Hello all,
I’m William Brown, author of The Mysteries of Baroque and Cliffhanger: Challenger of Tomorrow.
We’re now considering doing some DLC - “Penny Dreadfuls” – for Baroque (ultimately for Cliffhanger too). Each of these will be post-game expansions, each roughly about two or three chapters in length, but also featuring some additions to the main body of the game itself - new scenes, new subplots, new augmentations and powers, and new characters, some of them helping to set up the post-game content, some of them just for fun.
What I’d like from the good people of this forum is some input on what you’d be most interested in seeing. Characters, storylines, elements of the setting, lingering mysteries? Although I have the outlines for four Penny Dreadfuls below, I’d like to gauge people’s interest in the concept in general, and what kind of stuff they would be most keen to see.
I’d also like to know which of the four Penny Dreadfuls most intrigues you. If all goes well, I’ll write them all eventually, but your preferences might affect the order they come out in.
1. Tale of Tales
“Life is a dream,” says the Hypnogogue of Glasstown.
“Life is a story,” says the Dervish of Taksim.
Which is true? Or are both? Find out as you embark upon the Eastern Express to Scheherazade, getting caught up en route in a whirlwind of romance, adventure, espionage, revolution, and political and mystical intrigue. This story will take your character east from Baroque across Kadavergehorsam, Carpathia, and ultimately to fabled Scheherazade, Queen of Cities, and beyond it, into the deserts of the Utter East.
2. 100 Days
Apollyon. The Great Beast. The Emperor of the World. The Son of Destruction. A strategic mind of such ruthless brilliance and diabolical luck that it took a Grand Coalition of six of the seven Great Powers to defeat him in five blood-soaked days and nights of battle. A warrior-king of such unnatural vitality that rumour suggests that he could not be killed, only imprisoned amongst the innumerable Pirate Isles.
Now the Followers of Apollyon, a cult devoted to the Emperor, has a plan to liberate their lord and restore him to the empty throne in Prismus. The tattered battle flags of the Legion des Sauterelles will once again fly, the moon will turn to blood, and the end of all things will be nigh, unless their plans can be foiled.
This story will take your character west, to the dream-hazy Pirate Isles and the ruins of old Oneiros, the mystic empire that predated Babel, in a wild, swashbuckling epic of magic and horror.
3. The Great Game
The Great War may be over but only a fool would mistake the present armed truce between the seven Great Powers for peace. Spies, industrialists, secret societies, inventors, bankers, labor leaders, journalists, anarchists, and generals are all engaged in the Great Game: the attempt to ensure that their state or faction has the economic, military, and technological edge.
You are plunged headfirst into this boiling witch’s cauldron by a chance encounter with a dying man in Oubliette, and your subsequent adventures will take you across the capitals of the Inner Sea, fending off deadly assassins and seductive spies, investigating baffling mysteries, making and losing fortunes speculating on the stock market and trying to answer one single frightening question: is another war truly inevitable?
4. Polidori
You find yourself in the saloon of the ferry crossing fogbound Lake Polidori, amongst the peaks of Escher, late at night. Your fellow travellers are a strange crew: among them a brooding poet and your own self-styled creator, Doctor Holofernes. But you are certainly a well-chosen group for the peculiar game that begins: a game in which the company must take it in turns to relate spine-tingling tales of terror. But what are those winged shapes you sometimes glimpse flapping through the fog outside? Where is the crew of this ghostly vessel? Are you passengers… or prisoners? And what will transpire when you reach your destination?
I’ll check it out for sure!