Wild Cards Design Journal #3

Series Frameworks
Chapter Six of the Wild Cards Campaign Setting looks at some different frameworks for a Wild Cards series, ranging from low to higher power levels, and near and far from New York City, the center of events in the Wild Cards series.

Each framework has a general overview, along with information on appropriate characters, factions of the setting involved in the series, types of adventures, and at least two adventure ideas. You can use one of these frameworks as a basis for your series, or take different parts of multiple frameworks and cobble them together to form something uniquely your own.

Here’s a look at some of the series frameworks in brief:

Ace Investigators (Power Level 6+)
Knowledge is power, and people all have secrets, especially in a world where those secrets can include superhuman abilities and inhuman appetites. When people want to know something, they look to hire somebody who can find out. In an Ace Investigators series, the characters are those somebodies.

An Ace Investigators series can go for a modern noir style similar to some detective novels and television programs. The characters are fairly certain to see a lot of the ugly side of human nature in their line of work, and to get embroiled in some dangerous business, since most people want to keep their secrets secret at any cost, and some are willing to kill in order to do so.

A variation on the Ace Investigators series is for the characters to work for a media outlet like Aces Magazine, a tabloid like the National Informer, or a television news program. Some of them can be journalists or reporters while others are members of the crew, advance people, technical specialists, and so forth. Their investigations are more exposés, looking to get interesting stories.

Agents of SCARE (Power Level 8+)
With wild card persecution and witch hunts, political corruption, and genocidal Card Shark schemes on its resumé, SCARE doesn’t have a lot of credibility with the wild card community. However, the public reasons for the establishment of the Committee—the need to monitor and control wild carders and their abilities—remain valid. Given threats like the Masons, the Shadow Fists, and the Jumpers, people have good reason to be afraid of wild carders and to want the government to do something about them. This series is about doing just that.

The players take the roles of special agents of SCARE, charged with investigating the paranormal in the United States and safeguarding the public against it. They deal with wild card threats most people will never even know about, simultaneously lauded for their public service and treated as turncoats for working for the agency responsible for persecution of wild cards in the past. They might have to deal with some remaining traces of that persecution themselves, along with any lingering corruption within SCARE itself. Cleaning up their own backyard could be even harder than their field assignments.

Collectors of the Curious (Power Level 6+)
Charles Dutton, owner of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum, is a wealthy and well-known collector of oddities to do with the wild card (including the Oddity). Mr. Dutton (or his successor as owner of the Museum) might pay handsomely for certain items without asking too many questions as to how they found their way there, and he’s probably not the only one; other well-to-do collectors of wild card memorabilia and trivia would pay for certain acquisitions—Cameo springs to mind. Sounds like a lucrative market for “acquisitions agents” able to meet the demand.

In Collectors of the Curious, the characters travel the globe digging up (sometimes literally) all sorts of items valuable to the right people. Whether they’re just salvage operatives or willing to stoop to outright theft or grave-robbery is up to the players, but the possibilities are there either way. This kind of series is great for getting into the history of the Wild Cards world, with the characters as “freelance archeologists.” Include an ace with psychometric “flashback” powers and you can even have finds segue into scenes where the players take roles of characters from the item’s past in order to learn more about it.

Jokertown Blues (Power Level 5-6)
There’s no harder beat in the world than “Fort Freak,” the Jokertown Precinct in Manhattan. If you’re here, then you’re either a troublemaker, a hard-case, or an idealist looking for a quick and unpleasant education.

Jokertown Blues is cop-drama meets alternate history. The characters are all assigned to, or in some way connected with, the Jokertown Precinct of the NYPD. They may be nats, jokers, or even aces. Plots revolve around the day-to-day happenings at the precinct, particularly dealing with crime in an environment as unusual as Jokertown.
Officers at Fort Freak are caught between two worlds. On the one hand, people in Jokertown don’t trust the cops. They’re seen as instruments of the Man, out to persecute jokers and not interested in catching criminals, especially if it's the word of a nat against a joker. On the other hand, the city sees them as an indulgence—why even bother having a police precinct in Jokertown?—and the administration tends to think they’re too “soft” on the locals, too likely to side with the jokers, who everybody knows can’t be trusted and are little more than animals.

Shamans of the Dreamtime (Power Level 6+)
Characters in this series are all shamans, mystics, or their associates. Shamanism in the Wild Cards universe is a vocation in many regards; the shaman or mystic is “chosen” by an experience with the Dreamtime (or an out-of-body experience like Fortunato or the Astronomer). Turning the wild card can be a part of the shaman’s initiatory experience, and the trials of a shaman’s initiation may also trigger a latent wild card and shape its manifestation to fit the experience.

The characters may seek each other out or fate can bring them together (or a mixture of both). Their unique abilities make them suited for taking on the task of safeguarding the Dreamtime from various threats, and similarly protecting humanity from unknown dangers in the Dreaming. In the world of Wild Cards “imaginary” things like fairy tale monsters can actually kill you if you’re not careful!

Swarm Hunters (Power Level 8+)
The Swarm Invasion left behind remnants of three generations of alien Swarmlings, each more evolved and intelligent than the last. The United Nations contracts a team of xenobiologists and security experts to clean-up the remaining Swarmlings and gather information about alien life that may threaten Earth in the future. In the process, they learn a great deal about the remaining extent of the Swarm on Earth and also about contact with other extraterrestrial life, like the Takisians and the Network.

Characters can travel the world, dealing with human political realities as well as alien threats. Some of the Swarm remnants are in places where governments are touchy about visitors, and international factions may have a stake in acquiring information about the extraterrestrials that isn’t shared with the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, there are plenty of opportunities for scientific oddities and intrigue not directly connected with the Swarm or other extraterrestrial life, although they might appear to be at first.