Do Mysteries of Baroque and Cliffhanger: challenger of tomorrow take place in the same universe?

Choice of Games games CoG Questions
21

Not at all! It’s a pleasure.

The Implants

The implants were similar to the Crimson Death gifts. They were meant to be power-ups but with a body horror edge to them, meant to make the player squirm a little at the same time as they were enjoying it, to ask themselves exactly what they were letting Holofernes do to their body in the name of power.

The Lens

A photographic memory seemed like a cool power to have for detective-type PCs and I liked the idea that, in this era, “photographic” meant the kind of sepia-toned daguerreotypes of the High Victorian era. Plus the body horror aspect of having to have your normal eye ripped out of your head and this thing installed.

The Magnet

There’s an implant in Iain M. Banks’ science fiction novel Consider Phlebas that lets its owner go without sleep permanently by switching off first one half of their brain then the other. I probably made it a magnet in Baroque because people had a lot of strange ideas about magnets in the nineteenth century; a lot of quack doctors and pseudoscientists made all kinds of wild claims about what magnets could do.

In the game itself, never needing to sleep doesn’t really come up very much but I’m kind of fascinated by the idea. Working on a potential sequel to Baroque I came up with the idea of a Byronic, brooding pirate king figure with the same condition, who’s worried about going insane without being able to dream. So he kidnaps a theatre troupe and has them perfom enigmatic plays for him every night, in an attempt to artificially recreate the dreams that he should be having. I also considered having the PC having the condition and be the one slowly going mad.

The Drug Pump

Wasn’t originally an option but one of the play testers wanted an augmentation option for a more social/performance-oriented character. At first, I couldn’t see what kind of steampunk modification could possibly make a character better at creating art, and then I thought: drugs!

The dream that the PC has when they get the pump installed is a reference to noted opium fiend Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The story goes that Coleridge came up with the first three verses in an opium haze but then was interrupted and was never able to recreate the rest. But that won’t be a problem when you’re permanently mainlining opium.

Surnames

De Winter

“De Winter” comes from Milady de Winter, the antagonist of The Three Musketeers. It’s not a reference to the character herself (although she is quite a Gothic figure); I just liked the way it sounded. It’s simultaneously aristocratic, kind of ominous, and yet doesn’t sound completely made-up.

It was after settling on de Winter that I came up with the idea of the four masked rulers of Babel, each representing a different season, and the PC being a descendant of Winter. It seemed logical that Winter’s greatest enemy would be Spring; “Thallo” is the Greek goddess of spring, so that’s how Lord Thallo got his/her name.

I never wrote anything about what happened to the descendants of the other two rulers, Summer and Autumn. I think it’s healthy for a setting to have at least a few permanently unsolved mysteries; otherwise it begins to feel a bit small. Somebody did once ask (and get) my permission to run an online PbP set in Baroque that would have featured the Summer and Autumn bloodlines. I don’t think it ever happened, though.

Challenger

Pulp heroes usually have emphatic, action-oriented names like Doc Savage. I got the name “Challenger” from Arthur Conan Doyle’s pulp-adjacent Professor Challenger stories.

At one point I imply that the Challenger Deep was named after the protagonist of Cliffhanger.

22

Awesome! What were the wings and talon implants inspired by? What were also the inspirations for Mr. Merritt himself and each of the outfits he offers to De winter? (I really like Mr. Merritt, mostly cause I like insectoid characters and also cause I have a insectoid oc)

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I don’t think the wings were from anywhere in particular - they just seemed of a piece with the tone and mood I was going for. I remember I was a bit anxious about giving PCs the ability to fly - I thought that might complicate the plot - so I made it gliding only.

The talons were straight-up Wolverine from the X-Men’s claws.

Mr Merritt

I wanted to do an Elephant Man-type character, particularly influenced by the David Lynch film of that name. But I wanted to put a Baroque twist on the character. I think I was probably thinking about Kakfa’s story “Metamorphosis”, about a man who turns into a giant beetle. I called him “Mr Merritt” as a play on Joseph Merrick’s name, and also a nod to Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields.

But I wanted to show the player that the setting was bigger and weirder than they might have realised, so I decided that rather than a human being, Mr Merritt would actually be an alien from the setting’s equivalent of Mars, Barsoom (its name a reference to the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom books). I liked that because it made him a compelling, lonely figure; not just isolated because of his appearance but literally the only one of his kind in the entire world. I wanted Mr Merritt to be a sensitive and gentle character, who’d help the player find their feet after the hectic start to the game.

The Outfits

Saint Hypatia is a reference to the Greek pagan philosopher Hypatia who was murdered in Alexandria by a Christian mob.

All of the saints mentioned in Baroque are Classical historical figures like Hypatia or mythical figures like Ariadne. I avoid spelling out all the details but the implication is supposed to be that the world’s religion is founded around the myth of Theseus and Ariadne in the Labyrinth, with Daedalus as the Labyrinth’s designer being a Satan figure. The Hypnogogue, the Pope of this religion, is kept permanently asleep by drugs administed by his disciples, and his mutterings in his sleep are treated as holy writ.

Messer the Highwayman is a reference to Macheath from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and to Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife), his counterpart in Bertolt Brecht’s The Three-Penny Opera.

Julius Brenzaida and Gondal (and Glasstown) are one of several references throughout the game to the Brontë siblings, who created a shared fantasy world as children.

The Trapped Rat is a reference to the Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap. In the world of Baroque, “puzzle plays” are Agatha Christie-type whodunnits.

Scaramouche is a reference to the Commedia dell’arte.

Judex Avenged is a reference to the French silent film Judex and its various remakes.

The Fisher King is a reference to Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute; there’s a conspiracy theory that The Magic Flute revealed Masonic secrets and that the Freemasons had Mozart murdered as punishment. I wanted to use Falcone, the game’s equivalent of Mozart, in a DLC I once planned to write for Baroque; if I ever do so, there’ll be more on Falcone and what happened to him.

24

You put a lot of research into these games, I’m impressed! Bit of a what if question, but if De Winter had both the lens implant and the Crimson Death’s Vision, would anything they see with Vision be permanently imprinted in their memory due to the lens? Also, what were the specific inspirations for Communion, Shapeshifting, and Vision?

25

Nvm, I got the achievement, I just had to join the Syndicate and take control of it instead of creating my own criminal organization

26

Oh, great! I’m glad you got the achievement.

To answer the Crimson Death question: I don’t think anything de Winter saw with Vision would be imprinted in their memory because for that to happen, they have to see it through the lens itself. When you ‘see’ things with Vision, you’re not actually using your eyes at all: it’s just raw information going directly to your brain.

As for the Crimson Death powers: they’re not drawing on any one thing in particular. I was thinking about Steven Johnson’s non-fiction book The Ghost Map, which tells the story of London’s devastating 1854 cholera outbreak - I think that probably influenced the Vision power. Shapeshifting was there because I thought some players might be primarily interested in regaining their pre-death life. And Communion - I guess it’s similar to the idea of the Autarch in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, who absorbs the memories of all of his predecessors when he takes on the role? I don’t think I was consciously influenced by that, though - I don’t remember making the connection at the time, anyway.

27

Ik the whole thing regarding De Winter is a reference to Frankenstein’s monster, but is there also references to Phantom of the opera? I’m guessing so, but just want to make sure

28

Yes, also the Phantom of the Opera.

Here’s a DVD extra! Players might have noticed that Chapter 9 of Cliffhanger never got a sponsorship interstitial, like all the previous chapters did. I actually wrote one, but decided not to use it in the end for various reasons. But here it is now:

SET SAIL ON A FANTASTIC VOYAGE!

Friends, we live in a remarkable age. The zeta ray has liberated us from the tyranny of physics and economics, and enabled us to build the towering skyscrapers of New York, the melting spires and clock towers of Barcelona, and the astonishing earthquake-proof inverted ziggurats of Tokyo! Every day, our world becomes more interconnected and soon it will not just be our world.

The Abyssinian House of Wisdom is working on a fantastic new rocketship, the Astolfo, on which you will soon be able to travel across space with the same ease and confidence with which today you take the Rhinoceros Express to Adis Ababa! Imagine the incredible vistas that will unfold before your eyes, the shimmering fields of distant stars. Imagine setting foot amongst the ancient, silvery petrified forests of the Moon, or taking in the spectacular red desert scenery while drifting down a sinuous canal on Mars, or exploring the mysteries of Venus’ sultry, mistbound jungles!

It takes great skill and technical knowledge to navigate a rocketship through space, but that is for the pilot to worry about. She has her turbo-encabulator, her ambifacient lunar waneshaft, her interocitor, and her z-ray receiever. Let her do the work.

For it may be that, as you sit in our world-class saloon or look out at the ever-changing void from the porthole of your luxurious state room, you hear the stars whispering their secrets to you. You will understand something of the Great Mystery of Creation, knowing that you and everything else was generated so long ago in the glowing forges at the hearts of the stars, that you were born of that luminous star-stuff to which some day every one of us will return, cosmic pilgrims on an unending journey, a galaxy seeking to understand itself.

*page_break Well, That Took A Turn