Player Plot on the Backburner: Sleeper Council

[clocktowers]

Just a note about the IC fallout of a recent string of network threads!

Ironwood (RWBY) made this post about a recent Maul incident and rule of law, which has blown up to ~800 comments and counting. Ozpin (RWBY), who is familiar with Ironwood's fascist bullshit and much prefers his own imperialistic bullshit, stepped in to suggest Deerington select a group of leaders as the dream falls apart.

Wu (TLoK) is in eager agreement, and wants to create an interim "Sleeper Council" to oversee resource management, rebuilding efforts, and internal justice. The main thread can be threadjacked here. Responses vary from "why didn't we do that years ago" to "that system is a terrible idea" to "guys please the sky is literally falling rn."

With endgame at the doorstep and everyone wrapping up arcs, we don't want to clutter things with a political player plot now, but! For those of y'all coming to CH2, read on.

In CH2, Oz and Wu are likely to propose a 5-7 person elected council. OOCly, this would be a banner under which community-building player plots could be held (like Mako's resource caches, Wu's safehouse, fallout from PC rampage plots if desired, etc). The goal is to create structure similar to FEAR's leadership and give characters an outlet for political intrigue in the new world. We're sure that some characters won't be into this, and half the fun will be seeing how Sleepers argue over the idea.

Feel free to comment here with thoughts on how your character falls on the issue of Sleeper governance, whether you'd like to get involved with Wu and Ozpin in the remaining months of CH1, and what you might want to take into CH2.

Enjoy your endgame!

- Rona (Ozpin) and Mads (Wu)

UPDATE: Having discussed further with players and mods, we think that whether or not there is IC favor for a new Sleeper organization, we will ultimately have the effort ICly fail. The player plot will just be the proposal of a council and subsequent political arguing, not the successful creation of a council itself. The status quo will remain untouched! This keeps the plot more tidy and self-contained.

Those who want to opt in to discussions about Sleeper leadership can do so by tagging the thread linked above, and keep an eye out for a similar conversation in CH2. Those who aren't interested can safely ignore all mention.

Thanks, everyone!

Comments

Michael

[eudaimonikos]

As a recovering manipulative demon himself, Michael views this entire thing as a powergrab so blatant that it's almost a little embarrassing. Like, seems incredibly opportunistic, very much cashing in on something awful happening to a kid.

Come Chapter 2, he'll be very into the idea of community organization! As someone who's good at planning and...sort of community management, he'd very much like to be involved in the more low-key stuff people are circulating like community gardens and outreach efforts. He likes the idea of pulling together for mutual aid purposes.

He likes the idea of a law-making council, particularly one that can judge and punish people, far less! Michael's just distrustful of anyone trying to set themselves up as an authority, and very personally invested in ideals of transformative justice. Having to practically apply that here is pretty darn different from doing it in the afterlife, but all the talk of throwing people in prison earlier honestly just kinda disturbed him. He doesn't agree with it on principle, and also thinks it's a slippery slope - the town makes people do bad shit all the time, what if this council uses that as a pretext to go after people they just don't like? Are they acting as cops, jury, and judge all rolled up into one?

Despite his anti-authoritarian leanings, he's actually in a leadership position and on a general council at home, so he does still know how all that works. It's probably a little different among immortals, but regardless - he might enter the ring himself if he distrusted enough of the other candidates, or just felt uncomfortable enough with the vibe that the whole thing was taking. He has no real interest in politics, but he figures the best way to try and keep things from going bad is to be there to keep an eye on them himself. That's mostly a last resort, though; he'd much rather just not have this be a thing at all.

[survivalthroughhate]

If Michael were to toss his hat in the arena, Maul would back him up, cause he feels like this is someone who could have the best interests of people at heart, especially those who are a lot different or who are much darker-minded like himself, his brother, and Reaper.

[eudaimonikos]

That'd honestly be a lot of it - he is worried about where this whole "criminal justice being run by these five to seven people specifically" concept partially because of the potential for them going after personal enemies or political opponents. He figures it would be stupid to launch into that immediately, though. First they'll go after people who actually aren't great - which, preventing murders is all well and good, but a lot of the ideas of "justice" being thrown around seem to preclude the idea of growth. He's really not about the idea of tossing people in Sleeper jail or camping their respawns and killing them forever, those both seem pretty fucked up.

tbh he'd be all about the concept of Maul's campaign, but practically speaking he thinks the optics on Maul specifically doing it are really bad and someone like Michael himself has a far better chance of winning

[survivalthroughhate]

That's another reason Maul's interested himself. He feels if there's no one on the council that he could trust, it'd just turn into a witch hunt anytime someone they don't like does something wrong. He feels having someone there a little more dark-minded could prevent some of that from happening.

It's alright Michael, Maul will be your campaign manager! "Vote for the giant squid demon, he's a stand-up guy with no fishy business!"