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You've just rifted yourself into the fold. The Fire-Ice Brigade, an elite group of men and women under the command of Jade "Tag" McCullough and Colin "Livewire" McAndrews, is working to bring down one of the bastions of evil on their scarred and broken world -- Chi-Town.
- Campaign Members -
Gamemaster: Erin Klitzke (AKA
Erin #2)
Players:
| Andrew - Seth (Blaze) |
| Annie - Rhi |
| Dave - Peter |
| Diane - Natalya (mirror and real) |
| Erin #3 - Sylvia (mirror) |
| Joe - Alex |
| Josh - Eddie (mirror) |
| Kristie - Whiplash |
| Liz - Shotgun |
This GM can't claim full credit for some
of the things she's done with this campaign. A lot of thanks to Nick
Diggs, from whose campaign I'm borrowing some elements, and also to Kristie
Good, who's given me a wonderful character to drive insane in Whiplash.
The Fire-Ice Brigade was born out of a desperate need for two
gamers to have something to do over the summer while we were separated from our
usual gaming buddies scattered across the state of Michigan. After having
spent a lot of hours deep in the bowels of a Rifts/Robotech/Macross game run by
Nick Diggs, I decided that I wanted to run a Rifts game, a departure from what I
knew, which was Dungeons and Dragons. Don't get me wrong. I knew the
Palladium system long before I ever learned to play D&D, but I'd
never run my own game. The opportunity that presented itself to me,
however, was just too good to turn down.
After I decided to run a Rifts game, things sort of
snowballed. I'd known from the beginning that one of my gaming buddies,
Kristie, would be in my game because she didn't live too terribly far
from me (closer than everyone else, and that says a ton). When discussing
what sort of character she should play, I mentioned that she could play the
mirror of Whiplash, her character in Nick's campaign. Things sort of
snowballed from there, and we ended up saying to each other "You know,
wouldn't it be cool if she came straight over?" Thus, a major plot
point early on in the Fire-Ice Brigade was born.
- A Short Backstory - Some funny things happened on the way
to the skies for young Captain Alexis "Whiplash" Geütan (Queen of
Diamonds) of the RDF's Wildcards. After spending seven years in a
captivity neither she nor any of her companions in that incarceration can
recall, Whiplash was about to try out a new aerospace fighter under the watchful
eye of her fiancée, Commander Colin McAndrews (King of Hearts), also of the
Wildcards. Suddenly, poof! Whiplash finds herself falling
onto a girl in the middle of a dangerous landscape, landing herself in more
trouble than she's ever known.
Whiplash later learns that she's been rifted into this
particular reality by John "Burn" McCullough, who was searching for
her mirror in this realm, a young woman who goes by the name of
"Chance". This sparks a terrible animosity between the two.
As if being suddenly transported from one reality to another wasn't enough, the
fact that her counterpart in this reality wasn't exactly nice to anyone doesn't
help much.
Of course, Whiplash isn't the only oddity in the
Fire-Ice Brigade. Iris, also known as "Shotgun", is a
fast-talking Mind Melter with an affinity for poker and inducing fear.
Feared my most and reviled by others, she, strangely enough, helped Jade
McCullough run a clinic on the outskirts of New Lazlo before the Fire-Ice
Brigade got their mission.
Kingston McCullough is also a strange one, the younger sister
of the Brigade's commander, Kingston managed to infiltrate the Coalition
military to become a Battle Angel. She escaped with her hide and her armor
intact to rejoin the forces of New Lazlo and is ready, willing, and able to take
the fight back to the people she betrayed.
The Brigade, rounded out by McCullough brothers Crash and
Burn, the demolitions tech 'Wire, and a mysterious cyber-knight from a roadside
diner, is a force to be feared.
- Parallels -
The Fire-Ice Brigade presents some
interesting situations, not the least of which being caused by Whiplash's
confusion over friend and foe, lover and acquaintance. In this section,
there will be some examination of the parallels and differences between the
world Whiplash knows and the world she finds herself in.
The biggest difference, in a global sense, is the fact that
on the Earth Whiplash knew, the RDF had arrived with the SDF-1 and taken over
the better part of eastern North America. Space travel was possible and,
in fact, common, with projects including terraforming Mars being explored.
War was on the intergalactic level with a mysterious alien race rather than on
the local scale between the Coalition and everyone else. On the Earth
Whiplash lands on, the SDF-1 never arrived. Space travel is considered by
all parties impossible (or at least very improbable), and war is fought on the
level of the Coalition versus everyone who doesn't agree with them.
Also, the Wildcards. To Whiplash, the Wildcards are her
squadron, beloved and skilled. To the men and women of the Fire-Ice
Brigade, the Wildcards are the squadron from a favored television show of theirs
-- Space: Above and Beyond, from which the Fire-Ice Brigade has gotten
some of its little quirks -- the carrying around of playing cards, et cetera,
and their symbol -- modified from that of the Wildcards of the show and of
Whiplash's home reality. This is enough to cause brain aneurisms not only
for our dear Whiplash, but for some other visitors to this reality as well --
including Natalya, everyone's favorite bisexual weapons expert.
