OVERVIEW
Short Change Heroes is an action-drama story set in the Borderlands universe. We’ll be using lots of guns and grenades, Catch-a-Ride and New-U stations, mutants and bands of psychos across hostile environs, mega-corporations like Hyperion/Jakobs/Maliwan, and other Borderlands tropes alongside frontier survivalism and reality-television melodrama.

MOOD AND CONTENT
1. What’s the overall feel of the game? Is it gritty, funny, dark, romantic? What kinds of movies, series, novels, and so on would fit this mood? What would you pick as the game’s theme song?

Theme Songs
"Short Change Heroes" (The Heavy): https://youtu.be/vhwDxNqWtxk
"Come With Me Now" (Kongos): https://youtu.be/ITIhX5KoaT8
“Born Yesterday” (Robert Dougan)

Mood
Dark comedy.
Gritty, dirty, cell-shaded, and excessive aesthetics.
Most inhabitants of the borderland planets are damaged in some way.
As a result, everyone is a little over-the-top passionate in how they love, hate, and deal with themselves and others.

Desired Content
2. What kind of content would you like to see in your story? Lots of intense fights, introspection, romance, intrigue, exploration, or anime slapstick comedy? Are the combats wall-running, somersaulting action spectacles with no real blood or gruesome shotguns-and-tentacles gore fests?

• Excessively intense and gory fights and abundant opportunities to engage in badassery against ever-increasingly impossible odds are all part of daily life in the Borderlands
• Badasses jump from staggering heights, flip 30’ in the air from standing still, and cross frozen wastes and boiling deserts in tank tops without much complaint.
• Life is cheap and murder not only pays well but is nearly omnipresent, due to the benefits of New-U stations and life insurance backups.
• People obsess over uniqueness and manipulation via a robust favor/debt-economy since money and digistruct tech can provide nearly anything one could want.
• Relationship drama is rife as endearingly flawed protagonists stumble on their own and each other’s baggage.

Unwanted Content
3. What kind of content do you not want in your story? This comes in two flavors, labeled in the game Sorcerer (by Ron Edwards) as lines and veils, which I find very helpful. What kind of stuff can happen but only off screen (veiled), and what kind of stuff isn’t brought up by anyone at all?
For example, you might agree that characters in your story sometimes have sex, but do you fade to black before the clothes come off or actually play out parts or all of the event? Would it ruin the game for you if children got abused or killed during the story? What is over the line and not okay at all, and what is fine but shouldn’t be played in detail?

Lines (to be informed by player input)
Kids (if there even are any) will probably get bumps, bruises, and fisticuffs from tough life in the borderlands, but will not be tortured, abused, or killed as a cheap way to make someone evil. Death will almost certainly come to PCs, but they’ll come back with a bill.

Veils (to be informed by player input)
It's sort of assumed that there will be excessive and gratuitous violence, as well as occasional torture in this setting. These things will probably happen on screen, but it doesn’t need to be wierdly obsessed over.
Sex is also standard enough in the setting, and complicated, close relationships between characters is encouraged for the drama value, but things can move off-screen once they get steamy and we all know where it's going.

SEEDS
SETTING SEEDS
Hermes is the origin world of Sir Hammerlock, and has a thinner helium-rich atmosphere. That allows even greater vertical mobility than on Pandora, as well as heightened melodramatic angst, passions, and madness from prolonged inhalation of helium gas. Hermes features limited access to Dahl's ECHOnet and Hyperion's New-U technologies. Catch-A-Ride is just catching-A-On.

STORY SEED
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GROUP STORY SEED
We are competitors on Lodged and Loaded. We need each other not only to adequately defend our Lodge and thus survive on the hostile planet Hermes, but also to rile up each others' passions, relationship drama, and showmanship to raise our team's ratings with a sadistic, easily-bored audience.

Lodged and Loaded is team survival/elimination competition about showing the galaxies you're the most badass hunter, which obviously is primarily done by slaying ever nastier beasts and scavenging better loot than your rivals in order to set up (and defend) the sweetest, classiest Hunter's Lodge. The show's flavors combine Survivor, The Amazing Race, Bear Grylls, The Real World, Fixer-uppers/Flipped, and Pinterest boards for interior decorating.

Your Lodge, therefore, is the primary tangible display of your apparent badassery, and also where much of the best relationship melodrama takes place (a la The Real World). Jakobs doesn't mind that they can make a fortune merchandising scrappy/survivalist decor ideas copied from whatever innovative things their contestants hack together to make their little patch of Hermes more Northwoods-cozy.

Some Thoughts on Death
Since (most) contestants are brought back from death with New-U fees, the survival aspect of the show is more about how much you can go from rags to riches while keeping others from doing likewise: starting with nothing but the shirt on your back and a crummy supply drop spot, how can you pimp out a Hunter's Lodge that swoons the fans with your obvious badassery. Mainly that means both killing monsters and taking trophies, but also seeking out ruins, settlements, and factions to loot and barter with (before or better than rival teams do) in order to secure and upgrade ever sweeter amenities for your Lodge and maybe even make arrangements (or bots) that can watch your back while you sleep.

Consequently, getting killed—while it always hurts like hell and costs way too much cash—far more importantly gives your rivals free reign to pilfer your gains, loot and trash your Lodge, and worst of all, tarnish your reputation and ruin your rankings (especially in the "Highest Killing Streak" and "Avg. Living Spree" categories). Furthermore, the more you die, the less valuable of an asset you are to the show bosses, and the more likely they might cancel your sponsored New-U subscription. They may or may not warn you of such cancellation (probably not), so Marcus recommends stay alive whenever possible. Additionally, some nasty contestants are perfectly willing to maim or capture you rather than kill you since it'll keep you out of commission for longer.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:29, Thu 13 June 2019.

Faces and Places
MCCHISEL'S NAVY

• Vince Garrett (McChisel) "I don't carry cash on me. I'll just pay for that with an autograph." — Intergalactic ECHO star. Fan favorite, boosts ratings. Combat-competent, narcissistic, lazy, entitled.
• T3-M3 PLY4 (TP) "There's no team without m3." - Nihilistic, emo, Eeyore-like support bot; resident cook, janitor, mediocre taxidermist, and digi-librarian; handles official show correspondence. He's obliged to dig for your juiciest drama and secrets. (You met him in the ECHO above)
• Any other ideas? 4 may be plenty.

Competitors

• THE BLUDGERNAUTS: A team of bloodthirsty, psychotic jerks — Long-time treasure hunting buddies. This is the TORGUE team. Consists of TF2 classes Demoman (Tavish Finnegan DeGroot), Pyro, and Soldier, with the Soldier trying to herd the cats. Also has a pair of fraternal twins who aren't affiliated with the company, but joined the team because EXPLOSIONS!
• MAGNUM EPIC NEGABOTS or M.E.N!: (Blaize's Crush) Midnight Magnum badass 20-something on another team — loud, high-energy who steamrolls enemies, up and coming celebrity. There are four of them that use bots of some kind and act like rock stars, but the others are of course not as big of stars.
• FUTURE CLASSIC: The Jakobs team. Includes the TF2 Heavy (Mikhail "Misha"), Sniper (Mundy), Engineer (Dell Conagher), and Scout (Jude). A well oiled machine, these boys have the training and experience to turn their job into an art form. No one touches their base without at least the same level of precision (or the sheer insanity of the Bludgernauts). Their biggest flaw is that only the Scout would really qualify as a showman, and so they don't get the audience's favor like the other teams do.
• [???] One of the competition isn't cooperative. With anyone. He/she has no team, isn't exactly forthcoming during interviews, and doesn't even so much give a team name. Identifies as The Operative. Full body covering, including a helmet with a faceplace and a single glowing camera lens on the front. Super creepy. No one can find his Lodge, and his raids on the other Lodges don't seem to have any purpose. Doesn't steal food or weapons, and essentially doesn't appear to be participating in the show. Being so mysterious, and in general so cool in this 13 year old boy kinda way, means he gets good enough ratings that no one's kicked him out yet. Assuming they could.

Lodge Seeds

• Wildernessy area (plenty of lethal megafauna around)
• Near Dump/Salvage Yards (plenty of discarded crap and abandoned corporate sites around)
• Open warehouse space with ramshackle private cubicles, catwalks, and mobile divider walls; probably garage/shipping doors
• (The actual drop location is probably hidden out in the wild a bit away from the main compound, in order to lure competitors toward the more fortified building and away from the more innocuous drop-site.

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Early Q&A

Who is one other competitor or team on the show you can't stand? What about them makes you crazy?


Who is one other competitor or team on the show that you actually really are drawn to? What is alluring or admirable or mysterious about them and what have you done to get some more interface with them?

Who is someone or a team led by someone in Jakobs or another Corp that you feel personally strongly about? Think of one good and one not so good.



What is one place on Hermes or in your Lodge that you're particularly fond of or most alive in? What's one place you hate or fear and why?




If you could chill with someone for a day, who might it be and what would you do?


From whom did you learn some of what makes you so badass now?


Who (outside your team) do you envy, for what? Who do you feel you need, and for what?


Team PC






Mid Q & A













This message was last edited by the GM at 22:47, Thu 13 June 2019.