Crow Caller wrote:
Though one thing puzzles me, in my mind we stopped playing because I left, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
Well, your absence was only the first of a long run of enforced absences. Mine followed suit, and I guess that by the time I returned, and with you nowhere in sight, the air had somehow gone out of the thing.
But I can tell at least tell you what I had in mind for future developments, as far as I remember them, especially as it may be a good example for the technique of the referee riffing off players' inout.
At the outset, I had exactly
nothing planned for the campaign. There were just the PCs, and the doubly strange occurrences of Pac Utal's power and the arrival and death of a Servitor, probably linked - though I had no idea how - and the latter leading to an item of power coming into the possession of power-mad Itzcoatl.
Events progressed at a break-neck pace, but it was only when Crow Caller used Drama to introduce the rogue Servitor, the "Night King". I decided that the Night King was one of the "Wise" a class of top-Servitors I introduced on the spot, being the computing-engines and top-level administrators of the "gods"; the guys who actually run things.
The Night King was one Wise whose responsibility was the population control in the mound cities - breeding the humans, culling them, and supervising and cultivating, for reasons as of yet not determined, what we would call their genetic stock. By means of something like fuzzy logic he had, in the cold vaults of his isolated mind, computed that something like Pac Utal's power was about to arise, that it was most likely to arise in Ozomatli's genetic stock, and that it might pose a potential danger to the gods. He advised destroying the genetic stock of Ozomatli, but he had insufficient hard proof to convince either his fellow Wise or the gods of the dangerous development he had projected; his projection was after all part intuition.
So he decided to act on his own. He faked his death, went rogue, came to Ozomatli and established himself there, his goal being to bring about the utter eradication of the human population of Ozomatli. He intended to do this by destabilizing Ozomatli to such a degree that the gods would finally feel forced to cauterize it. Among other, not yet determined things, he attempted this destabilisation by covertly backing Itzcoatl's rival Layanna in her bid for power, rightly projecting that this would force Itzcoatl's hand; he had computed Itzcoatl to be the most ruthless among the high priests and thus the one most likely to take extreme measures - attracting the gods' attention.
The arrival of the other Servitors in Ozomatli were now decided by me to be the direct consequence of some of the Night King's hidden machinations, a kind of investigative mission to Ozomatli. I also thought that the death of the first Servitor may have been due to some hidden manipulation by the Night King, not to protect himself from discovery, but to hasten the cauterisation of Ozomatli. The savage Ghost Jaguar seemed another useful tool to destabilize Ozomatli further - his mental projections showed Ghost Jaguar to be likely to use the Shaq-Atlin in a conspicuous manner.
With the other Servitors being killed in open view of many humans, Itzcoatll about to stage a violent coup, and Ghost Jaguar ready to use the Shaq-Atli, Ozomatli was fast plunging into chaos, and decisive intervention by the gods seemed imminent...
So that's what I had in mind for the future developments, but one can of course never tell what PC actions and Drama use might finally have made of them.
the only question really, is by whose hand?