thing that are a bit of a mystery in the game right now.

  Stephanie did comment in this episode that every Android they run into seems to be broken down. This is a dystopian future sci-fi. There is a very lived in feel to it. There's a lot of old tech or tech that people don't necessarily understand how to use anymore, and so instead of necessarily creating new Androids, they will repurpose and fix Androids as much as they can because that is far cheaper than trying to build new ones, especially since a lot of the industry that created those androids.

  It doesn't really exist anymore. A lot of the factories and so forth, the knowledge to run them, maintain them and utilize 'em effectively has gone down [00:10:00] increasingly over time, especially as industry and research has moved towards the alien artifacts, all those eggs are sort of going in one basket. The, the corporations are really relying on Aly and tech to be the next big thing, and they're sort of ignoring everything else in the hopes that they're the first or one of the first to strike it big.

  Of course, the irony there is that they're ignoring AI and reaching towards this alien tech and what may become something more of like a virtual intelligence that's been transferred into a machine. And here in real life we have the AI revolution where tech companies are now ignoring everything that's not AI much to our detri.

  So they're seeing a post AI society just on the cusp of discovering something that is far beyond anything humanity has known previously. And that's where this campaign takes place, right on that cusp. But of course they're trying to create their own virtual intelligence in their own way. They can't transfer a consciousness, but they are playing with the [00:11:00] ability to copy a consciousness, and that's what we see at the end of this episode when the CEO takes PD and copies his brain into an AI model.

  Of course, this is an extremely destructive process, killing pd. His body is discarded as if it was nothing but a, but a banana peel and a copy of PD is now living in the vault, taking part in endless tests, not only to train the AI model, but to see how well the copy worked, and also perhaps to train his AI model to do new and interesting things.

  They're looking for test subjects, but obviously the ultimate goal of doing something like this far exceeds simple tests. It all comes down to money. For instance, if you had an extremely skilled one of a kind, I don't know, rocket scientist who's working on the hardest problems that the world has to face right now, then Omnitech could take that person, copy them into an ai, and then simply copy [00:12:00] paste that AI over and over again until you have an army working together on that same problem.

  That's sort of where Omni Tech's head is at right now. Little do they know that Dr. Voss is a virtual intelligence and that VI technology is out there. If only they can learn how to unlock alien technology, and we'll see that kind of come to fruition as the campaign progresses as well. So what's coming next?

  More focus episodes this season, each character will get a focus episode just like Felix's. Uh, the next one that we have coming up is Thorns, and it is a very interesting episode that delves deep into his own insecurities and his quest for revenge for being muscle doubt of his family business. But first next episode is episode 10, where the crew visits an Interstellar truck stop for a bit of rested relaxation.

  But of course, as things always go for them, they run into some trouble that they weren't quite prepared for. Well, that's it for me. Thanks for listening. Love you all. Bye for [00:13:00] now.