Schwarzkopf wrote:Important question seems to me: Which canonical NPCs can we use to enrich this project?
Well, you can use any you want. You probably don't
want to use any official commentators, because CGL is going to continue pissing on their characterizations until a new developer happens. So if you decide to write in Laughing Man you could discover that CGL comes out with a piece of shovelware next month that has Harlequin being a pedophile and then killed. It's basically like a much less talented version of Alan Moore was allowed to write anything he wants about those characters.
So if you use canon characters, use characters like Sophie de Rochefort of Cambodia that the current crop of CGL hacks
don't even know about, because that way you're unlikely to discover that someone has "officially" decided that the character you were writing about has moved to Denver and became a hippie or something. Heck, some of the characters on that list I provided are characters that exist in canon - they are just so extremely obscure that I doubt CGL is going to take time out of their day to piss on them.
Anyway, on how to progress from the introduction to the story, I would suggest starting with a piece describing why the events matter
to the player characters. So you should put job openings front and center, with the history of the events creeping in along the sides. Something like this:
Welcome To the Khmer Rouge
"
Whenever people are angry enough to kill, they are desperate enough to pay."
Posted by: Simba
When you're packing your bags to take a mercenary contract in Indochina, you'll want to make sure to take a Khmer Rouge uniform. Black pants, black shirt, green hat, red and white checkered scarf. It's surprisingly comfortable, and isn't bad for the terrain. But you'll be packing one because no matter what faction you're actually working for, chances are pretty good that you'll be wearing one of these.
The Khmer Rouge was the big bad in Cambodia about a hundred years ago. They were led by this guy Pol Pot who decided that he was bored of being a Buddhist monk and wanted to try his hand at some good old fashioned genocide. They wiped out about an eighth of the population. The monuments to their atrocities are just these mountains of human bones – it's
eerie. No one really understands why they did it either, apparently it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Khmer Rouge writings exist, but they don't make any sense. They got crushed by a Vietnamese invasion a bit over ninety years back, and after limping around as bandits in the forest for a few decades they pretty much went extinct in the early parts of this century. And that's why it's so popular to wear the uniform right now: no one ever knew what they stood for, they're scary as a barghest, and there aren't any real ones to get mad at you.
The tradition started right at the beginning, with the assassination of Vasuki. He was one powerful dude, so I don't know who or how anyone took him down with anything short of a nuclear bomb. But the real crowning achievement is that within seconds of the snake king hitting the dust, there were posts from Phnom Penh to Phucket to Ho Chi Minh claiming responsibility – signed by the Khmer Rouge. Now, I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the Khmer Rouge, because they don't actually exist anymore. Smart money is probably on shadowrunners hired by Esprit Industries. But I'm not
sure who did it, and neither is anyone else. And what a great bogeyman
that turned out to be. Most powerful naga that ever lived gets a bullet in all seven heads and the news feeds fill up with a thousand megapulses of arguments about whether the Khmer Rouge had reformed for real. That is some quality signal obscurement.
- I'll say. Remember kids: playing on local fears and expectations can be far more effective than simple wet noise to cover your trail.
- Green Ring
Turns out, that same strategy works for everyone else too. And now, everyone is using it. Back in the day, the real Khmer Rouge used to go on regular slave raids across the border into Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, so memories of the Khmer Rouge horror run pretty deep in adjacent countries too. Any faction that wants to conduct military action without taking the rap for it just puts their troops in Khmer Rouge uniforms and sends them on their way. It's well established that Cambodian, Siamese, Kampuchean, Vietnamese, and Laotian soldiers have
all donned checkered scarves at some point or another. And corp units have started getting in on the action too. So far, every interested party has maintained the fiction that they haven't sent any troops outside the areas they claim as their own – which is
almost credible considering that The Republic of Cambodia claims land as far north as Suwannaphum and Nag Kampuchea claims lands all the way west to
Assam.
Nevertheless, despite each country playing nice with the UN observers, there are a fair amount of military targets that simply are not in regions that those countries can make a vaguely plausible claim on. And most of the interested corporations don't have claimed territory in places they have military objectives. These days, Shinsiam and Esprit troops spend as much time in black pajamas as their own corporate uniforms.
What You'll Be Fighting For
“
It's a one, two, three... what are we fighting for? Seriously, it's confusing.”
Most experts predict this war to be both protracted and bloody. And one of the main reasons for that is that most of the national participants have wholly incompatible objectives. Siam, The Republic of Cambodia, and the Montagnard Confederation all want the same thing: they want
land. And worse, they pretty much want the
same land: the historically Khmer region between Pursat and Suwannaphum. Vietnam pretty much just wants to contain the conflict outside their borders, but the Montagnard Confederation wants their eastern provinces and every faction seems to think that outflanking their enemies through Vietnam is brilliant tactics. Laos isn't sure what it wants, which is why it has largely descended into civil war between the pro-Siamese Dai Lao and the pro-Vietnamese Pathet Lao.
- The Laotians are culturally and linguistically similar to the Thai, but have a shared colonial history under French rule with the Cambodians and Vietnamese. Laos kicked most of their Vietnamese occupiers out in 2067, but has been experiencing some buyer's remorse on that independence. Turns out that only people working for the Khouang Combine have jobs.
- Hannibal
The corporate actors have rather more complicated goals, but more limited official mandates. Each corporation only has fully recognized military jurisdiction within their own extraterritorial property. However, it is within the purview of every corporation that owns property to want to acquire
more property – so their military units are leaving their compounds all the time. They just have to do so in secret, under false flags (such as the ever popular Khmer Rouge uniforms), or as contractors working as security or advisors for some other agency that has a “legitimate” reason to be in any particular place. That last part is especially important, there are units of Cambodian Republican Guard that have more “advisors” from Esprit Industries than native born soldiers; there are units fighting for the Dai Lao that are almost entirely composed of Shinsiam security personnel who are nominally there as bodyguards for Laotian politicians.
You'll want to update some things, advance some plotlines and abandon others. For example: I dropped the plotline of people speculating that Vietnam was going to break up into Communist North Vietnam and Capitalist South Vietnam and have a civil war - because that shit is boring. There is a
reason that plotline never got picked up by any subsequent books. But the "Cambodian nagas are seceding and making their own kingdom" plotline has shown up several times (most notably in Running Wild, where it gets several pages). That is because that is weird and awesome and people like it.
Similarly, you'll notice that I updated the Dega Alliance to the Montagnard Confederation. As far as I know "Dega" are just the Montagnards who are Christians, while the "Montagnards" are all the various hill tribes that live in the border region between Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Since the Dega Alliance was portrayed as working with and for Forest Spirits and Ancestor Spirits, it is reasonable to think that they were not primarily a Christian sect. As such, it is more than probable that the Dega simply got to be in command because they had more food and guns because they were being supplied by Western missionaries. As soon as they coagulated into something that was even state-
like, the fact that the Dega were actually a small minority of the total people meant that the Montagnard name would get voted in.
You need a list of historical assumptions and a timeline - but you don't want or need that to come
first. People want to know what is going on and why they should care before they want to know what happened and why things are like this.
-Username17
