GATA GOTO CHUU CHUU

The Amaranth Express: A Pick-up Campaign

Perhaps you were an orphan who sought out the station as a last ditch effort to escape the deadly winter chill, or maybe you were a runaway, escaping from the chains of your miserable family life. Or perhaps your family was in the industry and passed to you a love of trains and travel. None of that matters now; all that matters is that you are now a train girl for the Amaranth Express, a new intercontinental railroad line that unites a once fragmented world. You could be a conductor, a mechanic, a waitress, or simply someone who shovels coal into the engines - no matter your official position you all share one thing in common: the secret mission of the Express.

It's the Golden Age of railroads now, before automobiles were invented and highways crossed the landscape of the world. Ancient ruins dot the land, and supernatural mysteries render the world an enigma even to modern science. Oftentimes, someone explores too deep, bringing out Something Man Should Not Know, or perhaps someone is simply unfortunate enough to stumble upon strange happenings of minor inconvenience. Either way, the Express uses its constant travel and lines leading all over the world to transport YOU to the site of such happenings so that you may solve them. Your clients contact the company in secrecy, often with complete anonymity and only a wad of cash to assure the legitmacy of their request. The railroad girls carry out the request without question, often finding themselves drawn into political intrigues, supernatural danger or even ancient conspiracies, but at the end of the day you are all coworkers and hopefully friends on the same train line.

The Amaranth Express will be a relatively low power game - the supernatural is largely an enigma in this world and those who have inborn supernatural talents or great knowledge of the arcane tend to be rare. And you in particular are for the most part the everyman thrown into a world of mysteries that might seem quite beyond you, not likely to be incredibly well trained in martial skills or a world class specialist in any field. Regardless, the Express takes on tasks of all scopes, and your abilities are needed for their operations. The focus will largely be on investigative sessions and slowly unraveling the mysteries of the supernatural, though with every secret there's someone out there willing to keep it, even if it means putting a bullet in someone's back.

The setting is steampunk, with tech level approximately equivalent to late 1800s otherwise. The campaign will take place recently after a large world war, the first of its kind. Analogous to World War I if it had happened a few decades prior. The world is in a state of rebuilding, and a concerted effort at creating intercontinental railroads is a major part of the peace-building process. Tensions are relatively similar to post-Great War Europe, though languages are less of an issue.

The intended tone will be light-hearted to start, focusing more on the inherent mystery of the world and setting, but with a greater sense of danger and horror coming to encompass the game when the larger mysteries and conspiracies come into play a bit futher down the line.

Brainstorming
Jobs on the train: Driver/Engineer, Conductor, Brakeman, Mechanic, Fireman/Stoker, Service Attendant, Dining Car Waitress, Chef, Security Guard, Bartender
Roles in the operation: Medic, Muscle, Investigator (various specialties), Psychologist/Therapist, Supernatural Scholar, Infiltrator, Social Butterfly, Tech Expert (various specialties)

SYSTEM:
*FATE - DFRPG Base With Customization*
Characters will largely be Pure Mortal template (speaking in DFRPG terms) or lack access to Power Advantages (speaking in Strands terms), and those who do take supernatural powers will likely be asked to take them as an Item of Power to represent the fact that, rather than an inborn ability, you have found some strange artifact while on the job that the Express allowed you to keep and use to aid you on missions.

As it can be easy to accidentally create big overlaps in what characters can do under a mundane human template, the players would have to work together carefully during chargen to not step on each other's toes. Keep in mind that in an operation such as this, combat is not the entirety of what you do and every skill such as having lots of contacts, lots of resources, being socially adept, being good at investigation, etc will come into play at some point, so there is a definite need for specialists of all kinds.

As far as likely progression into having supernatural powers, it is likely that over a longer time in the campaign characters will be able to keep some of the minor artifacts they find or perhaps even choose to requisition something from the Express once they've established themselves as a reliable and useful employee. That said, even what may seem in other settings and systems to be minor supernatural happenings or a mundane event that seems somewhat smaller in scale will pose a challenge for the everyman to overcome, and characters should expect to feel in over their heads a good amount of the time.

The equalizer of sorts acting in this version of the campaign would simply be the Express not sending you on missions without a clear assessment of their likely danger compared to your likely ability to accomplish the goals of the missions. Simply having the expertise and resources of the Express means a lot, though this also means there will be a higher assumption of training provided or on-the-job learning for characters and their specialities - nothing that brings them decidedly outside the human average, but characters will be good enough at what they do to justify staying on.