That’s very cool. Imagine a usurpation phase that takes place in a single household. Makes me think of sci-fi/horror movies where some attack broadsides the whole civilization, so the drama plays out at a family and friends level.
The Vaylen have somehow managed to infiltrate the whole planet (maybe an orbital drop of egg-sized re-entry capsules) in one go, and they’re trying to take the society with their social structures and institutions completely intact.
For factions, you have the neighbours, MTV, the police, the mailman, the household’s german shepherd, the teachers of Speedvale High, and Suzie’s weird friends.
This may not be a very practical suggestion. The conflicts would have to be sufficiently “contained” that they didn’t wipe out whole factions. But as an understated drama, it might work.
Bobby (the bad egg from next door, a non-hulled Vaylen FON) circles up Julian Blythe’s other schoolfriends, then initiates a DoW to goad him into sneaking out of the house to go drinking near Parker’s marsh.
Mr. Blythe (human FON) thinks this small town is having a bad influence on his kids - too many drugs - and wants to move to the next county, but Ms. Blythe (another non-hulled Vaylen FON) won’t leave: she’s having an affair with the neighbour.
Suzie Blythe circles up the vice principal to persuade her that something weird’s going on with the teachers, but it falls on deaf ears.
I was thinking through the practicalities of this (thanks for the heads-up about the thread, Michael). The only hiccup I foresee is the mix of skills required to make the Infection work.
Like…the absolute baseline maneuver you must be able to accomplish is Assess. Of all the Assess skills in all the phases, the only ones that make sense at the civilian level are accounting, observation, research, journalism and maaaaybe finance. The rest are, to my eyes at least, “adventurer” or military-grade skills: cryptography, streetwise, signals, recon, etc.
The problem gets worse from there once you start digging into the other actions. The game is clearly geared toward movers-and-shakers moving and shaking. I think the scene-maneuver disconnect would loom larger than ever as well, with characters making Command and Security Rigging rolls in the Infection but doing nothing of the sort within the scenes themselves.
Now…an intimate family drama among movers and shakers – totally doable. In fact it’d make for a very nice formalized Belief structure if everyone is de facto related to everyone else somehow.
Actually…maybe you could map many/most of the skills to high school melodrama. Propaganda? Absolutely! Tactics and Command for dealing with social machinations (the mean girls would have those skills). Smuggling…food services…cryptography…hm. HM!
And what about traits?
Anvil Lord = Class President
Forged Lord = Prom Queen/King
Psychologist = Class counselor
OK, so, I’ve been giving this a ridiculous amount of thought: cut LP times by two-thirds (ish) if you want the main characters to be a mix of students and adults, or simply replace years with months AFTER the born LP if you want all FoN’s to be students, which I think could be better. Imagine Oakridge High Vs. Vaylen Academy! Which brings me to my next point, which is instead of Firefights, having Sports Games. Instead of drawing a new map each time, you could develop a basic map for each sport: tennis, soccer, baseball, basketball, football. Though you could have small modifications for each game, like patches of muddy ground or whatever.
Imagine the stakes, too! “Team Captain transfers schools.” “Johnny’s father grounds him for disappointing him.” etc.
