Welcome back to #mothershipmonth. Every week day this month I’m producing part of a supplement for Mothership, set on Callaway Falls, an abandoned (mostly…) luxury resort turned mining colony. Last week we looked at the history of the world. This week we’re looking at the Callaway Five, the members of the board who have scattered to the winds, trying to work out why the planet they stole has been stolen from them. Each day we’ll look at one of the board, including background, roleplaying notes and plot hooks. I use the Story Engine card system a lot and the prompt that built their back stories are included next to their names. In addition, click through on their names for a fully statted character sheet.
Today, we’re spending time with Xavier Bolero. PR genius, the man apparently responsible for the fall of Callaway Reef and someone who is much less dead than he’s led people to believe.
Xavier Bolero (Has long sought parents/now wants to reveal it to the world)
Xavier Bolero was the weird kid in CorpSchool. Their parents never visited, but would always write, always send them gifts from different worlds. Xavier wanted for nothing but their presence and remained close to them until their deaths, not long before he graduated and visited them for the first time since he was a toddler.
When Sophie Kensington needed to come in from the cold, she contacted Xavier before the others. She showed him a photo of her and Xavier’s parents. A friendly pair of men whose faces Xavier had seen a thousand times before as the faces of Captain and Commander Competent. They had been forced to sell their likenesses, their lives and their consciousnesses to the company to pay off the cost of their research.
Xavier had spent years watching the CCs be used until they dropped, discarded like broken toys. He’d broken some himself. Something inside him broke. He argued constantly against using the CCs in construction and mining, spent hours with them trying to get them to ‘wake up’ and drunk himself into a stupor, sleeping in their holdings pens, trying to get them to acknowledge him.
He succeeded.
Xavier Bolero made contact with the distributed digital memories of his fathers and betrayed his friends to save their lives. He faked his own death and is now in hiding with the remaining units, working out what to do next.
Roleplaying Notes: Superficially think Daniel Curran in The Woman in Cabin 10. Under the surface, think Robbie Williams in Better Man (Just maybe not as a chimp).
Plot Hooks:
Hive Mind
The Commander Competent division on Callaway Reef have come to terms with the fact they’ve been left behind. They want to join the hive mind the CCs have formed. They want to get off world. They want to help. Most of all, they want vengeance for being left behind. The players are contacted by Xavier, and Faridah, and asked to escort and assess a group of Commander Competents on their way out to the ground convoy. But when one of the planet’s increasingly frequent magnetic storms hit, the Commanders go rogue. The players must decide whether to rescue them or destroy them
Group Think
Xavier has discovered proof that his fathers weren’t the only ones who were copied into the CC units. Buried deep in their psyche is Joanna Gardner, one of the first corporate astronauts who sold her brain scans to pay for medical treatment. Gardner wants offworld, and she’ll do anything to get it, and the players must decide whether to let her go or stop her from tearing the CC hive mind apart.
Commander Coup
Polonius has no virtual assets. His entire fortune is locked up inside a vault, on an autonomous submarine that traverses Callaway Reef constantly. Polonius is the only person who knows where it is and the players could either be hired to find it by an outside party or by Polonius to guard it or retrieve it when it disappears.
Zero
Unit Zero is somewhere on Callaway Reef. The original unit to carry Xavier’s fathers’ imprints, the best chance to get them back into cloned human bodies. Xavier’s narrowed Xero’s location down to two places: aboard the submarine carrying Polonius Callaway’s fortune and out in the wilds at an off the books hunting facility where CC units were the prey. The last group never left and the players must rescue the CC from very real, very motivated, ruthless hunters