Maid: The Ascension

Lighthearted miniseries. Planned to run around midday British time on weekends, so mainly suitable for Eastern hemisphere players.

51 weeks ago your London-based multitrad chantry Idol House suffered a crisis, of threat from the demon Calacthchan and simultaneously hostility from the Technocracy. You appealed to the umbrood Lady Tella, Baroness of Summer Fruits, who gave political protection from Calacthchan and refuge from the Technocracy, at the price of service for one year in her realm.

There is but one week left, when catastrophe strikes.

More details forthcoming.

IMPORTANT NOTE: 'lighthearted' doesn't mean 'totally wacky'. It's not a Marauder game, Real People Personalities are preferred.

IMPORTANT NOTE II: You don't have to be a literal maid, it's just the theme. If you have an obvious competence you'll probably have a job related to that, though you might be roped in to help elsewhere.

Chargen

• Characters start with Arete 4 (for free)
• Additional sphere dots cost 5 BP per
• Spheres still cap at 3 each and 8 total.
• Backgrounds will probably be messed with somehow but carry on until I see if any issues present themselves
• Knowledges cost 1 FP.
• Martial Arts is a Skill otherwise identical to Brawl
• To avoid unnecessary multiplication of abilities, maid skills come under Etiquette, gardening under Survival.
• NEW FLAW: Computer Illiterate (+2): The latest technology might as well be magic to you. You don't know how to send emails or use a word processor, you click on Internet adverts, and you can't understand the tech support guy when he asks you about your 'desktop'.

The Tella Estate

Baroness Tella's estate manifests as a vast country manor, surrounded by gardens and orchards brimming with life, mostly fruit. It is always summer. The established denizens are animal spirits of varying degrees of anthropomorphisation.

Keywords: Bucolic, colourful, summer, fruit

Residents

• Seamstress Cat is strongly suspected of FBHism.
• Librarian Owl has a bottomless store of lore, but most of it is about botany.
• Doorman Bear provides intimidating security.
• Butlerdog is dour and keeps things running.
• Chefpig is startlingly intelligent and an excellent cook. But he IS a total pig, so nobody likes being on kitchen duty.
• The Bee Unions provide delicious honey for the tables and the pedlars, but constantly negotiate over how large the Estate's cut is.
• Skit is the Baroness' brat of a son. He is boisterous, runs around, and breaks things. He demands to know the martial applications of anything he is taught.
• Opal is the Baroness' frustration of a daughter. She ignores lessons not somehow about plants. She has never been caught misbehaving, but pranks have been known to happen even when Skit has an airtight alibit.

The Halls

The main hall contains the one ancient telephone of the manor, which surprisingly enough can connect to the main British network. At great length Olivia and Electra have managed to feed a 56K Internet connection through it.

The Woods

Vast. Corr-phobic. Sinister. Contains the Moonlight Cave, a cavern with a pool that is a node generating tass in the form of rune-carved stones and gleaming water.

Consensus

The Estate fully admits the Verbena paradigm. The Hermetic paradigm is valid inside the library, which was the haunt of a regular Hermetic visitor in years past. However, many effects which would otherwise be vulgar are permissible due to the estate's reality being defined by superhuman spirits, who are not terribly fussed by multiple actions.

Technology-wise, the estate is a full hundred years behind, and gets on significantly better with the quaint, rustic and overgrown than shop-floor shine, which suggests the newfangled and unreliable. Technology in advance of that requires constant maintenance and care. Baroness Tella has dismissed entreaties from the technomages, maintaining that to learn to do without will do them good.

London

London was once the heart of the Technocracy and still is a stronghold. However, only the Syndicate and the New World Order still maintain a major active presence there, and as the Technocracy dislikes open magickal warfare near so many witnesses, many Tradition chantries are also allowed to operate, never sure how close the surveillance they are under is. Idol House has kept a low profile and thought it was off the radar - but the fateful arrival of Olivia one night led to an escalation of suspicions that ended with a flight to the Umbra.

Major locations include:

• The Greenwich Observatory, once the headquarters of the Void Engineers and still their greatest node.
• The City, which crawls with Syndics. Mages beware.
• The British Museum, near Idol House. Not actually a techno stronghold in itself, despite many trad suspicions, and mostly picked clean of real interest, but does turn up interesting objects once in a while.

The Golden City

Since people decided to bait fate.

Calacthchan and Calamity are a pair of demons who devote their lives to aesthetics without limit. Calacthchan, the nominal emperor, concerns himself with all aspects of exquisite, cultured beauty. His wife Calamity, commander of the armies and possibly the real power, concerns herself with the wilder, freer beauty of violence and competition.

Last year a young Mage in London inadvertently foiled an attempt by Calacthchan to obtain a beautiful sword from the British Museum as an anniversary present for his wife. He was not amused.