2025 Reading Challenge 21 The Missing and the Lost
This is game designer and writer (or is it writer and game designer?) Robin D. Laws second non-RPG foray into The Yellow King mythos, after a collection of short stories New Tales of the Yellow Sign. Picked from the Aftermath setting of his The Yellow King RPG, this book concerns post revolutionary America; alternate history, modern day, fifties styling and eighties tech. It's complicated. An alien backed dictatorship has fallen. Remnants of the Castaigne regime remain, causing paranoia and uncertainty. There is no government yet, elections are promised, different factions want different things, let's face it it's chaos.
Into this world comes The Technician, he services the Lethal Chambers, suicide booths, but he was also a key figure in the insurgency, leading his cell in the rebellion and gaining a level of notoriety that he could well do without. Now he wants these chambers dismantled, but is struggling to find someone in the Interregnum Administration to help him.
Not to give too much away the book concerns labyrinthine political manuevering, kidnapping, parageometry (Carcosan magic), Castaigne terrorist cells, Heat style gun battles and various protagonists who may or may not be on the side of The Technician including his own family.
The prose is full of vigour and humour, you'd recognising it immediately if you listen to KARTAS. The main villain has some very unpleasant paranormal powers. Action is there, though the bulk of the book focuses on Kafkaesque levels of dealing with bureaucracy and politics. I will most definitely be picking up part two, Fifth Imperative.
I rated this 8.1 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts
Where to start? I've been running a Yellow King campaign for over a year and we've just made it to the Aftermath setting, three scenarios in and Politics is starting to raise its head.
One of the players purposely called out the group action, asking, “Why are we doing this?” In the scene itself a PC had acted as judge, jury and execution on an admittedly thoroughly unpleasant ex-Castaigne interrogator. Other PCs grumbled but allowed the act to go ahead.
Now this is where the politics comes in, prior to this the group walked a fine line, upsetting no one and solving each case. Now they have enemies and friends, both of which are going to cause them problems.
The group has a political goal, Get Elected and this is now going to conflict and criss-cross with solving each case. Certain factions want them to succeed, but only if they do it their way, opposing factions want to thwart them. Combined with powerful alien enemies, Cassilda & Camilla who operate within and between these factions, there is now a great degree of complexity and intrigue on top of getting clues and solving cases.
It's been hard to get the politics in Aftermath moving, but it feels, that with scenario three, that it will be hard to avoid it. Certainly we may as a group decide to drop this aspect, but I'm intrigued to discover how the players address these conflicts and Get Tiny Elected!
Does politics play a role in your RPG? Or is it a topic that is forbidden at the gaming table?
