Castles of Steel - Lesbians Good, Imperialism Bad

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Lieutenant Arisukawa Haruna

Balance Stats
❁ • ❁ Work / Life ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Warrior / Princess ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Radical / Respectable ❁ • ❁

Tactical Stats
Gunnery 0, Navigation +2, Command +2, Technology -4, Personal -2, Strategy +3

Stress: 3​


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PLEASE READ THE QUEST RULES BELOW

You collectively vote on the actions of Arisukawa Haruna, the first woman to serve openly in the Imperial Akitsukuni Navy.

This quest is set in a universe which is much like our own circa 1910, but with different politics, cultural norms, and ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as some unusual and advanced technology in places.

We are using this quest to explore themes like breaking the glass ceiling, divergent outlooks on gender and sexuality, colonialism and imperialism, and the place of royalty.

Content Warning
This quest goes some dark places.

There is violence, often explicit, often unfair, often against undeserving targets.

There are not always good options forward. The protagonist is not necessarily a good person.

There is implied content and discussion of sexual harassment and assault.

This is a world where people are often racist, sexist, queerphobic bigots. Sometimes, even the PC and the people they are friends with.

Voting Rules

We will tell you if write-in votes are allowed. If we do not say that write-ins are allowed, they are not. This is to prevent people from unrealistically hedging their bets.

You may proposal other options in a non-vote format, subject to approval, on non write-in votes.

We will tell you when a vote allows approved voting. If we don't say the answer is no, pick an option. We like making people commit.

Discussions makes the GM feel fuzzy.

Game Rules
When we ask you for a roll, roll 3d6. You are aiming to roll equal or under the value of your stat. If you succeed, Haruna gets through the situation with no real difficulties. If you roll above the target value, Haruna will still succeed, but this success will cost her something or add a complication.

Whenever Haruna loses something or faces hardship from a botched roll, she takes Stress. The more Stress Haruna has, the more the job and the circumstances she's in will get to her, and it'll be reflected in the narrative. Haruna must be kept under 10 Stress: if she reaches 10 Stress, she will suffer a breakdown and the results will not be great for her.

Haruna loses stress by taking time for herself, by making meaningful progress on her dreams, and by kissing tall, beautiful women.

Meta Rules
Author commentary is in italics so you know it's not story stuff.

Please don't complain about the system or the fact we have to roll dice. We've heard it before, we've heard it a thousand times across multiple quests. We're not going to change it, and it wears at our fucking souls.

Just going "oh noooo" or "Fish RNGesus Why!" is fun and fine. Complaining at length because you didn't get what you want less so.

If you have a question, tag both @open_sketchbook and @Artificial Girl. If you only tag one of us, you will be ignored. Seriously, we both write this quest.

And yes this is an alt-history type setting with openly gay and trans people, ahistoric medicine, and weird politics. Just... deal, please?

This quest employs a special system called Snippet Votes. Please read this post for more information.
 
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[X] Forget the party. This is serious. (Roll subterfuge, Very Hard roll. No stress relief. On a success, get enough to implicate both of them. A partial will give you a hard choice.)

Roll me 5d6 please! Remember: drop the two highest!
 
*Sighs in frustration at people deciding to bet things on a dice roll.*

Now we get to see what the hard choice will be.
 
Why, this outcome was perfectly predictable?

There was less than 50% chance of succesfully passing this roll. It's not like this is some statistical fluke.
 
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Hey, y'all voted for the option where we might end up with another dead body, knowing our dice luck. :p

And stress level. Let's, next vote, please be kind to our princess. :(
 
3-10: Conspiracies & Family Lines
  • Threadmarks
    • "You're right. Hell, you're right. Okay, Nashimoto, I'm in." Arakaki said.

    "Good man, I knew I could rely on you. Look, I'll deal with the transportation, that's no problem. I'm just a little too recognizable for the actual pickup. It's all been arranged already. Just get two men you trust and a truck from Lt. Nagaoka at the consulate, and make the meeting: Pier 29, at 11PM, and just park the truck in our motorpool. Our logistics officer is on the level, don't worry, Yaginuma will take them off your hands from there."

    You heard the sound of a bottle touching back onto the table.

    "We're looking at 12 of these, right? How are we going to pay for it?"

    Something shuffled across the table.

    "This should cover it. There might be a little extra, so get rid of it. I dunno, buy yourself some souvenirs. I just don't want you caught with New Alleghany cash on you if anyone asks any questions."

    "But..?"

    "No, don't worry too much about it. The inspecting officers have been forewarned you're coming."

    "We're going to do this, aren't we?"

    "We are! This is how it starts, I tell you. Next election, one way or another, the communists are taking to the streets. They're getting too bold these days. I'll tell you: we have a truck of sailors block the bridge to the Palace with two of these machine-guns on the day, we'll be heroes. The Imperial Guard don't have the guts for that. An age like this needs heroes, men who will take the initiative. Men like you, Arakaki."

    "Then the restoration?"

    "Then the restoration. Once my dear cousin is under our protection, it'll be fairly simple to keep the Diet in line."

    You seethed at him talking that way. The Empress was four hundred years removed from his bloodline! How dare he be so familiar! And with someone outside the family!

    Also, the coup against the civilian government sounded pretty bad. Like, awful, really. Your interest in the actual machinations of politics had been minimal but you respected the government. It existed for a reason! Seizing it by force was like the bad old days of the Warring States when the country had been plunged into decades of civil war over who was going to become the next military strongman to tell the Empress what to do.

    That's what they wanted to restore? Well, they had another thing coming.

    You heard wet footsteps coming down the deck, probably Kenshin, so you carefully, quietly moved past the door and down the stairs. Sure enough, there he was, in his undershirt with a necklace of flowers and his hat askew.

    "Hoi, Arisugawa, you're missing the party! We told one of those hula girls about you and she's verrrry interested!" Spirits did he have to be so loud?

    "Kusakabe, we don't have time for that right now. I've discovered a conspiracy against the government," you hissed, trying to keep your voice down so it didn't carry down the corridors of the ship.

    Kenshin was suddenly sober, instantly. How did he do that? He beckoned you to follow and you found yourself below decks, in the damage control ready room.

    "Out. Both of you. Go join the party." Ken snapped at the two unlucky sailors on duty, and they were gone so fast you swore they left an afterimage.

    Ken snapped open a cabinet labelled "firefighting supplies" and within a moment you had a cold beer in your hand and were sitting opposite.

    "Okay. Explain." You took a breath. How did you explain this?

    "The captain and Commander Arakaki of the Kaiyo were talking about buying something in New Allegheny. I think weapons, so that the Purity Club can machine gun the communists after the next election and supplant the army in protecting the Empress…" You laid out the details of the conversation. "I don't think it's a coup exactly, but…"

    "It would be rather academic at that point." Kenshin said.

    "Right. There's nothing to stop it from becoming one once they get their blood up after shooting some commies. And even if they don't fight their way past the Imperial Guard at the Palace and the National Police at the Diet, it'll be a bloody mess." You paused and rested your head in your hands. The National Police were, well, the national police agency. In addition to protecting the Diet and other governmental institutions they also investigated crimes that took place on or in near proximity to those same institutions or on government property. They were also responsible for all railways and national roads as well as providing detectives and sometimes beat cops to smaller towns that didn't have their own police force or the expertise to investigate things such as murder. The Special Higher Police, the Diet's secret police, was a department of theirs.

    "We have to tell the Tokkeitai," you added.

    "Yeah, that sounds like a truly awful idea." Kenshin said.

    "What?!"

    "The Tokkeitai is where the Purity Club started, Haruna. Even if the upper echelons are mostly regular officers, most of the junior officers and middle ranks are in on that nonsense." He said. "Have you read your cousin's literature yet?"

    You shook your head. You'd been meaning to get around to it, but you were waiting for The Right to Well-Being to arrive to contrast it. You also discovered, to your amusement, that books on the banned list could actually be requested by officers specifically to help "root out subversive elements" by understanding them, so the Navy was actually the one sending you this highly-illegal book.

    "Okay, five minute summary. It's written by the guy who is currently the Tokkeitai's head of operations in Joseon. He was like, hey, you know if we structured the government back home like the military occupation here, people would be happier and safer, except of course for the 'undesirable elements corrupting our pure society' or however he put it. Also, a frankly staggering number of words about the so-called superiority of the Akitsukuni people over the, uh, 'Joseon and Cathayan mongrel stock.' And that's one of the milder things he has to say, if you can believe it."

    "My cousin buys this shit?" You said, amazed. The man's whole family line existed because of a marriage alliance with a Cathay prince in the 1900s! "My opinion of him falls by the second, seemingly with no lower boundary."

    You reflected a moment as well on the bits of your family line that intertwined with Joseon, Cathay, and similar. Hell, at some point one of the cadet branches got tangled up with the descendants of that slave-turned-samurai Hachisuka landed back in the day. You and the Empress's family weren't directly descendant of that guy, but some of the older families were.

    "Look, our dear captain is an idiot, there's no mistaking it, but some of these guys are scary smart. They want power and they know how to use fear and violence to get it. They've practiced, Haruna. They've been using our colonies as training grounds. I bet this whole scheme came up because there was some dumb motherfucker in Our Way who said the Navy detachment protecting you should have had a machine-gun in the truck. He probably thinks the communists are going to be just like an angry, frightened crowd with rocks and signs. Idiot."

    Every once in a while, you heard about the Secret Higher Police raiding a UCL building and finding rifles and bombs. They always managed to get clear of anything but a minor scandal, usually by denouncing everyone involved as 'Anarchist right-deviationist splitters,' but you wondered how they kept getting away with it.

    "It won't be like that, will it?" You said.

    "Fuck no. If they start shooting people and knocking over the government, they'll give the fucking communists exactly what they want. Both sets of these morons think politics is for cowards and are aching to just shoot the people they disagree with. If they start going at it, there'll be blood in the streets, like the Imperial Restoration all over again. Only this time no matter who wins, the rest of the country comes our worse for it."

    "Okay, if not the Tokkeitai, then who?" You asked.

    "Way I see it, we have two options. First, we go to the consulate and get them to contact the New Alleghany police. Anyone selling machine-guns is probably somebody they want to talk to, so we tip them off about the meeting. But…"

    "But what?" You said.

    "Well, look, snitching on a Prince to a foreign police force is not going to be popular. There's a lot of folks, and I don't just mean Purity Club, who'll think of that as treason, and we have no way to securing anonymity for this one. Hell, what will your family think, turning His Imperial Highness in to the security thugs of New Alleghany?"

    Now that you considered that, it did make you mighty uncomfortable. New Alleghany was, basically, a corrupt cesspool of religious fanatics. On top of that, they were notoriously a bunch of racist assholes, and you were vaguely squeamish about handing Akitsukuni sailors caught up in the thing off to the strange foreigners of indeterminate heritage that made up most of their country.

    "Plus if they try to arrest him, we might end up with a bunch of sailors in a shootout with the New Alleghany police because he's arrogant enough to break open the arms locker to protect himself and his ship from the long arm of the law." Kenshin added. "Which will be a hell of a scandal."

    "Okay, boo to that. What's option two?"

    "We go and we put a stop to it personally. Do you have sailors you can trust?"

    "A few." You said.

    "The damage control gang are on my side no matter what. Basically we… we do a little tiny mutiny, just like… I dunno, we show up at the exchange and take notes. We're not trying to be subtle, so we'll have numbers on our side, and there'll be no way out. Plus, it'll be cool as fuck to walk down the pier with a gang."

    "Hell yeah. Like showing up for a midnight duel."

    "Right, and we bring the XO with us. I've had lunch with him a few times: he has sealed orders to crack open to relieve the Captain of duty if he is 'compromised', probably by Caspian women, but I think this counts too. Either he goes quietly, or we threaten him with wrenches until he does."

    You'd seen some of the wrenches Damage Control carried. That would probably work.

    "But…" Kenshin said.

    "But?" You replied.

    "I'm trying to think of a faster way to get assassinated by the Purity Club and it's not really coming to me." He said.

    "Psh, they don't assassinate people! How would they get away with it? The Tokkeitai would… oh. Fuck."

    "Yeah." Ken said grimly. "I can't really think of anything else, except something desperately passive, like writing a letter to the Admiralty about it, and that's your word against his at that point."

    Right. You had family in the upper ranks (Your great uncle Prince Moritomo was on the Admiralty Board, and your uncle Arisukawa Seinosuke was flag captain of the Mochizuki). They had pull. Maybe there was a chance...

    [ ] This was a criminal matter happening on New Alleghany's shores. The police could handle it. (Secret background roll)
    [ ] This is a matter of honour inside the Navy. You and Kenshin can handle it. (Prowess roll.)
    [ ] Write a letter to your great uncle, Vice Admiral Moritomo, in the Admirality. He'd been one of the relatives who had helped you get into the Academy and you knew he despised the Purity Club. (Hard Diplomacy. Even a full success will have reduced results.)
    To be clear: if you take the first two options, no matter what happens, your cousin and his little conspiracy are done. The rolls will be about how that happens and what further consequences there are.​
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • [] This is a matter of honour inside the Navy. You and Kenshin can handle it. (Prowess roll.)

    What I think on going for
     
    Eh well. That could have gone worse by a fairly goodly chunk. Like whoa man that could have gone so poorly.

    I reallllllly don't like the idea of confronting the captain directly. That sounds like a nice way to get into a massive clusterfuck, possibly be stabbed, and the whole dealio with getting assassinated by the Purity Club is, in my mind at least, a nontrivial threat.

    Turning the Captain in to New Alleghany is a very different set of concerns, but it doesn't involve getting into a fight with wrenches, swords, and possibly guns.

    Then again, Haruna getting into a swordfight with her cousin could be pretty ridiculously badass.
     
    Our Prowess is weak, but I really don't want to involve NA in our internal affairs like this and I refuse to let this conspiracy go any further.

    Havin said, Tokkeitai or Purity Club killing us is problematic too. Argh.

    [X] This is a matter of honour inside the Navy. You and Kenshin can handle this.
     
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    commando2341 said:
    Our Prowess is weak, but I really don't want to involve NA in our internal affairs like this and I refuse to let this conspiracy go any further.

    Havin said, Tokkeitai or Purity Club killing us is problematic too. Argh.

    [] This is a matter of honour inside the Navy. You and Kenshin can handle this.
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    Our prowess is average; not particularly weak.
     
    Okay, so secret background roll is secret (obviously), but the other two options have basically the same success chances. Prowess is 37.5% full success, 83.8% at least partial; Hard Diplomacy is 38.35% full success, 86.96% at least partial.
     
    Rat King said:
    Although there might be blood.
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    Oh, there will be blood. Only question is how much of it will be ours. Prowess is still our second-to-worst stat, and never count on the dice to not fuck you over (or even to bother with the lube...)
    Crasian01 said:
    Then again, Haruna getting into a swordfight with her cousin could be pretty ridiculously badass.
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    Sounds like an excellent way to get stabbed, if you ask me...

    Still, I think it's the best of a bad lot of options.
     
    Wiadi said:
    Okay, so secret background roll is secret (obviously), but the other two options have basically the same success chances. Prowess is 37.5% full success, 83.8% at least partial; Hard Diplomacy is 38.35% full success, 86.96% at least partial.
    Click to expand...
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    Well okay, so, based on this:
    open_sketchbook said:
    To be clear: if you take the first two options, no matter what happens, your cousin and his little conspiracy are done. The rolls will be about how that happens and what further consequences there are.
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    Then it seems that Hard Diplomacy has the most questions marks for failure. We don't know what Hard Diplomacy Roll would actually net us.

    Meanwhile, Secret Background Roll and Prowess Roll would end up with at least a mission success, but absolute most horrific bad end worst case scenario has Kenshin dead, our name crushed under the weight of a court martial and public opinion, and the Purity Club being reinforced via the public fervor so that they sweep the election/stage a coup.

    ....it seems pretty unlikely to me that the GMs would go for the absolute most horrific bad end worst case scenario, as that seems counter to the sort of story they seem interested in telling. So, I'd say that we go for the Prowess Roll, since we at least know how likely we are to be Totally Fucked.

    Edit: I like how I personally would go for the Secret Background attempt IRL but am advocating for the Shounen Protagonist vote in game. WTF.

    --

    FlyingScanian said:
    Sounds like an excellent way to get stabbed, if you ask me...

    Still, I think it's the best of a bad lot of options.
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    Ara, I 100% agree, but metagame memes, my dude.
     
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    Crasian01 said:
    Then again, Haruna getting into a swordfight with her cousin could be pretty ridiculously badass.
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    I will vote for any options that lead to this- Warrior Princess dueling her traitorous cousin in a foreign land with the fate of the government at stake? Sign me the fvk up. It's like Lion King in the aesthetics.
     
    Let's handle it ourselves. This puts on a dangerous trajectory towards direct conflict with the Purity Club, but we were already drifting in that direction and this may help shape us into the person I'd like us to be going forward if we survive it. It will also give us a bunch of cred with the left that would be hard to get any other way right now, and it's not like part of the navy leadership isn't already trying to kill us.
     
    Christ what did we vote for in Plane Design Quest.

    Did we vote for the political upheaval?

    Is Haruna about to start that domino chain?

    Fuck.
     
    Actually we're like... in two months Asuka is joining Ohara!

    I bet that Asuka started their newspaper scanning habit because they missed whatever is just about to go down and they're like UUUUH LET'S AVOID THAT GOING FORWARD lol.
     
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