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Mafia Game 81.5 - Murder in New Piddlehinton


HT Reddy

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Sign ups are now open for the next mafia game to be played on this board. The game will start on Friday or Saturday.

It will be FUN! New players are of course very welcome, just head over to Soph's board at mafia.perendination.com/board and use your display name from here as your username there and you will be validated shortly. Details about set-up and story will follow when I;ve come up with some :)

PM HT Reddy (ie me) here or over at Soph's board in order to play! (you know you want to)

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You step grimly over the smouldering wreckage that is all now remaining of Puddletown, a formerly wealthy suburb of New Piddlehinton, the solar system's largest and most powerful city. Trying not to think about how the residents would have died, clutching their throats as they gasp down the fatally inappropriate Martian atmosphere, you are nevertheless reminded of the stories you heard of the mindless violence of the mid-21st century. No doubt this was intended by your local minders, trying to impress upon you the importance of the task you have been set. You know that the little group assembled here in absurdly cheerfully orange emergency spacesuits represent the power-brokers of the populated universe, including political leaders, captains of industry and well-known artistes. Even such people cannot resist a summons from the city elders of New Piddlehinton. The Mayor is dead. More important and more powerful than ever the Chinese or American Presidents, the Kings and Queens of Britain or Spain, the Pharoahs and Emperors, Princes and Chairmen or the myriad other great men and women who populate the schoolchild's history, the Mayor of New Piddlehinton ('Chief Piddler' to his opponents) is dead in the middle of his term of office.

People do not die these days, not in this greatest of metropolises, at the epicentre of a peaceful and successful systemwide civilisation that is greater than anything humanity has known. Disease is all but vanquished, accidents rarer than astronaut eggs (as goes the popular saying). That is what the children are taught, in any rate. You know different. You know that seventy-eight people died two days ago due to a catastrophic incident in Puddletown, which due to humanity's current innocence in ways of war has generally been reported as an inexplicable and horrendous malfunction, yet far more likely had more sinister causes. You know that someone murdered the mayor.

The city elders have decreed that everyone who saw the mayor up to twenty four hours before he died (at his flat, with no witnesses) is to be consigned together to find the perpetrators of this enormous crime (as a point of fact, these same city elders generally disliked the mayor, and one or two may be among your number, but as many of them aspire to the mayoralty themselves, they are unwilling to start a precedent of mayoricide). They have managed to dig up an obscure strategy for finding criminals from a poky corner of the Old Internet of the early 21st century. To preserve anonyminity of these great people of the solar system, in order, they claim, to make the process more objective, they are to be seated at antique computer consoles and given the name of a long-forgotten user of the system. You are not sure how you feel about this - will the well-used name give you luck, or drag you down? How many trials did its original bearer take part in? What does TheMalcolm even mean?

The city elders are convinced the destruction at Puddletown and the mayor's death are linked, and are sure that at least two of you are to blame. After the senior civil servant explains the rules you notice a brief twitch at the end of her mouth, just for a moment, and you realise that she is enjoying this. The last week has brought New Piddlehinton low, and her citizens noticed more than a little schadenfreude from the rest of the system. Now the city elders want the great and the good of the rest of the planets to suffer. The only way out will be to find, and kill (you hope, with increasingly desperate optimism, that lynch and night kill in the official's explanations were metaphorical) the real murderers, using this bizarre and antiquated system from ancient Earth; the trial known as Mafia!

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I will post a brief synopsis of the characters playing the game over the next few posts. Since the game is altless, I will assign you a character non-randomly and reveal it, but it's only for flavour and RP purposes - roles and factions will be assigned randomly to characters and will not be revealed.

Athens Nguyen: You are the Head of the Department of Life Sciences at the Lunar University, generally regarded as the best university off Earth, and as such are a member of the university’s influential Policy Committee, which has been involved in lunar politics since the earliest days of settlement. In contrast to several of your colleagues, your rise to this position has been built on a career of genuine academic brilliance and insight, and the success of the last decade’s ‘Green Moon’ programme is largely thanks to you; the endemic lunar echinoderms that you designed for your DPhil thesis back on Earth are still your pride and joy. You had been visiting the Mayor of New Piddlehinton after a 12-day conference in the city to discuss the prospects for increasing the diversity in some of the Martian forests, but much to your dismay the mayor only seemed to think about the expense of the forest projects – ‘why should we be forking out to keep some carping trees alive just to keep some over-excited wretched scientists in pointless employment at vast expense to Martian taxpayers?’ you believe was his exact, not entirely coherent, phrase. As it happens, you know that any of the three candidates who might plausibly take over as the next mayor are much more favourably inclined to the forest projects. And of course you could easily have access to methods of murder that are quick yet discreet from the lab. But of course you could never bring yourself to carry out an actual murder, could you? You are delighted by the cover name that is given you, as Faraday was one of your personal heroes.

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King Arthur II: You are the last hereditary monarch in the worlds, a rather romantic fact you often feel, though it would be nice to socialise with others in your own position – sadly republicanism had seeped inexorably and inevitably across the continent of Europe, then the Middle East and then Indochina, ending with the abdication of the last Empress of Japan just two short decades ago. Only little England was left unaffected, though her kings and queens saw their realms gradually whittled down as first Canada then Australia went their own way followed by the rest in their time. Scotland’s independence (or as you prefer to think of it, England’s independence from Scotland) is now nearly 2 centuries old, but it was only in your grandfather Alfred’s time that the Scottish government confiscated Balmoral and proclaimed the Scottish Republic, and so you live with a lingering sense of discomfort, that somehow your ancestors would not quite approve of your little domain. Sometimes you try to argue with them in your sleep, after all, you are at least still King of England and Tuvalu – it is true that the Tuvalu islanders long ago emigrated to the planets so you are King of three palm trees and some dead coral, but you don’t tell your ancestors that. You’re sure they don’t tell you everything either. You were visiting the mayor as part of a European Union trade delegation which had accomplished, as far as you could tell, precisely nothing, but in truth you have neither interest nor aptitude in such things – you know you are attached to such things so that you have something to do that looks useful. You had been to see the mayor later on your own to pass on a gift, a ceremonial plaque from the village of Piddlehinton to the infinitely vaster alien metropolis that shares its name, but the mayor was openly dismissive of the plaque – as far as you remember he said something along the lines of ‘What do I want with a plagueing plucking plaque from some moron villagers in little Europe, in old Earth, presented by their toy King? Thing looks like it’s made of cruddy paper and designed by a three year old sheep.’ You are not a proud man, and such talk should not really warrant death, but you were always taught the importance of courtesy as a boy, and some do say that you aren’t exactly the sanest of men – could you have killed the mayor?King Arthur II: You are the last hereditary monarch in the worlds, a rather romantic fact you often feel, though it would be nice to socialise with others in your own position – sadly republicanism had seeped inexorably and inevitably across the continent of Europe, then the Middle East and then Indochina, ending with the abdication of the last Empress of Japan just two short decades ago. Only little England was left unaffected, though her kings and queens saw their realms gradually whittled down as first Canada then Australia went their own way followed by the rest in their time. Scotland’s independence (or as you prefer to think of it, England’s independence from Scotland) is now nearly 2 centuries old, but it was only in your grandfather Alfred’s time that the Scottish government confiscated Balmoral and proclaimed the Scottish Republic, and so you live with a lingering sense of discomfort, that somehow your ancestors would not quite approve of your little domain. Sometimes you try to argue with them in your sleep, after all, you are at least still King of England and Tuvalu – it is true that the Tuvalu islanders long ago emigrated to the planets so you are King of three palm trees and some dead coral, but you don’t tell your ancestors that. You’re sure they don’t tell you everything either. You were visiting the mayor as part of a European Union trade delegation which had accomplished, as far as you could tell, precisely nothing, but in truth you have neither interest nor aptitude in such things – you know you are attached to such things so that you have something to do that looks useful. You had been to see the mayor later on your own to pass on a gift, a ceremonial plaque from the village of Piddlehinton to the infinitely vaster alien metropolis that shares its name, but the mayor was openly dismissive of the plaque – as far as you remember he said something along the lines of ‘What do I want with a plagueing plucking plaque from some moron villagers in little Europe, in old Earth, presented by their toy King? Thing looks like it’s made of cruddy paper and designed by a three year old sheep.’ You are not a proud man, and such talk should not really warrant death, but you were always taught the importance of courtesy as a boy, and some do say that you aren’t exactly the sanest of men – could you have killed the mayor? You are not sure why you've ended up being called after a day of the week, but you suppose Monday does reflect a certain hopefulness...

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Kamiliyah Mannsaker – You have no official role, a salaried figure in no government, agency or corporation and your name appears in no list of heads of state or influential people. Yet in the hive world of 23rd century Earth you control more levers of power from your gleaming office in dusty Nouakchott than all the mandarins in New Delhi and Podgorica put together. This is not entirely surprising to those of a certain cynicism – you are Earth’s richest woman (actually Earth’s richest person; you haven’t yet deemed it necessary to inform the relevant tax authorities of your late husband’s death), and through a string of puppets and front companies you estimate you control about a third of the world economy. Not bad for a woman of only 72. Like all the most successful politicians, you have no definable ideology or creed, but simply a raw lust for power and wealth that you reflect may have arisen from the poverty of your upbringing in post-2214 Buenos Aires, or may just be a facet of the nature of every human being who has ever lived. Really you don’t much care about human nature and you are not much given to introspection. What you do care about is the fact that the city elders of New Piddlehinton know enough about your influence to have summoned you here (and it is yet more galling that you felt it rather unwise to refuse the summons). Lately you have been visiting Mars frequently, as you have become obsessively interested in the political situation; Mars’ recent rise in relative power has made you belatedly realise how little involvement you have had off-Earth but the strident tone of the political discourse has had you worried, particularly the last few speeches of our poor dead mayor. You would not have got where you are now without being a good judge of these things, and you saw that left unchecked, war between Earth and the New Worlds was not an impossibility in the coming decades. Naturally this would be terrible for business, and even more so for your political influence, as generals and admirals rise to positions of power, and it was in order to ask the mayor to think of this when speaking to his people that you saw him last week. He was his usual irascible and unobliging self, but that’s no reason to kill him, is it? You do not know what on Earth (or Mars) the Pebble that Hides means, but you take an odd liking to your new cover identity. You have always liked secrecy, though, you suppose.

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Hrothgar Patel - Your journey in from your surveying base out beyond Jupiter has been a gruelling one, and each hour as you check your business report you see your beloved company losing more and more in value. Nothing less than the death of the mayor would have brought you back to Mars so soon after visiting to see him. For you more than any of the others, this has been a personal loss. It is widely known that the late Mayor of New Piddlehinton was a close friend from university with you, the most powerful prospector and businessman in space, the hands-on chief executive of Tata Solar Systems. It is less widely known (you think) that you were once lovers. Water under the bridge though now. You had been seeing the mayor on a matter of business, a negotiation over mining rights on Mercury, still claimed as a fiefdom of Mars. You had found him oddly indecisive and distracted, alternating between angry outbursts and cool rationality. He had not been like this before. Needless to say, the meeting had been fruitless, and you had ended being banished from the mayor's presence. His death has hit you hard though, and you can't believe that anyone would believe you could have killed him. You are ambivalent about your assigned codename theMalcolm, but you suppose you can cope.

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Okay, GO!

Days will be 32 hours maximum, nights 8 hours max. There will be one healer and one killer, and four RIs in the game. Good luck to you all; healer is unlimited but cannot heal themselves.

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I really do hope this isn't one of those games where people find improbable english very tiring. I can assures you its not faked. :P

In other news its really great to be playing again. if somewhat suprising.....

edit. ok its even more supprings seeing as I've now been removed from the Player list.

I suppose this is what happens when using 2 PM systems on 2 boards. Help?

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

Everyone now has an up to date PM over at Soph's board - if you don't have one you are roleless

There are seven players in the game, comprising 3 Roleless Innocents, 1 sympathiser and 1 Killer, and one Healer and one Guard (sorry not to dress this up in RP, but this is simpler; I might write a scene later)

Complain about balance in spoilers, not on thread.

The healer is unlimited, but may not heal themself

The guard can guard twice, and twice only.

Pebs needs the game to finish before Friday; all players are reminded that 32 hours is a maximum, not a target.

RULE CHANGE: There will be no nights. You must PM your night actions before the end of the day - if they are not received before the end of the day, we will assume you want to take no action. Repeat, there will be no time for nights - you must send in provisional PMs in the day if you want to take an action.

Only the 1 Killer will show up as a killer in the CF (there is a CF)

Enjoy the game! PM me or Lany questions and thoughts.

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Out drinking tonight. Just realised we've started. Soldier again? :-p

When I get home I'll participate in some discourse. The longer this takes the drinker I'll be.

Ps I'm not really soldier. Im actually bullet proof finder-vigilante.

Pss. All star cast this time! Nice.

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