What Willo-B, Willo-B

GM Notes

A Tale from the Time of Time of Crossing Intergalactic Voids for 5 players

by Jeff and Jordan Diewald

Tale Materials

The Tale requires the following characters:

Note: The subscripts in the names above are for GM / game running purposes. The files had to be called something unique. These subscripts are NOT visible to the players. (Yes, they are all prime numbers.)

The Tale requires the following materials:

Framing Text (Read Before the Tale)

The depths of Darkness, where lonely space is emptiest, is a difficult place. The more nothing there is, the harder it is on the members and ships of the Fleet. Yet, in the blackest Black, new ideas, driven by existing energies, can result in unusual technologies, with unexpected outcomes. One attempt to push the bounds of science results in the Tale of "What Willo-B, Willo-B."

Location of the Tale

The Chronometrics Lab, in Bay 61, of the Fleet Science Ship Chronosynclastic Infundibulum.

Props

Everyone needs two props: A Manipulator and the Manipulated. These will be used to act out their stage of the Field fix.

GM Notes

See Really Detailed Notes at the end, for the concept behind this Tale.

Safety Concerns

Self-sacrifice.

References

The Science Ship Chronosynclastic Infundibulum is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan.

A Stop at Willoughby is the title of a Twilight Zone episode about a man going to a different time and place.

Tale Concept Notes

This is what Jeff dictated to their iPad on April 16th, 2020. It may not always be comprehensible. It makes sense to Jeff

What will be will be it’s the tale of art from the time of the intergalactic boys where they’re out in the deepest darkest nothing and there are no particles around to disturb and experiments so will be our scientist is going to do something

Will be is working with time travel and he has developed a device that he believes will allow him to travel in time safely unfortunately what he’s done is he’s built a giant Time Machine a tractor device and so all of the other Willoughby‘s in all of the other realities who are trying to work their device are going to get sucked to this one

In the process our will be days off and there is this glowing orb where the device used to be in the Landing bay there are six ships of identical roughly designed the time ships one is Willoughby‘s and the other are the other five Willoughby‘s who have been sucked here from their time travel experiments poor Willoughby is dead. (ETA: Wetware Willo-B)

Our Willoughby is within the field that is generated by this device and it’s killed him it’s killed his robots and as the players arrive the field area jumps and expands to take in the giant of Master breaker so that they can’t turn this thing off without going inside the field which will be fatal so the question is what are the Willoughby‘s going to do. (ETA: Is dead robot friend/mate of our hardware Willo-Bs?)

They have the choice of turning his thing off or leaving it on him and trying to flee in their time ships which will not work they have the choice of staying here but they have to disarm this device because it’s going to destroy this site ship which has hundreds of people on it maybe thousands there’s no time for them to evacuate.

The field should expand visibly in the tail story before the end of it so that they come in and they’re screwed what can they realize from this they can realize that they have to work together what piece can each of them add to the puzzle? It would be nice if they could solve some problems problem between them.

Another thought arm they could be replaced by other Willoughby‘s coming in are being sucked in from their their time streams so they characters playing multiple times multiple Willoughby‘s overtime. How does that help the game? Do we have time to do that? I think probably we don’t so we’re stuck with the five Willoughby‘s from five different time streams from tight five different dimensions five different universes and they have to come from that understanding so

One Willoughby is going to the great disruption, one will be is flying towards a completely different direction in a completely different objects the third is flying towards the the great a tractor but it’s twice as far away from all of these things have to be explainable in the character sheets so they should be different enough to the players recognize that oh no this is not the same story of the of the LARP as a whole.

So what is the question what is the dilemma that they have to solve stay or go? Stay and help? Shut the device down or leave it on? Surrender or die?They should at least recognize it when they travel in time they’re going to a new universe a different universe that may be very different from their home universe and they’ve lost everybody that they knew and loved there are e-Quillivants here but it’s not the same equivalence. (ETA: If they turn it off, how does that effect [in a significant way] any further time jumps? They have jumped back in time -- anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.)

So are the five things that have to be done to shut the device down and they have to go. They have to go into the field to hit the master breakers which are now surrounded by the field and inside and that will be fatal. They have to do something on the outside of this which should be risky what is that? They have to turn this off if they’re going to leave. They’re going to have to turn this off if they’re going to stay because otherwise it’s going to wreck the fleet. I don’t think they can abandon ship while they’re in the great fleet and they were places for everyone in other ships it may not be time to get everyone off of this ship. It would be really nice to have some puzzle though. We are each one brings a piece of the puzzle. Phrased it in the form of the physics problem?

And how do we do this without a contingency envelope do they know they have to get to the value of 666 and the math has to work out otherwise they’ll fail? If we tell him the answer in advance does that make it easier for them to solve? Is that a problem? I don’t think so actually.

What Will-O-B, Will-O-B = title. Willo B?

Does the field work with an inverse square law.? If so it would be easier to deal with when it’s bigger? Do they have to let it get bigger for once before they can attack it? It seems counterintuitive. It seems come to atelier complexity. It seems an ad to add a layer of complexity. That’s better.

Does each Willaby have the experiment in a different part of the ship until they have to run around in order to find where this will be has the equipment? That would have to just be in the backstory but it could be amusing and hint that this is not the same universe. Oh yes it’s in the forward compartment 37 we thought about that but it would’ve required more work so we didn’t do that why did they put it in there? Why didn’t they leave this in the hanger where we built it in the first place it would’ve been much safer there. I think you could even put that in the main tail just simply say that you went to where you built the device it wasn’t there you finally found it in forward compartment 37. Somethings wrong. Somethings different. What the fuck.?.?!?

You were on a grand mission Dash see your character sheets. That’s the difference between the great attractor the great disruptor the giant bird of the galaxy Frank the wonder llama on the face of God the face of clod who knows.

Consider a simple additional problem addition problem. The sum of ABCDEF plus GHIJK equals LMNOP what is LMNOP and that’s the value they need?. Whatever.I don’t think we can assume that they can do algebra or anything kind of tricky we want everyone to bring a piece of the problem so how can we do that? Do we do the problem with the ships the 1, 2, 5, 10 transferring in 19 units where we give each team each player a set of possible unit apostle set a possible moves?

Yeah you have a piece of equipment like this back on the science ship thread. (Fred) Why are they calling this the Wilmer? (Wilma) And why does he think it should be called the Barney? Yeah but debit do! (ETA: Yabba dabba do!)

To make matters worse are there two different arithmetic answers so I give you a BNC (an ABC) to go back home or I give you a BNC (an ABC) to stay here? And of course back home means onto a different universe a third universe. I don’t despise much other than confusion. This buys much other than confusion. Both are true!

No, the answer is, as always, in bad poetry:

More thoughts for Attractor replacements, at Stupid (6 AM) O'Clock:

1. Phase state change in spacetime — e.g ice → water → steam. Caused by cosmic strings?

2. Incursion/collision of universes. What does brane theory say about this? §€£¥! — Branes oscillate in 5d? so what happens when they get close? Occupy similar regions? Isn’t brane theory explanation of gravity as a force?

3. Dark matter / energy. Dark matter being meetup is wrong for this Tale, but their influence could be used. DM beings building darkerspatial thruways, ala Vogons, but on a larger scale? Or is this the DM war to evict annoying light matter beings from their domain?